View from the office

150 yards west and 40 yards north of yesterday

Ten minutes of legal light left...

...and...no deer were injured in the production of this blog post.

I did get another three trees pruned. That counts for something.

The "Hungry Times"

Suppose...

Suppose something were to happen and rural folks were "encouraged" to move into dense-pack housing in urban areas. Suppose your refused.

Suppose that the incentive for moving was that the supply chain, maybe, could keep you fed but if you refuse then you might have to shift for yourself.

While this seldom happens in isolation, for the purpose of this blog-post let's pretend it does. There are no jack-booted thugs storming across the sandy-plains of Michigan or Georgia or Eastern Germany. Just you and your family trying to figure out where your meal will come from.

January

Foraging: 40 deer per square mile is considered a heavy population. That works out to one every 16 acres. Or, at 100 people per square mile (fairly typical for southern Michigan rural areas) one deer for every 2.5 people. Let's assume you manage to snare a deer and call it 15 pounds of lean-meat per person.

Garden: You still have some carrots you mulched that you can dig up. You have some turnip greens.

Remainder: Food from storage.

February

Foraging: You set out snares and catch two rabbits a week. You have to race the coyotes, foxes and possum to get your catch. That is 4 pounds of very lean meat per week. You are starting to crave fat.

You go ice fishing. You split the galls on goldenrod to collect some grubs to sweeten up the hook of the teardrop jig. You get four bluegills and you save the guts for bait.

Garden: Running out of carrots. Now scavenging garlic greens for flavor.

Remainder: Food from storage.

March

Foraging: In addition to the snares for rabbits, you are putting out snares for starlings and other birds. You are STRONGLY considering catching mice...to feed the dog, of course.

You discover that squirrels are fat and they become your newest favorite-animal. 

The snow is mostly melted. You could collect maple sap by you have to boil 30 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup.

You watch the picked farm fields like a hawk hoping to harvest some early geese.

Garden: Tapped out.

Remainder: Food from storage.

April

Foraging: Suckers are running sporadically near the end of the month but you don't live on a stream. You make a gill net anyway. You have a friend with a flooded drainage ditch that connects to the Spicer Creek.

You walk the south side of ridges looking for early dandelions and other greens. Yellow Rocket is eagerly sought and your urine turns fluorescent yellow.

Garden: Still tapped out. Maybe you can get a few stalks of rhubarb near the end of the month.

Planting peas, potatoes and field corn. 

Remainder: Food from storage.

May:

Common carp begin spawning in the shallows when the water temperature stays above 65 degrees for several days in a row.

 

Foraging: Migratory birds, primarily ducks. Carp are spawning in the shallows. Bluegills are on their beds late in the month.

Young rabbits and woodchucks show up in the later half of the month. 

Morel mushrooms early in the month. Oyster mushrooms later in the month.

Greens and maybe some Jerusalem Artichokes.

Garden: Tapped out. Burning lots of calories planting the garden and getting almost none out of it.

Cabbage and broccoli transplants are planted in early May. Tomatoes and peppers are planted at the end of May. 

Remainder:  Food from storage.

June:

Foraging: Lots of young rabbits. Robbing eggs from bird nests. The bluegills that are spawning near shore are rapidly fished-out.

Greens, mostly nettles and poke because they produce so much. You learn to dislike greens. It seems stupid to boil them multiple times to make the edible.

This time-table is highly dependent on the weather, especially early in the growing season. This early-June corn plant is stressed by cold and too much rain.

Garden: Strawberries through the middle of the month. Raspberries and cherries toward the end.

Lettuce, peas, onions are harvested.

Beans are planted the first week of June and vining crops are planted the second week of June. 

Large volumes of food but not lots of calories. You have been losing two-pounds a week for several months and are running out of pounds to lose.

Remainder: Food from storage

July:

Foraging: Lots of young rabbits. You sit in the garden and shoot starlings with your pellet gun because you are counting on every bit of food.

Greens shift to Lamb's Quarters, amaranth and purslane (which are weeds in your garden)

Garden:

Lettuce, peas and onions in the first two weeks.

Everything changes in the third and fourth weeks. Earliest sweet corn and potatoes are ready for harvesting. Wheat is ripe. Green beans and cucumbers start coming in. It is like a switch flipped on July 20.

Remainder: Food from storage for the first two weeks. Replenishment starts the third week as the first wheat comes off of the farm fields. 

Discussion

In spite of what Porgy and Bess told you, living is NOT easy in the summer, at least not until the second half of July (in Michigan).

In all likelihood, the majority of the calories that you put into your mouth are coming out of storage until at least July 20 unless....

Domestic animals

Suppose your neighbor has a cow or even several cows. They can even be "beef breeds".

Suppose you work out a deal. Maybe you trade a bang-stick and ammo and your labor to buy-into a 1/3 share of a cow-in-milk. If the cow drops her calf in April and the calf is not fed his mother's milk, then a 1/3 share might be seven gallons of milk a week*. At 4% fat and 3.5% protein and 3% lactose that works out to 17000 Calories a week and all of it from old grass that is not edible for humans AND it is showing up during the most calorie-starved time of the year.

If there are just you and your wife, then 17,000 Calories are about half of the calories you need per week. If there are four of you, then 17,000 Calories is about one-quarter of the calories you need.

Of course you can get milk from sheep and goats and camels and horses and yaks if that is what you have. 

*I used 1/3 of the average, commercial Holstein milk cow's production level in these calculations. 

What do pull-tabs, cigarette package wrappers and WOKE ideology have in common?

Norm (not his real name) is a simple-minded fellow who goes to the same church that I attend.

One of his quirks is that he hounds men to donate their beverage pull-tabs for recycling. He demands that we detach them from our beverage can and place them in a separate container.

When asked "Why?" he goes off on a long ramble about how the pull tabs are made of a special, ultra-pure alloy that is recycled for heart-valves and cardiac stents. At church dinners he places his chair by the barrel for recycling beverage cans (which have a ten-cent deposit on them in Michigan) and sternly lectures diners who do not separate the tabs from their cans.

Anybody who knows anything about metals and alloys know that this is pure B.S. Aluminum is not used in any in-body medical devices and even if it was, it would be far cheaper and simpler to use virgin material rather than recycling tramp materials into a pure enough form to use in-body.

Most of us humor him in the same way we would humor an intellectually-challenged child showing us a scribble that they inform us was "a horse". I deal with him by choosing to drink water.

Norm's quirk reminds me of the smokers in the 1970s who collected the plastic sleeves that went on the outside of their packages of cigarettes. According to them, the sleeves were made of a special, rare, exotic material that was used in dialysis machine membranes. People were dying because the companies that made dialysis machines could not get enough of that material. They also demanded that other smokers save their wrappers.

Why is that interesting?

This phenomena interests me because people outside of the "thrall" easily see that it is pure bull-shit. Irrational behaviors interest me, so dissecting the "thrall" or the "glamor" captured my interest.

I believe that the basis for the delusional behavior is that it allows Norm to feel morally superior to people who do not drink 24 cans of Keystone Light beer* every night because they are not saving the lives of people who need heart valves.

Likewise, the belief in saving the cellophane wrappers of cigarette packages allowed the believer to entertain the fantasy that they are righteous and pure and morally superior to people who do not pluck cigarette packages out of the gutter and strip them of their cellophane.

Norm's hectoring of people who do not share his delusions reminds me of the WOKE people who dog normal people like you and me. "XY"s cannot be women is a simple, biological fact and yet social justice warriors made trans-ideology (along with a host of other absurdities) a core belief. Not just that, but they are enraged if we do not validate their fantasies.

 

* Artistic license exercised. I don't know if "Norm" drinks. 

Deer hunting A-a-R (and notes on pruning)

Well, I know you are all biting your nails wondering if I connected with a deer.

Nope. Not tonight.

I got a late start. For some reason my muscles were sore and stiff. Never-the-less, I had my deer hunting property in sight by 2:30 p.m.

As I drove up to it I noticed a dead deer in the middle of the field west of the Upper Orchard. That was an oddity that merited investigation.

If it is deer season and you hope to harvest venison, it is worth your while to carry a suitable firearm while tramping about. Not carrying one is the equivalent of expecting to win the lottery but not bothering to buy a ticket.

I checked out the dead deer. And yes, Virginia, I was carrying a bang-stick. It had been dead long enough for the varmints to find it and there was snow on its eyeballs.

Michigan game laws are very clear. It is illegal to tag a deer that you did not shoot.* How-some-ever, if you happen to "find" a dead deer that is unclaimed. And if there is clear evidence that the deer died of ballistic trauma. And if you stick a finger into the mouth of that deer and you determine that the temperature is below 90F and more than 10F above ambient...then it is clear that whoever shot that deer is not going to claim it. If they were, they would have found it by now.

In which case you need to decide if you are going to comply with man-made laws and let the coyotes eat the dead deer or if you are going to comply with higher moral laws and make sure that the meat ends up in somebody's freezer.

Clearly, the deer had died long enough in the past that I was not confronted with such a moral dilemma.

While walking back toward the Upper Orchard, I took a slight detour. On two separate occasions I have seen bucks bedded down in a depression north of the field. I eased into the woods that separated the depression and the field. Lo and behold, there was a deer in the depression.

Alas, it was not a buck. A single deer, all by its lonesome is usually a buck .or. an orphaned fawn. Even though I had a permit for an antlerless deer I let it walk.

My Plan

My plan was to prune trees in the orchard until 4:30 and then sit until 5:36 p.m. which was the end of "legal light".

One of my readers commented about the ambiguity of the term.

With snow on the ground and with a full moon, there is enough light to clearly identify deer all night long. Since the DNR cannot predict snow-cover any better than the professional weather-guessers, and since they cannot predict if the moonlight will be intercepted by cloudy skies...they TELL hunters when it will be "legal" based on when the sun will set.

If one were inclined, it would be pretty easy to weasel on when you dropped the hammer if you were using a bow. But you would be pretty stupid to "violate" with a firearm by more than a minute or two, maybe. It just isn't worth it.

So, at precisely 5:36 p.m. I removed the magazine and cycled the bolt to eject the round that was in the chamber.

I saw three deer while walking from the blind to my truck.

Pruning report

I pruned one mulberry tree and three pear trees in the 90 minutes I was working.

If you are a long-time reader then you know that I did a major pruning of the orchards last winter. By major, I mean that I removed about 2/3 of the crowns of many of the trees. Others I culled.

Most of the ones I left responded by producing a dense forest of 24" to 48" long whips from the scaffold-branches that I left.  "Hairs on a dog's back" is an apt description of how some of these trees look.

Those trees will overbear and produce runted, flavorless fruit if I do not reduce the bearing potential. Not only that, but they will go into alternate bearing. One year will give a gross overload of mediocre fruit. The next year will produce nothing.

So, I am thinning out the whips. If most of them are 24" long, I am removing all of the whips within 24" of the ones I decided to leave. If the whips are 48" long, then I leave 48" of space around the few I select to leave. That way the sunlight and drying breezes can penetrate the crown and every fruit will have multiple leaves collecting sun and feeding them.

It would be excruciatingly slow work except that most of those whips can be yanked out by their roots. I grab each one and give it an authoritative JERK and most of the time I can rip it right off of its mother-branch.

It took a long time...but I finally found a job where my innate ability to be a big jerk works to my advantage. I highly recommend this job for people who are like me. 

*Some hunters bypass this law by putting a bullet through the dead deer they stumble upon. "There. It is mine now that I shot it." 

View from the office

 

I am still here

I have a couple of side projects going.

Water Locust

Water Locust (Gleditsia aquatica) is similar to wild-type Honey Locust in that the tree throws big balls (size of a football) of 2" long thorns that sprout directly from the trunk. It (supposedly) can fix nitrogen and the wood is very similar to Honey Locust...or Red Oak. The seeds are carried in pods that hold a single, 11mm diameter "button" shaped seed rather than a "bean" that can hold up to fifteen seeds.

As you can see, it grows as far north as St Louis or Terra Haut, Indiana.

Among this species's few virtues is that it can stand in water for extended periods and doesn't seem to be bothered by it. That might make it a useful niche-player. In my neck of the woods, 90% of the trees in "swamps" are Silver Maple. The ash have mostly died off. There are a few Swamp White Oak and a few Black Willow. Where it is just a freckle drier, American Elm and American Larch starts to show up but there are not a lot of choices for trees that will grow in swamps.

At the start of the soak. If you look closely, you can see two of them that were damaged and are significantly larger than the others.

 

Same container and zoom after soaking for 20 hours. I do believe that they absorbed some water! Four of them were still puny, so I am soaking them for another 8 hours.

The Water Locust seeds have an impermeable seed-coat that must be breached before the seed can absorb water. I used sand-paper to wear through the edge of the seed until I saw a lighter color. Then I soaked them in warm water...changing it as I remembered. After soaking for 20 hours, most had expanded from 11mm diameter to 15mm diameter. 

I will probably be cursed by future generations. Those thorns are the devil to rubber tires. 

The other "project"

The other project is hitting the gym to maintain my muscle-mass. 

After a warm-up at 135 and 185 pounds, I was able to complete four sets of 6 reps dead-lifting my body-weight. I expect to be sore tomorrow. 

"Diversity" means a representative cross-section of the population, right?

I don't THINK this site is satire or a parody. These are images of interns from the Headquarters of a Mainstream Media outlet.

Three of these pictures are not the same. Can you spot them? 

Note: Images were cropped to make their faces approximately the same size.

OK...this is not a picture of an NPR Intern, but it is weird that the one image of a Middle-eastern Intern is holding a microphone boom the way she is. That seems...insensitive.