Month: July 2020

Post #G14: Garden update

Source:  My garden.

If you have no interest in gardening, skip this.

Squash Vine Borer.  Looks like the SVB season is over.  I spend a lot of time walking around my garden, and my last sighting was 7/25/2020.  My first was 7/5/2020, making the SVB season just about exactly three weeks long.

My spraying regimen — I would term it spinosad with a side order of neem — appears to have worked so far.  In the sense that none of my many cucurbits is showing symptoms of SVB infestation.  Yet.  So that’s 0.008% spinosad solution (made up from concentrate), sprayed on the stems of my cucurbits every five days or so.  In the late evening, to avoid the bees.  Plus one random spraying with 100% neem (the variant that contains the insecticides, not the “hydrophobic extract” that’s just oil), more out of paranoia than from any thought-through plan.  I’ll have to keep up the spray for another week or so to account for the lag between egg-laying and hatch-out.

Powdery mildew.  I have that on nearly all my cucurbits now.  I should have been taking preventive measures, but I didn’t, so now I’m playing catch-up.

I tried baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) solution, once.  Recipe given in earlier posts.  I tried potassium bicarbonate solution, once.  Just substitute K for Na in the recipe.  If those had an effect, it was fairly subtle.

So I’m pulling out all the stops and following the hydrogen peroxide regimen as outlined on The Rusted Garden blog.  See the video above.  (Seriously, look this guy up on Youtube.  He’s in Maryland.  If you’re not envious of his garden, you’re a far better gardener than I am.)

This involves pruning out any leaves that are badly hit with powdery mildew, then spraying daily with a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide.  (Around) 4 to 6 ounces of 3% hydrogen peroxide per gallon of water.)

If nothing else, this is certainly cheap.  A quart of 3% H2O2 is $1.29 at the grocery store, and is enough to treat my entire garden four times.  I’ll post in a few days and report back the results.

Ongoing, I’m also pruning my squash and pumpkin plants.  It never even occurred to me to do that.  (I’m kind of a laissez-faire gardener, which is another way of saying, I do as little as possible.)   But after listening the the logic behind it and seeing the results on The Rusted Garden, I’m all in.  As with the mildew issue, I’m running behind, so this will be an ongoing process.

I’m planting mid-season replacements for some of my cucumbers.  That’s another thing I’ve never done before.  To me, you plant in the spring, you harvest in the fall.  But apparently that’s not what smart gardeners do.  In this case, my Spacemaster 80 cucumbers were incredibly productive, until the simultaneous effects of bacterial wilt and powdery mildew got hold of them.  They are now such a mess that I’m pulling them out and replanting.  Apparently, with warm soil and a bit of fertilizer, there’s plenty of time to have them grow up and produce cucumbers before first frost.

Cucumber beetles and bacterial wilt.  Today I was 4/4 (attempts/kills) when inspecting my squash and pumpkin blossoms, long-nosed pliers in hand.  (As described in Post #G13).  I think that I have seen no new cases of bacterial wilt these past few days, but it’s hard to say, as it takes some time for the plant to die off.  In any case, I’ve gone from finding dozens in one pass through the blossoms, to consistently finding maybe four or five.  Tentatively, I think I’m winning.

Timing is fairly key to this operation.  The limiting factor is grumpy bumblebees.  If I get out there at 7 AM, there are bumblebees  just kind of sitting in the squash blossoms, zoned out.  My wife swears that bumblebees sleep in squash blossoms.  (Aww!)  I, by contrast, thought that was way too cute to be real.  A quick google search shows that she’s correct.  Not only do they sleep in flowers, but squash blossoms are preferred due to size and configuration, and squash blossoms provide considerable protection from the cold.  Snug as a bee in a blossom, no joke.  The upshot is that I have to wait for them to get up and go to work before I can patrol for cucumber beetles.

Tomato ripening is now occurring generally across my tomato plants.  Slowly.  My cherry tomatoes are ripening a few at a time, and some Rutgers tomatoes are finally turning pink.  Still going slowly, though, that’s for sure.

And the deer have not yet returned. As evidenced by the fact that I still have standing sunflowers, above.  On net, I’m crediting Bobbex deer repellent.  It really stinks!  I think the motion-activated radio comes in a close second (Post #G07).  I don’t know if it scares the deer, but it sure manages to scare the pee out of me every time I inadvertently trigger it.

Post #767: Aerosol transmission of COVID-19

Source:  Japan ministry of health.  Note that the #1 item is about enclosed spaces with poor ventilation.

There’s an article in today’s New York Times that is is a must-read on the subject of aerosol (airborne) transmission of COVID-19.

It has more-or-less everything you’d need to  know on this subject in one place, including a brief summary of the extent to which various masks offer protection against airborne virus.  (They all work some, some work better than others.) Continue reading Post #767: Aerosol transmission of COVID-19

Post #766: Hygiene theater.

Source:  Washington Post.

I rarely ditto a news article, but this one, in the Atlantic, is well worth the read.  Cleaning/disinfecting surfaces, as a way to reduce COVID-19 transmission, is more-or-less a total waste of time.  Hospitals and other health care institutions need to do that.  Nobody else does.

This is one of those issues where a) the CDC flip-flopped its guidance, b) a lot of unhelpful and unrealistic research was published, and c) when the CDC flip-flopped its position, it worded things so vaguely that it took experts to figure out what the heck they were saying.

Its yet another example of a garbled message from the CDC.  Garbled and weasel-worded to the point where nobody outside of a few experts really understood what the CDC was trying to say.

I mentioned this in passing, back in Post #724 (6/20/2020), in the section titled:

Fomites are no longer considered a major threat

Fomites being inanimate objects that might have little droplets of infectious matter on them.

That change in CDC guidance is now more than a month old.  But it appears to have been almost completely ignored.  The gist of it is that you are extremely unlikely to catch COVID-19 by touching inanimate objects. It’s possible, but apparently it’s hugely unlikely in a community (non-hospital) setting.

Just how unlikely?  A scientist quoted in the Atlantic article said, emphasis mine:

“In the entire peer-reviewed COVID-19 literature, I’ve found maybe one truly plausible report, in Singapore, of fomite transmission. And even there, it is not a slam-dunk case. ”

Source:  Donald Schaffner, a food-microbiology professor who studies disease contamination at Rutgers University.   From The Atlantic.

The Atlantic article fills in a lot of the details, including an explanation from a qualified scientist as to why the original research on “how long the virus can remain on a surface” was misleading.  Among other things, some of that research used virus concentrations that were 100 times stronger than would ever occur in real life.  As they put it, you’d have to have 100 infected people line up and sneeze on the same door handle to achieve the virus concentrations used in the research.

To see why this garbled guidance matters, just consider what’s going to happen when schools re-open.  That’s laid out in the Atlantic article cited above.  Consider the effort and expense wasted on cleaning that could be spent on something more meaningful, such as providing teachers with high-quality masks.

Yes, you should still wash your hands.  It costs you nothing to do that.  And there is some very slight chance that you could pick up COVID-19 by touching something in a community (non-hospital) setting.  But the bottom line is that businesses and governments are wasting a lot of time and money on cleaning.  And it’s all for show.  It’s hygiene theater.

Post #765: That was not a one-day spike in Virginia COVID-19 cases

The seven-day moving average for Virginia is up to 1100 new COVID-19 cases per day.  Fairfax County is up to about 80 a day.  The big “spike” reported yesterday was an artifact of data reporting, as noted on the Virginia Department of Health website.

Below, blue = Virginia, Orange = Fairfax County

*

Below:  Blue = NoVa + Richmond + Accomack, Orange = rest-of-state.  As above, yesterday’s spike is an artifact of data reporting.

Town of Vienna ZIP codes.  We seem to be adding about one new case a day in ZIP 22180.

 

Post #G13: Garden update

Not everything in my garden is a problem.  I just tend to talk about the issues that I’m trying to solve.  I’m attempting to achieve some balance here.  Topic below, in order, are:

  • Deer (success),
  • Birds (limited success),
  • Cucumber Beetles (apparent success);
  • Squash vine borer (possible success, possibly too soon to tell),
  • Powdery mildew (no success at all, yet, but I’ve learned to prune my squash).

Continue reading Post #G13: Garden update

Post #764: Virginia case counts, hydroxychloroquine

The new normal in Virginia seems to be 1000 cases per day, and stable low case counts in the “late-reopening” areas (NoVA+Richmond City+Accomack).

There was an apparent spike in cases yesterday, but this was a result of a backlog in reporting, not an actual one-day spike.

Below, blue = Virginia, orange = Fairfax County, updated to 7/26/2020.

Below, blue = late-reopening areas, orange = rest of state.  Apparent jump in new cases yesterday is an artifact of data reporting issues.

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Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work on lung cells

And the (almost) final piece of the puzzle/nail in the coffin of hydroxychloroquine was published earlier this week.  It doesn’t protect human lung cells from COVID-19.  It protects other tissues, but not the lungs, as this detailed news article explains.

For those who were keeping score, randomized controlled controlled trials of this tended to show very close to no impact.  And “observational data” studies (just comparing people who were and were not given the drug by their physicians) gave hugely contradictory results.

In rare instances there’s still some effect worth nothing, but usually, when you see that combination, it means there’s no there, there.   And that’s the case for hydroxychloroquine.  The politicization of it didn’t help matters.  But the results are the same regardless if whether or not it was some sort of token of political faithfulness.

As I have emphasized here before, there were many good reasons for looking at this drug as a possible COVID-19 treatment.  (Long before the President mentioned it.)  The foremost of which is that it demonstrated strong anti-viral activity against COVID-19 “in vitro”, that is, in cultures of cells.  The last piece of the puzzle was explaining why this drug appeared to be so effective at suppressing COVID-19 infections “in vitro” but not in humans.    And the answer, per the study referenced above, is that it is effective in suppressing infection in kidney cells.  But not lung cells.

The only wild card remaining is whether hydroxychloroquine’s role as one of very few known zinc ionophores means that this drug, in combination with zinc supplements, might still be helpful.  This was explained back in Post #607.  The spectacular case reports at that time involved use of zinc supplements with hydroxychloroquine.

Source:  Wikipedia

If that’s true, then the role of the drug is not in suppressing COVID-19 directly, but in allowing zinc to pass into cells (“zinc ionophore”), where high zinc levels may suppress some aspect of COVID-19 reproduction.  But if that’s the case, then the key ingredient is the zinc, and any substance that acts to transport zinc through cells walls (e.g., quercetin) would service along with zinc supplements.

Post #763: Stable new case counts in Virginia

Guess the new norm is about 1000/day for the Commonwealth, maybe 60/day for Fairfax County.  Anyway, the good news is that it doesn’t look like we’re headed down the AZ/FL/TX path.  My three standard graphs follow, updated to today (7/23/2020).

Last 28 days of new cases, Virginia = Blue, Fairfax County = orange.

Last 28 days, late-reopening areas (NoVA, Richmond City, Accomack) = Blue, early-reopening areas = orange.

And the ZIPs of Vienna:

 

Post #G12: Further reports from my garden

Just a few brief gardening updates.  If you’re not into gardening, move on.

Shade your tomatoes. It appears to work.

See these little green guys, pictured left?  We’ve gotten to know each other on a first-name basis this past month.  Every day, I would come out and swear at them, individually, and at length.  And every day they just sat there, full-sized yet completely unripe.

 

But note the slight tinge of orange, on the alpha tomato.  That just showed up today.  He and his green brothers and sisters appear to be ripening now.  Just two days after I set up a sun shade for them.

As discussed in Post #G11, this year a lot of Vienna gardeners are experiencing tomatoes that won’t ripen.  Myself included.  Gardening gurus on the Vienna plant swap Facebook group suggested that the problem was that it’s too warm.  We went from too cold, to too warm, and didn’t spend enough time in the 75F sweet spot that promotes tomato ripening.

A quick check of the science verified high temperatures as the likely culprit, with a common solution being to shade your tomatoes.  So, two days ago, I shaded my tomatoes using a couple of pieces of PVC for the frame, and three layers of very thin floating row cover as the roof.  The idea was to reduce light transmission by 30%, which I verified with a light meter.

And two days later, amid the hottest days of the year, as if by magic, those very tomatoes are now starting to ripen.  Oldest first, as is the way of the tomato world.  With no other tomatoes in my garden ripening yet.  Either that’s a heck of a coincidence, or shade is just what they need to ripen in this hot weather.

So I’m checking this one off in the gardening success column.  Give it a try.  Per the reference above, you can shade them by doing something as simple as draping thin shade cloth over your tomato stakes.

Damnable squash vine borer (SVB) moth is still here.

I thought we’d reached the end of the SVB season, but that’s not yet so.  I saw one this afternoon on and around my pumpkin vines.  They are tough to catch in the best of times, but when the weather gets hot, they speed up.  I didn’t even manage to get close.

The practical upshot is that this extends the period over which I am spraying the stems of my cucurbit vines, per Post #G11.

Plausibly, the reason nobody would give a hard date for the typical length of the SVB season around here is that it’s hard to tell.  I might even have been SVB-free these past few days, and just had another one show up.  (They only live about five days, on average, in the field.)  It may be just plain difficult to tell when the season is actually over.

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Are canning supplies the next shortage?

We eat what we can, and what we can’t, we can.

Source:  Wal-Mart.

A canning supply shortage would make sense.  First, you couldn’t find seeds locally.  Then the hardware stores sold out of (and remain sold out of) many common pesticides.  And now that gardens are producing, it seems to be unusually hard to find canning supplies locally.

My go-to local supplier is Twins Hardware in Fairfax, where they have a ridiculously complete home canning section.  But they’re out of wide-mouth pints and quarts.

I checked Giant in Vienna, which manages to have a fairly good stock of canning jars most of the time.  Nothing but some regular-mouth pints and then some half-pints and decorative jars.  Oakton Giant either doesn’t carry them or is fully out-of-stock.

But one of our local Wal-Marts remained abundantly stocked with canning supplies of all types, as of today (7/21/2020).  A tip of the hat to the aforementioned Vienna plant swap group for that advice.  They must have had 50 12-packs of the wide-mouth pints that I was looking for.

For whatever reason, I could not manage to get the Wal-Mart website to tell me that this particular store a) existed, and b) had that much stock.  Which may well be why there was stock left.  Only because my wife joined that plant swap group years back did we find out, by word-of-mouth, where we could get some jars.  If you want to know which store, join that group.  I ain’t blabbing.

I’m scrambling to find jars because my cucumbers just won’t quit.  Bacterial wilt, powdery mildew, cucumber beetles, and no doubt some hits by the SVB.  And yet they are still cranking out cucumbers.  So I’ve started running out of canning jars.  I’ve now made three gallons of pickles (two lacto-fermented, one bread-and-butter).  I’m getting set to do a gallon of vinegar pickle spears this afternoon.

I didn’t expect this because I’d never had a garden succeed before.  To me, cucumber vines were these pitiful little plants that might give you a cuke or two before they died from exhaustion.  Or any of the bugs and diseases mentioned above.  But that was fair, because I never did much beyond planting the seeds and maybe watering now and again.  But this year, I’m taking it a lot more seriously, and planted this square in the middle of my sunny back yard.  And I wasn’t prepared for the results.

Oddly, having a successful garden is making me a much pickier home canner.  It’s one thing to ferment and can some market-bought pickling cucumbers.  It’s another thing entirely to do that with the fruits of your own labor.  So now, quarts are not good enough (you have to keep them in the boiling water for longer).  It’s wide-mouth pints or bust, despite the extra labor.

Bottom line is that I’ve never had a garden produce much of anything before.  So I planned for and planted for failure.  Now I’m scrambling to find enough canning jars.

I’m so desperate that I made dehydrated pickle chips, from my fermented dills.  Not only to they vastly reduce the amount of storage space required, they are like little pickle flavor bombs.  Sour patch kids:lemonade :: dehydrated pickle chips:pickles.  You really have to like pickles to like these.  But if you like pickles, give them a try.

Cut them into pickle chips (quarter-inch thick or less), dehydrate at 125 to 135F, stop when they are crispy.  Not a snack for the faint of heart.

Post #762: Uptick in Virginia cases levels off

My three main graphs, updated to today (7/20/2020) where possible.  The only material change is that the recent uptick in cases in Virginia, in the early-reopening areas, appears to be leveling off.  In short, although the rate of new cases is high in some (mainly) Hampton Roads area cities and counties (Post #758), it doesn’t look like we’re getting ready to join Florida and Arizona any time soon.

Virginia (Blue) and Fairfax County, updated to 2/20/2020:

Virginia, NoVA+Richmond+Accomack (late-reopening areas, blue) versus rest of state (orange).  This is only updated to 7/19/2020 due to a glitch on the Virginia Department of Health website today.

Town of Vienna, counts given for ZIP code 22180 today, and one week ago.