Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1633: An animated 1000 words on flu

 

Source:  CDC weekly influenza map.

This is not the worst flu season ever.

Just the worst in the past decade or so.  Here’s this week, in 2009, which was the worst flu season in about a half-century.

The CDC writeup of the 2009-2010 flu season makes interesting reading.  The severity of the 2009-2010 flu was due to a new and highly mutated strain of flu.  More-or-less nobody under age 60 had any immunity to it. Although CDC doesn’t use the term, that was the swine flu pandemic of 2009/2010.

For the U.S., CDC estimated about 275,000 hospitalizations with flu, and about 12,500 deaths from flu, during that exceptionally severe flu season.

To keep things in perspective, at current rates, for COVID, it will take about 78 days to equal that hospitalization count, and about 35 days to equal that death count.

Or, in round numbers, COVID currently amounts to about 10 swine flu pandemics per year, in terms of deaths, and about 5 swine flu pandemics per year, in terms of hospitalizations.

That’s comparing the current rates from COVID, to the worst flu season in the U.S. in roughly the last half-century.

Even now, you’ll read (e.g.) comments to news stories suggesting that COVID is no worse than flu.  The facts say otherwise.  COVID case rates will have to fall by about a factor of ten before COVID will be no worse than the worst flu season in recent history.

And, just FYI, regarding the death count, these are deaths from COVID, not merely deaths with COVID.  The U.S. CDC says this: 

  • COVID-19 should not be reported on the death certificate if it did not cause or contribute to the death (reference).
  • In at least 90% of cases, COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause of death (reference). 
  • In the remaining cases, COVID-19 was listed as a contributing cause of death (reference). 

So, yeah, I’m still masking up when I go to the gym.

Post #1632, COVID-19, still 13/100k, no U.S. winter wave yet, maybe some action in the Mountain states

 

Still waiting for the long-anticipated Winter 2022 COVID-19 wave.  Still not seeing it.  U.S. daily new COVID 19 case count stands at 13 / 100K / day, same as the end of last week.

By region, only the graph of the Mountain states resembles any sort of organized uptick in cases.  Everything else is either not rising, or so full of reporting noise that it’s hard to see any obvious pattern. Continue reading Post #1632, COVID-19, still 13/100k, no U.S. winter wave yet, maybe some action in the Mountain states

Post #1631: More weirdness in the market for N95 masks

 

Per prior post, I’m going back to the gym wearing 3M 8511 vented 95 respirators.

Of which I only have two left.  One of which is now quite soggy from its first trip to the gym.

And, while these 3M respirators last a long time, I’ve decided to buy another box for gym use.

I think. 

I mean, I’m sure I’m buying some more vented respirators.  I’m not sure they are going to be genuine 3M masks.  A felt a little tingle in my economists’ sense when I looked over what’s currently being offered, at what price.

For 10 of these 3M 8511 masks:

  • Home Depot wants $2.80 per mask.
  • Ace Hardware wants $2.80 per mask.
  • Lowes wants $2.60 per mask.
  • No-name vendors on Amazon want about $1.80 per mask.

Makes me wonder why 3M would offer such a steep discount to a handful of no-name vendors on Amazon.  Discounts that they won’t offer to big-volume sellers like Home Depot.  All selling just a few boxes each.

Maybe this warning explains it:

Source:  Amazon.

The above is actually in one of the Amazon listings.  But there are no listings for 8511 masks shipped and sold by Amazon, right now.  All the listings for the 8511 masks are a) for tiny no-name vendors, b) with just a few boxes left, c) typically with errors in the listing.

For example, I’m pretty sure this is NOT an accurate description of what these masks are made of.

During the pandemic, 3M had a serious problem with counterfeiting.  Check out the numbers on their COVID-19 fraud page.

I’m guessing the extra-cheap masks on Amazon are the last of the COVID-19 counterfeit stock.  It’s possible that many small vendors ended up with two or three boxes of the real thing, and they’ve all decided to dump them at a steep discount.  Maybe they all bought them at a much lower price than the current price, and they’ve all decided not to make some extra profit by raising their prices.

But if I had to guess, despite the positive comments on Amazon, I’d guess these are COVID-19 counterfeit stock, trickling out into the marketplace via Amazon.

So I’m off to Home Depot for what I sincerely hope will be my last-ever purchase of N95 respirators.

Post #1630: Reluctantly returning to the gym in the era of endemic COVID.

 

I’m old, fat, and have a tough time handling respiratory infections. I haven’t had COVID so far, and I really don’t want to catch it. 

Prevalence of COVID-19 is now about 10 times higher than the first time my wife and I returned to the gym (Post #1163).  But (arguably) lower than when we returned to the gym a second time (Post #1421).  At some level, the risk of going to the gym or not cuts both ways.  It’s a question of what else is going to kill me if I don’t manage to get my heart rate up on a regular basis.  So back to the gym it is.

The bottom line is that I’m going to wear a mask.  No matter how unfashionable that has become.

Not because I’m stubborn, but because I bothered to calculate the odds.  And the decision to go back to the gym, three times a week, will almost certainly expose me to an individual with an active COVID infection, over the course of the year.  Not to mention flu.  Exposure isn’t infection, but still, this is likely going to be the riskiest thing I do in the near term. Continue reading Post #1630: Reluctantly returning to the gym in the era of endemic COVID.

Post #1629: Worst economic advice ever?

 

What is wrong with this picture?

This is a political ad that has aired repeatedly in the past few weeks in the Washington, DC area.  It’s an ad for a candidate for U.S. Representative from one of the Virginia suburban districts.

That’s the candidate and her father.

Have you figured out what’s wrong?

Sure, this is a campaign ad.  You’re supposed to respond to the images emotionally.  You aren’t supposed to think about what they are actually saying.  But instead of just basking in the warm glow of that aw-shucks fiscal conservatism, try actually reading the words. 

Crudely put, savings + spending = income.  Which means that the candidate is endorsing the notion of spending less than 50% of one’s income.  As a matter of logic, that’s the only way that you can save more than you spend.

Let me walk through the implications of that, one step at a time.

Microeconomics:  Not feasible for the middle class.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) system.

OK, let’s just take that at face value.  The printed advice above boils down to “you should save at least half of your income”.

First, to be clear, for the U.S. as a whole, that’s never happened and never will.  Above you can see more than a half-century of the U.S. personal savings rate.  It has typically ranged from 5% to 15%, with a secular trend toward less savings.  In recent years, 5% would be roughly normal.

But that doesn’t tell the full story.  Almost all that savings is done by the well-to-do.  The top 10% and top 1% of earners. Here’s a graph — of unknown quality — of savings rates by wealth.

Source:  financialsamurai.com

That looks about right to me.

For the vast majority of Americans, the idea of saving half your income is absurd.  It’ll never happen, for the simple reason that you need to pay the bills. 

Even more absurdly, this same candidate has made much of how middle-class families must struggle to make ends meet. So the message here is that the middle class is struggling, but it should be saving more than half of its current income.

So, look, if you make tons of money, sure, you can look down on the great unwashed masses and their pitiful savings rates.  I’ve had years where my little business was so successful that I did, literally, save more than I spent.  But I can also recall the single-digit checking account balances of my youth.  So if people with modest incomes don’t save much money — and they never have — I find it hard to fault them.  Personally, I’ve always been extremely financially conservative.  But I don’t think that somebody with two minimum-wage jobs should be expected to save half their income.

Macroeconomics:  Economic suicide.

It goes without saying that if, in some imaginary world, Americans suddenly decided to save half their income, the economy would immediately tank.  We’d have the next Great Depression.

Oh, wait, didn’t that just happen?  The top graph below is personal savings, which appears to have hit nearly 35% recently.  The bottom graph is the unemployment rate, which hit 15%.  That was, in fact, the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.  Which we just had, during the pandemic.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED system.  I should note that this is a bit of a cheat, on the savings side, because individuals largely saved their first round or two of COVID-19 payments.  (Which is why they needed additional rounds of stimulus, get it?)  That artificially gooses the observed savings rate, but only by a bit.  Basically, from the standpoint of economics, people were pretty much panicking, as they had during the Great Depression.  And as everyone individually reduced spending, the macroeconomic results were inevitable.

My first point being that if Americans were suddenly to follow that folksy bit of economic wisdom, that would guarantee that we’d have the next great depression.

So, why didn’t we slide into an economic depression?

The answer is the COVID-19 spending bill that Trump signed.  Followed by the two COVID-19 spending bills that Biden signed.  All of which force-fed money to U.S. corporations and citizens, to counteract the collapse of demand that occurred during the pandemic.

Which was matched by similar programs undertaken by all of the industrialized nations.  This wasn’t a U.S. idea.  This is what everybody with any sense did.

Anyway, all that money is now coming out of people’s savings, and going into spending.  That’s my interpretation of why the U.S. personal savings rate is now just about 3%, which is low compared to recent history.  It’s also why the unemployment rate is about 3.5%, also low by recent history.  And, to some significant extent, why prices are up.

It may seem like the Federal government spent a lot of money to keep the COVID economic crisis from snowballing.  We did, in fact, run the largest deficit (as % of GDP) since WWII.

But the point is, that was almost undoubtedly cheaper than having the next Great Depression.  Which is what the entire industrialized world was facing.  Which is why everybody threw money at their economies.  They didn’t do it because they were stupid.  They did it because it was smart.  It was cheaper than the alternative.

Are we living with the consequences now?  Yep, sure are.  Are people going to squabble about how much was spent, try to use it to political advantage?  Yep, sure are.  Will folks forget why the money got spent in the first place?  No doubt.

Will this candidate ever get called to task for suggesting that middle-class people ought to save more than half of their income?  Nah, I bet nobody even noticed what that ad implied.  Will anyone ever point out that uniform adoption of that policy is collective economic suicide?  For sure not.

That’s just the way the world works.  Please feel free to say anything, no matter how stupid, as long is riles up the right people.  And never, ever apply logical analysis to anything that is said.

Don’t worry, be happy.

Post #1628: More on making a bug-out bag

 

Background:  Chump change.

After Post #1620, and Post #1625, I’ve followed through on stashing a few emergency-use items in my wife’s Prius Prime.  This follows the realization that if there is any sort of mass evacuation in my area, the inevitable result is that we’ll end up living in the car for a day or two, as we negotiate the resulting traffic jam.

This is, in effect, my quick-and-dirty emergency #vanlife kit.  I need to be able to drink, eat, excrete, and stay warm, in the car, for a day or two.

The trick here — as in so much of life — is not to be an idiot.  Don’t spend a ton of money.  Don’t interfere with day-to-day use of the car.  Make it easy to maintain.

But don’t skimp, either.  Keep this in perspective.   This is just another bit of of insurance, in a world where you already buy insurance.

Insurance?  For private insurance, I currently pay roughly:

  • $14,000 a year for high-deductible (“never-pay”) health insurance.
  • $1,500/year car insurance, two vehicles.
  • $1,200/year homeowner’s insurance.
  • $300/year for general liability (“umbrella”) insurance.

And I would guess that 35% of my federal taxes support Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and other government-mandated forms of social insurance. Most of which boils down to a subsidy of the less fortunate.  But some of which may benefit me.

It’s no exaggeration to say I routinely pay $20K per year for insurance.  That I hope I never get to use.  Hence the title of this.  (Which I stole, by the way, from a friend who was, at the time, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health, who used that line when people started talking about health insurance providing poor value.)

In that context, a one-off expense of $150 worth of stuff, for the car?  That’s not exactly rounding error, in terms of my overall insurance expenditures.  But it’s close.

Without further ado.

Water.

Below:  Vacuum-packed four-packs of half-liter bottles, hanging at the back of the cargo area.

 

Sure, water is more-or-less required for long-term survival.  But bottled water sells out rapidly in any U.S. evacuation.

You can buy bags of emergency water supplies, but they seem a) ridiculously expensive, and b) too small.

And yet, off-the-shelf bottled water comes in rather fragile packaging. Even off-the-shelf gallons will eventually leak, in my experience.  How can you take that cheap grocery-store bottled water and carry it safely in the car?

My solution is to seal four half-liter bottles inside a gallon poly bag, then hang those bags behind the back seat of my wife’s Prius Prime, hung off the rear headrests, over the all-weather floor mats.  If they leak, they’ll leak into the bag.  And if the bag leaks, it’ll leak onto the weatherproof floor mat.

This gives me 6 liters (1.5 gallons) of single-serving water bottles, with minimal risk of damaging the car interior via leaks.

Too much water?  Too little water?  Beats me.  Looks like a lot to me, but seemingly reliable sources say that you need to consume about three liters of water a day, in all forms (Reference:  Mayo clinic). More for men, less for women.  Given that everything else in the car is dry food, by that standard, this is a one-night supply of water for two adults.  I guess that’s about right.

Cost, if you have a vacuum-sealer already, is maybe $3.  If not, use zip-locks.  So, no problem if I have to toss these every couple of years.  Also uses space that doesn’t interfere with the everyday use of the car.  I might add a piece of black plastic over them to slow any UV damage to all that fragile plastic.

 

Sanitation. 

Well, there’s a reason they’re called SHTF bags.  God willing, I will never see this again in my lifetime.

Source:  Amazon.  References for other supplies are in prior post.

After looking at my off-the-shelf options, I decided that a stainless steel bedpan was my best choice for sanitation.   It’s a tried-and-true design.  And I’m fat enough that plastic likely wouldn’t do.  I bought one with a lid, and stuffed it with the items listed below.  Note that this takes up no useful space in the car.  It sits under the front passenger seat.  And, God willing, it will never come out from that hidey-hole.

  • Lidded stainless steel bedpan, containing:
    • Short bungee to anchor back of bed pan to seat belt.
    • One roll TP, compressed
    • 4 potty liners (blue, absorbent fill)
    • 3 urinals (pink, absorbent fill)
    • 8 small trash bags
    • Sanitary wipes
    • Disposable gloves
    • Water purification device
    • Water purification tablets

This is probably $85 worth of stuff, all told.  All of which should be a once-in-a-lifetime purchase.  And should never have to be touched, short of an actual emergency.

Seems like a lot, but when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Food 1:  Emergency rations.

Source:  Amazon and Amazon.

This is a brick of emergency food, plus some individually-wrapped emergency food bars, from Amazon.  Stuffed in a bag, to sit under the driver’s seat.  The main point is that you’d only eat these out of a total sense of desperation.  Ideally, these need to be replaced no more frequently than every five or ten years.  If then.

Cost, about $25. Should last anywhere from half-a-decade to a decade.  Call it insurance at five bucks a year.  Hope to see it again a decade from now.

First aid.

If you’re shopping for a first-aid supplies, it’s important to judge whether or not you have the moxie to deal with what I would term a trauma kit.  Something  for major injuries.  As opposed to first-aid kit, which is basically for minor injuries and common maladies.

I think the upper limit of what I can plausibly handle is a butterfly closure.  Maybe some gauze and tape.  And, e.g., aspirin, Tums, and similar off-the-shelf remedies.  So that’s what I pack.  If I manage to sever a major artery, I’m out of luck.  I think that’s the nature of insurance.

Tourniquets?  Sutures?  Splints?  Do you know you to use them?  If not, buy a first aid kid, no matter how appealing a trauma kit might be.

I have no clue what my first-aid kit cost, because I repackaged a bunch of first-aid supplies that I’ve had sitting around for years.Some elements (e.g., OTC medications) will have to be replaced every couple of years.  This sits under the driver’s seat, alongside the emergency rations.

 

Emergency tools.

The Prius Prime has one narrow, deep compartment under the floor of the trunk.  This is a place for storing (e.g.) tools for changing a tire.  I am adding, in one small bag, all the tools that might be useful in an emergency, and will never need to be refreshed or updated.  These include:

  • Multi-tool
  • Can opener
  • Space blanket x 2
  • Emergency poncho x 2
  • Compass
  • Work gloves, handful of misc car-related tools.

Note that this isn’t at all what is normally sold as a vehicle emergency kit.  Those kits focus on having a breakdown in your vehicle.  That’s not what I’m worried about.  I’m more worried about a breakdown of civil society.

In any case, despite having worked on a lot of cars over my lifetime (e.g., replaced the engine on my first car), the idea that I could diagnose and fix a serious problem on a modern fuel-injected computer-controlled engine is just laughable.  Maybe if I win the lottery, I’ll throw a high-end scan tool in that bag.  That way, if I’m stuck, at least I’ll know why.

Food 2:  Routine long-trip stuff, including snacks and the tools required to eat them.

Finally, in a small bag sitting in a little alcove in the trunk, I’m putting all the stuff that needs to be refreshed roughly annually.  That boils down to food and batteries, and a few pieces of equipment that might come in handy on any long trip. Things that you might just routinely tap into, on a long trip.  Or need to grab in a hurry.

  • Flashlights x 2
  • Spare batteries
  • Water heating device, insulated mugs
  • Tea bags x 10, other hot drinks
  • Ramen x 6
  • Plates, cups, utensils,
  • Misc dry food snacks (e.g., peanut butter crackers)
  • Cash.

The last item, because I’ve never been in a situation where having some money around made it worse.

The water heater, discussed in an earlier post, is about $30 and will take like-onto half an hour to boil a cup and a half of water.  Such is the tyranny of physics.  Otherwise, this is maybe another $10 worth of food.

Summary.

I’m not a nut.  I think. 

I’m just a fairly prudent guy.  Who, as a self-employed person, got used to paying for all of my insurance, including health insurance.  And once you’re in the habit of shipping off $1K+ per month for health insurance, while simultaneously fervently hoping that you are pissing your money away (because if not, that’s not good) …

Maybe out of all that, I ended up end up with a different attitude toward small insurance expenditures.  Which is, at root, what this is about.  This is about fitting out my wife’s car with a bit of insurance against (e.g.) what happened this past January, on I-95, in Virginia.  Let alone some greater catastrophe.

So the goal is to set up some supplies that:

  • don’t cost an arm and a leg (appropriately amortized over their expected lifetime).
  • don’t interfere with the day-to-day use of the vehicle.
  • cover the basics of existence (water, food, sanitation, light, warmth)
  • in a way that is easily maintained.

I think I’ve hit the brief on this one. 

I’ve made a one-time investment in sanitation supplies, packed so they’ll easily fit under the front passenger seat.

Thrown in some food and water, some first-aid supplies, and a few tools.

Separately, all the stuff that’s likely to need to be refreshed annually is in one bag, ready to go.

In the end, this is like having a will.  You aren’t buying happiness.  You are buying peace of mind.  If the unthinkable happens, you’ve done what you can reasonably be expected to do.  Having settled this, there’s no sense worrying about it further,  Just get on with the rest of your life.

Post G22-063, 2022 final garden wrap-up

I’ve picked the last of my peppers, stripped the green tomatoes from the vines, set them up to pickle (shown above).  All that’s left growing is a bit of stunted lettuce and spinach, and a few onions left to overwinter.

As I get my garden beds ready for the winter, I’ll summarize what I think I learned in my third year of being a serious vegetable gardener.  Let me arrange this from choosing seeds to preserving the harvest.

Choice of varieties. 

This isn’t everything I grow, it’s just plants where I had something to say.

For tomatoes, I settled on growing four broad classes.  Varieties are shown in Post G22-001. 

  • Early season/cold tolerant,
  • Heirloom “extra tasty” tomatoes,
  • Paste (for drying), and
  • Heat-tolerant (to keep yields up in August)

Early-season/cold-tolerant tomatoes were a total winner.  I had tomatoes by June, and those plants continued to bear through October (Post G22-025).  I judged the overall winner to be Fourth of July, a hybrid from Burpee Seeds.  I’ll plant that again next year.

OTOH, my other tomato choices were flops.  Two (paste, heat-tolerant) were due to operator error (deer damage, poor location, planted too late.)  But of the three heirloom tomatoes I tried, the only one I will keep is Cherokee Purple.  That produced a decent yield of consistently tasty tomatoes.  For the other two (Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Chocolate Stripes), I simply couldn’t guess when they were ripe. I won’t grow those again (Post G22-051).

Ground cherries.  I tried and rejected ground cherries (Post G22-029).  They grew with no fuss, as advertised.  But yield was tiny and harvesting was a pain.  Plus, as it turns out, I don’t much like them.  Mine, at least, were not sweet.  I’m not growing them again.

Summer squash and cucumbers.   I have a terrible time growing these due to insect pests (squash vine borer (Post G27), and cucumber beetle (various posts).  For squash vine borer, I had mixed success spraying with Spinosad (Post G21-044).  That’s only bulletproof if you stake the squash vines up, off the ground, and it’s a lot of work in any case.  For cucumber beetle, I never found a method of killing them that I was comfortable with, because I don’t want to use (e.g.) Sevin or similar pesticide dusts.  Nothing I tried worked at all, including methods that get a generally good reputation on the internet (such as yellow sticky traps).

This year I tried growing parthenocarpic varieties under insect netting (Post G22-013, Post G22-050).  The upshot is that the “parthenocarpic” part didn’t work out, but that growing under netting is a pesticide-free way to avoid the worst of the squash vine borer.  Timed right, I end up with large, flowering summer squash by August 1 or so.  At that point, there’s only an occasional squash vine borer visiting the garden, and I can take the netting off and get some summer squash.  For cucumbers, by contrast, this didn’t work at all, because the cucumber beetle appears to be a year-round pest in my garden now.

I’m  not sure if I’m going to try growing under netting again, or not.

 

Winter squash.  I experimented last year, but I’ve settled on good old Waltham Butternut squash, and on Dickinson pumpkin (which, despite the name, size, and shape, is just a gigantic winter squash, and tastes more-or-less exactly the same as butternut squash.)  These are pretty much hassle-free, although I do wrap the pumpkins in floating row cover to keep the squirrels confused.  I’ll plant these again next year.

Potatoes.  I finally figured out exactly why you typically can’t use store-bought potatoes as seed potatoes (Post G22-004).  And yet, sometimes, you can.  The answer is organic potatoes can’t be treated with the most potent and toxic sprout inhibitor.  So, either buy certified seed potatoes, or plant organic potatoes from the grocery store.  Chit early and often.  Consider no-dig planting if you’ve got money to burn and/or a cheap source of straw (Post #1073).

Sweet potatoes.  God’s gift to the lazy and untalented gardener.  Buy them from the store in late winter, sit them in some damp potting soil until they sprout, plant the slips (sprouts).  Water well.   If you want more, cut a foot off the ends of some vines, strip off most of the leaves, and plant those.  Nice to have a food plant that’s so aggressive it can strangle the weeds.  Definitely planting again.  No idea what variety I’m planting, because it’s whatever is in the grocery store.

Beets, turnips, radishes.  Nix.  I’m just giving up on these.   I can’t seem to get a decent-sized root in my soil, and I’m the only one in my family who will eat them.

Eggplant.  Nix.  Grows well, nobody else in my family will eat it.  Skipping that next year.

Heavy-hitter Okra.  This was a disappointment.   I grew about ten okra plants, of the “heavy hitter” strain.  These are supposed to produce multiple flower heads per plant and to be extremely productive.  What we actually got was some nice-looking plants with mediocre production.  Throughout the summer, we managed to get one pod per two plants per day.  I’m going to try a different strain next year, but I suspect that I’m just going to have to plant a field of okra if we’re ever going to have a surplus of it.

Seed starting

Fluorescents are obsolete.   I had been using a two-bulb four-foot shop light as a grow light, for staring plants inside.  This year I “rewired” it (basically, gutted it) and (eventually) successfully installed LED replacement bulbs (Post G22-003).  The LEDs use about half the electricity that the fluorescents used.

Window box is best.  That said, the cheapest source of grow light is the sun.  I’m not very good at using a cold frame — I typically end up frying my plants on a sunny day.  So I made a cheap, temporary window box out of some clear plastic totes (Post G22-003).  That worked fine and was climate-controlled.

Dump the peat pellets, use paper bags instead.  For years, I have started seeds using peat pellets.  These are convenient, and hold together well as you move your seedlings from place to place.  But a couple of things happened this year that have made me change my mind on peat pellets.

First, I had an exceptionally productive year for winter squash.   Easily four times the yield I’ve had in any prior year.  Here’s a picture of some of what I harvested.  Those butternuts came from just four Waltham butternut vines.

But the only thing I did differently this year was to start those squash seedlings without using peat pellets.  I started them in cups, then moved them to doubled-up paper lunch bags (Post G22-012, Post G22-017). As I pulled up those vines, this year, I noticed that they seemed to have exceptionally well-developed roots.

This got me to wondering whether those peat pellets inhibit root formation.  I stopped using peat pots long ago for exactly that reason.  I’d pull plants up at the end of the season, only to find that they were root-bound inside those un-degraded peat pots.

As I pulled up my late tomato vines, I decided to compare those that had been started in peat pellets, and those that had been started in cups of potting soil.  These are plants of about the same size and that were started at the same time.

These were both photographed at arms length.  Note that the peat pellet is still largely intact (left).  And that the plant grown without using a peat pellet (right) has an obviously much more developed root structure, with a far longer tap root and longer side roots as well.

As it turns out, I am not the only person to have noticed this.  If you Google peat pellet root bound, you’ll find lots of stories and pictures showing plants that became totally root bound in a peat pellet.  Some then suggest cutting up the mesh that holds the peat pellet together, but to me, that kills the main advantage of planting the intact peat pellet, which is that you avoid transplant shock.

The upshot of this is that I’m tossing out my peat pellets, and starting plants in doubled-up paper bags from now on.  Those bags get quite fragile by the time they get planted, but that’s the whole point.  You want them to be just at the point of falling apart when they are put into the ground.

Timing, frosts, and days to maturity

Fall garden flops.  Two years in a row now, I’ve followed standard gardening advice and planted some fall crops in the garden.  I’ve direct-sown some greens and such.  And two years in a row, that’s been a total flop.  Here’s the writeup for last year (G21-057).  It’s pretty much ditto for this year.

The upshot is that while I can direct-sow seeds in late August in Zone 7, it’s probably going to be a complete waste of time.  As the days shorten and the temperatures cool, plants begin to grow not just more slowly, but much more slowly.  I did the analytics on this in Post G22-061.

The upshot is that you can either put in some sort of poly tunnel or greenhouse, or you can start your fall crops in pots in July, so that you are planting out month+ seedlings.   What I can’t do is direct sow (e.g.) lettuce and spinach at the end of August and expect to have usable yield.

Frost protection alone isn’t worth it.  This year, I nailed down the ins and outs of frost protection.  Aluminized fabric or space blanket radiant barrier works great (Post G22-005).  Mason jars (and some types of plastic) work great, because they are radiant barriers (Post G22-006).  Some other plastics work, but polyethylene sheeting or floating row cover has no impact.  Basically, those are worthless for frost protection (Post G22-005).

But this year, as I was hustling and putting my plants in early and protecting them when there was a threat of frost — it occurred to me that this is largely a waste of time (Post G22-009).

Why?  See Fall Garden Flops above.  If it’s that early in the spring, when it’s cold out, plants grow at a snail’s pace.  You put in a huge amount of effort to keep those plants from freezing, and your reward is a tiny head start on the gardening year.

To get a head start on the growing season, it seems like it’s far smarter to keep growing your seedlings in some sort of protected (i.e., warmed) space, then plant those much larger seedlings into the garden only after things have warmed up.  That means setting up some sort of poly tunnel with frost protection — to raise daytime temperatures for the plants and prevent nighttime freezes.  Or keeping your seedlings in some sort of cold frame/window box arrangement until they are much older and larger than you would normally grow them.

In any case, my take on it is that planting early, into a cold garden, and hustling to provide frost protection, is all pain and (almost) no gain.  I’m not going to do that next year.   If I need frost protection, it’s too early to plant.

Days to maturity does not tell you much.  I worked through all the details on what “days to maturity” means, as printed on seed packets, in Post G22-025. The reality is that a) that figure is for ideal growing conditions, b) that’s just the date on which under ideal conditions you can pick your first ripe crop, and c) in spring and fall — when that figure really matters — days to maturity will be vastly higher than the number cited on the seed pack.  See Fall Garden Flops above.

The bottom line is that if you start from your fall first frost date, and count backward by “days to maturity”, you are nowhere near the correct date for planting seeds for a fall crop.  You have to plant them much, much earlier than that to be able to expect to harvest anything.

Water

Irrigation.  For a little home garden, it turns out that an effective irrigation system can be incredibly simple, quick to install, reasonably cheap, and will work with rain barrels or city water.  See post G22-037 and further references in that post.  I can’t believe I went through two years of carrying buckets all over the garden.  If I had it to do over, I’d put in irrigation from the start. 

Hose timers.  These always seem to fail after a few years.  With my last failure, I did an autopsy to figure out why they die, then modified my new timer accordingly (Post G22-028).

Rain barrels.   I think rain barrels are a good thing, and I have a bunch of them.  But no matter how many I have, I always seem to run out of water anyway.  And I end up using city water, run through an activated charcoal filter to remove the chloramines.

So I did a “micro-simulation” model of a rain barrel system, using the actual historical rainfall data for my area (Post G21-043).  And, sure enough, practically speaking, you are always going to run out of water.  As it turns out, for a small garden like mine, the first few rain barrels do a lot of good, and then the benefit per additional rain barrel decreases rapidly.  And, don’t kid yourself that you’re doing much for the environment by using rain barrels.  I think that if I’d known this from the start, I’d have put in a couple of rain barrels and called it quits. For a few hundred square feet of garden beds, a large rain barrel system is mostly a waste.

Staking, mulching, weeding.

Sprawl technique for tomatoes (Post G22-018).  That’s a big No on that one.  They grow fine.  In fact, the probably grow better if allowed to sprawl than they do if staked, because they put out secondary roots.  But harvesting is a nightmare, and you lose a lot of the crop to bugs.  I used the sprawl technique this year because I had an injury that made it hard to get around.  I’d never do that again.  I’m staking and/or caging my tomatoes from now on.

Oh, and sprawl technique with green tomatoes?  Dumb squared.  Sprawl technique with black plastic mulch, in Virginia summer?  Tomatocide.  Just don’t go there.

Woven black plastic ag fabric instead of mulch. I gave this a try this year, again because I had some problem getting around in the spring, and I figured this would be a labor-saving measure. 

I see this being used all over YouTube.  I couldn’t quite figure out how plants could possibly handle the heat stress of all that black plastic with the sun beating down on it.  Turns out, by and large, mine couldn’t.  Some plants were just outright killed by the heat.  Some were stunted.  Some — mostly beefy upright plants like okra — handled it OK.

In the end, I’d say that it’s OK if you put this down, then spread straw or other light-colored mulch on top.  It’s OK if you use it as straight-up weed blocking fabric.  It probably works OK if you’ve got enough foliage to keep the black plastic cloth in the shade.  But (e.g.) planting peppers, tomatoes, cucumber, and squash seedlings through holes in woven black plastic was simply a mistake.  Those that the heat did not kill outright clearly appear to have been heat-stressed anywhere any part of the plant touched the plastic.

I don’t think I’m going to use that again as anything but weed-block ag fabric.  I don’t think I’ll try to grow my seedlings through it.

Weeding.  I looked into numerous organic weed killers, and decided that I might as well just use a weed-whacker (Post G22-046).  With one exception, organic weed killers (e.g., strong vinegar) are burn-down weed killers.  They kill the top of the plant, but not the roots.

I also tried using bamboo leaves as a natural weed killer, with inferior results (Post G22-060).

If nothing else, I gained a better understanding of why people use Roundup in their yards, even if I won’t touch the stuff.  If you want to kill a plant roots and all, you don’t really have any good organic choices.

Pests and diseases.

Electric fence for deer.  After years of trying various deer-deterrent devices, I rage-purchased the equipment to set up a small, portable electric fence (Post #G22-018).  These are reasonably cheap and ridiculously easy to set up.  The “wire” is more of a twine with embedded metal fibers.  You run that through plastic step-in posts.  You’ll need to pound in a grounding rod, that’s just about the only work involved. And you’ll need to be able to run an extension cord to where the charger is attached to the fence.

Deer damage effectively ceased for as long as I ran it.  Wish I’d thought of it sooner, and this is now a permanent part of my backyard suburban gardening setup.

I also run a Yard Enforcer motion-activated sprayer.  This works, with a few caveats.  It tends to trigger off randomly when faced with bright sunshine on broad, fluttering leaves.  And the hose connection began to leak until I replaced the original cheap vinyl hose gasket with a standard 10-cent rubber hose gasket.  Otherwise, it shows no signs of deterioration after one season of use.  And the deer will stay out of the area it sprays.

Otherwise, I have retired the rest of my arsenal of deer deterrents.  Search for that category on this website if you want to see what else I was using.

Wrap your pumpkins to keep the squirrels off (Post G30).  For the second year in a row, I wrapped floating row cover around my pumpkins.  This appears to work perfectly to keep the squirrels from gnawing on them.  That’s now a standard part of what I do when I grow pumpkins.

Powdery mildew.  The first year I gardened, I had to put in the time just to learn the lingo (Post G15).  Because, as it turns out, most commercial treatments for powdery mildew don’t actually kill powdery mildew (“eradicants”), they only claim to help prevent its spread (“protectants”).  Next you have to realize that virtually no home-remedy type powdery mildew treatments work (Post G19).  Despite having people swear by them in various internet posts.  Or, at least, did not work on whatever strain of mildew I had in my garden.  Finally, once you do come up with something that will kill powdery mildew, what you find is that a) you have to keep spraying it, and b) what you end up with is a heavily damaged plant anyway (Post G20).

That learning is summarized in Post G20.  The upshot of all that is that you ideally want to spray to prevent powdery mildew, not to try to cure some that has already set in.

I tried to test a couple of preventatives this year, one a commercial copper-based spray, the other a weak citric acid solution (Post G22-039, Post G22-040).   Nature did not cooperate, in that I didn’t ever get significant powdery mildew in the garden until very late in the garden year.  At which point, I can certify that weak citric acid solution does not kill existing powdery mildew (Post G22-060) .

French marigolds.  I’ve bought a lot of “deer proof” flower mixes.  And yeah, you can get some flowers, and yeah, maybe the deer won’t eat some of them, even if they are desperate.

But let me tell you a few things about french marigolds:

  • They form spectacular masses of flowers.
  • Native bees and some butterflies love them, based on my observation.
  • They last through the end of fall.
  • They are tough as all get out, and easily out-compete with the weeds.  To some extent, they become the weeds.
  • They stink when disturbed.  I mean, really stink. Which I think explains the next point.
  • I’ve never seen even the slightest indication of deer damage.
  • The seeds are easily saved.

 

 

Food Preservation

Vinegar pickles do not require salt.  If you are making a traditional vinegar-based pickle, the salt is there solely for flavor.  It it not necessary for the preservation of the food.  Accordingly, I tried making a sodium-free vinegar dill pickle.  The results were … OK.  Edible.  Definitely pickle-like.  I’m undecided as to whether I’d do that again, but for sure, I can’t take the high-salt diet one gets with home-canned vinegar pickles following a traditional recipe.  (See Post G22-031, Post G22-032, Post G22-036).

FWIW:  Neither pickle crisp (calcium chloride) nor soaking the cucumbers in ice had any impact on the crispness of the pickle.  Based on my final batches, you can replace salt with salt substitute measure-for-measure in a vinegar pickle recipe and get a reasonably salty-tasting pickle without significant off notes.  And it definitely helps to replace about half the vinegar acidity with citric acid acidity, following standard canning formulas as described in the posts above.  Finally, because these salt-free pickles tended to have a somewhat tough skin, you get a better product processing them as spears rather than as whole pickles.

Freezing is the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes if and only if you are going to be running that freezer anyway.   That’s the gist of Post G22-010.   It is also by far the easiest.  And the skins slip right off the tomatoes afterwards (same post).

These days, I mostly preserve them by making tomato sauce on the stove, then freezing that in vacuum-sealed bags.  FWIW, my process is as follows:

  • Pressure-cook tomatoes for a minute or two, followed by natural pressure release.
  • Run the results through a Foley mill to take out skins and most seeds.
  • Boil that down to sauce consistency.
  • Place in vacuum bags, freeze, then vacuum-seal the frozen sauce.

I’ve stopped making tomato sauce in a crock-pot because it takes forever and is energy inefficient.  A crock pot is a poor device for reducing reducing tomato juice down to tomato sauce.

An ideal garden setup, based on three years’ experience.

I threw my garden together in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a way to get some exercise, and have something to do.  I set the whole thing up out of recycled materials, including a bunch of coroplast political protest signs that I had printed up for use in the Town of Vienna, VA, and some bamboo I had cut down in my yard (Post G05).

If I had to do a raised-bed garden over, from scratch, I would:

  • Orient the bed(s) east-west, for best access to sun.
  • Have one long bed, about 3′ deep from front-to-back.
  • Have a permanent trellis on the back of the bed, to stake up plants.
  • Have 1/2″ irrigation pipes installed at the surface, before planting, run to the nearest tap or water barrels.
  • Have an electric fence permanently mounted around the bed, to deter deer.
  • Accommodate a polycarbonate panel or other method for creating a temporary spring cold frame/autumn season extender.
  • Accommodate insect-proof netting, as needed.

I am still not quite ready to go full-on to growing in a greenhouse.  There are advantages to that, but any greenhouse I could build would end up being one great big disposable, as the various plastics broke down.

I think that, on this forthcoming re-build, I’m looking for something a bit more permanent, a bit less disposable, and something that incorporates all the varied temporary structures that I’ve set up over the past three years of gardening.

Post #1626, Yeah, still no COVID U.S. winter wave, or “No one has ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people”.

 

As I despair about the state of America today, among the things I focus on is the state of what passes for news.  Our entire “news” infrastructure runs on having fresh content.  And, in the case of the right wing, on the need to feed the existing propaganda apparatus with whatever narrative will be most “sticky” among their constituents.

And so, with the recent home invasion and attack on an 82-year old man, by a clearly demented right-wing nut job, obviously politically motivated, instead of reporting the facts, they substitute a laughably-implausible fictional narrative that both downplays the political aspect of the attack, and stokes their large base of homophobes.  A two-fer.  Then report on that.

Because, time after time, we seem to have an incredibly large number of Americans who are oblivious to how carefully crafted these right-wing and/or Russian disinformation false narratives are.  Trying to cast this as a random home invasion isn’t sufficiently sticky.  So that lie wouldn’t do.  Nope.  Similarly, just plain vote fraud wouldn’t do, it has to be massive vote fraud carried out by (pick one) a Black woman, or sneaky Asians with their bamboo-fiber false ballots, or maybe Italo-Jewish satellite space lasers, masterminded by the (long-dead) hispano-communist dictator Hugo Chavez.  And so on.  Once you grasp that this is all about writing the stickiest story you can — no matter how ludicrous — you immediately realize that the same morons who believed in the Democrat-Jewish pedophile ring run out of a DC pizza parlor basement, by Hillary Clinton — those people need something more salacious to catch their attention.

And so, to be an effective actor within the right-wing propaganda machine, you simply need to align yourself with the some deep-seated malice.  Then write the craziest thing you can think to provide the deepest stimulation of that malice. And see if it sticks.

And, of course, given that this one was in San Francisco, the obvious choice was to toss in a fictional gay-bar pickup.  By an 82-year-old grandfather who has been married to the same woman for more than six decades.  Whose wife is a famous public figure, so he is sure to be recognized in public.

Because that makes so much sense.

But, in fact, there ain’t all that much happening, on any given day.  And reality is typically pretty damn dull. So, collectively, every day, we end up scraping the bottom of the barrel to find people with something — anything — to say.  True or false no longer appears to make any difference, as long as whatever is said induces fear, anger, hatred, or, ideally, all three.  All that, because the money that drives the system depends on viewership, and to succeed you must feed the addiction of the large segment of the population that has become habituated to their daily dose of news-driven endorphins.

If it screeds, it leads.

This is all by way of saying that I am so tired of the term “triple-demic”.  Tired of reading this or that talking head telling us that the U.S. may be heading into an unprecedented epidemics of flu, RSV, and COVID.

Why?  Why drag COVID into that?  Is it just because triple-demic sounds so cute? Or is it not enough merely to state that this is shaping up to be an exceptionally bad flu season.  And it looks like serious RSV infections in kids are above average.  I guess, because we’re insufficiently afraid of flu?  And most people haven’t heard of RSV before, and can’t pronounce respiratory syncytial virus?

So we have to drag COVID into it, for dramatic effect.  I guess.  Because, as with the Pelosi story, there’s zero factual basis for doing so, at the moment.

Anyway, near as I can tell, the U.S. remains at about 12 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day.  Same as it’s been for about the past month.

And near as I can tell, there is zero evidence — anywhere — to support the idea that we’re going to have a big wintertime wave of COVID in the U.S.  U.S. COVID hospitalizations have fallen to their lowest level since May 2022.  And there’s no evidence of a winter wave in Canada.  And Europe still appears to be well past the peak of its small winter wave.

But those are facts.  And facts are often dull.  So triple-demic it is.

The quote, by the way, is best attributed to Mencken.

It’s not even worth updating the usual graphs.

Post #1625: Tyranny of physics, or still more on a bug-out bag

 

Background:  Emergency preparedness.

I’m in the middle of repurposing some old backpacking equipment into a set of bug-out bags (Post #1620).   To me, the big surprise is that mass evacuations in the U.S. almost always generate horrendous, days-long traffic jams. 

You can pretty much bet on it.  Which means that you ought to be prepared for it.  Which I was not.  As a result, my most pressing need wasn’t for camping gear per se.  It was for the supplies that would allow me to live in my car for a day or two.

Basically, to be prepared to bug out, in an urban area, I need a mini-#vanlife kit.  Ideally, without spending a fortune, and without having to replace critical supplies every year.  (Because I’m not that organized, and I’ll forget to do it.)

It’s not rocket science.  You need to take care of water, food, warmth (maybe), and sanitation (maybe).

In my last post, when I looked at options for the critical sanitation category, I found plenty of good choices for #1, but not such great options for handling #2.  In both cases, I’ve gone with some version of special-purpose plastic bag lined with super-absorbent gel.  I picked this and this, for starters, both of which I expect to last indefinitely and be once-in-a-lifetime purchases.

Research reveals some constraints on food choices for an emergency kit kept in the car, driven by the harsh environment of the car’s interior. Some mainstays of camping (e.g., chocolate bars) are obviously inappropriate.  Less obviously, experts frown on most canned foods and high-fat foods because the heat and freeze/thaw lead to rapid deterioration.  Even foods packaged for stability, like MREs.  In particular, the “best used by dates” of those foods cannot be trusted, if kept in a car, because those dates assume the foods were kept at normal room temperature, not at the often blistering-hot temperature of a car interior.

So I’m putting together a little kit of dried foods.  Starting with a brick of true emergency rations and some emergency food bars.  Both of those ought to last five years, even if kept in a car.  And then I’m adding things any camper would consider, and that have exceptional shelf life.  Or at least won’t kill you, even if they don’t taste so hot after a decade in the car.  These include ramen noodles, oatmeal, dried potato flakes, maybe some tea, and coffee, hot chocolate, and other dry foods.

But this brings up a new need.  My ability to eat anything tasty, out of that emergency stash, depends on my ability to boil water in the car.  I expect that the emergency ration bars taste awful, and while you can, in theory, just cold-soak ramen noodles and potato flakes, nobody claims that the results are palatable.

And that’s when I started running into the tyranny of physics.

Pick an option for boiling water in the car:  Asphyxiate, spend tons of money, electrocute, void your new car warranty, or wait a really long time.

The task is to come up with a modest amount of boiling-hot water, on demand, as the car is creeping along the freeway.

Seriously, how hard can that be?

Asphyxiate. First, I’m going to rule out any traditional flame-based camp stove.  Even clean-burning fuels like butane.  Burning anything in an enclosed space is just a bad idea.  Couple that with notion that a) you’re going to be doing this while in dense traffic, and b) whatever fuel you use, it’s going to get stored long-term in the car.  Aside from Esbit — of which I am a fan — I can’t think of a refined stove fuel that I’d even consider keeping in a hot car in the summer.

Spend tons of money.  Second, there are cooking systems that rely on exothermic chemical reactions.  You chuck a packet of chemicals into water or salt water, and the resulting chemical reaction generates the heat to cook your meal.  These include Army MRE heaters as well as commercial systems such as Barocook.  The only downside here is the expense.  Near as I can tell, it would cost me a $2 disposable every time I wanted to heat up a cup of water for tea.  And you should ideally buy the right equipment first, the sole use for which is to heat foods with these chemical heaters.

So, those would work, and those will keep indefinitely.  But there’s a lot of dedicated equipment and expense, and I would never get any utility out of them except as a component of this car emergency pack.

Third, seriously, it’s an electric car.  The motor/generators can put out tens of thousands of watts of power.  Why not just plug in an electric kettle/coffee pot and be done with it?  That’s where the choices boil down to electrocution, voiding the warranty, or waiting a long time.

Electrocution:  Although the Prius Prime can literally run on electricity, Toyota didn’t think to bring much of that inside the cabin.  The power sockets (“cigarette lighter sockets”) on the Prius interior are rated for a maximum of 120 watts.  The upshot is that if you plug in an inverter and a typical home electric kettle, you’ll instantly blow the blow the fuse on the power socket.  A typical US home electric kettle draws 1500 watts.

In fact, that’s so little power than you can’t even run this device:

Source:  Ebay.

The Kenner Easy-Bake toy oven above draws way too much wattage to be used inside a Prius Prime.  “The original Kenner Easy-Bake Oven was heated by two 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, …”  (source:  Wikipedia).

Heck, I already own one of these little immersion heaters:

 

And even the lowest-power version of that device draws far too much power for the Prius power outlets to handle.

Void your warranty.  There’s an obvious way around this, which is to wire up a socket or an inverter directly to the battery (fused, of course).  That way you could use much heavier wire, draw more current, and use an electric kettle capable of heating a pint of water in a reasonable amount of time.  Even then, as discussed in Post #1020, you probably wouldn’t want to exceed 1000 watts.  That’s the size of inverter I hook up, when I used my older Prius as an emergency generator.

That said, on an almost-new car, still under warranty, with a rather delicate 12V electrical system, I’m not sure I want to attach cables to the battery.  Let alone try to find a way to get them through the firewall.  For fear that if something goes wrong in the 12V electrical system, the deal will point to the modifications as an excuse not to fix it under warranty.

So while I have no problem hooking up a 1000-watt inverter to our long-out-of-warranty 2005 Prius, I’m not quite comfortable doing that with my wife’s 2021 Prius Prime.  Particularly not as a permanent install, to be ready in case of emergency evacuation.

Wait a really long time.  At this point, all remaining electrical solutions fall under the tyranny of physics.  If you input few watts, the water heats slowly.  And there’s no way around that.  That’s just basic physics.

If you want to heat a pint of water from room temperature to boiling, using the limit of 120 watts, assume zero losses, and assuming you don’t blow the fuse on the power socket, that will take you 22 minutes.

That said, of all the ways I could heat water in the car, a little low-powered cup-sized electrical heater seems to make the most sense.  For one thing, if I’m using it while stuck in a traffic jam, I’ll have nothing but time.  For another, I can actually use that on normal road trips to make a fresh cup of coffee or tea.  So I will get some utility out of it, beyond its value in an emergency.  For a third, they are designed to fit in a car’s cup holders, which would be handy if I’m going to use one while stuck in traffic.

When all was said and done, I ordered one of these:

Source:  Amazon.

This is an 80-watt device that should be able to bring 12 ounces of water to a boil in about 25 minutes.  That’s far enough below the power socket’s limit that I don’t risk blowing a fuse.  That’s enough boiling water to cook at least a single serving of ramen noodles.  And if I’m stuck in the car for 24 hours, the 25 minute wait will just give me something to look forward to.

Conclusion

For emergency rations to be kept in the car, experts say that a lot of your normal choices for emergency food are off-limits.  Canned foods, high-fat foods (including nuts), and MREs are all poor choices due to their rapid and unpredictable spoilage rates when subject to high temperatures and freeze-thaw cycles.

For my car kit, I am going with some ultra-stable commercial emergency foods, and a selection of dried foods and beverages.  The latter require me to boil water, in the car, possibly while moving in extended stop-and-go traffic.  After looking over my options, to boil water I’ve decided to go with the simplest plug-and-play setup I could find.  For the Prius Prime, that’s a small (12 ounce) low-wattage (80W) water heater built to sit securely in a cup holder.  The sole downside is that, assuming it works perfectly, it’s going to take roughly half-an-hour to bring 12 ounces of water to boiling.

Seems like a lousy choice.  Until you realize that all the other choices involved significant risks (flame-based cookers), expensive disposables (MRE heaters and similar), or blown fuses or possibly a blown warranty for higher-powered electrical devices.