EXCLUSIVE interview with Erin Donahue!!!

I recently had a conversation with Erin Donahue, co-owner and manager of Umbel Nursery in Parma, Michigan.

I asked her "What advice would you give to somebody who was spooked by the accelerating price of food and was just starting a garden in Michigan?"

"Assume that person is a niece or nephew who is a few years younger than you are. Somebody you really want to see succeed and somebody who accepts advice well."

Erin's advice is highlighted in blue. My comments are not highlighted in blue.

"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way" -Juan Ramón Jiménez

"If you haven't gardened before this year, my first piece piece of advice is to find a spot that gets a lot of sun and you can reach with a hose from the house."

"My second piece of advice is to plant a little bit of everything. Maybe not EVERYTHING, but everything somebody in your family is likely to eat."

Even experienced gardeners will have unexplained failures of plants that are considered bulletproof and unexpected successes of plants that others consider "fussy". It would be a shame to not be growing watermelons if everybody in the house loved them and it was a banner year for them.

Heat loving plants like peppers, tomatoes and eggplants will take off more quickly if they are planted on raised berms. The soil in the root-zone warms quickly in berms and promotes drainage. Black plastic mulch also warms the soil.

"My third piece of advice is for new gardeners to strongly consider landscape fabric or plastic film mulch for at least a portion of your garden. Michigan soil has an incredible seed-bank of weeds that will quickly outgrow your vegetables and you need every break you can get."

The genius in this advice is that we often get trapped into all-or-nothing thinking. We might look at the price of black plastic film or landscape cloth (aka, geotextile fabric) and think..."No way!" But if you only afford to put it around one cherry tomato plant, give it a whirl. You might be stunned at the difference in what you harvest. If you cannot get plastic film, use the cardboard from all of those boxes with the smiles on them or wood-chips.

"My fourth piece of advice is to plant some flowers. Man does not live by bread alone."

It will be discouraging if you look across your yard at your garden and see nothing but weeds. It is energizing to look out and see a few marigolds or zinnias or sunflowers smiling back at you. You might walk out to pick a few flowers for a vase and you might see a ripe tomato or pull a few weeds.

That is all it takes. Go out nearly every day and pick what is ripe and pull a few weeds.

And it is worth mentioning that many types of flowers are edible: Violets, pansies, rose petals...and many more. But you would have to ask Erin about that.

Umbel Nursery

Since Erin wrote this blog post for me, the least I can do is provide directions to her nursery.

Website

Directions from Battle Creek Michigan (about 30 minutes)

Directions from Ann Arbor (about 45 minutes)

Directions from Lansing (about 40 minutes)

Depending on the weather, Erin intends to open either April 27 or May 4. They will be open Wednesday-through-Saturdays.

MIL-Spec

No, Kenny. Not MIL-Fer.

Military Specifications. Some sound a little bit crazy, like the adhesive bonded, composite helicopter blade with the specification that every blade had to be 200% tested to destruction.

Say what? What did they have left after testing to put on helicopters. And how do you test the same part to destruction twice?

Some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed engineer noticed that all composite blades started to fail from the ends while they did durability testing. Blades were cut apart and it was verified that the ends were most vulnerable to poor wet-out and entrained air-bubbles which squished out to pancake-shaped voids when the assembly was clamped together and the adhesive cured.

Two, may three, birds were killed with one stone when they decided to make the blades one meter longer than required and to saw 1/2 meter off each end. Those ends were then destructively tested. If both ends met the spec the blade was a "good" one and used. The test also had the advantage of removing the two portions of the blade most likely to start to fail, a failure which could then propagate to the rest of the blade.

For shits-and-giggles, the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed engineer decided to label that form of process validation "200% Test-to-Failure" and the name stuck.

Pruning

 

The late Corwin Davis of Bellevue, Michigan used to advice orchardists to prune their apple trees to be open enough to "throw a cat through".

Modern cats seem less willing to volunteer for the task so using a basketball as a proxy for Felix will reduce the pruner's need for hydrogen peroxide and bandages.

The rule has some flexibility to it. You are doing fine if you can achieve 100% penetration in 8-of-10 throws or 2-of-10 throws. The nature of trees being what they are they will happily do their thing. 

If you over-prune then it will have filled in for the next growing season and you will have only lost a bit of one year's production.

If you under-pruned then you still improved the tree. Air and sunlight will penetrate more deeply into the canopy. Leaf health will improve. Average fruit size and flavor will also improve.

Stems from one Asian Pear tree. The butt end is about 3/4" in diameter.

Trees have different growth habits. Most pear trees want to grow a super-abundance of vertical or nearly-vertical branches. They look like a water tumbler stuffed with drinking straws.

Some apple trees are tip bearers and their yield is strongly reduced by pruning. Novaspy is one such cultivar.

Other apple trees carry flower buds in non-spur buds and you can remove an obscene amount of wood and they will still give you a full crop. Liberty falls into this category. It may be due to Liberty having at least two species of ornamental crabs (Malus floribunda and Malus X robusta) in its pedigree.

It is easy to get tied into knots when confronted with pruning fruit trees. Just remember Corwin Davis's rule about being able to throw a cat through the canopy and it will be fine.

Georgia offers to send Abrams Tank to Ukraine

 

On a more serious note

I am trying to sniff out propaganda. There are many images of "40 mile long convoy of Russian/Belorussian artillery" in transit.

I am not a military guy nor I am the sharpest pencil in the drawer, but this looks more like images of a training exercise than the transfer of weapons and ordinance in a war-zone. Any aircraft with the capabilities of the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt (first flight May 6, 1941) would make the road impassible and shred large amounts of material.

A ZPU 14.5mm machine gun could almost do the same.

I know there are stupid people everywhere. The Egyptians lined up their aircraft in tidy rows which made it easy for Israel to strafe them with minimal input to the stick.

What do the "armor" guys say? Is this in accordance with Soviet/Russian battle doctrine? Is this a stupid convoy master? Or are these photos repurposed from stock images of peace-time convoys?

Perverse incentives

The old-folks home where Mom is a resident is advertising for Certified Nurse Assistants and for RNs.

They are offering a $10,000 signing bonus. That works out to a $5/hour raise if it requires a one-year vesting period.

Now suppose you are one of the old-timers at this facility and you are making $15 an hour when a less experienced CNA walks in and is not only being paid $18 an hour but stands to get another $5 an hour on top of that with the signing bonus.

You ask your supervisor for the same. The supervisor says, "I can bump you up to $18 an hour but I cannot give you the signing bonus."

Pissed off? You bet they are.

But if one old-folks home is doing it then there are probably a bunch that are doing the same. The old-timers leave in droves to nail down the best deal they can find.

The problem is that workers in that sector of the economy were depopulated by Covid more severely than other parts of the economy. It is a game of musical chairs except it is not a case of fewer chairs than players, it is a case of too many positions and not enough players. Some chairs, somewhere, are going to be empty.

If you work your way back to the starting place of the avalanche, it was the panic the media whipped up over Covid, Governor Whitmer's requiring old-folks home to admit Covid-postive patients to free up hospital beds* and the great purge of medical support people over age 55 due to fear and onerous working conditions.

*Whitmer did the insurance industry a "solid" by forcing old-folks homes to accept Covid patients that were discharged from hospitals. Insurance companies cheered because old-folks homes are incredibly inexpensive compared to hospitals. It should be noted that Whitmer's father has been a life-long executive in the insurance industry.

There are documented cases of young patients recovering from Covid beating older, disabled residents to death.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Hans in Blueberry Forest. No artist listed. Finland?

A skimpy haul today.

Charles Sprauge-Pearce born 1851 in Boston. Died 1914 in France.

Notable for the stark functionality of the woman's outfit from the sabots to the double apron and the "corn-knife". Sprauge-Pierce even captured the diagonal slice on the butt end of the stems as would be typical of bending-and-cutting.

This is a woman not to be trifled with.

Even today, women in large parts of the world spend many hours a day foraging for fuel to cook food and heat their home.

Insert image of incumbent politician

 I did that!!!

...and I've only just begun!!!

Is there any question why so many Democratic politicians are choosing to not run for reelection?