A very old punchline

Q: Do you know why Alaska got mosquitoes and earthquakes and Hawaii got Zuckerberg and Obama?

A: Alaska got to pick first.

Generic "Old-Orchard" Recovery Plan

This template could apply to many enterprises.

Inventory

A:) Inventory assets

    1. Productive trees

    2. Trees nearing retirement

    3. Identify "open spaces' where trees died and need replacements

    4. Identify "volunteer" trees that are within rows and can be grafted to productive cultivars

B:) Inventory liabilities

    1. Non-fruiting trees (encroachment) shading otherwise productive fruit trees

    2. Brush that is interfering with the care of otherwise productive trees

        a. Most bothersome: Multiflora Rose, Autumn Olive, Poison Ivy

        b. Less bothersome: Mulberries, Ash, Hackberry

    3. Vines climbing and choking trees

C:) Protect existing productive assets

    1. Fertilizer (Nitrogen, limestone, other). Fertilizer is fast, easy, inexpensive.

    2. Cut taller trees that are shading potentially productive fruit trees. Treat stump with herbicide.

    3. Use herbicide to suppress undergrowth beneath rows of trees. Hit grass May 1 with glyphosate and non-grasses with 2,4-D + Triclopyr July1.

    4. Attack brush/vines starting with most obnoxious species/most disruptive places. Use whatever means necessary.

    5. As time permits, graft volunteers to better clones, even if it is a type of fruit      that you don't value highly or are not in total alignment with the plan. Example, Mulberries.

D:) Make a Plan

    Replanting like-after-like is asking for problems. The previous tree died for a reason and the soil is likely to be loaded with pathogens.

    Unfortunately, most orchard crops belong to the family Rosaceae. Replacing a dead apple-tree with a pear is unlikely to be satisfactory because they are so closely related*.

    Unconventional (for Michigan) crops like Mulberries, Figs, Hazelnuts, Persimmons, Pawpaws, Jujube, Cornelian Cherry (dogwood), Autumn Olive (selected cultivars), Seaberry, Gooseberries/currants, Chinquapin, Kiwi, Grapes, Aronia (Rosaceae but tolerant of most soil-borne pathogens), Blueberries, Che, Tea, Elderberries, medicinal herbs are non-Rosaceae options.

*There are rootstocks for apples that have been selected to be resistant to apple-replant-syndrome. To-date, other fruit rootstock have not been identified although some strains of Pyrus calleryana and P. betulifolia might have some resistance.

E:) Judiciously start pruning old trees

    1. Trees carry too much wood high in the tree

    2. Most fruit trees, if well watered and in reasonably fertile soil, can sustain the removal of more than 50% of the "wood" in the canopy every-oother-year.

    3. Top-out half the trees at a convenient height (less 3') the first year. Repeat with the other half of the trees the second year.

    4. Remove dead limbs and prune trees in third year so that the canopy is open enough to throw a basketball through the canopy 2-of-3 throws.

    5. If a tree appears to be too senile to survive the recovery plan, remove it as soon as it is identified. Replant with something else. Eating your losses early is the most profitable path.

F:) Have an "orchard floor" plan

    1. Default is mowed sod with bare soil (herbicide) beneath the trees where it is difficult to mow.

    2. Non-sod possibilities that withstand deer include mint, lemon-balm,  garlic, onions/chives, turnips/mustard. Wood-chips are also a possibility.

    3. Remember, if you cannot harvest the fruit, there is little point in having an orchard. Also, if somebody twists an ankle, it is not cost effective to have an orchard. Consider the mechanics of getting pickers-in and fruit-out.

G:) Have a plan for the imperfect fruit

    1. Juice/wine/vinegar

    2. Animal feed

    3. Attract game animals

Hazelnuts, Diversity, Lumpers vs Splitters and Hops

Hazelnuts

For future reference: The squirrels wiped out my entire crop of Yamhill Hazelnuts in two days. Quicksilver adores squirrels and I have been strongly discouraged from controlling their population.

I knew better. As soon as I have the slightest information that squirrels think the hazelnuts are ripe, I need to harvest them all.

Yamhill is one of my earliest ripening hazelnuts.

I was able to pick a few hundred Jefferson for seed-nuts. A goodly number of them were undoubtedly pollinated by Yamhill.

Michigan laws prohibit me from moving a "stem" of un-inspected nursery plants from one plot of land to another. Fines can be as high as $500 per stem, per Michigan law. That law does not apply to seeds. The take-home is that I can plant seed-nuts at the property I am managing but I cannot legally move seedlings from Eaton Rapids to the property that is forty-minutes drive-time away.

Ecosystem Diversity

Monday and Tuesday were unusual. Southern Belle was cog at her church's summer Vacation Bible School so we were tasked with watching Quicksilver.

Mrs ERJ tumbled into a person-in-crisis who needed transportation. Kubota was still having weird side-effects from his encounter with a stinging bug and the anaphylactic shock issues.

Bottom-line, I was pinned down and hardly twitched a muscle.

Wednesday dawned with promise but the Kracken kept throwing its tentacles. I was pinned down until 5PM.

I went for a walk in Delhi Township on their "Ram Trail". I went with the specific intention of scoping out specimen of "Viburnum" species that I might happen to sidle up to and have some seeds fall into my pocket.

Alas, my hopes were dashed. The local talent in Eaton Rapids exceeded what grew beside the trails in Delhi Township. Live and learn.

For what it is worth, locally we are blessed with large numbers of native Nannyberry (Viburnum lentago) and planted Highbush Cranberry (Viburnum trilobum/opulus) and a few V. acerifolium. In some places you can find Southern Arrowwood (V. dentatum). Other than that, most viburnum are Asian and European species/hybrids.

Lumpers vs. Splitters

For the record, I am a "Lumper".

Lumpers paint with a large paint-brush and we don't let ourselves become paralyzed by minutia.

A splitter will lock-up trying to figure out how many separate species of Oak and Hawthorne and Sedges are on a piece of property. The lumper will lump them all together and make a statement something like "A census of the property determined that there are over 45 oak trees that are over 4" diameter-at-breast height on the property."

The trap that "splitters" fall into is they can be beguiled into believing the illusion that a parcel is a paragon of resilience and floristic-quality-diversity when it is actually quite fragile.

Suppose you planted all eleven species of oak that are listed as "native" to Michigan. How "resilient" is your woodlot if all eleven species are highly susceptible to the same diseases and insects?

Referencing back to the previous bit about Viburnums, I will probably just collect seeds and cuttings from some local V. opulus and call it a day.

Any beer brewers in the audience?

It recently occurred to me that hops might be a useful addition to the various hedges and windbreaks that I am managing.

While I could plant "found" hops and assume they were native, my frugality pushes me toward planting fairly modern hop cultivars with good disease resistance.

The cement is still wet so I haven't made any decisions, but I am leaning toward Centennial, Citra and Nugget. So the question to the home-brewers is, if you found yourself stranded on Gilligan's Island, would you feel "crippled" if you were restricted to those three hop varieties. The second part of the question is: If you were to replace one of the three with something else, which one would you replace and what would you replace it with?

Moth traps

Posted for future reference

If you have kids or grandkids who are getting twitchy as the summer drags on, this might be worth checking out.

Mosquitoes: We have them

The remnants of Beryl went through our area July 10 and dropped 3.5 inches.

Six days later we picked up another significant rainfall.

How bad are the mosquitoes? I went outside to do my dead-lifts yesterday and after inhaling I had to spit out two mosquitoes.

Zeus brings in hitchhikers every time he comes back into the house after doing his business.

I went for a walk yesterday and turned back after 300 yards. Zeus stirred them up since he insisted on walking ahead of me. The bloodsuckers settled on me as I walked in the drag position. No wind is a bad thing.

The next three days are expected to be sunny but with very little breeze.

The Question of the Day

The question of the day is "If your spouse killed somebody, would you help them cover it up or would you turn them in?"

The leading response so far is "Sigh! Who is it THIS time?" by WJC.

I did not know that "Autism is a Super-power"

SpongeBob SquarePants is autistic and that "being autistic" is his superpower according to Tom Kenny.  Full disclosure: I had an employee who nicknamed me "SpongeBob" and I assumed it was because of my enthusiasm for my job, but now I wonder.

Research confirms that as many as 60% of autistic people are savants in some other domain like math, statistics, arts, music... 

A few tidbits related to high burnout rates in Mental Healthcare providers:

As many as 60% of all people who become Mental Healthcare providers self-reported trauma in their youth which was much higher than self-reported by students entering business. While that number must be taken with a grain of salt (is it possible to reach adulthood without experiencing events that could be framed as "traumatic"?), it does make those practitioners more vulnerable to being "triggered" when clients report similar traumas. 

Another trend that is reported in the academic literature is that the vast majority of people entering Mental Healthcare report being motivated by altruistic reasons or by empathy. The repetitive amplification of "feelings" over "objective facts" through-out their professional training leaves them unprepared for the reality of paperwork, expense reports and bean-counters. Compared to nurses' training, they have little explicit training in filling out medical records.

The aggressive filtering that favors highly empathic people also leaves the extremely vulnerable to the evil that resides in the hearts of some men: Incest, pedophilia, child abuse and neglect, torture and the casual killing of people who "get in the way". This is a big deal because a significant percentage of the patient load is generated by the justice-system. Like cops, Mental Health professionals get a jaundiced view of human nature because so many of their clients happily choose maladaptive responses to conflicts.

"Highly empathic" people might be very poorly prepared to provide care for autistic people (for whom emotions are a foreign language), sociopaths and psychopaths. A "empathy centric" therapist working with autistic, socio and psychopathic patients are box-end wrenches in a world of cap-screws that require Allen wrenches.

Another motivation reported by many people entering Mental Health professions is the belief that they will be able to guide policy and have a profound impact on society (i.e. throw a very long shadow). The reality of being low-seniority in the office is a shock to many of them and so is a work-load that leaves little time for strategic consultation with the Governor.

Prescription:

Three shifts of "job shadowing" during the students Junior year of their 4-year degree and an internship during their Master's program. Expectations minus reality equals disappointment. Internships are a great way to manage expectations.

Stop filtering out "non-empathetic people" from programs. A sociopath who is good at emulating empathy might be the perfect Mental Health worker for Child Social Services.

Explicitly train the student in a Electronic Medical Data system. They never have to learn to LIKE it, but if they are proficient it can free up hours a day. If they learn one system then they will have much better ability to learn a different system.

Teach mental-toughness skills. Too much empathy is like a weak swimmer going out into the rapids to rescue a swimmer who is foundering. The Mental Health practitioner needs to have a suite of skills on-the-shelf BEFORE they get their buttons pushed.

Advance apology

If a Mental Health provider reads this and is offended, I am sorry. Perhaps it would have seemed less judgemental if I had cloaked the observations in professional jargon. But my readers are not "professionals", they are practical people who solve problems. I write for them.

Swiss Family Transportation

We have a local harvester of undocumented game...let's call him Hubert...who has an interesting business model.

Hubert parks his truck one or two miles from where he will hunt or fish.

Then he hops on his cheap (solid frame) mountain bike that he had painted with red-primer. The primer is dead-flat and totally non-reflective.

He pedals to where he intends to collect his undocumented game. Does the deed. Then if it is big-game he drags it to a convenient place to load it into the back of his truck at a later time. If it is small game or fish he stuffs it into a plastic bag and puts it into his backpack. Then he pedals back to his truck.

Critical to the longevity of his enterprise, he never guts-out or field-dresses the game he harvested. The most people might find the next day will be a blood-trail and drag-marks.

Upon reaching his truck, if he had big-game to collect, he swings by where he pre-positioned the game he had brought-to-bag. The second-hand story that was shared with me was fuzzy on the details but it might have included ramps and an electric winch. A big buck might run +200 pounds if it is not field-dressed. Also "fuzzy" was how he broke-down his bow to make it transportable (and inconspicuous) while riding his bike. Key to his success was that the deer where he hunted were naive and Olympic-class accuracy was not critical to harvesting them.

Key Points:

• People notice vehicles if they are parked in unexpected locations for a significant amount of time.
• People do not notice vehicles if they are parked in expected locations, even if they are there for long periods of time.
  
• A bike that is painted flat(matte) gray, brown or olive is invisible if it is laid down in tall weeds, even if it is only 6 feet from the road.
  
• Separating the motor vehicle (with traceable license plate) from the scene of the crime by more than 2000 feet is sufficient to make the crime unsolvable.
• Without a body, nobody is interested. Blood is not a body.

The rest of the story

Hubert's most productive hunting grounds are the Michigan State University campus, behind Okemos high school, local golf courses and Lansing's Crego Park.

Those locations are far from untrammeled wilderness.

If Hubert can do it in locations with 3000 people-per-square-mile, then it should be a piece-of-cake to do the same in townships with less than 100/square-mile, especially if the harvester of undocumented game is skimming from the bottom (squirrel, rabbits, bluegills, catfish, bullheads, carp, suckers) rather than skimming trophy bucks, huge Largemouth bass and trout.

Hubert's one weakness is that he cannot pass-up a 10-point buck. Folks might look the other way if he was potting deer to fill his freezer but get downright pissy about people who pass-up scrubs and does and skim the trophies.

Note-to-self: Buy a cheap mountain bike at a yard-sale and paint it in flat gray/brown/olive. Put in pole-barn. I can always ride it 5 miles to the closest party-store to buy Slim Jims, beverage and fish-bait.

Seen through the lens of "a net cast wide can harvest more resources", a bike can cover 3 times the distance that walking can in the same amount of time. That opens up 9 times as much area to "harvesting".