Turkeys, raccoons, Seattle's economy as a bellwether

I am hearing more turkey gobbling when I am outside than I have ever heard in my life.

I am also catching far fewer raccoons and 'possum in my traps.

Raccoon populations are known to go up-and-down. The down is often caused by distemper. Distemper is very closely related to the virus that causes measles in humans and it can spread like wildfire when the raccoon population density is high or when an event like drought limits the number of food sources and the local population is concentrated at those sources. That is, the trash-dumpster at the local restaurant  or the porch of "that nice lady who feeds wildlife" can become Grand Central Station for raccoons.

The virus attacks a succession of tissue types. The first tissue on the menu are the lymph nodes. Those are the organs that product the majority of the antibodies that suppress bacteria and viruses.

That entire "the population can go up and down" makes me think of the stock market. Yes Virginia, it can go down.

Seattle's economy

A report came out from the Downtown Seattle Association that claims the "Jumpstart" tax has had a chilling effect on the Seattle economy.

When passed in 2020, city leaders said Seattle’s record new “JumpStart” business taxes would generate progressive revenue from Seattle’s largest, highest-paying businesses to fund COVID-19 relief (an important need at the time), affordable housing, essential city services, long-term economic recovery and resiliency, while jumpstarting economic prosperity throughout the city.   

But since 2020, what we have seen in downtown Seattle is not a “jump start”, but instead, a slowdown. Since being implemented, downtown Seattle has lost around 30,000 jobs. The office vacancy rate increased to 32% in the downtown core. And more than $10 billion in office value has been lost.  

Meanwhile, in Bellevue, dating back to 2020, the city has seen more jobs come to its core, lower office vacancy, and the stability of office building values. This provides a stark tale of two cities and two tax environments just miles apart.   Link

Direct Foreign Investment for the Greater Seattle Metro Area by year. Raw numbers look impressive (Source)

 

The numbers are very scary after adjusting for inflation to 2015 dollars. According to Financial Times, Seattle went from #2 metro region for "Attractiveness for Foreign Investment" to #13.

I used 3% inflation for 2015-2019 and 10% inflation for 2020-2025. You can quibble about exact inflation numbers all day long. I gave you the numbers so you can use your own, favorite inflation numbers and create your own chart.

One of the traps that growth-enterprises can fall into is that investment that is flooding in can mask the fact that the enterprise is not viable, that it is not making a "true" profit. The same thing can happen to a regional economy. Investment flooding in stimulates high-paying construction jobs and speculative real-estate feeding frenzies.

After the hysteria has run its course, the region is "over-built" and under-tenanted. The organic, home-grown business activity cannot sustain the cost of maintaining the grandiose monuments that were erected.

Seattle is also bucking a secular trend. AI is replacing a lot of coders who used to write generic code for apps. On the favorable side for Seattle, Boeing will be getting a lot of contracts to backfill losses in Iran and inventory gifted to Ukraine.

Not just Seattle

A breakdown of Phoenix, AZ economy

We are living in a bubble-economy. Politicians of all stripes and colors have been goading the Fed to pump the economy full of liquidity since 1999.

That money has been frantically looking for parking spaces in safe-havens while the perpetual malcontents have been agitating to "get whats mine".

Thinking of one of my friends whose net-worth is in the neighborhood of $10M...what good is it to have that much money if all of the inventory of the drug-store has been stolen...either from the shelves, while in transit or at the point of manufacture?

I am not slagging him. He has properties in several different locations, including a building the small town where his wife grew up. He has many physical skills that could come in handy. What will be devastating to him will be liquidity traps if/when things go into the septic tank. Bankruptcy proceedings could take years, especially if the courts get flooded with multiple, complicated bankruptcies. Outcomes in court are politically skewed and precedent is now considered just a vague suggestion. 

Many small chores. Little feeling of having accomplished anything

I have at least one small rabbit in the enclosed garden. It has been eating my pole beans.

Baited with a bit of apple with a few small chunks scattered nearby

Two rat-traps were deployed and I hung the netting for the pole beans.

Not a rabbit

I checked them yesterday evening when I put the ducks in jail. Not a rabbit. I rebaited and reset the trap.

I probably need to replant the beans...again.

Opportunistic meso-predators

That is what the smart kids in graduate school call raccoons, 'possum, skunks, coatimundi and monkeys. Most of their calories don't come from meat but they will consume it when they find it.

One characteristic of opportunistic feeders is that unlike obligate carnivores their population does not follow the boom-bust cycle of their prey.

The top of the duck jail had prints on top of it. I had not noticed them before, so I assume they are less than 24 hours old.

It could be either small raccoon or possum. If I had to guess, it was a raccoon that got his paws wet when he checked out the duck's swimming pool and then walked on top of the dewy truck-cap. That means it was an early morning foray.

Raccoon

Possum

It looks like I will be carrying the 20 gauge with me when I go out to open the duck-jail in the morning. I will also be freshening up the bait in the dog-proof raccoon traps; scrambled egg in the trap inside the enclosure and marshmallows in the outside trap. I will fry up the egg fresh this evening.

Burning brush

I was planning to mow but the brush-pile had gotten out of control. We have been cutting bamboo.

So I spent a couple of hours supervising the fire. I did not get around to mowing.

There is a small Carpathian walnut growing in the ashes just outside of the burn area. 

Vines and Thatch

I spent about a half-hour pulling vines out of fruit trees. 

I also spent about fifteen minutes raking the thatch off of the area I set up to capture mulberry seeds. I want to expose as much mineral-dirt as possible. Seeds that land on top of thatch are unlikely to germinate.

Those two tasks will make an interesting set of muscles hurt.

I have a doctor's appointment scheduled for the middle of next week. One of the standard questions is "Do you have any new aches and pains?". I now interpret that question as "Do you have any unexpected pains of unusual intensity?"

Potatoes

I did not add any fertilizer to my potato patch this year. The site had been fallow for at least two years and had heavy vegetation on it.

I hired Kubota to drive the garden tractor over it to smash it down.

Then I shredded it with the push-mower followed by tilling.

So, how is that experiment going?

Glad you asked. In previous years I would fertilize with between 100 and 200 pounds of Nitrogen. The potatoes grew so fast that I had to be Johnny-On-It to get them hilled before they canopied over the space between the rows. I had, perhaps, two weeks between the vines at 6" tall and then sprawled out across the 40" rows.

Photo taken at 6:25 a.m., June 20, 2026. In previous years you would not see any dirt in a photo taken this time of year.

This year...no sprawling. Like nearly all things, there are some good sides to that and some bad sides.

On the good sides, the plot is drying down more quickly than it would be if it was congested with vegetation. Sunlight falling on soil dries it out quickly and, in turn, the humidity of air in the potatoes' canopy drops quickly after a rain or dew. That is good for snail control and for slower leaf disease development. Given how wet this June has been, that is a very good thing.

The downside is that there will be a smaller harvest. Less sunlight is capture by the leaves. Less CO2 is turned into sugar, moved down to the roots (stolons for the nit-picky) and turned into potatoes. Since about 2/3 of the sunlight is falling on dirt, it is reasonable to estimate that my harvest will be somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of what I get when I fertilize.

I am sure I could throw fertilizer around and get a bump in top-growth but I don't anticipate need more potatoes than I am likely to harvest. If I needed to feed people, aka SHTF times, I would fertilize in a heart-beat. 

Shamelessly stolen from Midwest Chick

I think I will pre-print the "My Name is..." stickers for the next family reunion with various "Topics I don't discuss in polite company"

Texting in cursive

So there I was, dropping Quicksilver off at her play-date.

The mother of a different child was also doing a drop-off.

She was sitting and texting and it wasn't like any other kind of texting I had ever seen before.

She was holding the phone in "landscape mode" and her thumbs skated across the virtual keyboard and she rarely lifted them.

I week or so later I worked up the courage to ask her about what she had been doing. There is something creepy about people who are watching other people text and I didn't want to come across as "that guy".

She gladly told me that if you tweak-in the dwell-time required for your phone to register a letter, you can glide your thumbs across the screen without lifting them. The time it takes a thumb to reverse or change direction is enough to make the device "read" that character. 

She also pointed out that, like touch-typing, it pays to not look at the keys but to watch the "auto correct" or suggestions at the top. When the work you are keying out appears, glide up there and tag it.

She seemed to think that the cursive method of texting (a made-up term) worked better on some phones than other. It may be because of differences in operating systems and the amount of control they offer the user in setting dwell times, or maybe it relates to the quality of the screens.

And now you know. 

Gloating

 

The leaks are fixed. The hot water is back on. The plumber left three valves in the event that we spring a leak in any of the other three feed-lines.

I took a shower. While I did not dally beneath the wonderful stream of hot water, I did enjoy it immensely.

Three minutes from turning on the shower until grabbing my towel at the end of it.

Mowing Southern Belle's orchard

Before/After

Before/After

Lots of goldenrod still trying to over-top the grass. Many blackberry bushes popping up. The key seems to be to mow them while the stems are juicy and before they get woody.

Random pictures of Southern Belle's garden

'Taters

Second planting of sweet corn

Third planting of sweet corn

Broccoli ready to harvest

Socializing

I spent a couple of hours socializing with some guys I used to work with in the 1982-1992 time-frame.

It was a great time to be alive. We were worker-bees and (mostly) oblivious to the company politics that swirled around us. We were young, courting and starting families.

The guy sitting next to me was conversing with the guy across the table. They were both back-packers and they both took their kids back-packing. One of the stories was when one family hiked the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim. One half started on the South Rim while the other half drove around to the North Rim (4-1/2 hour drive) and started hiking from there. When the two halves met, the keys to the vehicle were handed over to the north-bound party...and they just kept walking. 

The elevation change for the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim hike is approximately 6,000 feet, as you descend from the North Rim to the Colorado River and then ascend back up to the South Rim. The hike typically involves a descent of about 14.3 miles and a climb of 9.6 miles back out    -AI content

They did it in one day! Oh, to be young again. 

P.S. Both of those guys still mow their lawns with (powered) push mowers. 

Things flipping right-side up and SURPRISE!

Three of the four issues that complicated my life are flipping right-side-up.

The patient who had surgery is doing well. In fact, the resolution of their chronic pain, or at least the promise of its resolution, seems to have made them happy and optimistic.

The issue that tangled us up on Monday is on the mend.

I got my truck back at 7:30 p.m. yesterday. It still had more than 3/4 of a tank of gas.

Those are the good parts.

The not so great part is that I called the plumber when he missed the 3:00 p.m. appointment. "Things came up. I will try to make it between 5:00 and 6:00."

I replied "OK. No problem."

Then he missed that window. I called him up. "Hey, what is going on? I am going to be away from the house for an hour and a half."

"I am in the hospital" was his reply. Then he gave me some details which I am not going to share.

The bucket is still under the sink. I am going to take a shower at the gym today. A HOT shower.

Air Layering

I still had a few scion of a hazelnut that I want more copies of. 

I also had a shortage of plants to graft them onto.

So I found a shoot that split into three stems that were of appropriate size and I grafted all three stems. Then I slid an empty milk jug over the stem and filled it with potting soil. I also ran baling twine through the handle and tied it to a branch in the mother tree.

  

Newspaper is stuffed in the hole that I cut in the bottom of the jug so I could slide it down the stems. (Pro-tip: position the jug over the mother stem BEFORE grafting)

So, I want you to picture in your head a craftsman hyper-focusing on his task. He is handling very sharp blades and is attempting a procedure more complicated that his normal job. 

The gallon jug holds quite a bit of potting soil and it has to be carefully tucked into every corner and care must be take that it doesn't leave the jug through the hole in the bottom.

Now I want you to visualize this refined gentleman reaching into his bag of potting soil to fill the milk jug and pulling out a 15" long snake.

Yep. A snake. A very dead, very stinky snake. I am not sure how he got there or even what species he was. 

Schizophrenia

There was a time when a person who believed that they were a woman trapped in a man's body or a man trapped in a woman's body would have been diagnosed as Schizophrenic. The cynic in me says that the medical industry decided it was more profitable to call it "gender dysphoria" and to chop off their junk at $100k a pop.

The internet claims that people who are diagnosed as schizophrenic and who are meds-compliant with an effective anti-psychotic drug commit violence at rates that are no higher than the general population. Peer-reviewed research that uses meta-data (combining a multitude of studies that are similar to produce a very large sample-size) states that the mean rate of meds noncompliance among people with schizophrenia is 52%.

The other fly-in-the-ointment is that drugs will suddenly stop working. There will be no warning. The brain will go off-the-reservation. So it is disingenuous to qualify the phrase "meds-compliant" with the term "an effective anti-psychotic drug" when the effectiveness of any drug might be years...it might be months...it might be weeks. It is a circular logic: They aren't any more violent than the general population (IF) they are taking the drugs that (by random chance) are making them no more violent than the general population.

Schizophrenia symptoms

• Delusions (often paranoia)
• Hallucinations (often hearing voices)
• Disorganized speech and thinking
• Unusual motor behaviors, agitation
• Flat affect, unable to show emotion (dead-eyes), poor hygiene
• Withdrawal from friends and family
• Doing poorly at school or work
• Sleep irregularities
• Irritable, depressed
• Listless
• Much higher risk of suicide...as many as 5% of people with schizophrenia commit suicide. 

Note: early use of cannabis is liked to higher risk of Schizophrenia

Side effects of Clozapine

Clozapine is the last-resort drug that is the go-to when everything else fails.

More common side effects

blurred vision

confusion

constipation

dizziness, faintness, or lightheadedness when getting up suddenly from a lying or sitting position

fainting

fast, pounding, or irregular heartbeat or pulse

fever

nausea

shakiness in the legs, arms, hands, or feet

sleepiness or unusual drowsiness

sweating

trembling or shaking of the hands or feet

unusual tiredness or weakness

vomiting

Less common side effects

absence of or decrease in movement

change in appetite

dark urine

decreased sexual ability

difficult or fast breathing or sudden shortness of breath

increased sweating

increased thirst

increased urination

lip smacking or puckering

muscle stiffness (severe)

puffing of the cheeks

rapid or worm-like movements of the tongue

swelling or pain in the leg

uncontrolled chewing movements

uncontrolled movements of the arms and legs

unusual bleeding or bruising

unusually pale skin

weakness

yellow eyes or skin

Gee, I wonder why people go meds-noncompliant. 

Invigorating!

I took a cold shower this morning.

I have our water-heater turned off due to a leak in the hot-water, 1/4 valve beneath one of our wash basins. This is the second 1/4 valve that split.

I have both valves at the water-heater turned off, both the feed and the outgoing. And I have the 1/4 open and the valve at the faucet turned on...and there is still enough pressure to have it drip at a rate of about one drop every two seconds.

I was a coward. I wet a little bit of my body. Scrubbed with a tiny bit of soap (the more you put on, the more water you need to rinse it off) and then rinsed of the scrubbed area. I started with my scalp and worked my way down.

We have a membership at a gym. I will be visiting just to take a shower if we don't get this resolved quickly.

Economics

The cheapest push-mower at the local big-box stores runs about $200. The big-wheeled version of that same mower runs about $250.

I have several "dead" mowers around.

A new made-in-Asia motor from Amazon costs $135.

The reviews say that the bolt-holes are not tapped. It is easy enough to use a slightly under-diameter nut-and-bolt and over-sized washers. Or, I can tap the holes.

I will start with the dead big-wheeled mower. I am willing to invest $135 if I can avoid spending $250.

Not having my truck to cart around my push-mower made me aware of how useful it is to have some basic equipment at the various locations I maintain.

Pecan buds on grafts are pushing

This tree will get a bamboo pole set next to it. Starlings, Red-wing Blackbirds and King Birds love to perch on emerging shoots and they get broken off.

Grafted June 1.

Moments like this renew my faith in my ability to graft.

Sometimes the scion was mishandled and is already dead when you graft it.

Sometimes the tree you are grafting it to has been girdled by mice at ground level.

Nut trees are considered moderately-difficult to very-difficult to graft so it is nice to get some wins in this category. 

Some days are diamonds, others...

Today's plans were a wash-out all the way around.

Plans changed and then changed again.

The most important thing is that the surgery was successful. The important body-parts that were shredded like old wicker-furniture were stitched back together and rehab starts next week.

The current plan is to deliver the lasagna (less a few pieces ;-) ) tomorrow.

My truck comes back, tomorrow.

The plumber who was scheduled to fix our (major) hot-water leak today is now rescheduled for...tomorrow.

As Scarlet O'Hara said "Tomorrow is another day." 

A question for the medical people

I finally popped open one of "Nurse Jen's" videos that have been populating my Youtube feed.

She has a lot of content that addresses navigating aging, whether in your parents (should you still be blessed with them) or in yourself and/or your spouse.

She doesn't have a very big footprint on the internet. She isn't beautiful and her presentation isn't slick and polished. That is fine. I am more interested in content. IS IT ACCURATE?

As a layman, I was impressed by the balance of her content. She stresses that you cannot pay attention to just one thing if you want to age gracefully. The implied message is that we need to intentionally work on those aspects we like to do least. For example, I like exploring new ideas and new things and am "burnt-out on people". Ergo, I need to make a conscious effort to maintain and expand my circle of social contacts...because my old network is dying off.

My problem is that I am not "calibrated" in the field she claims to be an expert in. I will appreciate any feedback. Bullshit-or-mostly accurate?

Making the best of a situation

As reported earlier, Mrs ERJ will be rendering aid to a person who is undergoing surgery today, first sitting with her husband and later running and fetching.

Without adult supervision, I will be eating white-bread with no added fiber, meat that has been fried in grease and covered with barbecue sauce and sipping forbidden beverages, soda-pop made with high fructose corn syrup. In a short amount of time I will be putting a Two Hearted Ale into the refrigerator for later tonight.

June weather

After a very dry May (for my area) June has been wet with significant amounts of rain every second or third day. By significant, I mean that it makes the dirt too wet to till or hoe without risking breaking down its structure. 

This week is no exception. The weather-guessers are predicting over an inch of rain starting tomorrow at noon with a teaser of about 0.2" today starting at 1:00 p.m.

News detox

I only looked at the news once even though my week of detox ended three days ago. I scanned the headlines and thought "Nope. I am good."

It is startling how much the reader's lens is tilted by the choice of words in the headline. "Trump rages fill-in-blank" preps the reader to expect a rogue elephant bent on destruction, all decisions irrational and totally directed by emotion. "Disadvantaged youth fill-in-blank" preps the reader to be sympathetic to "the plight" of some young person who made very, very bad decisions.

Grafts

Three of the four North Platte Persian Walnuts pushed their buds. Like a ninny, I didn't get the first one covered and a deer ate the shoot.

Bucket was placed in the background to provide contrast so you can see the shoots pushing out of the graft.

I quickly put paper lunch bags over the remaining grafts near ground level. Two of them have "pushed" since then. Today I installed cages around the tree.

Encouraging mulberry seedlings

According to Lucky, there have been articles in sites that discuss Deer Management topics.

One of them suggested that if you wanted more mulberry trees in a certain location, that you can simply remove the ground vegetation and place one of the same kinds of cages you use to protect trees from deer browsing. 

That seemed simple enough.

I buzzed down a patch of about 150 square-feet near some mulberry trees (in the background of the photo). I pushed some bamboo poles with their branches still attached into the ground. Then I sprayed the fresh stubble with glyphosate.

Some birds are likely to "loaf" on the side branches of the bamboo after gorging on the mulberries. As they take flight, birds typically de-ballast (i.e. poop) thereby depositing seeds and fertilizer on the bare ground.

Mulberries are a pioneer species. Their seeds are small and cannot punch through a lot of overburden. They like bare dirt. They like sun.

I don't NEED hundreds of mulberry seedlings but it does give me a source of understock if I decide to graft a bunch of them.

Random pictures

 

Bur oak acorns

Black walnuts on a Sparks 147 branch.

Hungarian hot peppers. We are not a "hot" pepper family but this variety grows well and is productive. Its heat approximates Jalapenos peppers.

I grafted this pecan last year. It suffered a lot of die-back this past winter. I expect it to do better this coming winter. For one thing, it will have a longer growing season because it will not be sulking for a month before the buds push.

Fine Art Tuesday

Jim Foote was born in 1925 in Gibraltar, Michigan and died in 2004. Gibraltar is where the Detroit River widens and flows into Lake Erie. It is a very fertile area for water fowl and other wildlife.

He worked as a biologist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, quitting after 27 years to devote his time to wildlife art. In his forties he became seriously involved with professional bird carving and entered bird carving contests. He was a self-trained artist who developed many of the techniques that he used in making his decorative decoys. He is most recognized as one of the first professional carvers to actually add feather texturing to the traditional decoys. He also carved fish decoys as well.

Mr Foote's work has been extensively reproduced and is widely available from secondary sources like eBay.

I spent time canoeing on Michigan's Au Sable river. This scenery reminds me of those days.

More Au Sable-looking river.

A tip of the hat to 10x25mm for suggesting this artist.

Unexpected. A dancer.

I expect to get some flak for this video.

Yes...I can tell that the young lady is probably 14-years-old. She is wearing a baggy sweat shirt and baggy sweat-pants in (boring) blue and gray. Her hair hangs damp-and-limp and is a nondescript, dishwater blonde. She should have been invisible.

The point that I want to make is that her clothing is NOT revealing and she somehow makes that an asset. It isn't about the clothes. It is what is inside of them and how she moves.

Ladies, you don't have to wear body paint to get attention. Watch this girl take over the space. She even has the busker smiling. He started out with a "Just another day in the office" expression until she started dancing.

Recorded in Krakow, Poland. 

Medical procedures, orchards and mulberries and a few pictures

The big news this week is that one of the people within our circle is undergoing surgery. While not a minor surgery, it isn't open heart or removing tumors either. It will, however, impair their mobility by a bunch.

Mrs ERJ elected to fly unto their aid with lasagna and plans to "sit" with them for a few days.

I will keep the home-fires burning and keep busy.

Very likely Mrs ERJ and I will pray a Rosary tonight with the intention of a great outcome for the surgical procedure. 

Dacha orchards

I have been thinking about home orchards and more specifically "dacha orchards".

The orchard at Southern Belle's house is an example. As the home-owner, she got to select where it was planted. They wanted to keep the yard the way it was and that pushed the orchard to a spot that is 200 feet from the house. In my opinion, it would be more valuable if it were closer to the house. 

At this point, her orchard has 11 fruit trees and five hazelnut bushes. 

Two of the apple trees are Liberty which is a mid-season (mid-September in southern Michigan) apple. The other five varieties ripen later in the season (Galarina, Melrose, Fuji, Gold Rush, Winecrisp). She has two peach trees with peaches likely to ripen two weeks apart. She has one mulberry tree and one pear tree.

A handy maturity chart. Dates will change year-to-year and in different places.. Order is very likely to stay the same. 

All trees are planted on approximately 12'-by-20' spacing.

Looking at this as a starting point for a pre-planted orchard:

I would probably replace the peaches with something else because peaches are typically short-lived trees. One of the substitutes might be a European plum variety like President or Bluebyrd (for canning) that is resistant to black-knot. Ideally, it would have a second variety grafted into it for pollination. Pozacaga and Kenmore are both self-pollinating but are both vulnerable to black-knot. I would probably replace the other peach tree with another pear tree...probably a very-early ripening one.

I would definitely keep the mulberry. It provides fruit from mid-June into August. Another advantage of mulberries is that you can harvest them by spreading a tarp and shaking branches and you can make pies using the entire berry, seeds, stem and all. Very labor efficient. 

Some mulberry pictures

A reminder of how tiny some of the unselected, wild mulberries are locally

A picture of some Silk Hope mulberries courtesy of Lucky Pittman.

If you tip your screen a little bit, you might get a little more color-contrast. This photo shows a mulberry scion and shows how large the pith is. Some of these sticks could pass for soda-straws. Fortunately, the wood cuts easily and does not shatter.

Yesterday's work-tickets

The feed-lot panels are up and I tied the tomato vines to them

 I grafted four mulberries as I continue to empty out the fridge.

Before weeding: a row of pole beans

After weeding

A tour of the property

We have Northern Orioles nesting near-by. They are hitting the bird-bath and working over the Serviceberry bushes.

 

We have garter/ribbon snakes by the gross-lot. Milk snakes are much less common. I think milk snakes are exceptionally handsome.

The snail populations in the areas where I have been spraying sodium carbonate solution and placed borax-laced baits had almost no active snails yesterday morning. Maybe they went to church! Alas, one sunny day does not make it summer. It could be a fluke. I will continue to monitor.

The small holes in these dock leaves are probably snail damage

In an earlier post I speculated that the leaves of dock (Rumex) might not support snails due to their high oxalate content. Looking at various dock plants, I see that snails DO feed on them but they don't appear to be a preferred food.

As a note for the future, slugs and snails are most active in the early morning. Both pests dislike sunlight and dryness. If you have ducks for snail control, letting them out of their nighttime safe-space shortly after sun-rise makes for well-fed and happy ducks. Also, if you have the flexibility time-wise...don't feed them until 9:00 a.m. Hungry ducks are the best hunters.

Raspberries

 

I random thought that will blow away if I don't write it down

It occurred to me as I was grafting the Howard walnuts that it would be a darned shame if somebody bulldozed the trees to build a house.

I know that it is impossible to control the distant future. Heck, I struggle to make my plans for tomorrow happen.

As I was grafting, I remembered that many of the houses...dacha...were VERY close to the road by Midwestern standards. Perhaps there might be something of value in looking at overhead images from various parts of Ukraine and seeing if there was anything useful to be learned.

Western Ukraine, near Slovakia. Houses fronting the street.

 

Northwestern Ukraine, near Poland. Very large dacha (rich people). Front of house 50 from the center of the road.

Northeastern Ukraine, slightly east of the Belarus/Russia junction. 70 feet.

So, if a fellow were inclined to plant random fruit and nut orchards, he would be pretty safe if he were to plant the closest trees 100 feet from the road. Furthermore, if he deduced where the grade favored the entrance, he can confidently predict where the house will be built.

Back engineering WHY the houses are so close to the road. It snows in Eastern Europe. Shoveling snow sucks. There is a labor shortage in Eastern Europe. They are poor by US standards with 10% of the GDP/capita. They don't just order a snow-blower from Amazon (and blowing snow sucks, too). They don't call the concrete company and order 25 yards of concrete to pour a driveway.

Also, the space between your house and the road is vulnerable to petty theft. Closing up the distance and keeping the tools and gardens behind the house reduces the visibility and the theft.

Orchards

It takes orchards time to become productive. God forbid that we should collapse like Eastern Europe but imagine the good fortune you would feel if the plot for your dacha (lifeboat) already had a dozen fruit trees and a handful of nut trees that were already producing. 

Bonus image

A composite diagram of what a typical dacha compound looks like. Source

 

A short parable for Sunday morning

Thebes found himself standing in the line that snaked upward toward the Pearly Gates. No surprise, really. He had been old. The cause was not what he expected but how you die isn't something people have a choice about.

He hadn't been a particularly pious man. He had been a man of duty and been busy. He couldn't read but even if he could there were no scrolls in the small village he lived in. Regardless, he dutifully listened to the occasional itinerant preachers who percolated through the small, rocky valleys that made up Thebes' world. He implemented what he could understand and marveled at what seemed inconceivable.

When it was his turn to be judged, a fisherman stood at the gate and the radiant ones were arrayed behind him. It was calming to know that he was to be weighed by another laborer.

The fisherman's gnarled hands swiftly counted the knots on the recording strings. His fingers shuffled the abacus. Then he paused and then repeated the counting and calculating.

Turning to the radiant figures behind him, he said "The one named Thebes is exactly equal. How do you want me to handle it?" The brilliance of the figures obscured the details. They reminded Thebes of the snow-covered sentinel pine on the ridge above the valley, first lit by the rising sun.

The voice from the brilliant figure on Thebes' left was as sweet and soothing as warmed honey. "Ask him what he wants."

Thebes was surprised, not by the fisherman's words but by what the figure had said. He was just a man. Not "holy". Not "bad". Just a man. He had not expected to be offered a choice.

"I am nothing but a common laborer. If it should please you, Lord, I should take that bucket of water, the stool and a towel and wash the feet those coming to see you" Thebes suggested. "I will set up at the edge of the light where I won't bother anybody."

The Lord asked "Will you only wash the feet of the just?"

Thebes replied "It is not within my power to know who was just or unjust. I shall wash the feet of everybody in the line."

The Lord said "So be it".

Thebes first picked up the bucket and then put it down. He could not carry all three. He solved the problem by tying the towel around his waist before picking up the other two items and trudging back down the line.

He set them down where the light of the Lord was but a kiss on the horizon and their voices were but faint murmurs. The line had grown since he had first joined it.

The worst seat in heaven is infinitely better than the best seat in hell. 

Thebes died many, many centuries ago. If you don't see him on your path to the Pearly Gates, then the position is probably open again. Something to keep in mind if the counting string with your name on it has a lot of knots on it.

Self-talk

Imagine it is the middle of the winter. There is no food in your house. As the bread-winner, the guy who "brings home the bacon", how far would you walk, how many hours would you invest to feed your beloved and your children for one more day?

Would you say "Screw it. If it isn't on the porch they can cry themselves to sleep?" There are some people like that.

Would you say "I will walk to the end of the driveway, but that is the limit of how much effort that I will invest in keeping my wife happy and my children fed."?

Or would you say "I would walk a mile (20 minutes) to get food"? I know that almost everybody would be willing to invest 20 minute from picking up the keys, driving, waiting in the drive-through and returning if that is what it takes to feed your family for one meal.

If you had no other choice, would you be willing to walk three miles one way (an hour) and back (another hour) if it meant you could bring back enough food to feed your entire family for a day. Sadly, I think that some "men" would fail at this, but most would step-up.

Weeding the garden

Before: Weeded row on the right. Unweeded in the center. Somebody has been falling down on his job.

 

After weeding. Dramatic photos are usually evidence of operator failure. The weeds should never have gotten that out-of-control.

For the sake of argument, let's say that I can hand-weed* two-feet of row a minute. That means I can weed 40' in 20 minutes, 120' in an hour or 240' in two hours...the time it takes to make a round-trip three miles away-and-back on foot.

240' of row will grow a lot of potatoes or rutabagas or tomatoes or sweet corn.

Yes, I know, there was time invested in many other activities to make that 240 feet of row happen. But if you don't stay on top of the weeds you might as well have not planted the seeds.

What weeding is not

Weeding a garden seems so pedestrian and simple that it is baffling that it can be so valuable.

But weeding isn't subject to income tax of FICA taxes. It isn't something where you have to "cover" for the sick, the lame or the lazy who expect a pay-check but don't work.

Weeding doesn't require $6 million in tools (the cost of a single robotic work-cell circa 1996).

Weeding does not require $500 wingtip shoes or a $3000 laptop with killer graphics cards. 

You don't have to take out a student loan to know how to pull weeds.

What weeding requires is that you show up and do it when it is time to do it.

Time-blindness

I think people who have ADHD lack the cognitive horse-power to envision scenarios where they might have to walk some distance and bring back food. 

They also lack the background.

Those of us of a certain age might remember reading The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder (no known relation to John Wilder) and how her future-husband, Almanzo, ventured forth in the blizzards to drag back two-tons of pounds of wheat on a sled to feed the village of De Smet, South Dakota.

That was back when men were men.

Pulling weeds when there is a pleasant breeze and the air temperature is tickling the upper 70s (F) is trivial compared to striking off across the trackless prairie in the middle of the winter looking for food. A veritable walk-in-the-park.

Self-talk

Thoughts like those are what loop through my mind as I pull weeds.

Bonus photo

Whole wheat tortilla, jasmine rice, Happy Rich broccoli from the garden, kielbasa. Eaten after a trip through the microwave and rolled into a burrito.

*Hand-weed: On hands-and-knees, identifying  the plants that should stay and pulling everything else using one's hands.