Busy, busy, busy...

It has been a long day.

Quicksilver showed up at 6:30 a.m. I handed her off at 9:30 and started cutting fence wire and loading the back of the truck. 2-3/4 hours time-on-task in the Upper and Hill Orchards. I got back home and took an hour long nap. Then off to watch a sporting event with Southern Belle. On the way home I stopped at Walmart for dog food, oatmeal, raisins and whole-wheat tortilla wraps. I got it all unloaded and sat down in the official recliner of the ERJ blog at 8:30 p.m.

At 1000 seeds to the ounce and approximately 60 clay balls, that more than 15 seeds per ball.

One of the tasks was to try out the seed pellets. I used the following mix and am pretty happy with it:

• 1kg damp sand
• 400 grams clumping cat litter (bentonite)
• 100 grams masa (corn flour)
• 100 grams Burpee Organic Fertilizer
• 400 ml of water

The mix was a little bit dry and crumbly but it packed like a snowball. If you try the mix, realize that you will have to make adjustments to the amount of water because "damp sand" is an imprecise term.

The area where I was planting the Redbud seeds. Two dead Bigtooth Aspen trunks in the foreground. "How has your Aspen?"  "Frankly, dead and decaying."

 Since the Redbud that I have seen growing wild has always been on the slopes above the flood-plains, I surmised that the seeds want to land on mineral dirt and not leaf-litter or duff. So rather than pitching them willy-nilly, I scuffed through the leaf-litter, dropped the clay-ball on the mineral dirt that I exposed and then stepped on the ball to squish it into intimate contact with the dirt.

The Liberty is past full-bloom. Melrose is at full bloom. This picture is from the Upper Orchard.

Mostly I worked the cusp of the slope near the road and overlooking the valley that is east of the Hill Orchard and the Upper Orchard. 

I was very pleased that the ball showed no inclination to stick to the sole of my shoe.

Random photo

A nice looking seedling Sweet Cherry. I saw this on my commute to "the office" today. I am tempted to liberate some scion even though Mrs ERJ (mostly) broke me of that habit.

 

Drought monitor. Moisture in the top 40" of soil (root zone). Displayed as a "percentile" of historically observed values on a tract-by-tract basis.

 

I am pretty sure I have at least three readers in New Hampshire and a few in the Piedmont region. Do they have burn-bans and fire warnings in place?

Follow-up on the power station

Reading the comments helped me clarify my thoughts. Thank-you, all.

I have two sets of needs that have some overlap. So maybe I need two different solutions.

On one hand I have three properties I am working on, two of them "remote". One of them has the Upper and Hill Orchards and a 1200 square-foot pole barn that is not electrified. It would be nice to be able to plug in a 5000 lumen (50 Watt) shop-light so I can clean out the trash and not trip on my feet. 

I also have an aversion to using the battery I count on to start the vehicle for mundane purposes. The Hill and Upper Orchard are approximately 40 miles away from "home" and while I have walked that distance it is not a fast process. I do have a mountain bike squirreled away in the barn, so I could probably knock the trip back in about four or five hours but I would not be a happy guy.

The other set of needs is anchoring-a-basecamp. If the grid is intermittent, then there is much to be said for skimming some power while it is energized to use for the very highest value applications when it is not energized.

• Medical equipment
• Communication
• Security (driveway alarms at a minimum)
• Securing information (internet, news)
• Light for reading, threading needles
• Enough power to run an AM/FM radio
• Run the blower on our fireplace insert

If the grid becomes very unreliable the same "flex" power means you can run the generator in the day when there is more noise-clutter to hide the sound signature for use during the quit hours. Solar is fine but not always sufficient, even in Arizona.

At this point, the very unreliable grid scenario seems unlikely. The powers-that-be understand that things will get VERY sporty in their A-o-O if the power drops out too often for too long. Even the warlords in Shitholistan understand that dynamic. 

Brains rather than batteries

Some of these things can be "managed" around. Can't function without hot coffee in the morning? Before microwaves, folks used to make it the night before and pour it into a thermos.

Need to communicate with neighbors? Bulletin boards work and the American Revolution was coordinated with "Broadsheet essays" tacked to the wall of the communal privy. And there is always the neighborhood gossip.

Dogs are still the best security system. A fish-line and tin-cans still work. 

Practices-and-procedures vs Infrastructure

I worked for a boss named John Pitlanish who explained it this way:

The advantage of changing work-instructions is that they can be rewritten tomorrow. Validate the changes today with your Team Leader. Start training the operators tomorrow on the new way.

If you only work the "infrastructure fixes" then you are looking at a minimum of twelve-months before it hits the factory floor, and more likely it will never get approved.

So even though it is harder to "manage" practices-and-procedures fixes they are the only practical way to fix things in the short-term.

Safety LOVED infrastructure fixes. They had an entire hierarchy of fixes with "Re-instruct the operator" as the least desirable and "Eliminate the hazard" as the most desirable. 

Managers get changed every 18 months. Operators change every 24 months. Grind the concrete flat and it stays flat for 30 years. The fix does not evaporate when it is buried in the infrastructure.

So there is a place for both. The quick bandage and the deep, permanent fix. 

Power Stations

 

I am looking at small power stations and trying to figure out how they might fit into my plans.

Athanasius in Ukraine gets a lot of use out of theirs because they have intermittent power issues due to the ongoing war. He was able to charge up batteries for his cordless chainsaw from one. Without the power station he would have changed his plans and done something else or been cutting wood by hand.

Like many things, the market is organized by various "price points". Currently, $200 will get you a 300 Watt-hour unit with a robust battery technology.

But what will 300 Watt-hours get me?

It can run two LED, 800 Lumen bulbs for 15 hours (overnight in the winter).

It can run a small electric blanket that is used to warm massage tables for 15 hours.

It can run a 6 Joule, low-impedance electric fence energizer for 30 hours. 

It can run a 32" TV for 5 hours so it is not enough juice to run a video-based security system overnight.

From a command-and-control standpoint, it provides enough power to recharge a VERY large number of cellphones or hand-held radios or rechargable AA batteries. 

It can run a 20" box fan for 5 hours. 

It can run a 1/4 horsepower motor for almost 2 hours so you better hope the power comes back on if a storm knocks out your sump-pump. Incidentally, this price-point will not deliver enough wattage to start a conventional sump-pump due to inrush current at start-up.

It can recharge 2, 20V 6.0 amp-hour batteries for my cordless tools. 

It cannot run an air conditioner or the fan on a furnace. It cannot run a microwave or a water heater.

I am on-the-fence about spending the money on something like this. The system seems hellbent on building data centers in excess of our power generation capacity. The spike in petroleum prices is causing a rush toward Electric Vehicles which will drive more demand.

Consequently, I expect more power-outages in the future. It probably makes sense to get something like this before the rush.

Any thoughts from my readers? 

Walnuts, expedition to Lansing, Grizzly Bears and Ducks

There is not a lot to report.

Walnuts 

A fine gentleman mailed me seven scion of Persian Walnuts (Juglans regia) that he just happened to have in his refrigerator. I grafted those onto likely Black Walnut seedlings which pop up around our yard without any input from me.

The four "North Platte" scion were grafted on two seedlings near Mrs ERJ's garden, one just east of the driveway and one seedling north of the wood-pile. I marked them with bright pink surveyor's tape.

The three Combe were grafted west of the collapsed barn, east of the standing barn and south of the drainfield. I marked them with a flag of "natural" colored masking tape.

I don't expect them to show signs of life for at least four weeks. Walnuts are like rattlesnakes, they really like heat. Not warmth: Heat.

A trip to the big-box store

I bit the bullet and drove to Lansing to visit the Menards on the west side of Lansing.

I came back with welded wire fence to make cages to protect newly planted seedlings from deer. I bought two hand-sprayers and some 5" round duct to protect various fruit trees from the predations of woodchucks and raccoons.

While I was there, I checked out their onion sets. They were plump and heavy, unlike the ones at Meijers (a grocery store). On a whim, I picked up three bags and will use them as markers to identify exactly where the rows of potatoes are. Onions come up much more quickly than potatoes do. 

Grizzly Bears are no longer "Ursus horribilis"

They are now lumped in with the Eurasian Brown Bear and since the EBB binomial name Ursus arctos has seniority, it becomes the official, scientific name for the Grizzly Bear as well.

I was faked out for a bit. I looked at Ursus arctos and thought "Polar Bears???".

Definitely a Public Relations win for Yogi Bear.

Ducks

The ducks got a small wading pool for their enclosure.

It is partially submerged and has a ramp made from the dirt I removed to facilitate their getting in.

As stated at the top: Not much to report. Everything is fine except that we have too many ticks.

Name that movie (and studio)

 

Better times...

Bonus points for the year it was first in theaters and the city it was filmed in (big surprise). 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

A hillside orchard

Iosif Evstafevich Krachkovsky was born in 1854 and died in 1914. He is considered a "Russian" painter. Many of his paintings were made in Ukraine.

He certainly knew how to paint an expressive sky. 

A garden

A well

Hat-tip to the usual guy...

...the tireless Lucas Machias

Unexpected help, dirt clods and another hundred hills of potatoes

All of the purchased fruit trees are now in the ground. I planted the last five of them Saturday.

I was packing up when one of the neighbors came over and started mowing at the bottom of the Hill Orchard. Word had leaked out that my riding mower was in-op and he was helping out. I think the guy who fixes my mower ratted on me. He also maintains the mowers across the street.

In my world, that means that I am not leaving. I started picking up sticks that were going to be in his path. Then his wife came over and started picking up sticks.

Good neighbors are better than money-in-the-bank. 

Saturday's tally of trees:

One Galarina/MM-111 planted into stiff clay in the northeast corner of the Upper Orchard. The high vigor of Galarina combined with the vigor of MM-111 might offset the infertility of the soil they were planted in.

One Liberty/G.890 was planted in the east row of the Upper Orchard where a Kerr/Malus baccata had unexpectedly died.

Another Liberty and two Winecrisp (a low-vigor variety) were planted in the Hill Orchard.

The package arrived on April 15 and they were all in the ground or "gifted" by April 25. I am happy with that.

Guerrilla gardening

A "Chuckit"

One of the "tricks" used by guerrilla gardeners is to knead seeds into damp clay and then mold balls from the mix. The balls can then be hurled by hand or using a "Chuckit"

A fellow can cover a lot of ground with a Chuckit and an apron full of seed-laden pellets.

The challenge for me is to find and easy-to-use "clay".

Today was my first crack at it. I do not represent this as optimum, merely as usable.

• 200 grams of sand for bulk
• 100 grams of Dr. Elsey's Ultra UnScented Clumping Clay Cat Litter (Bentonite for binder).
• 20 grams corn masa (short-term binder)

Mix dry ingredients very thoroughly, then add 

• 100 ml of water  

Stir. Let sit five minutes and then stir/knead again. If the mix is too runny, add slightly more masa.

 

This is a small batch that I mixed up without seeds to get a feel for proportions. The mix is elastic and not excessively sticky although it prints material onto the palms of your hands when rolling the pellets. These are about the size of small, Black Walnuts.

I have them outside on some newspaper to see if they firm-up overnight. 

After drying for 8 hours.

Bentonite swells when wet and shrinks outrageously as it dries. The inside is still damp while the outside is dehydrated. Consequently, the cracks. They are still solid and I think I could load four or five at a time into a Chuckit and start spreading seeds.

The next step is to make a larger batch with an ounce of stratified Redbud seeds in it and see if they withstand being distributed.

There is a west-facing slope east of the Hill Orchard where the stand of Bigtooth Aspen (Populus grandidentata) is in severe decline. I think there is enough light hitting the ground for the Redbud to thrive. 

Another 100 hills of potatoes in the ground

We had a surprise rain come through at 4:00 p.m. yesterday. I was hoping to get three-hundred hills planted.

Focus on the positive, Joe. Focus on the positive. 

 

At least two orders-of-magnitude

World War I started after a member of the Hapsburg Dynasty was assassinated by a radical in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary in June of 1914. The goal of the assassin(s) was to get out from under the thumb of the rulers in Austria.

Europe had been in a seemingly stable state. Two great powers were balanced against each other like two great slabs of rock, nearly vertical and leaning against each other with their tops touching. One power was land-based. The other's power was based on naval power. The assassination activated a series mutual-aggression pacts and soon most of the civilized world was at war.

Ultimately, the assassin(s) reached their goal. They went from being under the thumb of the Hapsburg Dynasty to being under Stalin's thumb (via Josip Tito's).

The Left/Deepstate sees Trump as someone who usurped what they thought was their personal property. They don't see him as a pivot-pin whose removal will unleash vast amounts of energy that is currently under control. They refuse to acknowledge that Trump is legitimate. They refuse to believe that anybody thinks other than the way they do. 

The thing about unleashing torrents of energy is that it cannot be controlled or directed. It goes where it will. It shatters and destroys in unpredictable ways like tornadoes spun off by a hurricane. 

And yet, there are elements of the Left who are hell-bent on making this happen and vastly more who passively think "It would be OK if...". A point that is lost on the Left is that it is impossible to cherry-pick the gold, diamonds and rubies out of the mud after you are dead. I am not saying it WILL happen. I am saying that the odds of it happening rises by at least two orders-of-magnitude if Trump is assassinated....civil war leading to world-war.

Quicksilver's Musical Moment

 

Green sleeves on her dress. Very clever. Subtle.

Greensleeves 

I like that a single artist plays all of the parts on the various instruments. Quicksilver will like that the artist* is a "niña" with long hair and a very feminine dress and cape.

 

*As a jaded, old man, the girl I see looks like Webb Hubbell's daughter. 

Pictures: The seedlings destined for the garden

 

African Marigolds, cv. Crackerjack mix. You can click on the images to embiggen them.

Rose de Bern tomatoes on left, Stupice on right

Happy Rich broccoli on left, Stocky Red Roaster sweet pepper on right

Tennessee 90 Burley on left, African Marigolds on right

More African Marigolds on left, Lovage on right

Quicksilver has a project going

Freedom primocane bearing blackberries interplanted with Tagetes lucida

A close-up of one of the blackberry plants. They small leaf with the reddish tint is new growth.

Rose de Bern tomatoes on left, Tagetes minuta on right.

Rhubarb seeds planted April 21

Just starting to push

Things are looking dry out-West.

 

According to this article, 75% of the water used in the West per-year comes from melting snowpack.

The water is used for domestic uses (drinking, laundry, bathing, flushing toilets and so on), industry (manufacturing, car washes, cleaning parts before painting) and agriculture (which often includes lawns and golf courses). Water is also set-aside by the EPA for wildlife purposes.

Water for agriculture is allocated via a complicated set of rules. If your share of the allocation looks like it will not be enough then you have to make some tough choices. Do you sell you herd now (good prices, cattle in good shape) or later (other producers dumping their herds, your cows looking scrawny)? How many do you send to market? Do you hold onto some of them and hope to get lucky next year? Regardless, it will take the region many years for the cattle herds to rebound to previous numbers.

The same thing happens with orchards. If you know you will not have enough water, which trees do you water and which do you let fend for themselves and likely die? Do you water just as many trees as possible just enough to keep them alive or do you water fewer trees enough to bring in a good crop? 

Orchard trees are not like wheat. If you sacrifice 40 acres of walnut, plum or almond trees (for instance) then replanting might involve $800k and five years or more years before you see a return to production.

My advice to readers is to plant onions and carrots in your garden this year.

Hat-tip to Coyote Ken 

Bonus images

 

An untimely rain and tab-clearing

There I was, carefully placing seed potatoes into the row. One-two-three. Move. Another one-two-three. Move. One foot apart. Skin-side-up. The potatoes probably don't care about the precision but I do.

Then, from the south a rumble that sounded like thunder. Could have been a truck, though.

A few seconds later. More thunder. Definitely thunder. It sounded closer.

Crap.

293-294-295. Move. 296-297-298. Move. 299, 300. Stand up. Stretch. Move the bucket of cut seed potatoes into the shade and tip it over so it will not fill with water.Start the tiller and run it into the barn. Roll the push mower into the barn. Walk toward the house in a sprinkle of rain.

The sprinkle turned into rain. We picked up about 0.2". I went out after the rain and the ground was to wet to do any more planting. Just barely too wet.

The grass was too wet to mow.

I didn't hit any of my goals yesterday.

Some days are like that.

The good news

I seemed to have cracked the code for staying peppy.

It was the lack of salt.

I was drinking powdered Gatorade + 1/4 tsp of salt per quart at breaks and I felt peppier after my second and third hours than I did after my first hour. I probably should have loaded up on the electrolyte before I went out working.

I drank about 28 ounces of the mix at each break but nothing during the hour of work. 

Some tab clearing

Fencing: The garden I planted the broccoli in has a 4' woven wire fence around half of it and a 52" fence made of feedlot panels around the other half. At the bottom there is 1" poultry-netting that is 24" tall attached to the taller fence. In some places I have 1" plastic netting which the rabbits have turned to Swiss Cheese. I need to upgrade that.

Yes, deer can easily jump over 4' fence. But most of them are lazy and don't do it when forage is abundant and they are not frightened.

Storing potatoes: Last year was a "Fail" in terms of the ERJ household storing potatoes. 

Digging the potatoes had been sort of a last-minute thing. Some of them had frozen. Some of them had only the thinnest bit of their top surface frozen.

Back in the day, there was a story of a disgruntled employee who tossed frozen potatoes underneath the hanging files in a dozen file cabinets shortly before he quit. Two weeks later there was a noticeable but difficult to find odor. A week after that the office was uninhabitable due to the stench. The potatoes had autolysed to slime which in-turn had dripped through the slots in the bottoms of the drawers and impregnated the paper filled hanging-files below them.

Yes. All of our stored potatoes got pitched. I went through the buckets a few times and sorted out what I thought were the good ones only to be wrong and have to start over. By the third sorting...Mrs ERJ suggested that potatoes are not expensive and maybe I could write it off as a lesson-learned.

And now it is a lesson-shared.

Miscellaneous

Yesterday, we had a kid slowly come putt-putt-putting up the driveway on a quad. He was wearing a helmet, which is unusual around here. He came ALL the way up the drive and SLOWLY turned around. My spider-senses tell me that he was scoping out the property for stuff to steal. He was going VERY SLOWLY as he looked inside the garage (the door was open).

It is probably time to display the gas can filled with water and with a 1/2" of gasoline floating on top. I prevent accidents by tying several wraps of red baling-twine around the handle of the decoy gas can. Red means "do not use". Blue means "mixed gas".

Just sayin'. Ain't the first time we have had this problem. Two-gallon gas cans seem to be the most popular with thieves. Five full gallons is too heavy and awkward to carry. One-gallon isn't hardly worth stealing.

More of the same, sweat and Amazing Grace

Today's work ticket

Take Quicksilver to a garage sale. I will give her a dollar for helping in the garden. I expect her to buy a stuffed animal with it.

Update: She bought a pair of sandals. 

Plant more potatoes. I had a shipment of seed potatoes show up yesterday. I want to get four-hundred feet of row planted.

Update: One-hundred feet is about 100 "hills" of potatoes. I am averaging about 2 hills a minute. I work an hour and then rehydrate and sit under the ceiling fan for twenty-minutes. Lather, rinse, repeat. I don't think I am going to get to mowing today. 

Plant the last four fruit trees. I have two Liberty/Bud-118 and one each Winecrisp/MM111 and Galarina/MM111 left.

Mow grass.

Heat

Image from Wikipedia

I am not dealing with the sudden onset of heat very well this year. I need to buy some sweat-bands to keep the sweat out of my eyes. I am also thinking about purchasing a straw hat because I cannot find the one I wore last summer.

At least I can sweat. I worked with a guy who went through chemo-therapy and his hair fell out. He said the summer he had no hair was the hottest summer he ever endured. I think the damage to his hair follicles also damaged his ability to sweat.

Quicksilver Music Moment

Amazing Grace. 

All work and no play makes Joe a dull boy

On today's work-ticket

Plant a tree in Southern Belle's orchard. One of the pear trees I planted last year never grew. I will be planting a Galarina apple that is grafted on a MM-111 rootstock. Since the dead pear is in the north row, an overly-large tree will not shade the other trees in the orchard (at least not very much).

---Added at 11:00 a.m.: There were two pear trees that needed replacements. I planted a Winecrisp/MM-111 in the southwest corner and a Galarina/MM111 immediately to the north of that tree. That gives her two Liberty apple trees, one each of Winecrisp, Galarina, Melrose, Fuji, Gold Rush, Harrow Sweet pear, Contender peach and Red Haven peach. She also has five hazelnut bushes, mostly cv. Somerset.--- 

Share some trees with the gentleman who remodeled our bathroom. He is building his own personal house for his retirement years and one of his goals is to produce as much food on the three acres as he can. He also asked for pruning and grafting lessons.

---Added at 6:00 p.m.: This ticket was punched by 4:32 p.m. The gentleman was a quick student and very capable with his eye-hand coordination.--- 

Plant potatoes in the garden. At a minimum, I want to plant forty hills of Red Pontiac for early potatoes. The detail that makes it awkward is that I want to put them in the row closest to the path for ease-of-harvest. I am contemplating moving the path so it runs up the middle of the 100'-by-40' plot. 

---Updated at 1:15 p.m.: I was assisted by Quicksilver in the garden and the Red Pontiac early potatoes are in.

I gave her an 8" long stick to use as a gauge to space the potatoes but she was a little bit unclear on the idea.---

I also decided to split the 100' length into two, 50' sub-parcels for ease of management. The west half is about 4' higher and the soil dries out and warms up more quickly than the east half. The early potatoes will be planted in the west half. That is NOT where they would be planted if I followed my usual "Plant the first items closest to the entrance to the plot" habit or "Start along a fence so the rows are efficiently spaced".

Well, well, well, would you look at that!

 

Twenty-one broccoli transplants into the ground!

Those were not on the work-ticket. Updated 2:30 p.m.

Quicksilver Musical Moment

Dance Monkey How do you say "Joyous abandon"?

Bonus headlines

This hospital treats many patients with "mental health issues"

Evil! Crazy-people need attention the way normal people need oxygen. They are performing for their "tribe" to get the "fix" that they crave.  They do that by inflaming the outrage of "the other side". This will not end well.

Planting asparagus

 

Today's adventure was to plant 60 asparagus plants ins a 60' long row.

First I tilled.

Then I trenched

 

The crowns look like octipii migrating in formation. The internet said that is not necessary to spread out the roots.

Looking up the row

The shorter stick in the foreground (that runs up-down in the photo) is 4' long with blazes every 12". I used it to space the crowns. The longer stick in the background is an 8' furring strip that I used to "calibrate" the compost application. One bag for every 8'.

Love is planting a row of asparagus because your wife loves asparagus. I can take it or leave it. I don't see what the big deal is. But if this makes her feel cherished, then it is time well spent.

Incidentally, the Caledonia Farmers Elevator on M-50 east of Charlotte has very large crowns of Millennium hybrid asparagus for $1.50 each. Best get them while they are in-stock. 

I also planted 7 fruit trees to round out the day.

3 hours time-on-task with a high temperature of 80F and no wind. Time to start taking electrolyte rather than plain water. I am worn out.