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.