Apples, pears and fruits of southern Appalachia

Mosquitoes

Mosquitoes are still ferocious. My little patch of heaven had about 9" of rain in July which is about 3 times normal. I friend who lives a bit south of me had 11" in July

I went into the small tree nursery that I mess around in. I budded four rootstock to Harrow Sweet pear. I was just about carried off by the mosquitoes.

By the way, a big shout-out to the reader who suggested rechargable "camping" mosquito zappers. Mrs ERJ is thrilled. Zeus (our dog) is not. He sniffed one of the units and "ZAPPP!!!"

Bob Purvis's notes on Harrow Sweet:

Harrow Sweet (Harrow 609):  Medium sized tree, moderately precocious, somewhat spreading growth habit, hardy in SW Minnesota to at least -34F, resistant to fire blight, very productive.   Fruit ripens 3-1/2 weeks after Bartlett, yellow with red blush, sweet and juicy with excellent taste, keeps about 3 months in cold storage.

I decided to use Harrow Sweet as a "frame builder" on my pear trees. The truck and main scaffold limbs tend to be the most vulnerable to damage from winter-time and cold. Using a variety that is exceptionally cold-hardy and resistant to fire-blight as the "frame builder" and then top-working to other varieties is a very good thing.

And if I am unable to top-work the trees over to another variety...well, it is a good pear whose only flaws are that it ripens about two-weeks earlier than I prefer and when allowed to over-produce, it make small fruit.

Apples and canker

Canker is a bark-rot and it affects many species of trees. It is currently considered a "minor" issue because it impacts older trees and most commercial apple growers plan on replacing their trees on a 25-to-30 year cycle. The do that because consumer preference is a moving target and there is no point in growing apples if you have to mark them down to a price that does not cover the cost of growing and picking them.

There are some growers who WANT a fruit tree with the capability of lasting fifty or one-hundred years. I am one of those growers. Not knowing the challenges of the future, I get a lot of satisfaction when I can provision my "life-boat" with items with a really, really long shelf-life. How else are you going to provision such that your great-grandchild might benefit?

If you dink around in scholar.google.com and search "malus canker" you will learn that the state-of-the-art is still on the ground floor. Several "crabapple" species have been identified with resistance. Even the best domestic apple varieties only have "modest" resistance while most of them are highly susceptible.

Of the "sort-of-resistant" domestic varieties, one that keeps popping up is Golden Delicious. Golden Delicious was a chance-seedling found in West Virginia. West Virginia is humid and the valleys often have little breeze to help dry the trees and it gets hot in the summer. If you were looking for trees that resisted canker, a place like West Virginia is where you would look.

A little farther south in the coves and hollows of the southern Appalachia, a vast number of seedling-derived varieties evolved. Every cluster of inhabitants had their own favorites.

People like Ron and Suzanna Joyner of Big Horse Creek Farm (Lansing, North Carolina) and Tom Brown (Clemmons, North Carolina) and Henry Morton (Gatlinburg, Tennesse, deceased) went looking for those folk-apples that were grown with very few inputs in one of the worst climates for growing apples.

The apples they found would be a good place to look for canker resistance. Especially if any of the scions they collected were from "Monument" class trees.

Black Limbertwig. Photo from a grower who goes by the name of Greyphase

 

Victoria Limbertwig

If I don't get any more information, I will probably purchase some Victoria and Black Limbertwig scions and see how they do in Michigan.

If anybody has any opinions about the apples of southern-Appalachia or knows of any ancient and enormous specimens in that area, I would love to hear about it in comments.

Townsends channel

Townsends just put out a video on "Orchards in Early America".

John seems a little bit distracted but it still is a pretty-good video.

Shout-out to the reader who suggested rechargable "camping" mosquito zappers.

Presented without comment

 

Kamala Harris demonstrates one cost of identity politics

Donald Trump has the Harris campaign in a dither because he claimed Harris is an East-Indian rather than "Black".

People of East-Indian descent make up about 1.3% of the US population. People who identify as "Black" make up about 13% of the population.

The obvious solution is for Harris to submit her DNA to a reputable, commercial site like 23Andme.com  Of course, it would have to be proctored and the sample submit with many other samples to ensure the test was truly double-blind.

The test results will identify, within a few percentage points, the origins of the DNA in the sample.

The questions that would raise

It won't happen for a multitude of reasons. One of them is "What percentage of sub-Saharan DNA qualifies a person to legitimately identify as "Black"?

Let's suppose for a moment that the answer is 25% or more sub-Saharan DNA is the threshold.

Since the "average" US Black has 25% European DNA, doesn't that also mean that they can also identify as "White"? If they can be either and choose to identify as "Black", then that blows the entire "systemic racism advantaging Whites" trope out of the water.

Another reason it will not happen is that if the DNA test comes back showing Harris has infinitesimally small amounts of sub-Saharan African DNA, then either Donald Harris is not her biological father or that Donald Harris is not "Black". The first result would be less devastating than the second because Donald Harris's career (and the institutions that hired him) rode on a wave of "first Black" accolades.

Bonus image

Prices August 2, 2024 at 10:40AM EST

Visions of Hell

 

The New Testament has several word-pictures describing Hell. Luke 16:19-31 is one such vignette. Flames, thirst, powerlessness and torment play prominently in our vision of Hell.

Theologians like to poke-and-prod at things. Often they over-complicate things. Sometimes they offer a nugget that resonates.

One of those concepts that resonated with me is an expansion on what Hell is like.

Some backstory

Quicksilver, my two-year-old granddaughter was overly tired due to three hours at the zoo. It was past her normal nap-time. She was angry about being strapped into her car-seat. She melted down. She was inconsolable. She wanted to taken out of her car-seat and be held and cuddled.

Southern Belle concentrated on driving. I tried to distract the wee-tot as she sobbed and kicked and thrashed in her seat. Kiddy books. Singing. Letting her look at pictures of puppies on my smartphone...

Quicksilver was inconsolable. She was accepting no substitutes.

Back to the theologians...

The theologians' expansion is that Hell is complete separation from God. Inside of each one of us, even the most grizzled and calloused, is a two-year-old who needs to be held and cuddled. Hell is the natural endpoint of our resistance to God. We don't want Him to be a part of our life. Fine. Have it your way.

But we don't REALLY want Him out of our life. We want him to be like AAA Roadside Assistance in the Contact List of our smartphone. "Hey, Big Dude, I am in a bit of a jam. How soon can you come pull my bacon out of the fire?"

Many of us fall into the habit of treating God like an ugly side-chick who is our Plan G, the one we call when there is NOBODY else available and when we are feeling needy.

Hell is when Plan G does not return your frantic phone-call. You are the sobbing, willful two-year-old who suddenly realizes that you are powerless and separated from the One you need. In Quicksilver's case, seemingly for eternity. In actual Hell, for eternity.

Luke 16 portrays the rich man in Hell as being alone. Solitude is one thing. Being alone and having no prospect of any other human interaction (who, after all were created in God's image), ever, is pretty scary. 

But I don't know if being packed into Hell (which I imagine is getting crowded) with a braggillion other screaming two-year-olds is any better. Speaking from recent experience.

"Settled Science"

Back when I was a Boy Scout in the early-mid 1970s, it was "settled science" that first aid for suspected poison ingestion ALWAYS included dilution. The thinking was that even if the substance was caustic and could not be safely puked out, diluting it would reduce the osmotic potential and slow its entry into the body.

The standard advice was that as soon as you knew somebody had ingested a potentially poisonous substance, to make them drink a pint (half-liter) of water. Then, determine the nature of the poison before making the vomit/not-vomit decision.

Current science is to call 9-1-1 and then poison control. Do NOT dilute.

The thinking seems to be that the human stomach is mucus lined and poison that is in the stomach is absorbed very slowly. That is not the case of poison that is "burped" into the small-intestine. "Diluting" the poison increases the fill of the stomach and hastens the transfer of the stomach contents to the lower intestine.

Note to the folks who work in Emergency Medicine or Urgent Care...kick my dupa in the comments if I have this backwards.

The "settled science" flipped 180 degrees.

From a slightly different perspective, drinking 12 ounces of water with your aspirin or ibuprofen means it will dissolve more thoroughly and will enter your blood-stream more quickly than if you just take the tablets with a single swallow of liquid. 

Foliar fertilizing

The old "settled science" was that plants could not use ammonia (+NH4) ions as a source of nitrogen. "Settled science" insisted that it had to be converted by soil microbes to the nitrate form (-NO3) before it was available to the plant.

The new "settled science" is that +NH4, usually in the form of urea solution, is the PREFERRED source of nitrogen for fertilizer that is applied to leaves (foliage).

Cations like +NH4 are much more readily absorbed through the micro-pores in the cuticle of the leaf than anions like -NO3.

For the record, a 1%-by-weight is the standard urea-water solution. 38 grams of urea per gallon of water (and some wetting-agent) and you are rocking-and-rolling. One of the nice things about foliar applied fertilizer is that you are not depending on precipitation to dissolve the fertilizer and move it down to the plant's roots. Nor are you depending on evaporation rates to "pull" the nutrients from the roots to the growing points. That is kind of a big deal if your plants don't have a lot of leaf area and the next week looks like it will be humid and overcast.

Foliar application is just the ticket when you need a quick shot in the arm.

Once again, a near 180 degree reversal of previous belief.

ERJ, in the dog-house

I was in the dog-house.

We (mostly me) have been fiddling around the hallway doing drywall, plaster and painting work. I got to the wall that held the thermostat and it made sense to remove it from the wall.

Except for a 5000BTU window unit, Casa ERJ is without AC or a fan pushing air around the domicile.

It is not EFFICIENT to jump ahead and primer-and-colorcoat one wall, but that is what I did. It was effective.

Mrs ERJ is starting to wise-up to my tricks. "How come a top-coat of mud requires exactly as long as one of your coffee breaks to set?" she asked.

"Well, my dear, it is because I very carefully tuned the length of my breaks to coincide with that amount of time" I reply with a waggling of eyebrows.

Frowning, my bride noted "But couldn't you be working on another wall?"

"But my love, the dust from my working on one of the other walls will contaminate the quality of mud I just applied" I reply.

Like I said, she is starting to wise up.

"We could always PAY MONEY to have somebody else do the work" she noted.

Fortunately for me, Mrs ERJ knows where I have a quarter pound of Alliant Bullseye powder stored. At 21% nitroglycerine, a scant 2.7 grains of powder blown through a plastic, soda-straw and deposited beneath my tongue diminishes most of the pain of the major cardiac event hearing the words "PAY MONEY" invariably causes.

Much will be forgiven when the brute fires back up and we will have central-air available.

Once again, my name will be engraved in the Hall of Heroes. It won't be my best work but it will be far from my worst work.

Oh, and I took pictures of how the green, red, yellow and white wires attached to the thermostat. I also drew a picture!

Sunrise: August 1, 2024

 

Sent by a friend and posted with his permission.

Not Eaton Rapids.