Urban agriculture

Peterforester commented on a recent post:

I actually read an article a while back about a guy who was buying up derelict houses in Detroit. The city was selling them for $1.00 apiece. He bought up several blocks of them. The he had them torn down. Then he returned the land to agricultural use.

 

Can it work?

Four minute video. To live in this planned community, you must commit to growing food on 1/2 of your "lot".

From the same channel. About five minutes long.

Can it work? Maybe. Historically, gardening in medium-to-low density urban areas was the norm. It was promoted as recently as WWII, particularly in Europe. It is still common in parts of China and Latin America. 

Stumbling blocks

Theft and vandalism

The ethic of private property is not respected in many places. Gardens are difficult and expensive to armor against those threats. If/when people get hungry, they will steal the food or destroy it out of anger and spite. Theft and vandalism totally guts the incentive to cultivate a garden.

The places that are most likely to be food-deserts are also likely to have the poorest regard for the sanctity of private property. 

Property ownership

Much of the housing in food-deserts is rental. Length of tenure is uncertain. There is little incentive to make property improvements (fences, soil amendments). There are likely to be clauses in leases that prohibit "eyesores" like compost piles.

Poor soil

Most cities started on fertile sites with geographic advantages like harbors or navigable rivers. Decades of excavation and earth-moving destroyed the topsoil. Much of what is left is polluted with heavy metals and long-lasting contaminates.

In older parts of cities, the drainage is compromised since the oldest, most-in-need of repair parts are where the urban expansion drains through. Detroit, specifically, was built on a flat, clay-pan that used to be the bottom of a prehistoric lake. "Flat" and "clay" do not drain well.

Some land was created by filling in tidal-flats. The fill rubble, foundry sand and other waste.

People choosing to use your garden as a toilet or to shoot-up drugs turns your garden into a biohazard. 

The places that are most likely to be food-deserts are likely to have the worst soil for growing food.

Shade

Small lots means that a neighbor's tree or the apartment block next door will shade your garden. And there is nothing you can legally do about it.

Unrealistic expectations

Because the urban dweller who shops at Kroger sees fresh plums and cherries and strawberries in the produce department year-round, they expect their two trees and the bale of straw with five strawberries on it to do the same. They have a hard time comprehending that a tree full of sweet cherries has ripe cherries for about a week and if you want cherries for longer than that, you need to refrigerate the fifty pounds you might harvest.

They want to grow crops that have specialized requirements. They expect the produce to be cosmetically perfect. They cannot comprehend that the perfect carrot they buy in a bag was grown in deep, "muck" soils that only occur in very localized areas. Basically, muck is a drained peat bog.

Labor requirements

It is difficult for people who lived an urban existence their entire lives to comprehend the labor requirements involved in gardening on a large scale.

The needs of the plants determines what you do, not your To Do list.

Your hands will get dirty.

You will be bending over or on your knees. You are likely to get blisters on your hands. Slivers are a real possibility. Weeds and bugs can and will sting you.

Weeds. Watering. Harvesting. Storing dirty food somewhere. Cleaning. All that has to happen before you can start preparing a meal from-scratch, which in itself is seen as an accomplishment on-par with climbing Mount Everest by a portion of the population.

Restrictive rules

Unfortunately, "consensus" usually devolves to capitulation to the most unreasonable person in an effort to avoid conflict.

Even though pesticides and fertilizers are used liberally on lawns and public spaces everywhere, urban Karens go ballistic if they see anybody using "chemicals" near a vegetable garden. They insist that everybody be "organic".

They also throw a hissy-fit when you live-trap raccoons, possum, squirrels and other vermin and relocate them (after dispatching them in a private place).

They complain about bees.

They blame marigolds and zinnias for their hay-fever.

They complain about fences and sheds and other structures.

They complain about the untidy appearance of raspberry bushes and okra. 

Pumpkins

For some reason, every new gardener wants to grow a crop of (ornamental) pumpkins. They are the bane of people managing community gardens.

The gardener thinks they throw some seeds into the ground in June and come back the week before October and that there will be 20 pumpkins to pick.

It NEVER works out that way. Their allotment becomes a weed-choked jungle. The weeds go to seed and make all of the surrounding allotments much more difficult to care for.

If the vines survive, they sprawl out into other allotments and cause strife. Attempts to reach the absent gardener are never answered. The other gardeners curse the pumpkin-farmer and keep chopping back the vines.

About August 15, after the vines set a crop of baby pumpkins, the vines are killed by squash borers. The absent pumpkin-farmer visits and accuses the other gardeners of killing his vines and he threatens legal action.

Summary

It is NOT impossible to grow food in cities but there are many road-blocks.

One of the prime-enablers would be to carve out something like an Enterprise Zone or the special treatment of railways* but for agriculture. I think it needs to include language that operations inside the zone be results-oriented rather than getting all tangled up in "process". 

*Railroads are allowed to have their own police force just like Indian Reservations. Trespassing laws are actually were enforced with great vigor even by local enforcement. 

Three pictures from the weekend and a few thoughts

A goat and a tree that is being removed from the canopy. Southern Belle is using goats to remove brush.

Detail of a door, one-of-six, that will be in Southern Belle's rabbit jail.

Chinesium sprayer puking spray.

I am going through a steep learning curve with the sprayer. The manual is...crude.

The controls were shipped with the "sprayer" and "duster" modes both in the half open position. That meant that the reservoir was sending highly corrosive liquid to both the turbo spray-head (good) and the vacuum side of the fan (bad).

I justified the purchase of the sprayer solely on its ability to spray calcium solution (a nutrient) on an acre of orchard. I really don't need it for any other purpose although I might spray micronutrients on some chlorotic oak trees in the neighborhood.

I was feeling bad about spending the money but then I saw a truck pulling a trailer with a new dirt-bike on it. A $2000 trailer with a $5000 motorcycle for a high school kid. From that frame-of-reference, dropping $150 for something with a gas motor that provides entertainment (but does not break bones) is dirt-cheap.

The motor started and ran fine although the gas:oil ratio of 28:1 was unexpected. I had to add oil to my usual 40:1 mix.

The liquid feed to the turbo-head is by gravity. Lifting the snorkle to spray up, into the tree starves the turbo-head. Consequently, I need to find an elbow to insert into the system so I can get enough liquid to the head while still spraying upward.

We are not the same

We were on a family camping trip circa 2000. We took bicycles for local transportation.

Pelee had a melt-down because his bicycle did not shift EXACTLY when the pointer on the grip pointed at the "speed" he wanted.

I tried to explain that the numbers on the display are meaningless. If the pedaling is too hard, downshift. If the RPM are too high, up-shift.

That was a hard NOGO for Pelee. He threw the bike into the weeds beside the road and stomped off.

I was baffled.

In retrospect, Pelee was slightly ahead of the curve. In a digital world, the Command-and-Control display is slaved to actual state. In an analog world (the world I grew up in), the display is a general guideline.

Very, very different. 

For example, when turning down a piece on a lathe, there is lash (slop) in the adjustments. You backed off and then dialed back in to minimize lash. You took off less than you could to avoid over-shoot. You measured frequently. Those were all ways of compensating or coping with the inherent limitations of the analog world.

Most of the time, the digital world is better. What you see is what you get.

However, being able to operate in the analog mode can be a life saver when systems operate in "degrade" mode.

I used a lot of words to set the stage to say, I can deal with things like this Chinesium sprayer because I grew up in a time when low-end-of-market US-made goods needed tweaking to make them usable.

Lessons from Detroit

I have lunch with my high school buddies about four times a year. A slightly different group of guys shows up each time and that influences the course of conversations.

The last time I went, one of the conversations turned to the City of Detroit. One of the guys used to work in the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit and this was his take.

"People almost always look at current conditions and trends and then extrapolate.

Detroit's financial problems exist because people in 1960 assumed that Detroit was going to have 10 million residents in the foreseeable future and built infrastructure to support that population."

Detroit population over the last 200 years. Extrapolating from 1930 data, Detroit was on-track to hit 10,000,000 in 1960

Cherished beliefs die slow, hard deaths.

Detroit didn't grow much during the Great Depression.

Population growth was relatively stagnant during the 1940s as the young men, the nucleus of family formation, were off fighting the war. Regardless, population peaked in 1950 at 1.8 million people. 

Since 1960, Detroit's population has been dropping by double-digit percentages every decade and now sits at about 600,000.

 

Adjusted for inflation, the tax-base eroded even more.

 

Some neighborhoods survived almost entirely intact.

 

Other neighborhoods were not so lucky.

Regardless, there is a tremendous amount of fixed-cost overhang and not a lot of of grassroots generated revenue to support it.

Some residents blame racist whites for fleeing, even though most blacks move out as soon as they can afford to.

Some blame corruption in Lansing (the state capital).

Some respond with anger and rage.

Some respond with hopelessness.

Some respond with resignation. All in alignment with the stages of grieving.

The Progressives are encountering some head-winds

I think many of those same things are happening to the Progressive movement.

They became accustomed to effortless, exponential growth and their paradigm assumed it would always continue. That effortless growth was one of their baseline assumptions like "gravity" and "the sun rising".

They are in the anger-and-rage stage of grieving. They are exactly like the two-year-old whose mom told him "No!" for the first time. Their universe just up-ended and they don't like it.

Detroit, August 1967

I think that the state of Progressive America is analogous to Detroit in the year 1955 or 1965.

It has been 72 hours

Charlie Kirk was murdered because he was supernaturally gifted at selling traditional, Conservative values at the retail level. Charlie Kirk was effective. That was very, very threatening to the people whose rice-bowl is chained to the legacy narrative. That is why he was murdered and why the Left celebrated his death.

Some pair-wise comparisons of comparable items in the retail space

Older, dominant modality................... New Modality

Land-line telephone................................iPhone

Company store.......................................Dollar General

Legacy narrative.....................................Charlie Kirk  

Commonalities.....................................Commonalities

Coercive.................................................Free-market    

Producer-centric......................................User-centric

Not responsive to "customers"...................Responds to customer needs

Wealth pumps.........................................Offers value in exchange

Charlie Kirk's "selling" technique

1. Invite the potential customer to tell him what is important to the customer
2. LISTEN to the potential customer. 
3. Rephrase any potentially ambiguous language
4. Validate or recognize the potential customer's feelings
5. Agree with what he can agree with. This step and the prior step establish an empathy bond.
6. Articulate his own views on the topic without denigrating the potential customer
7. Focus on one or two points where the views are diametrically opposed
8. Reference pertinent data. For instance, talk about outcomes of Native American tribes that receive casino money vs. ones that don't when talking about Universal Basic Income or Reparations
9. Observe that the data suggests that his viewpoint produces the most compassionate outcomes for the majority of the people.
10. Admit ignorance when the potential customer brings an event that he had no knowledge of. 

Most people with a brain appreciated the respect Mr Kirk extended to them. They could FEEL the difference between Mr Kirk's engaging with them on their home-turf and the Legacy narrative's "We will kick in your teeth if you disagree with us" approach.

Transgenderism and Mental Illness

The functional definition of Mental Illness 

The functional definition of "Mental Illness" is "Do your issues interfere with the activities of normal life?"

We all have "symptoms" of mental illness. We all have quirks. 

Normal, developmental stages of life also resemble the symptoms of mental illness. Most teenagers go through a phase where they compulsively argue. But that is a normal phase that nearly all of them grow out of. It is not an illness as long as they don't get stuck there. 

Those behaviors do not rise to the level of diagnosable "illness" if we, as adults, can function smoothly in modern life. 

For example: Consider somebody who is stressed by crowds. It is not considered a mental illness if they can work and shop and do all of the other things considered parts of ordinary life. 

That person might have several coping mechanisms. They might work third-shift stocking shelves or they might be a cobbler who very rarely has more than two customers in his shop at a time. Maybe they work from home as a seamstress. At that point, it is not considered a mental illness.

But if the company eliminated third-shift and the person locks-up and cannot find another job, then it becomes diagnosable because the demands of everyday tasks changed and suddenly exceeded that person's capability to execute them.

ADA and Mental Illness 

The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) was interpreted as covering mental illness and employers are expected to make "reasonable accommodations" to employ people who are diagnosed with mental illnesses. That is problematic because there are no objective tests to diagnose mental illness. There is no blood test nor imaging technology like there are for diabetes or brain tumors.

Catch 22

If a delusional behavior like transgenderism is very pointedly written out of the Mental Illness Diagnostic Manual, then why are "reasonable accommodations" still being made for it?

And many of those accommodations ended up being far more than "reasonable". There is a 125,000 square-feet factory in southern-Michigan where the single "transgender" employee is allowed to use the Plant Manager's personal restroom and shower (only accessible through a door in his private office) because they filed a complaint stating that they "didn't feel safe" using the one for their pretend gender. Having worked in a factory and knowing the near-godlike powers and the number of confidential issues (often involving personnel) that are handled in the office of the Plant Manager, that access to his office is inconceivable to me. 

The barroom lawyer cannot stand on Title XI (against sexual discrimination). Sex is in your chromosomes. Transgender is gender which we are repeatedly told is totally different than XX, XY and YY.

Which brings us back to "Transgenderism is a delusional mental illness where the patient is incapacitated when others don't play along with their delusion".

Bonus argument

Many mental illnesses are cursed with accompanying comorbidities. There is a cascading effect of suboptimal "maladjustments" as the brain tries to cope while still cherishing the original bad decisions.

Even proponent of the transgender movement admit that transgenders are a bundle of mental illnesses although they attribute those mental illnesses to society "not accepting them".

It is interesting that kids are diagnosed with autism before they decide they are transgender. How can society's discrimination work backward in time? 

The day I was a typo, and the crowd cheered

I gave blood today.

Yes, I am Type O Positive.

Retting

This is a follow-up to the post on hemp fiber.

Good post HERE written in very readable English.

Short, interesting video showing mechanical retting (not hemp).

Retting is actually two processes. The first part of the process is to separate the fiber bundles from the core. That part can be very fast. The second process is to delaminate the fiber bundle into its individual fibers by breaking down the gel that glues the fibers together. The second part is similar to making paper from wood.

Long, academic paper. 

Upper Orchard notes

The tree in the picture is an apple tree that was originally grafted to a very early apple. Then two water-sprouts were grafted to Melrose. The grafts are about 8' above the ground. Then the tree was given zero attention for more than a decade.

A couple of years ago the orchard came under my care and I mentally marked this tree for culling. The reason that I dislike very early apples is that it seems like there is a three-day picking window. If you miss that window, they fall to the ground and make a mess. They are also magnets for stinging insects. Finally, they just don't taste all that good.

While reviewing it mid-fall 2024 I noted the branches of Melrose apples in the dense thicket of branches. I picked the apples and marked the two branches by tying face-masks to them. Hey, I was working with what was in the truck and it seemed like a good use for them.

Pruning out the branches of the early apple left two, gangly whips that were much too tall. I made the executive decision to leave them as they were because I needed to leave some wood to leaf-out to support the metabolic needs of the trunk and roots. My hope was that more shoots would sprout lower on the gangly whips and I could start taking some height out of the tree.

The branch on the east side of the tree surprised me with a bumper crop of apples. Maybe it is saying "Thanks!"

Hunting blind update

The sheet-metal went up without a hitch. Potential issues were identified ahead of time and I put plans into place to remediate them. Working alone can be a challenge when you have to handle sharp and awkward items like 8'-by-3' sheet steel panels.

One of the features I added is that I capped the header with a 6", 5/4" decking plank with rounded edges and I tilted  the outer edge of the header a quarter inch downward so any rain that falls on it will run OUT of the blind. It is also closer to parallel with how the firearms or crossbows will be tipped when shooting.

Now I have two more sides to complete.

Palmer amaranth and water-hemp

PA and WH are similar species of amaranth that are weedy. I imported them when I purchased bags of "composted" cow manure.

Many species of amaranth have edible greens. These two species are nominally edible but the tips become fiberous quickly. In the wild, they are often contaminated with pesticides and during dry-spells can have issues with nitrate accumulation (the cause of Blue Baby syndrome) and possibly hydrogen cyanide.

I spent part of yesterday walking the orchard and grubbing out the PA and WH plants I saw.

Shift in orchard priorities

The priorities shift with the season.

Obviously, harvesting fruit is the major priority but there are also other tasks. 

One task is to identify the varieties of the trees. The two trees in the west row immediately north of the newly grafted Enterprise might be Spigold or Sweet Sixteen. They are late, large, crunchy and already sweet. They also appear to have corky-spot. Corky-spot is a fruit quality issue where the tree cannot deliver enough calcium to the fruit. The fix is to spray the trees with multiple sprays of calcium-rich solution.

"Why not just add calcium (limestone) to the soil?" you ask. Because Corky-spot is often a transport issue. For some reason, the stems cannot or will not ship the calcium to the developing fruit.

In the third row, counting from the west, the two northernmost mature trees appear to be Jonafree.

Another task involves armoring the baby trees against mice/voles eating the bark. That involves removing all of the deer and rabbit guard fencing and wrapping several wraps of paper or metal window-screen around the trunks before re-installing the rabbit and deer protection. I expect that to take 15 minutes a tree so that will absorb a lot of time.

Branches and brush still need to be cleared out to facilitate mowing. 

Mowing

I removed one of the blades from the mower at the Upper Orchard site and sharpened it. When I returned to reinstall it, the adaptor that is supposed to be on the end of the spindle was gone. That is baffling because I immediately replaced the bolt and washer after pulling the blade.

While searching the internet for a replacement I learned that the blade is supposed to be 20" instead of 18", so the mower has the wrong blade, too. Used equipment is full of surprises. The right answer is to get the proper adaptor and blade which will work if the spindle is still original. 

Ground blinds

I also put up a ground-blind on the edge of a grassy, goldenrod filled field. I was disappointed with the size of the stakes that came with the product so I need to purchase some real tent-stakes.

You can see the traces of the deer trails in the upper, right corner of the image.

The distance between the blind (the green diamond) and the extreme, upper-left corner of the image is about 40 yards.

Charlie Kirk

A brave man. He knew there were grave risks and he answered the call of what he saw as his mission anyway.

The 72 hour rule is in effect.

I find that the best way for me to deal with stress is to throw myself into something productive. Fight, flight or work. And of the three, I prefer work.