Weeding

 

Before and after. Rutabagas.

Mrs ERJ shared with me that I have a tendency to generalize small tidbits of information to global significance. I am guilty as charged.

The photo on the left was taken after 30 minutes of weeding. I managed to hand-weed 50' of row on the extreme left in 30 minutes.

The photo on the right was taken after I weeded the second row. Based on the first photo, most people would have probably assumed that there was nothing worth saving in the second row. Looking at the photo on the right, it is clear that they would have been wrong.

My take-away lesson is that even when a "population" seems hopeless, there are often enough people-worth-saving to make it worth tilting the reward system in their favor. 

Slow? Yes. 

Tedious? Yes. 

Worth the effort? That depends. I have one row that I planted to beets where I uncovered two plants in about twenty feet of weeding. The economics point to mowing the weeds, tilling the entire row and replanting to a fall crop like Spinach, Daikon or Chinese Cabbage. The situation reminded me of Genesis 18:16-33. Abraham would have made an excellent lawyer!

Time-on-task

I managed to spend 4-1/2 hours in the garden today.

I was struggling after 1-1/2 hours. My back was talking to me.

I started alternating weeding with staking-and-tying-up plants. I also changed my posture every five minutes: Kneeling, kneeling on one knee (i.e. genuflecting), kneeling on the other knee while weeding the other side of the row, standing and bending over.

I planned to take a break every half hour. Sometimes that turned into fifty minutes.

The exercise yard of the duck-jail

Early on, I planted marigolds, Federle tomatoes and Tagetes minuta and Tagetes lucita around the exercise yard of the duck jail.

Predictably, they were swamped by aggressive, weedy grasses like Giant Foxtail and Echinochloa frumentacea.

Part of today's work-ticket was to recover the original intent: Train the tomatoes up, over the exercise area to provide shade and tomatoes for canning.

The photo is underwhelming.

The plan is to flop a feed-lot panel over the exercise yard and to train the tomatoes over it.

Autoimmune disorders

I recently went down the rabbit-hole looking at autoimmune disorders like Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis and Multiple Sclerosis.

78% of autoimmune disorder diagnosis are of women. That is, four cases cases diagnosed in women for every diagnosis made in a man. Virtually everybody in the medical care community knows that as a fact. The general consensus is that the hormones that are more common in women are largely to blame.

Having worked in the automotive industry, an industry that has endured increasingly hostile litigious environment since the 1960s, my gut tells me that the Transgender industry is facing a potential tsunami of class-action lawsuits where they are accused of "failing to exercise due diligence" in informing their patients (and the patients' parents and guardians) of the incremental and differential risks posed by exposure to feminizing hormones. Having a receptionist hand the patient literature or to have a non-doctor deliver Q-and-A isn't going to cut-it.

The sheer number of the potential plaintiffs (1% of the population now claims to be trans) and the possible settlement-per-plaintiff (mid-seven-figures) will bankrupt any institution that gets sucked into the litigation.

The same goes for exposure to masculinizing hormones. The few autoimmune disorders that are more likely to afflict men tend to have higher fatality rates...things like ischemic cardiac disease where inflammation of blood vessels starts the cascade of blood-clots spawning and then calving and floating into hearts, brains, lungs and other important organs.