Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post G24-005: Is it March already?

 

This is one of those old-guy, life-is-like-a-roll-of-toilet-paper posts.  About gardening, yet.

If you actually have things to do, just move along, there’s nothing here for you.

Today’s topics are ginger, spinach, tomatoes, and garlic.

 

1:  Ginger.  If you enjoy watching paint dry …

… you’ll love sprouting ginger.

I decided on a whim to try growing ginger this year.  Apparently, it can be done in Zone 7, you just have to start them in the winter and grow them as housplants until mid-summer.

On the plus side, yes, you can sprout grocery-store ginger root.  There’s mine, above.

On the down side, I planted this particular piece of root just shy of one month ago.

On the other plus side, the internet correctly warned me that this was a slow and piecemeal process.

This is interestingly unlike anything else I’ve ever grown.   Usually, you plant a bunch of fill-in-the-blank, and then, however long it takes them to sprout, you get a bunch of sprouted fill-in-the-blank.   All at the same time.  Not so with ginger.  Each piece of root proceeds according to its own timetable.

On the other down side, this means I have to run an electrical heat mat for months.  I’m only running this at six watts, by using a lamp dimmer in the circuit.  But it runs all the time, so that by the time these are done sprouting (say, three months total?), that’ll be about 13 KWH, or enough electricity to drive may be 65 miles.  That’s rounding error, in the grand scheme of things, I guess.  But I’d rather avoid it if I could.

In hindsight, I ought to have started these around New Year’s Day.  Or not at all.  But now that something has sprouted, I’m going to keep going.

2: Spinach.  What, I’m already late?

Source:  Clipart library.com

Yes, I yam.

My wife is particularly fond of fresh spinach.  But I’ve never had the least luck growing it.

Maybe that’s because I didn’t know what I was doing.  So this year, I actually read the directions.

Turns out, spinach seeds like being in the cold, wet ground.  Far more than I would have guessed.  You should sow spinach seeds four to eight weeks before your expected last frost of the spring.

Or, in my case, the eight week limit was a couple of weeks ago.  So today I planted a few short rows of spinach.  I’m sure this is vastly earlier than I have ever planted spinach in the past.  Maybe I’ll actually get a decent yield this year.

3:  Tomatoes.  No way that it’s time to start tomatoes now.  Is it?

Yep, sure is.  In Zone 7, it’s time to start short-season (a.k.a. cold-tolerant) tomatoes, indoors, if you grow them.  Varieties like 4th of July or Early Girl, and more exotic ones that promise to produce tomatoes in a hurry.

After trying out various approaches to growing tomatoes, I’ve now settled down to growing some short-season (cold-tolerant) ones, and some regular-season ones.  (I’ve given up on heat-tolerant or late-season tomatoes, because all of those that I have grown have tasted just like bland grocery-store tomatoes.)

Cold-tolerant or short-season tomatoes can go out in the garden as soon as all danger of frost is past.  They can tolerate the cool nights that we’re still having in early spring.  By contrast, regular-season tomatoes have to wait another month or so, beyond that, until the nights have warmed up.

Anyway, in my area, we’re now about six weeks before our nominal last frost date of April 22.  So it’s time to get my early-season tomato plants started, indoors.  A week or so to germinate, five weeks or so to grow, then out into the garden they will go.

I was more than happy with the short-season (cold-tolerant) tomatoes I planted the past couple of years, so this is just a re-run.  I just set up six starts each of:

  • Burpee’s 4th of July.
  • Glacier
  • Moskovitch.
  • Quedlinburger Furhe Libe

Transplanted into the garden on or about my last frost date (April 22), I find that the 4th of July is true to its name, and has consistently given me its first tomato on that date, plus or minus a week.  Glacier and Moskovitch come in a few days later.  But for a truly early tomato, Quedlinburger Furhe Libe takes the prize in my garden, consistently beating 4th of July by a week or so.

These all yield decent-tasting golf-ball-sized tomatoes.  They keep on yielding through the summer.  And the deer leave them alone, at least once the plants have a bit of size on them.  What’s not to like?

It’s hard to think about the 4th of July right now, when we’re still having freezing nights.  But there’s a solid and logical chain between starting those seeds today and eating tomatoes out of the garden in early summer.

Sometimes I wish the rest of my life had been that linear.

4:  Garlic:  The hazards of planning for failure.

And then there’s the garlic I planted last fall.

I’ve tried growing garlic in prior years.  I’ve never gotten much yield.  But then again, I never did it right.

Among the things I didn’t know were that you really shouldn’t use grocery-store garlic for planting.  That’s for two reasons.  First, it’s all “soft-neck” garlic, which is both bland and does not grow well in the hot and humid Virginia climate.  (Though it does keep well, which is why you find it in the industrial food chain.)  Instead, I want to grow hard-neck garlic, which I can’t get in the stores here, and has to be bought from a supplier of some sort.  Second, “culinary grade” garlic is the puny stuff.  They reserve the biggest heads, with the biggest cloves, to be “seed grade” garlic.  And it is well-documented that if you plant bigger cloves, you’ll harvest bigger heads of garlic.  Which is precisely why they save the big stuff for use as seed.

The final thing I didn’t know is that garlic may benefit from the addition of a modest amount of sulfur to your soil.  That’s covered in Post G23-067.

Last fall, I decided to do it correctly.  Just for a change.

I bought three varieties of seed-grade hard-neck garlic from Snickers Run Farm, a Northern Virginia garlic farm.  Their product was, by a longshot, the burliest heads of true garlic I’ve ever seen. (N.B, elephant garlic is not actually garlic.)  I added a modest amount of a sulfur-containing fertilizer (Espoma Holly Tone) to the soil, along with compost and mulch.  And I planted in the late fall, when it was already pretty cold, though in hindsight, I probably should have planted later.

By-the-book, start to finish.

Based on prior experience, I didn’t expect much. I figured half of them would survive. So … rational or not, I planted quite a lot of it.  (Plus, I had to buy quite a bit of seed garlic to justify the shipping cost, which didn’t exactly help temper my decision-making.)

I looked that bed over today, and my only thought was, what on earth was I thinking.  Because, as of today, I have a 32-square-foot bed chock-a-block with garlic plants that seem very happy to be here.

Based on various estimates of typical yield, this should give me somewhere around 8 pounds of garlic, if it all comes to fruition.  That, where the recommended planting is about one pound, per adult, per year.

Luckily, garlic goes great with tomatoes.  And, I suspect, will go with pretty much everything I’m going to cook from June onwards, this year.

Post #1951: Replacing the battery in a cheap cylindrical dashcam.

 

 

This post walks through the process of replacing the “non-replaceable” battery inside a cheap cylindrical dashcam, like the one pictured above.

It’s not hard to do.  I did two identical cameras.  The second one took about 20 minutes.  Both repairs were successful.

You don’t even have to read this post to figure it out.  You can get the gist of the steps by scrolling through the pictures below.

If I learned anything from this, it’s that if I ever buy another dashcam, I’m going to be sure it’s the type that uses a capacitor instead of a battery.

Continue reading Post #1951: Replacing the battery in a cheap cylindrical dashcam.

Post G24-004: Advice on sheltering your bee hotel for the winter.

 

My advice:  Don’t shelter your bee hotel for the winter.  Let it freeze along with everything else.  This post explains why.

Early bee emergence

Last year, for the first time, I hung up a bee hotel.  This is a set of nesting tubes designed to make it easier for solitary/native bees, such as mason bees, to reproduce.  It seemed to be quite successful, per the picture below.  Ultimately I ended up with about 15 nesting tubes filled.

I left that up through the summer and fall, and, per common internet advice, moved it to a sheltered location once winter set in.  In this case, I moved it to the inside of a detached, totally unheated garage.

Moving a bee hotel to a sheltered location, for the winter, is probably not a good idea.  Despite that being widely suggested by seeming experts.  That’s because if your sheltered area is even a little warmer than the outdoors, I think it entices the bees to emerge too early.

That’s what appears to have happened this year.  For my particular Home Depot bee hotel, the nesting tubes that were filled by mason bees last spring …

… are all now empty.

Consistent with that, my wife noticed some bees on her crocuses this morning.  Which was odd enough to stand out.  Because, among other things, not much is blooming right now except crocus and daffodil.  And it’s not all that warm out yet.  The upshot is that it seems a little early to be seeing bees out and about.

I’m betting that those were “my” bees.  And I’m betting that I did them no favors by (inadvertently) waking them up too early, this year.  If I put up a bee hotel again this year, I’m just going to leave it alone.  I’m now of the opinion that  bees ought to overwinter at exactly the temperatures they’ll face out-of-doors.

Like Tinder, but with only 15 people using it.

Experts say that mason bees should emerge when blossoms are open, and daytime temperatures consistently reach 55F (reference).

By those benchmarks — blooms and temperature — my bees are at least three weeks too early. That’s based on these observations.

Blossoms:  Slim pickings.  At present, only the crocuses, daffodils, and maybe a scattered other few species blooming.  There are a few cherry trees here and there, in this area, in blossom.  For reference, the earliest recorded peak bloom date for the national cherry trees is March 15, with April 1 being a typical date (reference March 15 to the National Park Service).  Separately, a harbinger of spring in many areas is forsythia, but our forsythia isn’t even close to blooming yet.

Temperatures:  Still too cold.  We’ve had a couple of days where the high exceeded 55F, but those are still few and far between.  We are not consistently 55F and higher.  But we’re closing in on that.

Source:  Weather underground. 

And based on our historical weather averages, you wouldn’t expect consistent 55F and higher days for another two-three weeks or so.

Source:  Analysis of NOAA weather data for Dulles Airport (Sterling, VA).

All of that, plus my experience last year, tells me that my little batch of bees emerged the better part of a month too early.  Call it three weeks, minimum.

Finally, these bees don’t live very long.  They emerge, eat, mate, and die within a span of a few weeks.  They’re now out of sync with their species in general, and they’re going to be dead before the rest of the local mason bee population emerges.  So, if they all survive, their procreation will be as described in the section title.

Conclusion

I’m not a bee expert, but I’ve spent a lot of time observing the habits of bugs, since I took up gardening during the pandemic.  The one universal rule is that everything in the garden — plants and bugs alike — operates on temperature, and on degree-days.

By keeping this bee hotel in an unheated garage, I kept it warmer than the ambient outdoor temperatures.  I suspect that, one way or the other, this caused my bees to emerge earlier than is optimal, for their species.

If I do this again this year, I’m going to leave the bee hotel outside all winter.  The bee larvae may not much like the cold, but they need to stay in sync with outdoor temperatures, in order to emerge at the right time.

Source;  All the pictures for this post are from Gencraft.com AI, with the prompt of “a bee, wearing a stocking cap and scarf”.

Addendum:  To bee, or not.

Edit:  In the end, I gave it another go, doing it better this time, as explained in Post #G24-008.  This year, my bee hotels are ugly, but properly constructed (closed-ended tubes roughly 6″ long), as shown above.  Well over half the tubes are now filled, as of this writing (4/22/2024).  I’m just going to leave them be until its time to take them down and put them in an emergence box next spring.

Original post follows.

Am I going to put up bee hotel this year?  Not sure, but at this point, I’d say, no not.  Probably not going to put up another bee hotel this year.  For the following reasons.

First, these bees don’t pollinate my garden.  They’re out and about early in the year, and they are gone by the time my garden crops or flowers need pollination.  So when you hear about “attracting bees to your garden to get better yields”, they ain’t talking about mason bees.  The earliest-blossoming food I grow is peas, and my recollection is that mason bees do their thing well before (e.g.) the peas blossom.  Apparently they are good for orchards.  Which would make sense, as fruit trees blossom early.  (And mason bees are orchard bees, or orchard bees are mason bees, or something, I’m not entirely sure.  I don’t have an orchard.)

Second, I’m trying to grow the kinds of plants that (the internet tells me) make good natural nesting sites for these bees.  But that whole enterprise is looking a bit sketchy at the moment.  I’ve started down that path, by not mowing my wildflower beds yet.

You’d think, well, that’s got to be dead easy, just grow some plants and leave them. Just don’t mow.

But its not that simple.

Mason bees need medium-sized hollow stalks to nest in.  (Or equivalent.)  That seems right by my experience so far.  Sturdy annuals will sometimes leave behind big, ugly stems.  Looks about the right size.

But that’s the point where anything ceases to be easy.

In a nutshell, you have to keep them for two years, they’re ugly, they get in the way, and you have to defend them from the deer.  I’m not going to go through the details.  I can boil it down to this.

Do I really want to use my time and attention to try to protect some ugly weed stalks from ravenous end-of-winter marauding deer?  For a couple of years, yet (the literal same batch of stalks, I mean.)  And somehow work around them, while prepping the beds for this year’s flowers.  And in the end, really have no clue whether they are effective or not.

I have a lot of sunk cost in this whole bee-hotel thing, not in the sense of buying the Home Depot wooden bee hotel, but mostly in the time and effort gathering and cutting bamboo, in anticipation of annul replacement of the nesting tubes in that hotel.

In addition, rehabbing that Home Depot hotel for re-use could be a fair bit of work.  I should replace the bamboo nesting tubes each year.  This year — with the off-the-shelf unit — that means breaking the existing glued-in tubes out first.

I think I’ll see how hard the rehab is, first, then decide on next steps after that.

But as of right now, I’m not seeing a huge benefit to anybody or anything in being a mason bee hotel keeper for another year.  I should let them find their equilibrium vis-a-vis the local flora.  Might tweak the flora to try to help them out, if I can figure out how to do it.  But I think I’m going to punt on maintaining a manufactured bee hotel.

Post #1949: The great flat spot in car prices.

 

The biggest eye-opener that I ginned up in the last year was a graph of new and used car prices.  As above.

Functionally, all it told me is that official U.S. price statistics are worthless for tracking trends in how much you have to pay to buy a car.

But, as it turns out, if you look a little deeper, the goofy official U.S. car price data have a lot of company.  That is, many items in the U.S. Consumer Price Index now have “quality” adjustments of the type that generate those odd car price trends.  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) price indices, for such items, net out a BLS estimate of the change in the “quality” of those items over time.  The upshot is that much of the spending in the U.S. Consumer Price Index is now somewhat divorced from the actual prices that you, the consumer, must typically pay.

I am hardly the first one to have noted this.  I think the BLS numbers for home computers, in particular, have drawn a lot of attention.  There, “quality” includes attributes like processor speed, disk size and speed, installed memory, and so on.  As computers have gotten better, but prices have risen in line with overall inflation, the BLS has recorded that as a massive, ongoing decline in the dollar price of home computers.  Per quality-adjusted unit.  And, because computers are part of the CPI, this means a lower overall CPI increase.

My only real point is that the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) is increasingly less relevant as a measure of “the cost of living”.  In any real-world sense.  It doesn’t track what it costs to get by in America.  Not unless you know where I can buy a brand-new 1993 Toyota Corolla, at the 1993 price, instead of what’s currently being offered on new-car lots.

The CPI measures something, and I’m sure that whatever it measures makes good sense to the folks who measure it.  But if you’re merely a typical U.S. consumer, and, say, need to own a car and a phone to get by in life, you can’t take the increase in the CPI as any accurate measure of what is happening to the cost of living.  For you, the typical U.S. consumer.

Sketchy details follow.

Did you know that the price of a typical new car in 2019 was the same as it was in 1993?

Lines:  Price index data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via the Federal Reserve of St. Louis FRED system.  Toyota Corolla lowest MSRP from Cars.com, history of the Toyota Corolla.

That, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official source for U.S. price data, and the keeper of the super-important U.S. Consumer Price Index.

I ginned up the graph above trying to make sense of new and used car prices, Post 1836.

I think we can agree that something happened about half-way up, on the graph above.  Or halfway across, depending on your perspective.  The lines diverge.

What happened, exactly, we might reasonably disagree about.  But the title of the graph gives a broad hint.  Just prior to that, BLS began embedding a quality adjustment in its car price data.

Whatever it was that happened, it’s clear that past that point, what the BLS tracked as the price of a car (orange and gray lines) had almost no relationship to the price of a car, meaning, what you actually have to pay to buy a car (yellow bars).

Did you know that the price of the typical cell phone fell 50% in just the past four years?

Source:  https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SSEE041

From the same folks who produced the car data above.  Again, quality-adjusted data.

Such a bargain now.   Maybe I’ll finally bite the bullet and buy an Apple phone, now that they’re half-price.

Or are they?

Might as well toss this one in, too:  The price for an internet connection is easily 10% less now than it was in 1997.  Again, this is supposed to be an index of the price, in dollars.  I have no clue what the big dip is, mid-graph.  But this is what the BLS says.

Base source:  BLS data query, for finding data series, https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find

Did you know that the dollar price for major kitchen appliances in 2024 is essentially unchanged from where it was in 1998?

Source:  https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find?fq=survey:[cu]&s=popularity:D&q=appliances

You get the drift.  BLS data, quality adjusted.  Per the BLS, you have to shell out fewer dollars, today, to buy a fridge, than you did 25 years ago.

Quality-adjusted.

Inarticulate conclusion: I am not a Luddite, I think.

I drive an Eee-Vee, for gosh sakes.  I’m not ready to toss my wooden clogs into the industrial machinery of Progress.  Nor am I here to kvetch about the accuracy of BLS’s methods for making these quality adjustments.  (That’s a completely separate issue).

Instead, I want to ask a question.  Can I buy a brand-new 1993 Toyota Corolla?  At the 1993 price?

No?  Then maybe the CPI is no longer a good cost-of-living index.  Or, alternatively, maybe it’s a bit harder for the younger generations to get by than you might think, based solely on the official numbers.

I’m not one to say that the sky is falling because of these quality adjustments embedded in the U.S. CPI.  Practically speaking, I would say that the CPI understates the actual change in “the cost of living”.  Where living is defined as living like the average American.  I.e., has a place to stay, drives a car, uses a cell phone, wears clothes, and so on.

You can see the full list of what’s adjusted in this fashion on the BLS website:   https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/.   Broadly speaking, BLS embeds some sort of quality adjustment into most of the items in these categories:

  • Cars/trucks
  • Clothing
  • Appliances
  • Electronics
  • Information services (internet, phone, cable service).

By and large, BLS has no such adjustments for:

  • Car/truck repairs, parts, or rentals.
  • Food
  • Energy
  • Health care
  • Misc household stuff

And there’s a separate, seemingly quite different adjustment for rent and the rental equivalent of home ownership.

By inference, then, payments linked to the CPI as a “cost of living adjustment” won’t rise fast enough to keep up with the actual cost of living. To some degree.  This includes most notably Social Security payments, but also most Medicare payments to health-care providers, and in general a whole lot of salary and contractual payment items in the private sector.

In my darker moments, I’m sure this is considered more a feature than a bug, by the Federal government.  At some level, it doesn’t much matter if these quality adjustments are right or wrong on their own merits.  They are saving Uncle Sam some money (via, e.g., reduced Social Security outlays), and they are being tolerated.  In a rational world, legislation that would weaken those adjustments would have to be scored as costing the Federal government money.  Hence, a tough sell, and the net effect is that the legislative branch turns a blind eye to it. 

Meanwhile, getting back to cars. I believe that most of the quality-adjusted items in the CPI have, in fact, gotten a lot better in recent years.  I’ve argued that for cars, specifically, many times, on this blog.  It’s self-evident for phones.  I’m pretty sure my current internet service is a lot faster than it used to be.  And so on.

Back to cars, well, in fact, cars are … more now.  Passenger vehicles are bigger, faster, and get better mileage than they did 25 years ago.

Source:  https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report

But at the same time, if you need a car and a phone to hold a job, you don’t have the option of buying a new 1993 Toyota Corolla (-equivalent), at an appropriate discount to the current model year.  Your option is to buy the better quality modern car (phone, internet, clothing) currently offered for sale.  At the current higher price.

So if your metric is “I gotta have a car”, then the cost of “a car” has indeed risen a lot faster than the BLS says.  Per the original graph, it (yellow bars) seems to have risen right in line with inflation/the overall price level (blue line).

What you can buy now is a better car than you could buy 25 years ago.  Safer.  Better gas mileage.  More bells and whistles.  (E.g., I don’t know the last time I even saw a car that didn’t have power windows and AC, both of which used to be luxury add-ons.)  But it’s still, at root, just a car.

A weird side-effect of this is that, per the BLS, recent generations of Americans are, in essence, victims of forced hyper-consumption.  When I was a youth, I drove cars that were absolute pieces of crap.  But they were cheap.  A kid today has no option but to buy a much better, far more sophisticated vehicle.  And those simply are not going to be as cheap as beater used cars were when I was in their shoes.

You have no choice but to buy a much better fill-in-the-blank than people were buying two decades ago.  And you have more-or-less no choice but to pay accordingly.  The net result of which is that the — income shares — of these items stayed about the same.  A phone was a relatively expensive object four years ago, and it’s just about as expensive now.

But, when it comes to cars, phones, internet service, and so on, as far as the Federal government is concerned, dollar prices have been flat-to-falling for past couple of decades.  And the reason we now pay many more dollars for “a car” is that we have, collectively, decided to buy bigger, better cars.

And while it is true that cars (phones, internet service, …) are better (bigger, more capable, faster, more efficient) than they used to be, you, as the consumer, or Americans, as consumers, don’t really have the option to keep your level of consumption constant.  Every time you replace an item of that sort, you have to replace it with what’s offered in the marketplace.  And if the market offers you ever-more-capable, ever-more-expensive items, well, if you want to replace your old one, that’s what you have to buy.

The bottom line is that if you accept the BLS quality adjustments as fundamentally correct, then you have to believe that we are, in effect, trapped on a treadmill of ever-increasing levels of consumption.  For some items, at least.

And yet, it’s an odd sort of treadmill.  It’s not as if you’re now required to own two phones, if you want to make phone calls.  It’s that you are required to own one, but your only option is to buy one that’s twice the phone it was, four years ago.  At about the same price you’d have paid four years ago.  Which the BLS then handily marks down as a simultaneous doubling of your phone consumption, coupled with a 50 percent cut in the price of a phone.

That’s just bizarrely at odds with perception, I think.  If the price of chicken goes from $2 to $1 a pound, then I correctly perceive that the cost of my chicken dinner has been cut in half.  By contrast, I sure wouldn’t notice much difference in functionality between a four-year-old phone and a brand-new one.  But per the BLS, that price has also been cut in half.  Even though I’m paying more for a new phone today than I would have paid four years ago.

Conclusion.

I guess that’s as far as I can take this train of thought.

If you’re of the opinion that a phone is a phone, then the BLS numbers don’t “fit” your experience.  You’ve seen no huge fall in cell phone prices these past four years.  By contrast, if you are really into phones, then maybe the BLS got everything right and there has been a halving of quality-adjusted phone prices over the last four years.

At root, my issue with these quality-adjusted items is that the declining price per unit is coupled with an offsetting mandatory increase in units consumed.  Per the way the BLS reckons it. With the result being a bunch of price cuts, on paper, that in no way, shape, or form reduce the amount of money I have to shell out, to own a (car, cell phone, and so on).

It’s kind of a good-news, bad-news joke.  The good news is that the price of X has fallen in half, as BLS measures it.  The bad news is that you can’t buy X.  All you can buy now is 2X.  Again, per the BLS method.

Sure, the BLS-measured price of X is way down.  But you can’t pocket that money.  You can’t use it elsewhere.  This makes a BLS-estimated price decline in (say) cell phones fundamentally different from a decline in (say) the price of chicken.  Unlike the chicken, the only way to take advantage of half-price cell phones is to buy twice as much cell phone.

So the joke’s on you.  Your out-of-pocket is the same, but BLS tells you your life has gotten easier.  Because cell phones now cost half what they used to (per quality-adjusted unit).  With the catch being, you now have to buy twice as much cell phone.

The effect of these ongoing quality improvements is that material goods are getting better.  But as the BLS measures it, that makes it appear as if material goods are getting cheaper.

But they aren’t.  Not if the relevant unit is “a working car” or “a functioning cell phone”.  And as a result, changes in the CPI understate the actual change in the cost of maintaining a typical American lifestyle.

My gut reaction is that the BLS numbers help to paint too rosy a picture of what it takes to get by in the modern world, versus the world of a few decades ago.  The march of progress has made these objects and services better.  But it’s almost a matter of opinion as to whether that has made them cheaper.

Post #1946: Now the government is coming for my smoke detectors.

 

Or maybe it’s just the smoke detector manufacturers?

At my wife’s request, I’ve gotten around to looking at the smoke detectors in my house.  How many do we have (three), where are they (one on each level), do they work (eh, mostly yes).  It’s something that one does, from time to time, as a responsible adult.

This is when I found out that the modern recommendation, repeated everywhere, is to toss out any smoke detector that’s ten years old or more.  Or maybe seven years old, depending on the source.

Why?  Well, maybe (fill-in-something-plausible-sounding here).  And if that happened, the smoke detector wouldn’t work.

You wouldn’t want to take a risk of that, would you?

Anyway, this was a new one on me.  You’re supposed to toss out all your smoke detectors once a decade, and buy new.

Really?

That’s what they say. Continue reading Post #1946: Now the government is coming for my smoke detectors.

Post G24-003, addendum 2: Starting ginger root, second try.

 

 

The goal here is to force some ginger root.  To do that, you put the root in a warm, moist (micro) environment, and encourage it to sprout.  Typically, you do that warm-moist thing indoors, with a planting tray on a “seedling heat mat”.

On my first attempt, I ended up cooking my ginger roots.  Per just-prior post.  Soil temps approached 110F, in what I think was its thermal steady state.

This post is about my second attempt at sprouting ginger root. Continue reading Post G24-003, addendum 2: Starting ginger root, second try.

Post #1945: Microplastic, not sure I much care about it.

 

Let me give you the argument, to see if you buy it.  (Read Post #1941 and Post #1942 to see where I’m coming from on this issue.)

1:  We’ve been using plastic, including artificial fibers, in the U.S., for a long time.  2:  Therefore, best guess, whatever microplastic does to humans, it has already done that to us.  Plus, 3: personally, as it turns out, I live in a microplastic-fiber-rich environment.  I think.

Regarding that last point:  The wall-to-wall carpet that came with my house is polyester fiber.  Not only do I walk around on the cut-off ends of pieces of artificial-fiber yarn whenever I change locations within my home, the fiber is polyester, which typically gets fingered as potentially harmful microplastic.

My guess is that this surely (surely!) generates a microplastic-fiber-fragment-rich living environment.  (But to be clear, there’s only a bit of research to support that, as outlined in this reference.)  And there are a lot of people in the same boat.  A lot of folks who spend a lot of hours in places with synthetic-fiber wall-to-wall carpet.

The upshot is that if microplastic from polyester fibers is a major health hazard, even if that only shows up late in life via a cancer effect, you’d think we’d have noticed it by now.  We’ve had a lot of time and variation in chronic exposure to do so.

Restated:   If there were significant human health effects from typical exposures to microplastic, you’d think we’d have noticed by now.

But how, from this viewpoint, can you explain why we are suddenly seeing and hearing so much about microplastic? How do you explain that, if it has, as you say, been there all along?

My guess?  I guess that we’re now seeing it because we’re now looking for it.

One guess for the uptick is a change in or diffusion of microplastic-detection technology.  The best studies seem to use some fairly exotic equipment, something I take to be a microscopic infrared spectrometer.  Maybe those have gotten cheaper, or maybe it’s just the case that more people have access to the required equipment.  Alternatively, other studies appear to use minimal equipment, but may require significant time.  The publishable standard of measurement is so low (particles per liter) that maybe a lab with the right filter paper (and a microscope and some lab assistants) can quantify microplastic-in-blank to a publishable degree.

(I think that this last point, more than anything else, explains the view that microplastic is an inexhaustible source of clickbait, via finding microplastic in any (e.g.) bodily fluid or organ that you care to examine closely enough.)

A second guess for the uptick is that we now bother to look for microplastics, in both the human and natural environments.

One the one hand, maybe we look more often because “microplastic” is clickbait-du-jour.   An internet-fed fad.  A response to economic rewards for attracting eyes to your article.  After all, every N days, somebody finds microplastic in some new (and yuck-inducing) substance and/or bodily fluid and/or internal organ.  And that makes great clickbait.  Particularly for the closet doomscrollers.

On the other hand, microplastic is part of a legitimate concern about plastic in the environment, overall.  I mean, how many times have we heard this story, only to find out it has an unhappy ending:

There's this stuff?  We use a lot of it.  But it doesn't decompose well.  

So, where does it end up?

But in any case, I’m betting that any human health impacts of microplastic are  pretty subtle.  Not that I’ve done any research on that, but just from a feeling that we’ve been living with plastic for so long, I think we’d have seen something by now.

OTOH, I live in a house with polyester wall-to-wall.  So take this FWIW.

 

Post G24-003, addendum 1: Slow-roasted ginger root.

 

Yield:  Approximately one-half pound roasted ginger root.

Preparation time: Ten minutes.

Cook time:  Two weeks.

  • Purchase a few ounces of organic ginger root.
  • Wash and cut into bite-sized chunks.
  • Sprinkle with copious amounts of potting soil.
  • Water to taste.
  • Place on seedling heat mat.
  • Bake at ~110F for one to two weeks, or until shoots fail to develop.

Ready, Fire, Aim.

I started some ginger and turmeric plants about two weeks ago (Post G24-003).  This is the first time I’ve tried growing these.

For me, they fall into the same garden category as potatoes and sweet potatoes.  They  are roots/tubers that you start by sprouting indoors, before moving them out to the garden much later in the year.  The sole difference, really, is that these will need to spend several months as houseplants before going out into the garden.

The potatoes are doing fine — see prior post.

The sweet potatoes aren’t expected to start sprouting for another couple of months.

But ginger and turmeric sprouts are now conspicuous by their absence, nearly two weeks after planting. So I decided to see what was up.

Turns out, the cheap seed-starting heat mat I bought from Amazon last year was a bit too powerful for the task.  I thought it might warm the soil enough for to prod these into growth — maybe 80F or so, from my roughly 60F floor. Never bothered to check it.  I figured that, if anything, that cheap little mat wouldn’t cut it, and so this tray of soil might remain too cool for the ginger and turmeric to sprout.

But now I see that I have more-or-less cooked those roots, over the past two weeks.  What felt warm to the touch was actually around 110F where the roots sit.  Pretty sure that’s lethally warm.

Another twenty degrees and I can claim I was trying to compost them.

In hindsight, expecting that off-the-shelf heat mat to be just perfect, for this situation, was kind of dumb.

So it’s back to the grocery store for another few dollars’ worth of ginger and turmeric.

And off to rummage in the garage for some sort of lamp dimmer or similar, to allow me to control the temperature of these heat mats.  Pretty sure that anything that will control a small electrical resistance load will work.  That, and a thermometer, and I ought to be able to make this work.