Author: chogan@directresearch.com

G23-16: No-dig potatoes using leaf mulch, and how manure increases potato yields.

 

The second part of the title is a joke.  See below.

The first part of this post just verifies that you can, in fact, grow no-dig potatoes in leaf mulch.

The second part examines the astounding levels of internet-based bullshit manure regarding vegetable yields, and in particular, potato yields.

Edit, 7/12/2023:  Near-total failure.  Never going to do this again.  See post G23-041. Edit 2/10/2024:  If I had to guess why this failed (but an earlier try using straw bales worked fine),  I think that the dark, compacted leaf mulch allowed the potato tubers to get too warm.  That would explain every aspect of the harvest — few, small, knobby potatoes.  Potatoes are a difficult crop at best in the South, due to high summer temperatures.  Trying to grow them in Virginia, with just a thin, dark mulch covering the tubers — in hindsight, that was a bad idea.

Continue reading G23-16: No-dig potatoes using leaf mulch, and how manure increases potato yields.

Post#1784: Nearly 2% of attendees known to have been infected

 

With new COVID-19 case counts below prior minimums, and weekly risk-of-death now similar to that of flu during a typical flu season, I felt a little self-conscious, masking up for a local theater performance a couple of days ago.

I mean, COVID-19 infections are so last year, already.

Except for today, when the CDC announced that 35 people caught COVID at a recent CDC conference attended by about 2000.  Doing the math, that’s a known infection rate of 1.75% of the persons attending.

In hindsight, I’m not feeling quite so stupid about masking up in that crowded theatrical performance.

The thing that gets lost, in any COVID-versus-flu comparison, is that COVID is vastly more infectious than flu.  And the infections are vastly more clustered than flu.

If you can recall R-nought, the basic measure of infectiousness, the R-nought for season flu is somewhere around 1.5.  On average, absent vaccines, precautions, or prior immunity, every person infected during flu season goes on to infect 1.5 others.

The last estimate of R-nought for COVID, by contrast, put it in the the mid-20s.  That is, absent vaccines, precautions, or natural immunity, each person infected goes on to infect an average of 20-some others.

The other way in which the two diseases differ is in their “kappa”.  Few individuals with COVID actually go on to spread it.  But those who do tend to spread it a lot.  And so, unlike flu, which seems to settle across the entire population, COVID perpetuates itself via outbreaks.

Just as it did at this recent CDC conference.

I suspect that I will continue to mask up in higher-risk situations. Given that the use of a high-filtration mask is more-or-less free, and reasonably effective, in light of what just happened, it still seems like a prudent thing to do.

 

 

Post #1783: COVID milestone, reported new case rate finally reaches prior pandemic low

 

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 5/1/2023

This brief note to mark what I hope is a final footnote to the COVID-19 pandemic.  The COVID-19 new case rate, as-reported, has finally fallen below its prior pandemic low.

As you probably (don’t) recall, we got a little respite from COVID-19 in the summer of 2021 (e.g. , Post #1163).  For those of us who keep score, that was the brief period post-vaccine, pre- Delta and Omicron.

Ever since that — what with new variants and all that — that new cases rate has remained above that level.

Until now.  As shown above, as of this week, reported new U.S. cases are as low as they were in the summer of 2021.  And new case rates still appear to be falling.

Source:  Our World in Data, accessed 5/1/2023

Around the world, all is quiet with the possible exception of Australia and New Zealand.  It’s worth noting that they are in late fall there, equivalent of November 1 in the Northern Hemisphere, and that coronavirus cases of all sorts tend to peak in the winter.

The COVID-19 death rate is around 1,000 COVID-19 per week (not shown).  That’s half of what it was back at the prior low in the summer of 2021.  More to the point, on a per-week basis, risk of death from COVID-19 is now lower than risk of death from flu, in a typical flu season.  Putting aside issues such as long COVID, we’ve reached the point where COVID-19 now poses no more than flu-like risks to the U.S. population, in terms of mortality risk.  As you can see from the “deaths” column below, 1000/week would be mid-range for a typical 20 to 30-week flu season.

Source:  Calculated from CDC illness burden of flu web page.

The practical upshot of all this, for me, is that I’ve long since stopped wearing a mask in all but higher-risk situations.  I don’t wear one while shopping, for example, figuring that risk of infection is almost negligible in that situation.  Low new-case rate, large space, few encounters, and brief encounters with other people.

But I still mask up in some situations.   Yesterday my wife and I attended a community theater performance.  I figure the auditorium held about 100 people.  Based on my calculation below, there was about a 3 percent chance that somebody in that crowd was actively infectious with COVID-19.  We were going to share that relatively small room with that crowd for a couple of hours.  It was a comedy, so you’d expect people to be laughing, which is likely to result in increased emission of airborne droplets, similar to coughing or singing.

So we masked up.  Why not.  I now have what would I’m guessing is a more-than-lifetime supply of high-filtration masks.

It was a matinee performance, so there was a lot of gray hair in the audience.  Best guess, I’d say that maybe one-in-fifteen in that crowd was masked.

Not with a bang but with a whimper.  I think that’s the right quote for ending this.

Post #1782: A 4.3 percent increase in real estate taxes for the coming year.

 

I tuned in to parts of the Town of Vienna Town Council meeting last night, on Verizon channel 38, to listen to their legally-required public hearing on the property tax rate for the coming year.

There’s a simple question that citizens want to know:  How much are real estate taxes going up, in the coming year? 

And the answer, from the Town of Vienna, was, figure it out yourself. 

Which, although it may somehow satisfy the letter of the law, is the exact opposite of the clear intent of Commonwealth statute.

An apparently pointless Virginia law

The Commonwealth of Virginia requires that any government entity that charges property taxes must inform its citizens about the increase in taxes from year to year.  (As long as total taxes are expected to increase by at least one percent.)  There’s a standard notice, with a calculation and language set out in statute.  The whole point of which is to combine the increase in assessments with any change in tax rates, and tell the citizens the bottom line on how much their real estate tax bills will rise, on average.

 But every year, the Town manages to goof up the math on that legally-required notice.  See, e.g., Post #1495, for the 2022 notice.  They literally get the math wrong, year after year.  And, so far, they have always understated the actual increase in taxes that would occur based on the proposed tax rate.

I post about that every year.  Each year, the Town posts a notice that does not comply with the statute, because it does not do the calculation correctly.  (The details of the calculation are laid out in statute, shown at this reference).  Each year, the Town ignores it.

This year, we continued that long-standing tradition.  The 5.4% increase, underlined below, is actually an 8.4% increase, based on the numbers shown.  Roughly speaking, the 9.7% increase in assessments, less the 1.2% reduction in the tax rate, leads to an approximate 8.4% increase in total real estate taxes.

If you had an interest in the Town’s legally mandated public hearing on the tax rate, this is the document the Town showed you (reference).  For purposes of that hearing, as a citizen, you’d think that the new tax rate was going to be 0.2025 cents per $100 of assessed value, and that taxes were going up an average of 5.4%.

But in addition, as of two weeks ago, at the Town’s public hearing on the budget, the Town also knew that the tax rate stated in that notice was incorrect.  The Town wasn’t going to proposed a new tax rate of .2025 cents, but instead Town staff had already figured out that they could balance the budget with a new rate of 0.1950.

The bottom line is that none of the numbers in that legally-mandated notice to citizens was correct.  Except for the increase in assessments, which comes from Fairfax County.  Based on the tax rate shown in the document, the percentage increase in total taxes was a math error.  The numbers supporting that estimated increase were incorrectly calculated.  And, in addition, the tax rate for the coming year had itself changed weeks before the public hearing.

But nobody felt the least obligation to change or correct anything.  Or even note that they were wrong, in the public hearing.

Which leads to an obvious question: If the numbers in that legally-mandated notice don’t have to be correct — if the stated tax rate isn’t the rate the Town is planning to use, and if the stated increase in total taxes (and subsidiary calculated figure) isn’t even calculated correctly — then what, exactly, is the point of the law that requires it?  You can use any tax rate that’s in the ballpark, and do the arithmetic wrong, and … well, basically offer a page full of misinformation as the background to your public hearing.  And … that satisfies the letter of the law?

I guess so.  I have to wonder of the folks who wrote that piece of the statute realized that this would be the bottom line.  It literally appears to make no difference whether the numbers in that document bear any relationship to reality or not.

Answering the question, even if nobody cares.

Not that it really matters here, because the citizens are indifferent.   Routinely, the public hearings on taxes, water-and-sewer rates, and the budget draw no public comment.  Literally, nobody cares enough about it to say anything.

Anyway, if you listened to last night’s public hearing, you still wouldn’t have been told what the proposed increase in total taxes is.  Amidst all the back-patting, and the emphasis in cutting the rate (while increasing the assessments), nobody bothered to inform the citizens what their average increase in real estate taxes will be.  I think that just underscores how little this seems to matter, in this increasingly wealthy town.

In any case, 1.097*(0.1950/0.2050) =~ 1.043, or a 4.3 percent increase in real estate taxes, on average, for the coming year.  That’s what I calculate.  That’s the increase in assessments, times the reduction in the tax rate.  Not that anybody cares.

The bottom line is that the Commonwealth enacted a rule requiring entities such as the Town of Vienna to tell citizens how much tax bills were going up, on average.  The Town has to provide a document combining the increase in assessments with any change in the tax rate.  And the Town does that.  The only problems are that the document bears no relationship to the actual increase in taxes.  And it’s still up to the citizens to calculate, for themselves, what this year’s increase in taxes will be.

Post G23-013: Bee hotel success, Part 1

Edit 5/19/2024:  This year, I made my own bee hotels, and those worked out a lot better than the off-the-shelf bee hotel that I discuss in this post.  See Post G24-014 for this year’s bee hotel results, and Post G24-008 for construction details, such as they are.

Original post follows:

I try to maintain a reasonably bee-friendly property, out here in the wilds of Northern Virginia.

It’s not just that I need them to pollinate my vegetable garden. Or that bumblebees do, in fact, sleep in squash blossoms (aw!).  Or that the hum of bees at work in my garden marked the never-to-be-repeated peak of mid-pandemic suburban quiet (Post #G11).

It’s more bee-as-coal-mine-canary. If I’m doing something in the yard or garden that’s likely to be killing off my bees, odds are I shouldn’t be doing that.  It’s a quick way to rule out some environmentally stupid behavior.

In any case, I’ve had a couple of bee hotels (native bee nesting boxes) kicking around my yard for a few years now.  Shown above.  But those were never very successful.  It took years to get the first bees to use them.  And I might get a one or two tubes filled, per year.  There are clear exit holes on some tubes, so some new bees were produced.

But not a big hit, over all.

This year, on a whim, I bought a different model of bee hotel, at my local Home Depot.  The Home Depot mason bee box is already working vastly better than the previous model.  It’s been up a few days and I already have more tubes filled than I got in the first few years of the other model.  In short, my bees love this new bee hotel.

Now that I’m finally doing something right, I’d like to keep that going.  In a radical and very un-guy-like step, I actually read the directions.    And — surprise — I’ve been clueless as to how these things actually work. 

But now that I know, I realize this new bee motel is a fundamentally terrible design.  Not for what you can see — that part’s OK.  And, as noted, it’s definitely attracting bees.  The problem is that those bamboo tubes are permanently attached.  As discussed below, that’s a no-no.  You want nice clean new nesting tubes each year.  And that means that, unless I tear it apart next year, this lovely little bee hotel is a single-use disposable item.

So this post is going to summarize everything I think I learned about mason bee nest boxes (“bee hotels”).  And about the difficulty of making smooth-ended splinter-free replacement tubes for this, from bamboo I have on hand.

Three-minute tutorial:  Bee hotel or roach motel?

Key point: For best results, you need two bee hotels (or equivalent) for every site at which you wish to maintain a bee hotel.

You ideally want the female bees to use clean, new nesting materials each year.  The use of new (or carefully sanitized) nesting tubes each year minimizes the presence of diseases and parasites in the nest.  If you don’t keep the premises clean, your bee hotel can end up as the bee equivalent of a roach motel.  With poor enough conditions, the bees check in, but they never check out.  Your bee hotel becomes a catch-and-kill trap. 

The problem is that each spring, some bees are ready to check into your bee hotel before your existing guests have checked out.  Some are ready to lay their eggs before others have emerged from their cocoons.  The reason for this chaos is that these bees are quite short-lived.  The emerge, mate, forage for food, lay their eggs, and die, all in the course of a few weeks in the spring.

The solution is to put last year’s bee hotel (or, at least, the nesting tubes) aside in an “emergence box”, to give the bees time to emerge from their cocoons.  At the same time, you need fresh, new nesting tubes nearby, for the emerging bees to lay the next generation of eggs.  An emergence box is just an opaque weather-protected box with a small opening.  This allows the newly-emerged bees to exit, but prevents bees outside the box from seeing (and therefore attempting to re-use) the old nesting tubes.

No matter how you cut it, you would ideally have two sets of nesting tubes in rotation at each bee hotel site.  One set of clean, new tubes, for this year’s eggs.  And last year’s tubes, from which bees continue to emerge.  You want to keep the emergence box with last year’s nesting tubes near your new bee hotel, because, as noted above, the bees get right down to business as soon as they emerge.

Here are my five Ws for bee hotels.

Who?  These bee hotels provide nesting places for some species of solitary bees, that is, bees that don’t form big communal hives.  Mainly, that means these are NOT for honeybees.  The bees that use these devices are typically referred to as “native bees”, but that’s imprecise.  For one thing, bumblebees are typically native bees, but those are ground-nesting bees, and won’t use these tube-type bee hotels.  Your primary target bee is a “mason bee”, so called exactly because they build those little mud walls at the end of the nesting tube where they’ve laid their eggs.

What?   A bee hotel provides tubular structures into which a mason (or similar) bee lays eggs.  The bee lays a series of eggs in the tube, providing each with food, separating them with mud walls, and capping off the tube with more mud.  Over the course of a year (in some cases, two years), each egg hatches into a larvum (worm), eats the food that its mother left for it, pupates (cocoons itself), and eventually emerges from that cocoon, the subsequent year, as a bee.

When?  The eggs are laid in spring.  The eggs hatch/larvae emerge in summer.  They cocoon in the fall.  And they re-emerge as bees the next spring/summer.  (In some areas, there are species that spend two years in the cocoon, but I’m not sure how relevant that is to most places.)

Place your bee hotel outside in the spring.  It appears to be fairly important not to disturb this during summer, as the larvae are delicate.  That means you attach it to something solid in the spring, so it doesn’t shake around, and you leave it alone.  The larvae pupate in fall.  At that point — late fall, early winter — they are tough enough to be moved.  Place the bee hotel in a sheltered, unheated location (such as an unheated shed).  Then, next spring, place the bee hotel (or the tubes from it) in an “emergence box”, move them back outside, and let the bees emerge as the weather warms. Google “emergence box”, but it’s basically a sheltered box with a hole in it, to let the hatched bees escape.

Some experts “harvest” the cocoons as an extra sanitation measure.  They break open the nesting tubes, remove and possibly clean the cocoons exteriors, and place the cocoons in fresh material for eventual hatch-out in the spring.   The claimed advantage of this is that it separates the bees from various parasites that may linger in the nesting tubes and this allows them to emerge from overwintering parasite-free.  If you are going to do that, you need to use relatively fragile nesting tubes (paper liners, reeds) that allow the cocoons to be removed undamaged, and not sturdy ones such as bamboo tubes shown above.

As of this writing, it’s not clear to me how much of an advantage you gain by harvesting cocoons, or what evidence basis there is for it.  The only obvious advantage is that if certain fungal diseases are present in the nest, you’ll see them if you harvest the cocoon.  As I plan to use all-new materials each year, I’m not sure that’s much of a concern to me.

Where?  These bee nests ought to be protected from rain, protected from getting cooked in the afternoon sun, and so on.  he most common advice is to locate them to catch morning (but not afternoon) sunlight.  They need to be firmly attached to something substantial because the larvae are delicate and don’t want to be tossed about.  In plain sight, so the bees can find it.  And near a ready source of mud.  Because bees need mud to cap off their egg cells.

Upshot:  Facing east-ish, under eaves if possible, firmly attached to something, near water or mud, maybe 5′ off the ground, and plainly visible.

Why and how? Different bee species want different sized tubes.  So from the get-go, a rack of identical tubes limits the species that can use that particular hotel.   The tubes need to be closed off at the back, in some fashion.  The tubes need to be sturdy enough to keep out various bee predators.  Paper straws alone, for example, appear to be frowned upon, thought to be too fragile to keep out certain types of bee predators.  In rare cases, you need to put hardware cloth across the front to keep birds from pecking out the larvae.  That’s only necessary if you wake up one morning and all the previously-filled tubes appear empty.

The simple upshot of all this is:

  • Each Spring, put last year’s nest out in an emergence box.
  • Nearby, place a clean, new nest out to attract bees.
  • Each Fall, refurbish last year’s nest, to be placed out the next spring.

Post #1781: No comment on electric vehicles

 

The Washington Post just published one of its weekly anti-Electric-Vehicle (EV) screeds.

This thing:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/15/electic-cars-biden-epa-climate/

And, God help me, I just spent a couple of hours posting comments.  I gotta stop doing that.

My wife suggest that I compile and post all my comments. Think of it as a collection of short, related essays.

Sometimes, thoughtful comments in the Post allow me to discover something new.  As in red, below.  But my main takeaway from all this is that I have to stop commenting on Washington Post articles. Continue reading Post #1781: No comment on electric vehicles

Post #1779: Approaching tax day, so it must be time to start planting

 

I paid my Federal and state income taxes yesterday, so that means it’s almost time for our last frost date.  This, in Northern Virginia, Zone 7.

This post is a bit of a potpourri regarding

  1. taxes,
  2. last frost dates,
  3. paper pots, and
  4. whatever happened to seed starting mix?

1:  The joy of tax-free vegetables, or how to misunderestimate the value of food gardening.

Source:  U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The oddest facts I can recall from my education in economics have to do with the National Income and Product Accounts.  That would be GDP accounting, to you civilians.  Back in the day, I had to memorize most of the major details of how Uncle Sam figures out the value of Gross Domestic Product.  (Back then, Gross National Product, which is a slightly different concept.)  For reasons that totally escape me, bits of that stick with me 40 years later.

Most people have a vague understanding of GDP.  It’s something like the total market value of all final (for-consumption) goods and services produced by U.S. citizens and their capital.  And, in general, things that don’t get traded via a market simply don’t get counted.

Except sometimes.

In some areas where something of value is consumed, but there’s no market transaction, Uncle Sam just kind of makes up a number.  These are the imputations in the GDP calculation.  And these imputations are legion.

So, in 2021, US GDP was $23.3 trillion.  But of that, $3.5 trillion (17%) is made up — that is, imputed.

I’m not here to dump on those imputations.  IMHO, those imputations are necessary, well-thought-out, and about as accurate as they can reasonably be expected to be.  The numbers are better with them than without them.

I just wanted to point out an historical artifact.  One of the formal, major imputations in U.S. GDP accounting is a $200M imputation for the value of food that is grown and consumed on the farm, and never makes it to market.  (That’s circled in red above.)  Without going into the details (about 2% of Americans live on a farm), I make that GDP imputation amounts to about $30 worth of farm products, per-farm-resident-capita, consumed on the farm.

Arguably, we only have that adjustment because farms were a vastly more important part of the economic landscape when GDP accounting was first developed.  That all took place in the Great Depression, at which point we still had about 20% of the U.S. population on farms or ranches.

Source:  Farm bill fairness.org

The key point here isn’t necessarily the size of the adjustment, it’s the reason they had to make an adjustment.   There’s no money transaction for food that is grown and eaten on a farm.

Not sure how accurate the underlying Federal figure is (it doesn’t matter, so I’d be surprised if a lot of effort went into it.)  I’m fairly sure that one of the reasons it’s low is that this only accounts for the products of the farm enterprise.  For a corn farmer in Iowa, it would be an estimate of the fraction of the corn crop they eat, rather than sell.

Just taking that at face value, I’m guessing that my back-yard vegetable garden produces that much.  A few hundred dollars’ worth of vegetables per year, say.

That’s a drop in the bucket, in our overall spending on food in and out of the home.

But it’s a very sweet drop, in that it’s not taxed.  If you buy groceries from the store, you’re paying with after-tax dollars.  Roughly speaking, if you earn wage income, all things considered, depending on your income and where you live, you probably need to earn around $1.50 in order to buy $1.00 worth of groceries.  That’s my rough estimate of the effect of Social Security and Medicare taxes, state and federal income taxes, and sales taxes.

I have just two points here.  If you’re working out the math of value versus expense for your vegetable garden, be sure to multiply the difference by 1.5.  Because that’s how much income you don’t have to earn, if you replace store-bought produce with your garden-raised produce.  In terms of income avoided, it’s worth more than just the prices you’d pay at the store.

Second, don’t just think of home gardening as a way to get exercise and grow fresh produce.  Think of it as a way to stick it to the tax man.  Legally.  As with all forms of D-I-Y production, there’s no money payment for the final product or service (and you are not engaged in a barter-based commercial enterprise), so there’s no tax due.

My tomatoes taste all the better for it.

2:  Last frost dates and improved weather forecasting.

This is just a quick recap of my utterly incomprehensible post G21-005.

Source:  Garden.org.

Springtime last frost dates aren’t hard numbers, they are probabilities.  Briefly, take the last 30 years or so of temperature data for your area.  Take the low temperature recorded for each day.  And, for any given day in the spring, just count how often you saw a frost on that date or later, in the past 30 years.

In my case, over a reference 30-year period, there was a frost in 10% of the years, following April 21st.  So April 21 would be my 10th percentile last frost date.  If the climate is stable, then nine years out of ten, if I plant my frost-sensitive plants on that date, they’ll survive.

But those are simple, crude averages.  They assume that you will plant on a given day, regardless of the coming forecast.  My guess is, they were developed in an era before we had reliable long-range weather forecasting.  Likely you’d get a forecast for a day or two out, but not much more than that.  So weather forecasting just didn’t figure into the picture.

But now, we have reliable five-day forecasts, reasonably reliable 7-day forecasts, and possibly even some forecasting skill in 10-day forecasts.  But the entire process of calculating last-frost dates hasn’t adjusted accordingly.

The upshot of that is that what’s labeled my 30th percentile last-frost date above is actually my 10% percentile or better.  For the simple reason that if there is frost in the forecast, I won’t plant.  But if I hit the 15th with no frost forecast for the next week, excluding major forecasting error, I’m guaranteed to make it to the 21st — my 10th percentile frost date — with no frost.

The presence of an accurate 7-day forecast converts what would have been my 30th percentile last frost date into my 10th percentile.

Either way, having paid off the tax man, it’s now time to start thinking about setting out those frost-sensitive vegetables.  Peas and potatoes went in on St. Patrick’s day.  It’s now time to get the rest of the spring garden planted out.

3.  Paper pots.

Source:  Last year’s garden.

This year I finally gave up on using peat pellets for seed starting.  Those are incredibly convenient, but seem to leave a lot of plants root-bound.  As with the comparable tomatoes grown with and without peat pellets, above.  Note the much more developed root structure on the plant without the peat pellet.

Instead, I’m doing my seed starts in paper bags.  This, as laid out in one of my Wordless Workshop posts (Post G22-012).  I figured, for 2 cents each, it was easier to use a pre-made paper bag than to go through the hassle of making my own paper pots.

But even the smallest commercially-available kraft-paper bags are a bit too large for most of my seed starts.  And potting soil costs money.

So I finally tried making paper pots out of old newspaper.  Only to find out that it’s ridiculously easy.

After reading about a dozen sets of contradictory instructions, and looking at various gizmos for making paper pots, I decided to wing it.  Picked up some some tabloid-style papers that I had on hand, plus a skinny wine bottle, and some sopping-wet potting soil.

There’s no need to wet the paper, no need to use a device, and so on.  Just realize two things.

  1. Until you fill the pot, the only thing holding it together is your hand.
  2. Once you fill it with sopping-wet potting soil, and set it down, it’s nice and solid.

So, in order, and without illustrations, assuming you are right-handed:

  • Rip a tabloid newspaper sheet along the center fold.
  • Fold the resulting half-sheet once, to make a long thin strip.
  • Wrap that long strip around the bottom of a skinny wine bottle, letting the paper extend beyond the end of the bottle, by almost the diameter of the bottle.
  • Fold that extended paper over in three of four places to form the bottom.
  • Briefly mash the bottom against the table top to set the creases.
  • Pull the paper pot off the wine bottle, cradling the bottom of the pot in the palm of your left hand,  and fold down a 1″ “cuff” around the top of the pot with your right hand.  The point of the cuff is to lock in the seam where the paper strip ends.
  • At this point, the pot is still quite fragile and will fall apart if you take it out of your hand.
  • Fill with very wet potting soil, still cradling the bottom in your left hand.
  • Set it down carefully in a tray.

Any idiot can do it.  No device needed.

4:  Woke potting soil?

A final oddity in this whole process is that the “soil” I’m using for seed starts this year is completely different from what I used last year.  Compared to what I used last year, it’s nasty stuff.  Coarse, full of little sticks, and quite clumpy.

I’m pretty sure it’s the same brand I used last year.

And it absorbs water right out of the bag.  The old stuff, I used to have to coax it to get wet.  Pour water into the bag of potting mix and knead it for minutes to get it uniformly damp.  This stuff, I just use the watering can and it’s instantly wet.

It finally dawned on me what has changed.

Best guess, they’ve taken the peat out of the potting soil.  The stuff I got in the past looked so nice — and absorbed water so poorly at first — because it was a peat-based potting soil mix.

Peat — peat moss — is now officially Frowned Upon as being unsustainable.  At least in some circles.  But this is, of course, disputed in other circles.  I haven’t cared enough to try to form an educated opinion.  I guess when it comes to Canadian imports and the environment, I’m far more worried about the Alberta tar sands. (Or whatever they are called these days.)

That said, just by buying a cubic foot of peat-based potting soil each year, I’d have been a typical U.S. consumer of it.  The most recent figure I could find showed that the U.S. imported 420,000 tons of peat moss from Canada in 2022.  That’s down from about 480,000 in 2000.  (That info courtesy of the U.S.G.S.)  That’s (420,000 x 2000 / 360,000,000 = ) 2.3 pounds of peat per capita per year, on average.

In any case, it’s probably just an odd coincidence.  The year I finally swear off peat pellets for seed starting, my potting soil supplier appears to have switched away from peat-based potting soil.

I’m not so attached to the old mix that I’ll even bother to try to hunt some down.  It was just unsettling to find that a product I’d bought for years was now something almost completely different, in the same old bag.