Grab-bag

According to the Raindrop website, Eaton County got between 0.6" and 1.2" of rain last night.

I am off-the-hook for carrying trees until September 11. That will probably be the last time I water as I let the trees harden-off. I may even pinch-out the growing tips because they act as carbohydrate sinks. Removing them will make more carbs available for the roots and trunk to harden-off.

Sick kids

School started back up a week or two ago, depending on which school district you look at. All of the Petri dishes were dumped in a blender and then sent back home. They mix with their parents and the parents take the plague to work and mingle with their coworkers.

Kubota is sick. Handsome Hombre is sick. Southern Belle is sick. Quicksilver is sick.

Seasonal flu vaccine

I skipped the seasonal flu vaccine last year because research since the mid 20-teens shows that multiple vaccinations for the same strain reduces our body's immune response to variations to the flu as it hyper-focuses on the exact strain that was in the shot.

And, as luck would have it, the CDC/WHO typically recommends the same strains for vaccinations for three years in a row. 

It turns out that two of the three strains in the "Mammalian Cell Culture" vaccines are different strains than the "Egg Culture" strains.

2025/26 Cell Culture

• an A/Wisconsin/67/2022 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus;
• an A/District of Columbia/27/2023 (H3N2)-like virus; and (Updated)
• a B/Austria/1359417/2021 (B/Victoria lineage)-like virus

2025/26 Egg Culture

• an A/Victoria/4897/2022 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus;
• an A/Croatia/10136RV/2023 (H3N2)-like virus; and (Updated)
• a B/Austria/1359417/2021 (B/Victoria lineage)-like virus

I know that many of my readers don't get seasonal flu vaccinations for various reasons, but if you are one of the ones who does, alternating "Egg-based" and "Cell-based" vaccines will give you a wider range of coverage and reduce the risk of "blunted hemagglutinin antibody response".

Antibody levels and speed-of-response

I think it is worth pointing out that the antibody level in our blood is only part of what needs to be considered when thinking about resistance to disease. Our lymph nodes retain cells that produced disease-specific antibodies. The cells might be dormant but they are there, waiting to be reactivated. When our bodies are challenged again, they spring into action much like industries that were idled during the Great Depression sprang into production during WWII.

The size of our exposure is a critical factor. Did somebody sneeze in our face or did we walk 40 yards downwind of that sneeze? Lower exposures are a signal to our lymph nodes to reactivate those dormant cells and our body can stay ahead of the disease pressure. The very highest exposures overwhelm the reactivation process and that is when having a high level of specific antibodies is important.

Picking apples, free fertilizer and killing grubs in seed nuts

 

The 8' step ladder with about 15' of plastic drain-tile tied to one upright continues to be an awesome productivity aid. Climbing up-and-down the ladder is non-value added work. I have the top of the drain-tile sticking about 18" above the top of the ladder.

The black bucket is a 7 gallon nursery planter. Two "sets" of the ladder filled the bucket to the level you see. The third "set" produced the scatter of apples on that you see on the ground.

Somebody wanted to give me some fertilizer. I gratefully accepted 175 pounds of this and 220 pounds of high-nitrogen fertilizer. At current prices the water-soluble "plug" fertilizer costs about $250 and 220 pounds of high nitrogen fertilizer would run about $150.

The gentleman is moving to Florida. He also has a bunch of metal halide lighting to give away if anybody is interested. Obviously, it has been a while since he grew whatever he had been growing.

Sanitizing seed-nuts

Unfortunately, acorns and chestnuts are likely to be harboring various kinds of weevils. The protocol for sanitizing the nuts is to soak them in 120 degree F water for 20 or 30 minutes.

The literature says that 20 minutes only kills 85% of the weevils, so I would go with the 30 minutes. 

Quite the bargain at approximately $40

It occurred to me that a sous vide cooker would be the cat's meow for taking care of business. 

Harvest Anxiety

It is my belief that Jesus frequently used recent local events as the springboard for many of his parables. It is a very reliable "hook" to engage listeners.

Perhaps the return of a shamed son had everybody's tongues wagging and that Jesus tweaked that event into the parable of the Prodigal Son to illustrate the benevolence of our heavenly Father. Perhaps there was a recent flash-flood in a local wadi that had washed indigent housing off of sandbars and that became the parable of building on rock.

Sometimes the parables may have been prompted by something as trivial as a songbird nesting in a tall weed growing beside a field or road.

In many cases, those moral stories were likely to have had their origins in concrete events that the listeners were aware of and triggered visceral reactions within them.

The workers in the vineyard

One parable that seems contrary-to-logic is the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt 20:1-16)

In the story, the owner of the vineyard goes to the village square and hires day-laborers to harvest his fruit. Then he goes again at lunch and hires more. Then again in mid-afternoon. At the end of the day he pays them all the same wages

What kind of situation would make that seem logical to the listeners?

Osmosis

Osmosis is a phenomena where water will permeate through a membrane and dilute the side with the more concentrated solution.

Suppose you had a membrane with pure water on one side and a solution with 25% sugar and 75% water on the other. The volume of the sugar-water will increase as water molecules migrate from the pure-water side to the sugar-water side.

That is why ripe cherries, tomatoes and grapes split after a rain. Once split, the crop is spoiled.

A storm is coming

It is almost a certainty that the people listening to Jesus knew of somebody who had lost their entire crop of grapes due to an untimely rainstorm.

If the owner of the vineyard had a sense that the weather was shifting, he would hire every day-laborer available. Since day-laborers might finish up a job mid-day a few might trickle back to the hiring place throughout the day.

Now suppose that the weather becomes increasingly threatening as the day progresses. The original laborers have been cutting the bunches of grapes and filling baskets which are scattered about the vineyard. Those grapes are just as vulnerable to splitting as the ones hanging on the vines. The owner tells the laborers to keep cutting bunches as he goes back to the village to get more laborers to carry the baskets to the pressing room.

Still, the thunderheads tower higher.

The owner goes back to the village to get even more workers, perhaps to run the presses and fill the fermentation vessels.

At the end of the day, the absence of any of the workers would have resulted in the loss of the crop. They would have rotted on the vine if they had not been picked. They would have rotted in the baskets within the vineyard if they had not been carried to the pressing house. They would have rotted in the pressing house if they had not immediately been pressed. In that sense, every worker was worth the same wages. 

Harvest equals anxiety

Crops are usually increasingly vulnerable to losses as they approach harvest. Bugs, animals, humans, war, weather...they can all destroy next year's larder in a short period of time with weather like hail or heavy downpours being able to destroy ripe grapes in a matter of minutes.

Yes, I feel anxiety during harvest season. There are two ways to respond to anxiety: Double your efforts or go comatose. Of the two, increased effort is the more functional response. 

If I were a betting man, I would bet that a local grape-grower had recently lost a bumper crop of grapes due to an untimely rainstorm or hailstorm a few weeks before Jesus shared the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. 

And one of the unspoken undercurrents would be unknowable of sudden storms and other catastrophes. No man knows the day nor hour.

*Potatoes are the exception. 

Price of beef and a few apple tree pictures

 

1 pound chubs of ground beef at Walmart. 73% lean, 27% fat.

All other cuts of beef were more expensive.

Cull apple trees

Picture taken while mowing the grass. You can see the white "C" I sprayed with cheap, white primer. Also note that there are VERY few apples on these trees.

 

This is "Empire". It is a cross of McIntosh and Red Delicious. I don't know how visible the dark red apples are, but there is a good number of them. Also note how healthy the leaves look.

The tall, gangly tree in the foreground is "Melrose". It is a Jonathan X Red Delicious cross. Note the fruit load.

Empire and Melrose trees are paying their rent. They are earning the right to live in their spots.

The Ozark Gold and Jerseymac, not so much. 

Rounding out Labor Day, 2025

It was a real treat to have Mrs ERJ accompany me while I worked in the Upper Orchard yesterday. Not only is she excellent company and industrious, she is also pretty!

She moved the dripper buckets while I carried the water buckets. I believe that she cut my best time in half. While moving dripper buckets isn't heavy work, it takes time to dump any excess water on the target tree, find the next baby tree and then to position the bucket so it is secure and the holes are pointed in the right direction.

After watering the new apple trees in the Upper Orchard and the pears on the Hill Orchard, we found three spots where first year pears had died and marked them with stakes.

Then we marked six trees in the Upper Orchard for removal. Now that they are fruiting we can start assessing which are worth keeping. According to the scanty records available, it looks like we might have marked two Ozark Gold, two Jerseymac, one Liberty and one unknown pear variety. The Liberty tree was dying and may have been infected with Carpenter Ants which are recognizable by the fact that they whistle and carry a pencil behind their right ear. The Ozark Gold fruit is insipid and the Jerseymac season-of-ripening competes with peaches and pears...and the Jerseymac quality pales in comparison to a well-ripened, mid-season peach.

I started mowing but broke a belt five minutes later. Mrs ERJ and I made the strategic decision to end the mission and to pick up a replacement belt on the way home. We made it to the farm-store 40 minutes before they closed and they had one 1/2"-by-68" belt in stock. 

Odds-and-ends

I completed the bottom of the rabbit jail and delivered it to Southern Belle.

I was gifted some free lumber.

I will see if a week of togetherness will improve the situation. I am not in a hurry to use this wood.

"Transgender Genocide"

Genocide combines the Greek "Genos" for race and the Latin "...cide" for killing. The original meaning was very clearly restricted to the extinction of "family lines" or genetics by killing all members of that race or unique combination of genes. Examples include the Ottoman (Turkish) genocide of Armenians in the 19-teens, the Soviet genocide of Ukrainian peasants in the 1930, the Nazi genocide of Jews and Gypsies in the 1940.

Those who throw around terms like "Trans Genocide" are brazenly fanning the fires of outrage and violence. The term is an Orwellian twisting of the language. There is no "genetic" component to "trans". It is nonsensical to combine the terms.

Transgender people are "born" when they kill their old gender (as in "Don't dead-name me") and they are born under the scalpel. Their fear is that health insurance companies will not be forced to pay for the transexual's ongoing mental healthcare, hormone treatments and cosmetic procedures. Because without that ongoing support, they partially revert back to their birth gender. In their warped world-view, that is "killing them".

Make hay while the sun shines

 

Perfect weather for working outside

We are not watching Quicksilver today so I am making hay while the sun shines. Posting will be light.

This is the base for a three-cell rabbit jail. The base of the cages is 36" above ground and the footprint is sized to fit a 92" by 60" truck cap. The portion between the two parts, the base and the cap, will be 16" tall and each cell will be roughly 30-1/2" across by 60" long with doors on each end.

The jail will be divided into three parts that can be separated to facilitate moving and cleaning.

Apples

This is "Liberty" grafted on MARK, an obsolete apple rootstock of the M26 size class.

A branch

What I picked while standing on the ground.

Tomatoes

A row of Stupice tomatoes. 95% of our canned tomatoes are Stupice because they ripen early and they keep pumping out tomatoes. The losses due to snails and other wildlife were much lower on Stupice than on the Ace 55.

 

The row of Ace 55. Still producing. I will plant two plants of it next year. That will be enough to keep us in BLT sandwiches with a few extra to give away.

Coffee-break is over

Time to go back to work. 

Some Labor Day humor (courtesy of Frito-Lay)