Duck dormitory, walnut orchards and taking a child to the dentist

The Duck Dormitory

 

The glass in the rear lift-gate of the (free) truck cap had been broken. I framed the opening with 1" x 1-1/2" strips ripped from a two-by-four. Then I used 1/4" crown staples to attach galvanized poultry-netting across the opening. I plan to stretch clear, poly-film across it when the weather turns cold. 

Persian walnuts

Ukraine is the world's 4th largest exporter of "English" or "Persian" walnuts.

Producers get four-times as much, per unit weight, for cracked nuts as for nuts that are in-shell. By "cracked-nuts" I mean nut meats that have been removed from the shell. Since most Persian Walnuts run about 50% nut-meat by weight, that has the potential to double the revenue per tree.

Producers get a much higher premium for nut-halves, something like an additional 5X over the price received for nut-meat pieces.

The major bottleneck for the producers is lack of manpower. The men either migrated to Western Europe to avoid being conscripted, are conscripted or are dead. There is a stunning lack of "labor" in Ukraine.

From the perspective of the buyers, there are many quality issues with nuts purchased from hundreds of discrete suppliers. Some sell moldy or off-flavored nuts. Those are impossible to sort-out when sold as uncracked nuts. Some mix in a percentage of off-flavored (rancid, discolored, moldy) pieces to pad the weight of good nuts.

That results in the buyer absorbing all of the risk and he discounts the prices he offers for nuts that are still in-the-shell. 

Another factor is that most nuts sold in Ukraine come from seedling trees. Some walnut trees produce nuts that are well sealed at the suture between the nut halves and the nut-meats retain quality even when subjected to challenging environments. Other trees are the opposite. Their nuts are not well sealed and absorb water and quickly lose quality.

The universities in Ukraine, in spite of being battered by the tumult and vicissitudes of war, are promoting grafted trees of proven selections and seedlings from elite selections. The elite trees don't take up any more area or demand any more fertilizer than the trees that produce fewer or inferior-quality nuts. Planting them is like finding free-money.

Young walnut tress in the background.

It gives me hope when I realize that people were planting nut trees 70 miles from the war's front-lines, even as the war raged on.

And so, I was quite interested when one of the "Dacha" videos showed the fifteen year-old granddaughter tooling by a newly planted walnut orchard. Due to editing, the sequence is split but the first bit shows her driving by four year-old trees and the second bit shows her driving by 8 year-old trees. Guessing the age of trees is a hit-or-miss endeavor. They might be younger if heavily fertilized. They might be older if planted on blow-sand not taken care of.

Today's big adventure

I get to squire Quicksilver to the dentist at zero-dark-thirty. 

***Follow-up: A big shout-out to Pediatric Dentistry of East Lansing. Dental Tech Miss Emily (the Emily with the hair the color of a new, copper penny) was totally awesome. Dentist Jenn was also superb. They both have a gift for connecting with the-little-people.***