Pulled a muscle in my back!

One of my goals when I started to blog was to be real.

This is not an "I Love Me" blog. I do dumb things. I make mistakes. My garden has weeds in it. I have crop failures.

Saturday I was pulling a wheel off of the truck to fix a leak and I strained my back.

No worries. I got the wheel off after lashing a 5' length of black-iron pipe to the 4-way and took it easy for a couple of days.

In the middle of the night, while sleeping, I must have yawned and stretched. That aggravated my back strain. Today will not involve any heavy lifting. Quicksilver weighs 24 pounds so that will be my lifting limit.

The good news is that I fixed my first punctured tire. Usually, I drag them to the farm elevator and have them fix the leak. The foreign object was a drywall screw and it came out easily. The kit from Slime worked just fine and I have four more rubber plugs for future leaks. Now I need a place to store it that I will remember when I need it next.

Linden/Basswood

Basswood was a very useful tree in the days before plastics. The wood carved like soft cheese and was a preferred species for carving statues. The blossoms were attractive to bees and the leaves are edible.

The inner bark of basswood (bast) is very strong and flexible and makes acceptable cordage if you have the time to collect and work it.

A fact that I find oddly entertaining is that Tilia (Basswood) is related to Mallows as in marshmallows. Mallows are tenacious weeds of medium height in the garden. It is quite a leap from a 15" tall garden weed to an 80 foot tall tree.

As noted in a previous post, basswood recover quickly after fires. They have latent buds at ground level that burst forth after fires. They grow very fast because they have mature rootsystems scavenging nutrients from a large volume of soil. That, and the ashes leach nutrients into the soil...nutrients that had been tied up in the standing biomass of neighboring trees. Those latent buds may be a legacy from the basswood's weedy ancestors.

Basswood is unusual for a forest tree in that it is easy to propagate from cuttings. I assume that the more juvenile the wood the more readily it roots. That is, cuttings from young trees for from suckers arising from the base of the trees are most likely to root well.

There is one basswood species native to North America but it has a wide range of shapes.

There are three European species that are commonly planted in Michigan cities: Little-leaf, Big-leaf and Silver. Since the cultivars and seedlines have been selected for the quality of their shade, they tend to have LOTS of branches and are not great choices for timber trees.

Since American Basswood is a very minor timber tree, virtually no effort has been put into selecting better timber trees. This is a case where I am on my own. I am going to have to make some road-trips to see if I can find better-than-average trees to collect material from.

The corner of North East Street and Barnes Road has many specimens of basswood.

Locally, the northeast corner of the City of Eaton Rapids has many basswood trees. Many of them have been cut because they are beneath power lines and they are throwing up lots of vigorous growth.

Another location with a mix of Little-leaf and a decent American basswood is Contec Drive in Lansing. I don't know if Little-leaf and American bloom at the same time but if they do there is a possibility that some of the seeds will be hybrids.

Garden

While eating dinner yesterday, Southern Belle looked across the table and noted "Except for the meat, everything on this table came out of the garden."

She was right if you didn't count the butter in the mashed-potatoes and the salt and pepper.

Mrs ERJ has a friend in Brethren, Michigan who is a master of small-lot canning. The town was named for the original settlers who were Brethren which is in the same cluster as Amish and Mennonites. Annette is an acorn who did not fall too far from the ancestral tree.

I am going to try to replicate Annette's practice. Rather than have canning be a massive, factory production, I am going to try twosie-threesie canning on the hot-plate on the front porch. I will be using the cold-pack method which is not as efficient in the sense that I cannot pack as much food in each jar but it should streamline the process. I will also use pints because I can fit them in the smaller pots that I am likely to use.

Wish me luck.

Videos

I have been enjoying three "rural" channels on Youtube.

China Country Life would be more accurately titled China Village Life. I am impressed with their frugality. They burn crop waste (corn cobs, peanut vines) to cook their food and they recycle bits of plastic to cover crops in the spring. Every calorie has a second or third destination; food waste is fed to hogs and chickens and their manure is returned to the gardens. They appear to have no running water in their dwelling. There are three generations involved but no children, which I find sad.

The author of the vlog is coy about identifying exactly where in China they are located. It is not the vast flat paddy fields of far eastern China. There is a little bit of topographical relief and it is far enough south for kumquats and bananas to grow.

BijayaLimbu vlogs out of eastern Nepal at about 5000 feet elevation. His vlog is less focused than China Country Life but he publishes daily.

Unlike China Country Life, BijayaLimbu records the lives of random strangers rather than intimate family life.

Diversity in Nepal

Nepal is interesting because they are ethnically heterogeneous. I even saw a Caucasian digging a drainage ditch in one of their towns, something that surprised me.

The author of the vlog seems to be tolerated everywhere by everybody. The tolerance seems to have evolved organically rather than have been imposed by outside forces. The fact that even the elderly grannies carry big-ass knives ALL-THE-TIME might have something to do with the civility. 

When the author visits the weekly farmers-market, the first vendors he encounters every Saturday are the tobacco sellers and the permanent booth closest to the entrance is where the local craftsman sells edged tools.

KUCH vlog follows nomadic people in Iran.

I just started watching this channel.

 

It is a reality check for those who think they can just run out into the woods when things get spicy. It is eye-opening to see the calorie burn put into fishing (for instance). In one of the videos, five men go fishing with a single cast-net. One of the men carries a Mauser and a belt with 100 rounds of ammo. I am 90% sure that his primary purpose is security against two-legged predators and not to harvest wildlife for the stew-pot.

The river the men are fishing is not swimmable due to the swift current...not that I think any of the men can swim. They are casting the net from smallest of ledges. The ledges are sloped and wet and probably slippery. They are risking their lives to collect fifteen pounds of fish.