One of my friends found himself with technical difficulties which impaired his ability to barbecue. Things recently flipped right-side up and he can now scratch that itch.
He reached out and asked if I could spare some apple and other types of wood to fuel his adventures.
Hey, that is what friends are for!
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| Slow-grown Shagbark Hickory |
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| Same piece, different place on the "cookie" using the Canadian side of the ruler. |
That is a slowly grown tree!
I also have cookies of apple-wood (Duh!) and cherry. Next on the list is pecan wood. Those will be 2" diameter rods. Then, I will give him a call and ask how much room he has to store his windfall and what size "prisms" he wants the cookies split into.
Tomatoes
I saw the first blossoms on two of my tomato plants.
For my gardening readers who are blessed to live in more southern climates, when do you expect your first, ripe tomato?
Sighting in (new scope)
The first shot at 25 yards hit the paper (Yeah!!!). I was aiming for the dot in the middle of the 8-1/2" by 11" sheet of paper.
I made 32 clicks to move the point-of-aim to the left and 20 clicks up.
The second shot chipped the black dot.
Then I moved the target out to 100 yards and was about 3-1/2" high. I made 4 clicks down and it hit about 2-1/2" high. Plenty good enough for me. 2-1/2" should be about the peak of the trajectory and give me a point-blank-range a bit more than 150 yards with the .350 Legend.
This is the first time in my life that I got the rifle functionally sighted in with only four shots.
Replanting
I lost a few small cucumber plants to my clumsy feet while putting up the structure to support the netting. Then I lost a few more to cut-worms.
It is still early enough to replant seeds where I lost the plants.
Some vegetables are very "plastic" in terms of plant density. Bush beans show relatively little change in yield between seeds planted 2" apart in the row and 6" apart in the row. Other plants are very "not-plastic". Peas are "not-plastic". If you lose pea plants, you lose production. They will not fill-in.
I think the cucumbers would fill-in...as long as I didn't lose any more. But I am not willing to bet that my losses will stop.
Modern pickling cucumbers vs. older cucumbers
Color me surprised! Modern cucumbers are selected...designed if you prefer...for mechanical harvesting. They are selected to have one or two cucumbers ripen per vine exactly at the same time and the harvesting machine rips the vines out of the ground and puts the cukes into the bin.
You read that correctly, due to the high cost of hired labor, it is more economical to only harvest one or two cukes per vine with a 6000 pound machine than to repeatedly pick cucumbers, by hand, over a period of several weeks.
As gardeners, we don't have "hired labor". For our purposes, we might pick the same 30 feet of trellised pickling cucumbers seven times over the course of two weeks.
Back when I was an engineer, all claims of "...it has been optimized..." were met with challenges of "Optimized with regard to which variable?" There is nothing universally magical about "optimized".
Systems that are "optimized" for commercial growers are organized around minimizing the bottleneck variable: Labor and secondarily "inelastic market specifications".
Systems that are "optimized" for subsistence growers should be organized around the limited footprint (yield per square-foot rather than yield per manpower-hour) and pesticide avoidance. Modern cucumber varieties MIGHT be a solid choice because most of them have multiple disease resistances.
First tomatoes late May in North Texas. Second harvest can start late October. The heat of summer causes them to go dormant in July and August.
ReplyDeleteStarted getting tomatoes in late April. About to get the last of the heirlooms and romas, it’s getting too hot and buggy for big tomatoes here in Florida. I should keep getting little Everglades tomatoes all summer.
DeleteI'm in central Oklahoma, usually plant my tomatoes mid-April and am expecting ripe tomatoes in about a week or two.
ReplyDeleteI remember pulling small batches of cotton boll stems off the boll to check the force needed to separate them. Texas A&M experiment station working with the USDA in late 70's. We were looking at how easily mechanical pickers could strip a plant. The plants were "optimized" for shorter stalks and heavy fruiting. The force to pluck was another variable they were working on. In my dad's early years, cotton was taller, and they would manually pick it. They went through multiple times picking just what was ripe each pass.
ReplyDeletePlanted my beefsteak tomatoes Easter weekend. They’re loaded but green. Probably another week or so. If nothing unfortunate happens this will be my first good year for tomatoes in about 6 years
ReplyDeleteSouth Louisiana btw
DeleteGetting first blush of color but very few fruits are set right now in ETN.
ReplyDeleteBack when I was an engineer, all claims of "...it has been optimized..." were met with challenges of "Optimized with regard to which variable?" There is nothing universally magical about "optimized".
ReplyDeleteSame with "efficiency". Efficient financial conditions rarely lead to efficient operation and maintenance conditions
Re: Optimization. We have optimized things for climate, water, etc. almost as long as we have been growing things. The fact that we are optimizing based on technology more and more begins to suggest a level of dependence on something none of us can control that should alarm a great deal of people. Like any technology, it is an amazing step forward - until it stops working, goes away, or simply is no longer made.
ReplyDeleteAnother quirk about the modern system is that for many commodities, the farmer does not plant a crop unless he has a contract-for-delivery of the crop. That contract is for a set amount and times and has very rigid size and variety specifications. Food produced outside of the parameters of that contract have no market value.
DeleteThat is very efficient from an over-all supply chain perspective but might be lacking in resilience if events go off-the-tracks. There isn't a native market for 100,000 heads of iceberg lettuce a day in Yuma, Arizona, for instance.
if your friend is worth anything at all, you have something tasty in your future. Roger
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