The ramblings of an addled mind.
I hope you enjoy this Saturday Silliness spritzer with just a twist of education.
As a retired tradesman (carpenter/furniture maker) I’ve found it discouraging how few young people are willing to consider taking up the life of a skilled Tradesman as a way of earning a living.
Despite the fact that most skilled tradesmen earn more than college graduates, experience less unemployment and do it without the burden of college loan debt, only 6% of highschool students are currently considering going into a trade. This is partially because more and more high schools are cutting back or eliminating industrial arts classes.
As a result, by the year 2030, 79 million tradesmen will be retiring — and only 41 million new tradesmen will be entering the work force to replace them. This trend is expected to escalate. If you think hiring a plumber or auto mechanic is expensive now, wait another decade when there will be 50% fewer people to fill those rolls!
My wife and I like making soups and stews with dried beans. Prior to putting in our own garden, we bought bags and bags of various dried beans and bean soup kits (assorted beans and seasoning in one bag). Black beans have always been a favorite of ours, so when I started gardening, I was sure to put in some black bean plants.
When I think of dried beans, this is the sort of thing I think of. But recently I stumbled across a twist on the dried beans idea: dehydrated green beans. We dehydrate a lot of things: fruit slices, tomatoes, peppers, onions, and a wide variety of herbs, but green beans?
My green beans are doing quite well this year and I have bunches of them blanched and frozen or canned for later use. And still they come in. So I decided to try drying a batch and see how that works out. Continue reading “Dried Beans a Twist on an Old Favorite”
I wonder if we’ll ever be able to grow black beans on Mars.
This afternoon – during the girls (and Cochise’s) nap time I shelled a basket of black beans. The yield was about a half of a zip-lock sandwich baggie of dried beans. A little disappointing, but under the weather conditions we’ve had… eh, better than nothing at all, and there are many more bean plants to harvest yet. I’ll probably get a jar full to tuck away for winter soup making. While shelling these I watched a YouTube video called Mars Underground.
I was hoping it was a Sci-Fi movie. It started off like a sci-fi movie, then turned documentary. Then it started sounding like one of those conspiracy flicks and I expected them to say “We don’t need to go to Mars, Martians are already here and in control of our Government.” And I was prepared to believe it because that’s one of the better excuses for the US government’s insane behavior. Continue reading “Why We Aren’t On Mars (Yet)”
In part 2 of this series we looked at robots and robotic devices that are available today. Some, like the robotic training aids in use to teach people CPR, medical diagnostics, dentistry and even child birth are fairly sophisticated. The Geminoid line of robots are incredibly life-like.
If you’re wondering whether this was in fact a real robot, or actually a person pretending to be a robot; it is not a fake. This is the latest iteration of the Geminoid series of ultra-realistic androids from Japanese firm Kokoro and Osaka University mad scientist roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro. Specifically, this is Geminoid DK, which was constructed to look exactly like associate professor Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University in Denmark.
Prof. Scharfe confirmed: “No, it is not a hoax,” adding that he and colleagues in Denmark and Japan have been working on the project since 2010. His Geminoid, which cost some US $200,000, is going to be used for studying human-robot interaction, in particular people’s emotional responses when they face an android representing another person. Prof. Scharfe wants to find out if the robot can transmit a person’s “presence” to a remote location and whether cultural differences in people’s acceptance of robots make a difference.[1]
Have you seen the movie Surrogates? Continue reading “Robots of the Not Too Distant Future”
Published in July, 2013 by Grit Magazine
This is my post strawberry season post. Almost. Actually because I have ever-bearing strawberry plants I will get another crop in another month or two. If these were June berries then the season would be over and it would be time do the final clean-up and put them to bed. The process is similar in both cases; it’s mostly a matter of timing.
When I planted this bed I bought plants from a nursery and set them in the spring. The Square Foot Gardening book says to plant them 4 plants per square foot, I modified that according to the number of plants in the flat (about 25). That resulted in a much wider spacing, but that’s OK.
T
his is the bed’s second season and I now have around 10 plants per square foot: way too crowded! This is because I was lax about this maintenance business last year.
Today I’m going in to clean up. It’s been very wet this year. Too wet. And the leaves of my strawberries are showing signs of a leaf disease which I suspect is attributed to the really wet conditions and overcrowding.
Christine Engelbrecht, of the Department of Plant Pathology at Iowa State University says: “Strawberries in this region are commonly affected by three fungal leaf diseases–leaf spot, leaf scorch, and leaf blight. These diseases typically do not cause serious damage, but when they are particularly severe, they may reduce yield and make the plants more susceptible to devastating root diseases.
Leaf spot is the most common disease on strawberry. Symptoms at first appear as small, round purple spots on the upper surface of leaves. As the spots enlarge, the centers turn pale tan to white, with a purple or rust-colored border.
Leaf scorch appears as small, irregular purple spots or blotches on the upper surface of leaves. The spots enlarge and coalesce, often covering a large portion of the leaf. As they grow, the centers of the spots turn brown.
Leaf blight begins as small, purple spots. These spots enlarge into large, triangular-shaped lesions bounded by leaf veins. The centers of the lesions turn pale brown, with dark brown margins.
Management of all three of these diseases is similar. Some varieties are resistant to leaf spot and leaf scorch. Resistant varieties include the junebearing varieties Allstar, Canoga, Cardinal, Delite, Earliglow, Honeoye, Jewell, Lester, Midway, and Redchief, and the ever bearing varieties, Tribute and Tristar. Maintaining adequate spacing between plants, and managing weeds, helps to increase aeration and reduce leaf wetness. Infected leaves should be removed after harvest to reduce inoculum levels. Fungicide sprays may also be used to prevent infection by leaf diseases.”[1]
Based on her description, I’m thinking this is leaf scorch. Her treatment recommendation is to do pretty much what I planned to do anyway – I love it when that happens.
First I’m going in around the edges of the box where runners have bumped into the sides and rooted, producing a dense wall of young plants, and rip them out. Horrible aren’t I? I will transplant these orphans to another spot in the yard where I need a ground cover, and the birds may have the berries. Or some of them anyway.
Then I’ll snip out any diseased or dead leaves/stalks and clean out the debris around the base of the plants. Last fall’s tree leaves are still in there as well as last season’s strawberry leaves. All that needs to go. The pine straw can stay for now. Strawberries need a slightly acid soil so they LOVE pine straw.
Were these June berries, I’d perform the end of season ritual now; which I will describe in a moment. But I’m looking for another crop from these plants this year so after the clean-up I’ll take a look at the over-crowding situation inside the box.
I want to snip off ALL runners this time around. This will help the plants to direct their energies into producing berries. I will have to do this again when the blossoms appear, because strawberries are stubborn lil things about wanting to produce daughter plants via those runners. But I also want to pull out some plants where I have more than 4 plants per square foot. Leave the bigger, healthier looking plants: they’ll have the best root system, and pull out the sprouts or sickly plants. More plants does not mean more berries, or if you do get more berries they will be smaller because the plants are competing for nutrients and water in the soil. Also be sure to pull out any weeds that may have snuck in.
Speaking of nutrients, after population control it’s time for a feeding. Use a balanced, all purpose nitrogen fertilizer (10,10,10). If using a regular fertilizer try not to get the stuff on the plant’s stems, this may burn them. Side dress them – which is harder to do in a box than it would be in a row. So I use a slow release, granular fertilizer. Don’t over fertilize as this can lead to root problems and inhibit berry production.
This will have the bed ready for the late summer crop of berries. When that crop is done, the winter maintenance consists of going in with grass shears and lopping the heads off the little darlins. Cut the stems about an inch above the ground level or the top of the crown, whichever is higher. Then use a rake to pull all the debris out.
Strawberry plants will normally produce for around 3 years, so if your bed is two or more years old you will want to let the plants daughter. You can leave two runners per plant to propagate, remove the others. Apply fertilizer again and cover the bed with a couple of inches of fresh pine straw. Compost the debris you raked out.
Your strawberry maintenance chores for the year are now done and you can look forward to a bumper crop of plump, delicious berries again next year.
Ever since I was a kid I’ve had a penchant for photography. I started with an old Brownie box camera and through the decades have worked myself up to a mid-range DSLR. Or… it was mid-range when I got it 13 years ago, now it’s pretty much an antique. But, it has served me well.
I always figured that my next step would be a new(er) high end DSLR.
Video has been a curiosity for me, but I’ve not done a lot with it. I enjoy the videos I see on the internet of people and pets doing silly things, but never really considered joining in. Quite recently, Marie suggested that I reconsider.
I did some homework and decided on a Sony Handycam HDR-CX220. There are fancier models out there, but for what I will be doing I’d be paying more for features I wouldn’t use. There are cheaper brands and models out there, too… but reviews from several places on the web proved discouraging about reliability and/or picture quality. This one seems to do what I want to do, and do it well, for a reasonable cost. That’s called “value”. (Especially since when we bought it there was a $50 manufacturer’s instant rebate in effect… BONUS!)
Continue reading “Taking the Next Step: Video with Sony Handycam”
Published in June of 2013 by Grit Magazine
Actually, what I’ve been building is much more than just eye candy. The thick bed of wood chips over landscape fabric bordered by landscape timbers that now surrounds all the boxes in my “Lower 10” also serve some good purposes:
My berry house is also done. It encloses a blueberry bed, strawberry bed, red and purple grape vines. Bird netting over the PVC frame keeps the birds away from the berries.
The door is the curved section with all the slats between the strawberry and blue berry boxes. It’s a flap of bird netting that lifts up to allow me in and out, yet keep the avian fiends away from our berries. I stabilized the edges by trapping them between two layers of duct tape (sticky sides together) and stapled the slats on to lay across the door frame to prevent the netting flap from falling through the opening. A piece of PVC at the bottom holds the flap down and keeps it from blowing open in winds.
We just bought some marigolds to plant around the high perimeter to brighten it up a bit and help repel rabbits. They can chew right through the bird netting.
The Middle 10 was completed just days ago. This section required shoring up the lower ends of the paths between the boxes (the slope is steeper here), which meant some extra digging to level the timbers.
For the most part, this work is very simply done; no hoopla. Well, almost no hoopla.
I did angle the cuts when I made the timber pieces that went between the boxes so the ends of the timbers sit flat against the boxes despite the slope, and I could not resist showing off just a little by coping the ends of the timbers where they meet the curved face of another timber.
Otherwise, it’s all pretty much plain-Jane work: timbers, pinned to the ground with rebar, on top of landscape fabric to keep the weeds out and filled with wood chips I make myself by chipping up tree branches from the spring trimming. But it should ease my maintenance chores, make my knees happy, and it looks pretty nice too.
I’ve been meaning to write an article about common herbal garden items that have healthful benefits beyond their vitamins and minerals. Now that spring is upon us and the garden is coming along nicely it’s time I got around to that.
Effective communication between men and women has always been a issue of contention. Let’s look at why that is.
In the 1960’s what is now called Second Wave Feminism began to build up steam as it tried to tell the world that men and women are – apart from some reproductive organs – identical. This movement took up the mantra of the First Wave Feminists, which began in the 15th century, that women should have rights and opportunities equal to men. And indeed they should and great strides have been made on that front.
The second wave added the ideology that men and women think just alike. In the 1970’s gender neutrality became a big issue, and has had major repercussions in our society ever since. Aside from divergent physiology, says this theory, a woman is simply a man with a keenly honed fashion sense, and conversely, a man is just a woman who can’t dance and refuses to dust. Continue reading “Blue-Gray Matter and Pink-Gray Matter in Communication”