Red, clay soils

Note: This essay is what I think I know about growing plants in the south. Hopefully, Lucky will chime in and correct my errors.

Early studies of nutrient cycling in moist tropical forests describes productive forests rich in nutrients in which the rates of primary production (photosynthesis) and amounts of nutrients cycled clearly exceeded those in temperate zone forests. Reviews of global-scale patterns in biomass, production and nutrients cycling reported these results as representative of tropical forests.

At the same time, tropical forest soils were described as acide, infertile clay that hardens irreversibly to “laterite” when cleared or to bleached, quartz sands low in mineral nutrients. This apparent paradox was crystalized by Whittaker in the statement “The tropical rain forest thus has a relatively rich nutrient economy perched on a nutrient-poor substrate.” P.M. Vitousek and R.L. Sanford, 1986

The forest floor in the tropics teem with termites, ants, terrestrial crabs, centipedes, snails, slugs and similar scavengers. A piece of snake feces falling from the canopy and hitting the ground is cleaned up within minutes. A leaf or twig might be gone in a day or a week.

Due to the heat and humidity, organic material quickly decays and release their nutrients. The dense webbing of feeder roots just below the surface are in a life-or-death battle to grab those nutrients before some other tree does or (unlikely) the nutrient is leached out of the reach of the roots.

The red, clay soils in the southeastern United States have many similarities with the soils in the tropics. 

How to manage gardens in red, clay soils

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Mimic what works in nature. Red, clay soils are very similar to the soils under tropical forests.

That is easier than you think because you have probably been fighting it. 

Stop being anal about eliminating "weeds", at least in the places where you haven't planted yet. That mat of Crabgrass (in the summer), Dead-nettles, Chickweed and volunteer turnips (in the cooler months) are busy keeping the nutrients in the biosphere. And since you cannot effectively bank it in the soil as humus, then that is really you only alternative.

Nutrient cycling as "an economy"

Economists look at two numbers when assessing the health of an economy: The money supply (the number of dollars in circulation) and the velocity-of-money.

Injecting funds into the economy by giving benefits to poor people has more POP! than giving it to wealthy people. Poor people don't hoard the money. They run out and spend it. Wealthy people are much more likely to park their money in bank accounts or bonds which doesn't keep the money in the high-velocity parts of the economy.

As a gardener or orchardist living in places with red, clay soils or blow-sand, you need to stop thinking of yourself as a banker but as a scheduler who makes sure that there is always a line of customers waiting to grab those nutrients before they leach away. 

ADHD and time-blindness

Russel Barkley (no relation to Brigid's dog) is a person who researches ADHD. He is the guy who linked ADHD and many of their struggles for their inability to conceptualize time and to use it to guide their actions.

A comparison between how a "normal adult" and somebody with ADHD respond to deadlines (called "Event" on the graph).

I see this in ADHD kids. They are totally binary in the sense that there is NOW and NOT-NOW. The deadline could be tomorrow or next week or twenty years from now. It is all the same to them...meaningless.

Many of the people in prison have ADHD. They grew up without consequences in the sense that a consequence tomorrow had no meaning for them, even when it was an almost certainty.

In the dry language of one criminal justice scholar "Most felons are not capable of appropriately discounting the probability of future consequences to their current actions."

An example of a profoundly ADHD kid

Smedley had a son named Earl.

Earl had ADHD.

In an effort to train Earl on the benefits of deferring gratification, Smedley made Earl a deal. 

"Earl, I will give you a dollar on Sunday. You can go out and spend it, but if you have that dollar I will give you two dollars on Monday."

On Monday, Earl had the dollar bill that Smedley had marked with his pen in the corner of the bill.

So, on Monday, Smedley traded that dollar bill for two one dollar bills and told Earl "If you have those two dollars tomorrow, then I will trade them for four dollars on Tuesday." 

Since Smedley had proven as good-as-his-word regarding the two dollars for one, Earl was able to produce the two bills on Tuesday and Smedley faithfully produced four...

On Wednesday Earl traded his four bills for eight.

On Thursday Earl traded his eight bills for sixteen.

On Friday Earl traded his sixteen bills for thirty-two. And still, Smedley was willing to offer a 100% "interest rate" if Earl hung onto them for another day. That is, he was willing to give Earl sixty-four dollars on Saturday if Earl still had all thirty-two dollars.

On Saturday, Earl didn't have any money. Smedley was dumbfounded. Earl didn't seem concerned.

Later, Sissy told her dad "Earl played your game until he had enough to buy seven-grams of weed."

Still confused, Smedley asked "But if he had waited one more day he would have had enough money to buy TWO baggies of weed! What is the matter with him?" 

Mr Smedley, your son has ADHD. It was binary in his head. "Not enough money to buy seven-grams was the equivalent of zero, of no-value. Once he had $30 he had enough to buy that baggie (with enough left over for a bag of skittles) and two baggies tomorrow did not compute in his head because the concept of "tomorrow" is a foreign country." 

Back to the video

The narrator describes a very simple experiment to sort ADHD from "normal".

The person performing the test turns on a light bulb and leaves it on for a predetermined amount of time. For the sake of example, let's say it is on for twenty-five seconds.

Then, after a short bit of conversation, the person giving the test hands the switch to the person being tested and tells them, "Turn on the light and turn it off when it has been on as long as I had it on."

A "normal person will likely fall within some range...again, for the sake of argument, let's say between 20 seconds and 30 seconds. An ADHD will turn it off in five-to-fifteen seconds or leave it on for minutes. 

IQ or ADHD

Granted, there will be a huge amount of overlap. A person with ADHD cannot sit through an IQ test so we really cannot measure their "intelligence".

But I propose that time-blindness has such grave consequences that there would be value, and profit, in finding ways to train-the-brain to compensate for that inability. 

First harvests, gardening fail and simple garden tools

First Harvests

The first broccoli florets, harvested May 29, 2026!

 

First potato harvest of 2026. Uncovered while tilling. Still sound!

 

Gardening fail

I had cucumber transplants die!

I had grown them in water-bottles that I had cut the tops off of. Since the bottles are wasp-waisted, I rolled up strips of newspaper to hold the soil, thinking it would be easier to remove the root-ball from the plastic container.

A cucumber plant still in its paper sleeve

That part worked like a charm

What I did not realize was that the paper was almost impenetrable to the cucumber roots. The baby plants were not able to access the moisture in the soil around them because I had planted them paper-sleeve and all.

Transplant with the paper sleeve unrolled showing roots

I replanted with the same batch of plants but unrolled the paper sleeve from the root-ball. That took about 4 seconds and there roots were well enough developed to hold the soil together.

Then I gave the plants a large drink of water to settle the soil and melt the tiny clods into the roots that had been exposed when I unrolled the sleeve.

Simple tools

You can see water ponding where I stepped

The simplest and cheapest tool is to change your gardening practices.

Walking across garden soil compacts it. That limits water being able to soak in. It also hampers root growth thereby limiting the plants' access to nutrients and moisture.

The picture shown above isn't quite what you think it is. My practice is to place my feet in the same place every time I walk up-or-down a garden path. The footsteps you see are the result of ten or fifteen round-trips up that path. What I want you to see is the area in the path where the water IS NOT ponding.

No flag stones. No boards (which can shelter insect pests). No gravel. Just a simple change in practice.

Actual tools

Repurposed items are inexpensive because you didn't have to drive somewhere to buy it. They are fast because you didn't have to wait for deliver.

 

This might LOOK like a common leaf rake. But it is not. It is a Border Collie!

This is the rake that I use to herd my ducks into their enclosure to keep them safe at night.

Ducks are terrified by raptors like hawks. It is in their DNA.

When I raise this rake and rotate the handle +/-30 degrees, the visual effect (to the ducks) are the beating of wings.

If I want the ducks to go to the left, I raise the rake in my right hand and give it a wiggle.

If I want them to go right, I shift the rake over to my left hand, raise it up and give it a wiggle.

I can move that "hawk" 15' between the length of the handle and the span of my arms. No need to run or hurry. I don't need to move my body. 

If the ducks are moving in the direction I want them to go, I lower the rake.

And guess where those ducks want to be when they start seeing "hawks" flying over-head? You guessed it. They want to be in their safe-space.

Information is a tool

This is a simple, plastic cereal bowl that was purchased at a garage sale

Two of these go into a bucket for the ducks to eat. This bowl lives in the open bag of duck food.

Do you see to dashed line on this jug? That is how much water I add to the duck feet to make a mash that they don't waste. The jug is a tool.

This jug lives on the stack of kindling in the breeze-way.

This is a simple 3-by-5 inch index card that I laminated with packing tape. This card is a tool...a device that helps me work more quickly and/or perform higher-quality work.

 

Rather than recalculate the dilution rate every time I need to do it, I wrote it down. This card lives in the open bag of urea fertilizer. I even did it in metric so I don't have to change the mode on Mrs ERJ's kitchen scale (it defaults to metric).

 

Peanut butter, toys for children, longevity of various dog breeds

 

Counties that grow peanuts on the left, drought map on right

I believe that D1 is the equivalent of Mean Soil Moisture - 1.0 Standard Deviation. D2 is MSM - 2.0 Standard Deviations and so on.

Source of drought picture.

Source of peanut production by county (Note: there is one county in Texas that produces a lot of peanuts that I trimmed off to make the two maps match.

Conclusion: This might be a good time to buy peanut butter.

Toys for children

Quicksilver had her 4th birthday this past week. 

Kids are very quick to identify playground equipment because it is almost always combinations of vivid red, vivid yellow or vivid blue.

While walking in town (Eaton Rapids) to get to the library, she saw some toys. She liked the blue one best.

Photo take with the driver's permission

I think the vehicle owner was a U-of-M fan. It had yellow seat/shoulder belts. Just because you have money doesn't mean you have good taste.

Gardening report from Southern Belle

The tomatoes and peppers were planted at the widow's house. 

The "garden" consisted of two raised beds, 4' long by 2' wide. They were tucked underneath the eves on the west side of the garage...so half-day of afternoon sun. The beds were 8" deep trays held up with 4-by-4 legs.

The customer was happy.

Thanks for all of the comments in the previous post

It feels odd to not have Zeus or some other dog around.

I was not aware of how much attention I paid to him. It was just part of the normal fabric of life.

For example, our main security camera (which we think of as a window where the builder didn't put one) looks down the length of our driveway from the corner of the garage. That feed captures Zeus's kennel. EVERY time I look at that feed "window" I monitor Zeus's body language.

We have owned single or multiple dogs continuously since 1988.

The data for life-expectancy by dog breed is squishy. There is not a lot of it and it is known to have self-selection biases, i.e. owners of posh purebreds are more likely to register data than owners of mutts.

We will probably get another dog but it will be on our terms; our  timing, the size that will work for us, breed and so on. 

On average:

• Smaller dogs live longer than larger dogs
• Dogs with longer muzzles live longer than dogs with pushed in muzzles
• Crossbred dogs live longer than purebred dogs.

Some breeds defy expectations. Border Collies, Australian Shepherds and Jake Russel Terriers are over-achievers for longevity. I am clueless regarding the personality of a Jack Russel x Border Collie cross. They are both very intense dogs with the Jack Russel being ADHD and the Border Collie OCD. It could go either way, best of both or worst of both.

 

Seedling trays

Japanese Water Iris

The seed package said they would sprout in seven-to-fourteen days. I planted 100 seeds. The first one sprouted on Day 15. I am up to five of the hundred showing green.

 

Wibb Watermelon. 2021 seeds. 6-of-9 planted germinated so far

I already have a marketing plan for the melons. I will sell them to McDonalds to use in their iconic McWibb sandwiches.

Tasteless jokes

The best thing about being a grave digger is that it is one of the very few professions where you start out right at the top.

 

Zeus update

Zeus's deterioration accelerated. He was crashing. Kubota was a rock-star. He used some connections and pulled in a few favors to get Zeus into the vet (small towns have advantages), but it was to no avail. Zeus slipped his mortal coil at 9:14 A.M. local time.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven

A time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up

 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance...    -Ecclesiastes 3, KJV

 

One hour, 15 minutes from marking out the corners of the grave in the sod to sprinkling zinnia seeds over the newly filled grave.

Zeus is planted between a Bur Oak and a Persimmon tree in our yard. He is looking west. My apologies for the crappy pictures. I was distracted.

God-speed, Zeus. Rest in Peace.

If you can spare a prayer for Kubota, I will appreciate it. He was holding his dog for the last 20 minutes telling Zeus "I'm sorry". Kubota could not hear me telling him that he had no reason to be sorry, that he (Kubota) had not failed him. That Zeus didn't blame him. That Zeus was happy that Kubota was there in his moments of greatest need. 

Lives end. Life goes on...

Zeus update

Zeus is fading fast. There is more going on than the hot-spots. My kids have been alerted so they can swing by the house and say "Good-bye". Zeus was Kubota's dog and he is taking the news hard.

There are a lot of moving pieces. One of the big ones is how to bring him back home without freaking out Quicksilver. The time windows when the vet is open and we are not watching her are very short slivers of time.

Quicksilver knows about death. She has seen dead chickens and her papa, Handsome Hombre "took care of" the raccoons responsible for the dead chickens. We walk country roads and she is keenly aware of the dead birds, rabbits possum, raccoons and deer that we encounter.

I don't think she is ready to process a family member dying. More honestly, I don't have the energy right now to help her process that.

Southern Belle update

Southern Belle took the vegetable seedlings to her Wednesday church-group meeting. One of the other women there was recently widowed. Her deceased husband was the gardener in the family. The widow longingly looked at the seedlings and said "I wish I could take some but planting a garden is beyond what I can do."

Southern Belle stepped up. "I can plant your garden" she said.

I looked at the widow's address on Google. Her entire back yard is 1100 square-feet and the "garden" is a narrow strip of bare dirt next to the concrete patio.

The irony is that I am planting SB's garden and she is going to plant the widow's garden. You know, I really don't have an objection to that. My goal is to have her family be proficient at growing food. If it takes a grieving widow to prime-the-pump, it is just more evidence of God's mysterious ways.

Fishing report

I sat in a chair on the beach while Shotgun fished. He had two bites but landed neither one of them.

Biological Calendar

The Black Locust, iris and first white clover are in bloom. Alas, so is the Orchardgrass.

The peonies are just opening up and our first head of broccoli is ready to harvest. If you look very closely at the ends of the new shoots on the pecan trees you can see the tiny shapes the will become clusters of pecans while the catkins are strewn like confetti along the length of the twigs.

The horseradish is done blooming and the raspberries are near the end of their blooming. Our last lilac, Betsy Ross is near the end of its show.

The bluegills are newly on their beds. I could smell them as I sat on the beach. I can also smell the male Honey Locust flowers.

The geese have goslings in tow. Swallows are abundant. 

The grass needs mowing and the garden needs weeding. 

Stuff I planted yesterday:

Another 60 feet of sweet corn in Handsome Hombre's corn patch.

Two cantaloupe plants. Interplanted with turnip seeds for greens.

Two Atlantis cantaloupe seedlings.

A row of broccoli on the left and newly planted sweet peppers on the right.

Eleven sweet pepper plants in Southern Belle's garden.

Twenty marigold plants and five small rhubarb seedlings. 

Adeline of Bohodukhiv plants a garden

Adeline is the youngest sister of Athanasius who posts on Youtube. She studied in Germany and then moved back to the family compound. She teaches German language "remotely" and posts cooking and family-life videos on Youtube.

She recently moved out of the family compound. It may have been difficult to work remotely due to ambient noise, power outages and general chaos.

The first order-of-business after moving was to put in a garden. Several things struck me as notable in this video:

• Adeline and her helper are very industrious. They keep working and working and working.
• The only power-tool I saw them use was a cordless drill. Everything else was done with hand-tools. I saw them use a mobile-home anchor as an auger to dig holes for trellis posts, for instance.
• Other than seeds, the only "purchased/manufactured" materials I saw them use was netting for the cucumbers to climb on.
• Their soil was very easy to work. It is "Chemozem" or "Black soil". The garden appeared to have been used in 2025 since the only weeds were common annuals like Wild Lettuce and Lambsquarters.

Other observations that are making me think

While videos like this can be inspirational to new gardeners, it comes with some caveats.

If a person were to attempt to exactly replicate her garden in the US, for instance, he would likely have problems. Most specifically, the planting density that she uses.

Things like planting density depend on "the system". Context matters.

• Varieties planted
• Training 
• Soil fertility
• Dryland or irrigated 
• Weed control plan
• Disease pressure 

My father, for example, planted potatoes in hills that were planted in a 36" grid in both directions. He cultivated (kept the weeds under control) with a rototiller with a 24" width. First he would till east-west and then he would follow with a north-south tilling. He did not have the means to water the garden during dry-spells nor did he use significant amounts of fertilizer.  

All of those pieces fit together. Effective cultivation conserved water and the low density meant that the individual potato plants were not competing with each other for the limited moisture and fertility. While his harvest per unit-area was low, he cultivated enough area to have plenty of potatoes.

I, on the other hand, plant at about three times that density. But I fertilize and I use impulse sprinklers to water the garden through dry spells. You cannot mix-and-match details from the two systems although sometimes you might get lucky with rain and fertile soils.

Some examples from the video:

She is planting a boat-load of carrot seeds per inch. Perhaps they will suppress weeds?

 

This row-spacing commits them to hand cultivating

In this image she is planting tomato plants.

By midwestern standards, this is a very high planting density.

From a systems standpoint, it could work with a "determinate" tomato variety like Roma trained to a single shoot per plant and modest amounts of fertility. A dry summer climate is also a part of the system...high plant densities and wet weather foster disease.

That is one reason for finding a local gardening mentor. YOUR local conditions and the best methods might be very different than what a glamorous influencer does. 

Another grab-bag

Today was taken up with little, fiddly things.

Quicksilver and I went for a walk and played "Quicksilver, COME HERE!" 

Repetitions are the foundation of classical conditioning. In the factory, the standard was between 1000 and 10,000 repetitions to gain mastery. In a factory pumping out 442 vehicles a shift, that amounts to a month on a job without rotation.

Muscle memory is not something you can think-into-being or arrive at by means of logic. You just have to do it.

While we were walking Quicksilver started batting the tall weeds growing alongside the road. Three of those tall weeds were orchardgrass. All three emitted puffs of pollen as Quicksilver hit them. 

Garden update

50 feet of beets were transplanted and after I depleted the seedlings, I seeded the remainder. I have 100 feet of row left in the potato patch to populate.

Southern Belle took a flat of seedlings to her church yesterday evening: Rose de Bern, sweet peppers, Tagetes minuta and Tagetes lucida. 

Southern Belle is scheduled to get another four, 10' rows of sweet corn seeded today and I will probably finish out the sweet pepper seedlings in her garden.

Luna moth

I found him, spent, on the floor of our garage. Not a bad way to go, really.

I wonder if he came out of one of the cocoons I saw on the persimmon tree?

Ducks

The color of the Khaki Campbell ducklings looks exactly like our brown, Michigan loam when it is damp or shaded. When they are resting and not moving, they are almost invisible.

After two days-and-nights, I released the male Rouen duck to be with the others. It was hot and I could not ensure he would get sufficient water or shade to survive, so I rolled the dice.

The older (girl) ducks treat the young ducks with the disdain that 23 year-old college graduates would treat 7th grade girls. The drake (male duck) pretty much ignores them as well.

That was a happy ending.

Zeus met Pepe le Pew last night

 Nobody is very happy about that.

Tomorrow's work-ticket

More "Quicksilver, COME HERE!"

Mowing the Upper Orchard.

Making and installing cages to protect trees from deer.

Maybe go fishing with Shotgun. 

Grab-bag

This will be a gossipy, newsy kind of post.

Zeus gave us a scare. He started suffering from hot-spots that he kept biting at and wouldn't leave alone. He also had some skin eruptions near the hot-spots that were hard and woody.

We noticed Friday, not the best time to take him to the vet. They were closed Monday.

The thoughts running through my mind were "Cancer". When we take him to the vet, what if they recommend putting him down RIGHT NOW? The kids are off on Memorial Day holiday. One was in California. Another was near Higgins Lake.

In an attempt to buy time, we started hitting him with a near-max dose of diphenhydramine (Benadryl is a common trade-name). I also bought a topical spray that contained Lidocaine and Hydrocortisone. I also dosed him with nitenpyram to eliminate fleas as a potential contributor to the problem.

And in two days our pup was sort-of back to normal. He still has the woody skin condition but the hot-spot disappeared and he isn't chewing on himself. But he is back to meeting me at the end of the hallway at 5:02 a.m. when I wake up. He is back to doggy smiling and tail-wagging and trying to jump up and kiss my face. "Bad dog. Down!"

I think we dodged a bullet. The worst case would be if the kids didn't have the opportunity to say "Good-bye" to Zeus and if I had to explain Zeus's inert form to a very curious Quicksilver.

Replant and thin no more

I replanted the Blue Lake pole beans. About half of them haven't come up yet. I planted a bit to the side, and only where a plant might still be thinking about coming up so I wasn't killing any beans that I had already planted.

I burned brush today

No explanation needed.

One of the eye-openers was burning some bamboo. That stuff sounds like gun-shots when it burns. I suspect it is the air inside of the joints heating up and causing a shock-wave when the joint ruptures. It even has a random staccato like a fire-fight.

Keeping a weather-eye out

Orchard grass pollen is my kryptonite. It usually hits June first, give or take a few days. It pollinates like crazy for a week and then much less so after that.

I have some chores that will keep me busy in the basement for that week. 

Books

At my friend's mother's funeral, one of the siblings read a prepared statement. A line impressed me "All of us have vivid memories of sitting on our beds while Mom read Little House in the Big Woods, Lord of the Rings and other books to us. We learned to love reading listening to our mother read."

I wasn't able to find our house's copy of Little House in the Big Woods today but I did find a copy of Pippi Longstocking. I woke Quicksilver from her nap by starting to read from it.

When Mrs ERJ came home, she found the LHitBW book and I read about 20 pages from it to Quicksilver.

She was mesmerized by both.

Incidentally, she has her 4th birthday this week. And unlike me at 4 years of age, she knows EXACTLY what deer meat tastes like. 

Stick with what works

Quicksilver and I play a game. We go for a walk. I say "Quicksilver COME HERE!". If she drops what she is doing and bee-lines to me; she gets on M&M. If she lollygags or drags her feet; no M&M.

The first two commands that are usually taught to dogs are "COME" and "STAY". There are reasons for that. It keeps them safe.

I am not proud to admit that I was once building a swing-set. I was making it from 12' long, treated 4"-by-4" timbers. Southern Belle, who may have been 9 at the time, was helping me by steadying an "A" frame when things went pear-shaped.

I shouted "GO!" and pointed. She bailed out. No argument. No questions. She dived and maybe even did a rolling somersault. She instantly "got off the X". There were no broken bones. No brain injuries. No bruises. No bad memories.

Later in life I was to learn her instant, unquestioning response was an aberration in children. Of my four kids only one of the others might have responded the same way.

There are times for discussions and debate. There are times to vote and negotiate. And there ares time when the only thing that matters is crisp, vigorous execution. My goal is to have Quicksilver's muscle-memory slaved to tone-of-command so that the urgency will be instantaneous. The path to obtaining that deep knowing is paved with peanut butter M&Ms. Your mileage may vary.

Grafting updates

The apple graft percentage keeps climbing as the "slow" scions decide to push buds.

When I teach people to graft, one of the hardest things to drill into their heads is that the MUST remove the shoots that keep pushing on the rootstock. Those shoots communicate with the main stem with growth regulators that suppress other buds from breaking dormancy.

As one veteran grafter put it, "You have to convince that plant that it is going to die if it doesn't let the scion push those buds". Hard, but true.

Pecan update

I was surprised to see catkins (pollen emitting organs) on a Kanza tree and a Liberty pecan tree that I grafted just a few years ago. It will be a hoot if they set some nuts. They might not fill to commercially acceptable standards, but they might still produce viable seed nuts for germination.

Last winter was a test winter. Local weather stations recorded lows in the range of -24F to -25F.

I had a mixed bag. Some trees that I did not expect to die, died. And vice versa.

Barrels

One of the five barrels I bought will not be usable. Somebody dumped coffee grounds into it and the sediment has proven difficult to remove.

Southern Belle said "My neighbor sells barrels. You should have told me you wanted some!"

Duh! Communication is not one of my strong suites. However, that means that I only have to drive about three miles to get the fifth barrel I need for my project.

Random flowers

I keep looking for clover and birdsfoot trefoil seedlings  where I frost-seeded this spring. I am seriously wondering if the seed I used was sterile. I cannot find any evidence of the (literally) millions of seeds I scattered over multiple locations.

I do see lots of hop-clover* in places where I seeded. LOTS of hop-clover.

Prior to seeding I limed, added P and K and sprayed boron.

There are two possibilities. One is that there has always been a huge spring flush of hop-clover and I never saw it because I never looked for it.

The other possibility is that there were always hop-clover seeds germinating but they fizzled due to the inhospitable soil fertility. 

 

Iris versicolor I planted this about five years ago and thought it had died out. I was happy to learn that I was wrong. I saw it while dragging wood to the burn pile.

This is a peony. Quicksilver was fascinated by the ants that were attracted to the extrafloral nectar glands. I wonder if peonies would be useful for feeding parasitoid, nectar-feeding wasps.

* Hop-clover are several very similar species of Eurasian legume species (Common Hop CLover, Low Hop Clover, Little Hop Clover) that are short, short lived and quite inconspicuous. Even the names are repeatedly redundant and exceptionally forgettable.

...suck the juice out of the stone...

 

Click HERE to skip the first minute of "artsy" introduction

A crazy Swiss dude going through his mid-life crisis decided to grow grapes in a hostile, inhospitable environment. 70% of the vines that he laboriously plants dies in the first year*.

He spends his winter dry-fitting stone walls and backfilling with "soil" that has so much stone in it that cannot be used for gravel roads.

Nearly all progress can be laid at the feet of crazy or desperate people. "Normal" people accept that there are a thousand inter-locking reasons for why things are exactly the way they are. Only a fool or a crazy person would fight that. 

Nearly all the interesting stories are at the margins and corners of society. Men heroically (perhaps Quixotically) striving to bend austere, stony  wilderness to the plow are such men-of-the-margin.

I am proud to call several such men and women my friends. 

*If it were me, I would place empty five gallon buckets with their bottoms cut out where I wanted grape-vines. Then I would backfill around them. When it came time to plant the vines, I would put four inches of screened "soil" in the bottom, position the vine and then fill the bucket the rest of the way with the screened soil. Then I would pull the bucket up leaving the vine and cylinder of slightly better soil.

It broke my heart to see him trimming the roots to stubs because he couldn't make the holes wide enough. Those vines NEED those roots.

I would screen with 3/4" or 1" screen...not very radical, just enough to enrich the soil/stone ratio around the roots. 

Another work-around would be to plant ungrafted rootstock and let them grow a year. Then field graft or bud them the second year. 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

George Catlin was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1796 and died in New Jersey in 1872.

He is notable for painting more than 500 Native-Americans in a time (1830s) and place when beaver pelts and barrels of bear-grease outnumbered canvases and linseed oil (for paint) by 10,000 to 1.

As a frame of reference, Pittsburgh had a population of 13,000 in 1830. Cincinnati had a population of 25,000. St Louis boasted 14,000. St Paul, MN wasn't founded until 1841.

If some of his painting seem to lack some of the fine detail seen in European paintings of the same period, consider that he could not just saunter down to the local art-store and buy another three camel-hair brushes when his wore out.

Ball Players

Tipis

Osceola

A chief of the Plains Ojibwa tribe

Cutting ceremony

A chief going to Washington dressed as a native, coming back as a dandy

Woman of the Wichita tribe

Crow woman, her name translated into English as "Woman who lives in a bear's den"

 Hat-tip to 10x25mm (I think) for suggesting this artist.

Crispy-dry weather and Legacy Infrastructure

 

Dry, crispy weather ahead of us. Look at the separation between the predicted temperatures and the dew-point. Very unlike Michigan.

That is lovely weather to work in as long as I stay hydrated with "electrolytes"...its what plants crave. 

Legacy infrastructure

I have hazy memories of widely spaced walnut trees growing on the hillside that is now the Hill Orchard.

There are still walnut trees growing in the bottom-land at the base of the hill.

The tireless Lucas Machias sent me an article quite some time ago. It was about how the roots of trees in a forest will cross over each other and as they gain girth, they will graft together.

That is a problem when something like Oak Wilt strikes. The disease organism can spread from tree-to-tree-to-tree without the need for a vector.

The positive side is that if the top of a tree dies, the roots continue to live as the neighboring trees continue to trade carbohydrates for water and nutrients. What is totally weird about this is that trees will root-graft to trees of other species!

So that has me wondering, are the walnut roots that are bedeviling the bottom half of the Hill Orchard legacy roots that once belonged to the trees that grew on the hill and have been kept alive via root-grafts with the bottom-land walnut trees? Or are they roots that have always belonged to the trees growing in the bottom-land?

One of the tidbits that stimulated this thought is that the roots we cut when trenching last fall were not where I expected based on the mortality patterns in the Hill Orchard, nor was the diameter of the roots that we cut what I expected. 

If they are vampire roots from the trees that were cut decades ago, then cutting the connection between them and the bottom-land trees means that it is unlikely that the bottom-land trees will make the investment to regrow roots out that far from their stem. If those roots have always belonged to the bottom-land trees and no others, then they will probably grow back.

I am sure there are many other analogies to this issue. Legacy infrastructure can be waste-water and storm drains deeply buried beneath the surface, COBOL or FORTRAN programming or traditional curriculum and "trades" training in social backwaters. Those resources are darned near invisible until they become extinct. And then the cost to replace them is astronomical.

This-and-that

I finally hit my ideal weight. The breakthrough came after I learned that doctors typically deduct 5 pounds for clothing.

I now wear a knit cap, PJ top and bottom and two socks when I step on the scales. Five pieces of clothing at 5 pounds each means that I can deduct 25 pounds from the weight that I read off the scale's display.

My BMI is now exactly 25.

Big day planned

Due to the rain we received, I will stay out of the gardens for a few days to avoid compacting the soil.

I will be going with Shotgun to pick up the barrels in Caledonia this morning. The gentleman selling them had multiple entries on Craigslist but only one of them listed his address and hours. He answered one email but he didn't include hours or his address. I finally stumbled across the one listing that had that information and am going to act on it.

Then I will be working in the orchards. Wind speeds of 3mph predicted and low humidity. No rain forecast for the next ten days. It is the perfect day for spraying herbicide.

I used to shoot for May 1 for spraying herbicide beneath the trees. That is great for controlling grass but some classes of vegetation (like woody vines) leaf-out much later in the spring. So, over time, the orchard floor becomes a jungle in the places where you cannot mow. 

Other tasks include grafting and putting cages around trees to protect them from deer.

Scams and fraud

The general buzz on the streets is that scams and fraud have become more aggressive over the last few months. Various forms of identity theft are the high runner with the EASIEST way to do it being to steal a senior citizen's phone and guess the password (1111, 2222, 1234, 1212 and so on). Then they open their Amazon, Walmart or payment apps and buy a bunch of stuff with gift cards being the item-of-choice.

The most common PINs start with "1", "0" or "2"

 

The least common PINs start with "8", "9", "6" or "7"

The point is to use a unique PIN or password, to treat your phone like it is a wallet with ten, $100 bills in it.

I must confess to being willfully ignorant about payment apps. I watch people pay for things by opening their phone and scanning QR code and that seems risky. Again, I am ignorant, but linking my phone to a bank or a credit account gives me the willies.

Luanda, Angola: Population 8.8 million

 

I am not going to do a lot of editorializing.

Angola is not a rich country.

Based on the walls and bars across every opening, it is not a high-trust society.

Trash is thrown into the street and is helpfully packed into the deepest ruts and potholes.

The torrential rains are more than the streets/drains can accommodate and the very foundations of the city are under-cut by erosion.

The high point of the video is when the videographer walks past a Catholic school at the 3:45 mark.

Catholic teachings on "birth control"

At this time, the mainstream Catholic teaching on artificial (i.e. not abstinence or (in some cases) barrier methods) birth control is that it is the equivalent of homicide because a fertilized egg is denied its right to implant into the endometrium of his or her mother's uterus. It is theologically considered the equivalent of not allowing a baby to nurse from his/her mother's breasts and letting him/her starve to death.

Catholic teachings evolve...but they evolve very slowly.

For instance, it was once taught that rape was a less grievous sin than masturbation. The "logic" was that a potential good (a baby) was possible with rape that was not a possibility with masturbation. That teaching reversed when the the debate expanded to include not just the sinner and potential offspring but to also include the woman (or man) who had been violated.

In the glacial pace of the Eternal Church, similar arguments are evolving where the greater social consequences of exceeding the carrying capacity of the land are being introduced into the debates. Every person who dies by starvation or communicable diseases that are exacerbated by over-crowding is a potential "player" in the calculus of sin-and-salvation.

Personal space: Duck Edition

All four ducklings made it through the night alive.

This morning they were getting trained on "personal space". The ducklings were raised in a crowded pen and their idea of personal space is much less than that of the girls with seniority.

Ducks are gregarious animals. They find safety in flocks (or "rafts" when they are on the water). They have a natural desire to be close to each other, but how close is variable that depends on the environment.

It looks to me like the senior girls are setting up a zone-defense as one might see in the game of basketball. They want a certain amount of space between each player...not too much but not too close, either.

My guess is that there is an optimum range between ducks when they march abreast foraging. That is, each duck has a lane that she can efficiently forage and she will not tolerate another duck cutting into that lane.

As she marches up that lane, she shoves her bill beneath every wad of vegetation, under every dirt clod, under every board...searching for snails, slugs, centipedes, cut-worms and other tasty bits of protein. That said, the lane is something like 12"-to-18" wide, which is about twice as far as she can reach by pivoting her body and extending her neck.

For those of you who have studied defensive warfare, those lanes are analogous to "fields of fire". There is a certain amount of overlap that is desirable but too much overlap defeats the purpose. 

Today's work-ticket

Stretch a short fence across the middle of the fenced in garden. The beans are starting to come up and I don't think they will survive the ducks. I anticipate that I can dispense with the fence in about 10 days. By then, the beans should be tall enough and well enough rooted to brush-off the duck's foraging.

Ducks, rain and durable clothing

 

I purchased four straight-run, Khaki Campbell ducks. My intention is to go from 2 Rouen and one Khaki Campbell to all KC ducks.

The male (called a "drake" in the business) wss acting very aggressively toward the ducklings. He is spending the night in a dog-crate while all of the girls (until proven otherwise) spend the night together. When I left the girls, the two grown-up were schooling the newbies on the pecking order.

Odds of all four ducklings being male are (1/2)^4 or about 6%. Odds of them being all female are the same. So there is an 88% chance that the four new ducks are of mixed sexes and I will have a flock of both KC ducks (i.e. girls) and I will keep one drake. 

Speaking of which. One of Southern Belle's male rabbits gave birth this morning. She had assumed Bingo was a boy based on what the seller told her...she never checked.

 

Looking up the rows of the potato patch.

We had about a half-inch of rain today and the weather-weenies promise another half-inch tomorrow. We needed it. That will bring our total May rainfall up to about 1.5"

If you zoom in and look for a horizontal row of tiny green sprinkles across the center of the frame, you will see that the rutabaga seeds are up.

How long will well cared-for clothes last? 

I cajoled Mrs ERJ into modeling her favorite jacket for the blog.

This is her spring/fall, walk-in-the-woods and camping jacket. It is over 40 years old.

She also has a pair of sweat-pants and a matching sweat-shirt that is at least 38 years old.

One of Mrs ERJ's most endearing traits is that she values paid-for, reliability, quality and steadfast endurance over new-and-shiny.

Scarifying Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) seeds 

I opted for the boiling water treatment, a method that still strikes me as impossible.

The literature from scholar.google.com suggested that 10-to-15 seconds of dumping the seeds into boiling water and then a quick cool-down by adding tap water. Then a 24 hour soak in water at room temperature was a good method.

The literature universally give soaking in concentrated sulfuric acid higher germination rates but boiling water is easier to come by.

I brought about one quart of water up to a boil in a 3 quart pot.  I dumped in 50 grams of Black Locust seeds that were harvested in 2024. Due to fiddling around, the time was closer to 15 seconds than 10 seconds.

I weighed the seeds after the 24 hours of soaking and they weighed 142 grams, so the impermeable seed-coats on most of the seeds were breached.

The seeds will be mixed into clay balls and planted in the next week. They are sitting in the refrigerator until that can happen.