Eclectic Grab-bag

Surveying my gardens this morning I saw a little flash of orange. It was the same orange as the cheapest basketballs you could buy when I was a kid. Not at all like a snail.

Colorado Potato Beetle larva!!!

Not on every plant, but enough to know that it was time to address the issue.

Colorado Potato Beetles tend to lay eggs on adjacent plants. When the distance between rows is large in comparison to the distance between plants within a row, it is common to have streaks of between three and ten plants in the row populated with larva and then gaps where the plants are "clean".

If a fellow were trying to conserve his supply of insecticides, it is possible to walk the rows and when larva are spotted to spray the infected plant and then to spray two (or three) plants to either side of it in the row on the assumption that the mother laid eggs on those plants as well.

It comes down to "What is the bottleneck resource?". If it is labor, then it is much faster to spray the entire potato patch. If the limiting factor is availability of effective pesticides, then using some intelligence can really stretch that supply.

Boring details 

Same water-prep as before. This time I used 3 ounces of 13.3% Permethrin per gallon of water. The plants are bigger now than they were on June 8. I went through two gallons of spray over 650' of row.

Permethrin is non-polar and is absorbed by the waxy cells in the leaf's outer layer. Pemethrin has a very low vapor-pressure and is persists in the leaf for a long time. It is not very mobile in the plant since it is not water soluble. 

Southern Belle reports that there are no larva visible on her potatoes...yet.

One nice thing about CPB larvae is that they like to eat the tops of the plants. That makes them easy to see and pretty much ensures that the parts of the plants that are most at risk get good coverage.

I assume the tops taste better than lower leaves. Maybe they are sweeter. Or maybe it is because the lower leaves are older and might retain toxicity from the earlier spraying.

Another consideration (for organic control) is that these larva might be beyond the easy reach of ducks. I estimate that the plants are currently  18"-to-24" high and that would be quite a stretch for the ducks. I could train them to follow me and I could shake the plants. CPB larva drop out of the canopy when stressed in that way. That would put them within easy feeding-range of ducks.

Chipmunks

Something is appreciating my trapping efforts, and it is not the chipmunks.

This is what I found this morning. It is the front 1/4 of a chipmunk. The rest of the animal was a midnight snack for some animal. It reminds me of the stories of people fishing off-shore of Galveston, Texas. Lots of sharks out there in the Gulf of America.

Mowers

I am fiddling around with changing the motor on one of my dead push-mowers.

The diameter of the through-holes in the engine-block for mounting the engine to the deck are 8.6mm which is the minor diameter for M10-1.25 bolts. A 5/16" bolt will fit with a tiny bit of play. That is, 8.6mm is a bit larger than the major diameter of the threads. A 1/4" bolt simply swims in the hole and requires some stacking of washers to ensure that they don't fall through the hole.

It may be counter-intuitive, but a nut-and-bolt with the bolt being smaller than the hole and torqued-to-yield is usually more resistant to dynamic side-loads than a bolt threaded into a tapped hole. The long, skinny shank of the bolt is stretchy (like a bungee cord) and loss of stack-height due to fretting or material creep is absorbed and forgiven by that bolt stretch.

I will probably opt for SAE Grade 5, 1/4" bolts (less risk of hydrogen embrittlement than Grade 8) and Grade 3 nuts with Grade 8 lock-washers and washers. Cast aluminum is not very forgiving of being over-stressed by bolts.

Plumbing

I am tinker-toying together a bunch of tubing and fittings with the intention of helping a friend salvage some heating oil (virtually identical to diesel fuel, except the color) from an in-ground tank.

I have a love-hate relationship with this kind of work. It is frustrating and time-consuming. I don't consider myself particularly gifted at it but that might be because I know several people who are absolute geniuses at that kind of work.

Keep your eyes on Egypt

Egypt is a flash-point along several different axis. Food insecurity and food-inflation in Egypt are in the top five world-wide. Food inflation is currently running at about 7% per MONTH in terms of typical wages. Furthermore, from a geopolitical standpoint, Egypt is near the center of a very explosive region.

Egypt was in the vanguard of the "Arab Spring" uprisings. History rhymes. 

Much of Egypt's irrigated agricultural land grows wheat and barley to make bread, the staff-of-life. They are very dependent on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer (#3 in the world in pounds-per-acre at 400 pounds per acre per year  applied to agricultural land) to grow that grain. They were monkey-hammered by the Uke-Rus war that stopped shipment of wheat through the Black Sea. The US/Israel/Iran conflict put a cork in the Persian Gulf and blocked Nitrogen fertilizer shipments.

If/when Egypt blows up, drop whatever you are doing and drive to your favorite big-box store and max out your credit card. Rice, beans, motor oil, solar panels, pool sanitizer (chlorine), water softener salt, nails, screws, tarps, seeds, soap... Whatever strikes your fancy. I am not sure it will matter in the sense that nearly everything will become hard to get.