Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1603, COVID-19, no US winter wave yet, but …

 

… but France and Germany appear to be starting theirs.

The U.S. remains at  14 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, same as the end of last week.  The downward trend continues, it’s just so slow that it now takes several days to drop another whole case from the daily count.

In particular, in the U.S., there’s no winter wave yet, but the state-level trends seem to be separating by cold/warm states, a bit.  Which would be the first indication of a winter wave.  So … eh, it’s too soon to tell.  But we’re about due for a wave to start, if we’re going to have one.

Deaths are closing in on 300 a day, down from a steady 350 for the past few months.  Hospitalizations continue to fall, and currently are at 3200 per day, down a few hundred from the end of last week.

 

Continue reading Post #1603, COVID-19, no US winter wave yet, but …

Post #1602: Legal radio use!

Source:  Fandom.com

Police scanner! This post is notes to myself on the quick and easy way to get a modern police scanner functioning.  It boils down to:

  • Ignore the directions.
  • Buy the software.
  • Buy the data.

Am I really that dumb?

Source:  Fandom.com

In my quest to Get Rid of Stuff, I’m now working through a lot of old electronics, including a bunch of different radios.  Most of it, I knew what to do with, or the stuff was good enough that I could easily give it away.

And then there was my police scanner.  This is a Radio Shack Pro-197 digital trunking scanner.

I bought this years ago — I’m guessing mid-2000s — for reasons that escape me.

All I recall about it is that:

  1. I paid a lot of money for this, years ago.
  2. I never could figure out how to get the damned thing to work.

I figured it would be like a short-wave radio.  Plug it in, turn it on, turn the dial.

Boy, was that wrong.  And welcome to the world of Object Oriented Scanning.  Where everything is an object.  And nothing makes sense.

Realize that I spent my professional career writing complex computer programs. Yet I couldn’t make head or tail out of Object Oriented Scanning.  I won’t go into how absolutely useless the user manual is.  Except to note that it’s so awful that somebody took the time to rewrite the entire manual into a more readable form.   And even that went over my head.

Moreover, my usual approach of turn it on, push the buttons, see what happens, yielded more-or-less nothing.  All the elements appeared to be in place — frequencies, system types, all that jazz needed to define the modern communications object.   All that was missing was noises coming out of the speaker.

Nor was I alone in this.  You can look at internet chatter and see that many, many people were baffled by the brave new world of Object Oriented Scanning.

In any case, after years of occasionally trying (and failing) to get this to work, I finally cracked the code.  So I thought I would share it.  All I had to do was:

  1. Ignore absolutely all the bafflegab about Objects, Trunks, Talkgroups, and so on, in the user manual.
  2. Realize that all of the frequency (etc.) information that came pre-loaded on the radio was wrong/obsolete.
  3. Buy the software, hardware, and data access to replace the incorrect frequency information with the correct data.
  4. Now it works like a charm.

I suspect that a big part of the problem is that I really needed the software and the (hardware) data transfer cable from the get-go.  But Radio Shack provided neither of them.  It is possible, in theory, to program that information in manually.  But it’s a lot easier just to buy and use the right software.

The quick guide

These folks will sell you the PC software, for about $40.  They have a one-time free trial, which for Radio Shack radios is at this reference.  I believe that’s all Windows only.

If you want to use this more than once — say, take another crack at downloading the information that lets you listen to your local public service providers, or download different types of radio networks  — you’ll need to subscribe to the RadioReference database, for about another $20 for six months. 

If your radio is like mine, you’ll need a cable to connect your PC’s USB port to the input jack on your radio, which, archaically, uses a headphone jack instead of a USB port.  Mine, I bought years ago from Radio Shack.  For your radio, you’ll want to look on your manufacturer’s website.  Mine was so old it was very old-school in term of manually loading the drivers and all that.

Using the software on the PC, look up the information for your state and county.  Say, for trunked systems, which is going to cover most urban police forces.  Download it off the RadioReference database.  Edit it, if you must.

Then, turn on your radio, plug in the cable, and download all that correct and current information to your radio.  Instructions for the radio side of this were nonexistent.  That’s because, near as I can tell, when you plug in the cable, with the radio turned on, the radio stands by to download the information.  The computer software controls the download.

At the end of which, all that information is in your radio’s active memory.

Then, to be safe, you should save that information to a permanent file in your radio’s memory.  For the Radio Shack model, these permanent files are termed V-scanner folders.  The radio comes with 21 of them, and you should just think of them like awkward Windows folders.  On my radio, you access that via Function – Program.  Pick a folder, and save the current memory to that folder.

You’re done.

Hit “scan”, and the radio will scan all the systems that you just downloaded.  In my case, every trunked pubic provider system in Fairfax County.

I suppose there’s a software method to limit that search to just a subset, but with 20 more V-folders available, if I want to do that, I’ll just edit the list and load that into another V-folder.  If I want to restrict to that subset, I’ll load the contents of that edited list — from the V-folder to active memory — and use that.

Anyway, for the first time since I bought this close to two decades ago, it works as advertised.  Nothing wrong with the hardware.  Major issues with the input data.

And, I guess, operator ignorance.  Funny thing is, I’m still ignorant — I have no clue how this actually works.  But now, at least, it does work.

Post #1601, illegal radio use!

 

Those of you who just got done tossing all your 3G phones may get a kick out of this.  Or maybe not.

Today I applied for and was granted an FCC license to operate GMRS (General Mobile Radio Service) equipment.

For just 35 bucks, I may now legally operate a GMRS radio.  The license is good for ten years.

But wait, there’s more!  The FCC tosses in licensure of my immediate family members, for free.

Such a deal!

There were only two qualifications:

  1. I could not be a convicted felon.
  2. I had to be dumb enough to think I needed a license for a toy walkie-talkie.

This post is mostly a note to myself, so I can keep straight everything I think I just learned about some of the radios that you, as Joe or Jane Citizen, can buy and use for short-range communications.  Unsurprisingly, I guess, that world has changed substantially over the past five years or so.  Owing, in large part to a 2017 revamp of the FCC rules covering those devices.

The main surprise is that these radios keep getting better.  Even in the age of cell phones.

To be clear, your kid’s Buzz Lightyear walkie-talkies don’t need a license.  Not now.  But, weirdly, until 2017, technically speaking, they actually did.  As evidenced by the ancient manual for the Motorola toy radios that I bought for my kids years ago, shown at the top of this posting.

I’m guessing the number of FCC seizures of unlicensed Buzz Lightyears was pretty small.

In any case, here’s the story behind my newly-minted radio operator’s license.  And everything I just learned about CB, FRS, GMRS, and other citizen two-way radios.

 

Background:  Swedish Death Cleaning

I’m going through an extended period of GRS (Getting Rid of Stuff, to keep it family-friendly).  My version of SDC.  It’s a long-overdue thinning out of 30 years’ accumulation of stuff that I don’t need, but is too good to throw away. 

Much of the volume of material is the result of those twin evils, Cheaper if Bought in Bulk and Free Shipping.  There’s a reason my wife revoked my Costco membership.

But in other cases, I own perfectly functional items that I no longer have a use for.  Sometimes I can recall why I bought a particular item, and the memory sparks joy.  But most of the time, it’s more a case of “What was I thinking?”.

Luckily, for most of my stuff, even if I have no use for it, somebody else does.

This week’s task was electronics.   Not computers — I dealt with my computers last year.  This is mostly radios, cameras, WiFi extenders, weather monitors, adapters, cables, and similar assorted other electronic junk.

Mostly, radios — lots and lots of radios.

Breaker 1-9.

Amongst which was a perfectly useful Citizen’s Band (CB) radio.  (Which, believe or not, has been officially re-designated by the FCC as “CB radio”.  So “CB” is no longer an abbreviation for anything.)

Worse, it was a virtually brand-new radio.  I bought it years ago, for a family vacation to Florida, thinking I’d use it to assess traffic conditions on the road.  And otherwise pass the time on I-95.  Only to find out that almost nobody uses CB any more.  Not even truckers.  Drove the length of I-95 and didn’t hear a peep.

 

But it’s not your grandfather’s CB any more

I found a good home for that particular unit.  So that’s a happy ending.  As part of the process, I decided to see what was going on in the world of CB.  And that led to something of a surprise: CB FM?

I knew that CB had been around, with only minor modifications, for decades.  It was first authorized by the FCC in 1958.  The number of channels was increased to 40 in 1977.  The use of some channels was restricted (e.g., channel 9 is used for emergencies).  There was, at one time, a requirement that you have a license and call sign, just like ham radio.  That was eventually dropped after people routinely ignored that requirement during the 1970’s CB craze.   (All of that information comes from Wikipedia.)

The point is that, aside from a few legal changes, and the increase in the number of channels, the technical specifications for CB remained virtually unchanged until very recently.  Other than SSB (below), until recently, I believe that every CB radio ever made for the U.S. market, since its inception in 1958, could communicate with every other CB radio.  Which meant that if a bunch of people wanted to communicate, and they all had “a CB radio”, then all that equipment would play nicely together.

The only technical innovation (or equipment incompatibility) was the gradual addition of single-sideband (SSB) transmission, in addition to standard AM.  Even with that, I believe that every SSB unit sold is also capable of broadcasting and receiving standard AM signals.  Without going into detail, you need specialized equipment to translate SSB into intelligible speech.  If you only have a standard AM receiver, SSB transmissions sound like a cross between Donald Duck and voice synthesizer.  You can tell that somebody is talking, because it has the pattern of human speech.  But you can’t make out a word.  (It’s downright creepy to hear somebody laughing in an SSB transmission heard on a non-SSB radio.) If you ever tune in to ham radio bands, and hear something that sounds like speech, but isn’t, that’s probably SSB.

 But, to be clear, CB uses AM transmission, and AM radio isn’t “nice”.  It’s static-y, for want of a better term.  And the weaker the signal, the worse the sound.

But in July of 2021, the FCC approved use of FM transmissions on CB channels.  The radios themselves have to be capable of both FM and AM, so they are backward-compatible with the original standard.  But they will allow individuals who purchase new, FM-capable CBs to communicate using a far less static-prone FM signal.

Based on the reviews on Amazon, the resulting voice communications are a lot cleaner and a lot easier to listen to.  Judging by the price, you more-or-less get the FM option for free.  Give it another couple of years, and I’d bet that, with the possible exception of those who require the additional range offered by SSB, you won’t find a unit offered that doesn’t have FM.

So, weirdly enough, 67 years after the standards were first established, in a country where everybody has a cell phone, you can now get these niche-market radios with an FM option.  That, along with the general improvement in electronics in general, means that you can now get a CB that has pretty good (or at least, non-annoying) sound quality.  And yet, by law, every CB radio can still communicate with every other CB radio, using the original AM standard.

Who would have guessed that in the era of the cell phone, CB could still evolve?

FRS, GMRS, kids’ walkie-talkies, and the risks of believing what you read on the internet.

As part of this process I exhumed three old kids’ walkie-talkies.  Probably bought them in the early 2000s.

They still work, and they are occasionally useful things to have around.  So I looked into getting them up and running again, starting with the users’ manual.

To my horror, I discovered that these “toys” required an FCC license for legal use.  The users’ manual said so, with zero ambiguity.  Using these “toys” without a license risked fines, imprisonment, and confiscation of equipment.  All that time, I thought I was just having a good time with my kids.  And the FCC could have come gunning for me at any moment.

But that didn’t quite make sense.  These things look like toys.  We used them as toys.  And the only other people we ever heard, through these radios, were clearly kids.  Using them as toys.  Yet, there was the manual, straight from the manufacturer.  FCC license required, under penalty of law.

I looked around and found numerous seemingly-well-informed internet sites that said — again unambiguously — that any device capable of broadcasting on these channels requires an FCC license.  In particular, use of any 22-channel walkie-talkie absolutely required an FCC license.

Seemed kind of silly, but $3.50 per year seemed like a small price to pay for staying on the right side of the law. So I got a license.

But, at some level, who’s kidding whom?  I could go on Amazon and see 22-channel walkie-talkies that were obviously made to be toys.  Barbie walkie-talkies.  Buzz Lightyear walkie talkies.  Hello Kitty walkie-talkies.  There’s no way that the FCC is going to confiscate a kid’s Buzz Lightyear walkie-talkie for lack of the appropriate license.

And, as it turns out, that license requirement was the law, when my walkie-talkies were made.  But what most internet sites failed to mention is that the law was changed in 2017.  As with CB above, this market continues to evolve, and the law is evolving with it.

Not only do those little half-watt toy walkie-talkies require no license, but you can now buy and use the 2-watt versions without a license.  Anything more powerful than that requires an FCC license for legal use.

You see a lot of stuff about this that comes across as just so much gibberish.  So let me try to distill the current law.  Without resorting to any of the arcane language that we have inherited from prior law and regulation.

Family Radio Service (FRS) and General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) are two FCC-authorized radio communications options intended to be used for short-distance, low-power communication.  Once upon a time FRS consisted of just a handful of channels, restricted to very-low-power (half-watt) transmission.  And GMRS encompassed a larger set of channels, and allowed mostly higher transmitting power (and allowed the use of remote antennas).

To cut to the chase:

Any device with a fixed (attached) antenna, capable of broadcasting at no more than two watts power, can use all 22 channels found on your standard kids’ walkie-talkie.  No license required.

For want of a better term (and possibly even technically correct), I’ll call those devices FRS radios.  Functionally, FRS no longer applies to a restricted set of channels, it applies to the limits on power and use of external antennas of any 22-channel walkie-talkie.  (There may still be a lower power limit on the original FRS channels, but the device itself will automatically take care of that.)

Any more power than that, or if you want to use a remote antenna or repeater, and you need a GMRS license from the FCC.   GMRS base units can operate at up to 50 watts, with reductions required around the subset of channels that was the original FRS channels.  The law also added new “interstitial” channels that presumably would be available to newly-manufactured GMRS radios.

My recollection is that my kids’ walkie-talkies worked exceptionally well.  Certainly had far better range that I would have imagined.  Now I can operate them legally without a license.  And I should be able to get license-free two-watt walkie-talkies with even better range.

Most importantly, all of that equipment will play nicely together.  The two-decade-old units and any modern counterparts.

That said, manufacturers have complicated the situation with use of various “privacy code” standards.  (See this reference).  But the bottom line is that if you turn that off, every FRS/GMRS walkie-talkie or base station can talk to every other one.  Still.  Newer ones will have access to a few more channels.  But that’s the full extent of incompatibility.  My old units are weaker than is now allowed by law.  But they remain usable, decades after they were manufactured.

Post #1599, COVID-19, down another one since last week

 

The U.S. now stands at  16 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, down one from the end of last week.

Deaths remain around 350 per day, heavily concentrated among the oldest old.

Hospitalizations are now around 3700 per day.  That’s down by about 1000 in the past month, and 2000 in the past two months.

The situation continues to improve slowly.  The big unknown now is whether there will be a winter wave, as there was in the past two years.

Continue reading Post #1599, COVID-19, down another one since last week

Post G22-062, notes on trying to grow pawpaw from seed

 

Update, July 2023:  Near as I can tell, none of these saved seeds germinated.  So this ended up being a lot of work for nothing.  This fall, I’m going to try something easier, such as tossing whole fruit into pots of soil and seeing what comes up the next year. 

I have a couple of pawpaw trees in my back yard.  Well, two big ones, pictured above.  And then what amounts to a growing pawpaw patch all around them.

Near as I can reconstruct from old emails, these were planted in the spring of 2009, and they are:

  • Stark Brothers Mango Grafted Pawpaw.  This is a large-fruited, late-ripening variety with particularly tasty fruit.  Here’s their ad.
  • Edible Landscaping Select Pawpaw.  This is just a normal, native-to-Virginia pawpaw, that the folks at Edible Landscaping selected for better-than-average fruit.  This is a small-fruited, early-ripening variety. Here’s their ad.

I have, on occasion, eaten some of the Mango Grafted pawpaws, and they are delicious.  I no longer eat pawpaws, though — see Post G24.

Propagating pawpaws

I’ve now been asked to supply some fruit to people who want to try growing pawpaws.

I naively said, sure, I’ll just pick up some of the remains of the rotting fruit that are still on the ground.  I figured, seeds are tough, a seed is a seed.  Just pick them up, let them over-winter, and plant them next year.  Give it some time, and you too can have a delicious Mango Pawpaw.

But, as is my habit, I decided to do a little research.  And the answer is nope.  Everything I just said is incorrect.

First, from the Home Orchard Education Center, I learned one key fact:  Pawpaws do not grow true to seed.  They are like apples in that regard.  Plant a seed from a Granny Smith apple, and you’ll get an apple tree.  But it’s not going to be a Granny Smith.  Same with pawpaws, apparently.

In particular, seeds from that delicious Mango Grafted pawpaw are not going to produce Mango Grafted pawpaws.  The only way I could get more of Mango Grafted pawpaws would be to .. wait for it … graft a cutting from that tree onto some pawpaw rootstock.  Which, I now realize is probably why grafted is part of the name.  (Duh.)

Second, there’s a recommended process for saving the seeds. Apparently the seeds are fairly fragile, and require significant special treatment.  (Which, to be honest, does not quite square with the dozens and dozens of little pawpaw trees I mowed down this year.  Fragile or not, mine seem to be quite happy to sprout after falling on the ground and overwintering there.)

I’ve now started looking into what you’re supposed to do to save pawpaw seeds.  And there’s quite a bit more to it than than just picking them out of some old rotted fruit and chucking them in a paper bag until next year.

By far the most surprising recommendation is that you’re supposed to keep the seeds moist. That’s a new on on me.  Decades of growing stuff, and the advice has always been the opposite:  Keep saved seeds dry.  But for this one, nope, you have to keep it moist.  “If seeds are dried for 3 days at room temperature, the germination percentage can drop to less than 20%.” (From Peterson’s Pawpaws).

That makes any that I gathered from truly well-rotted fruit suspect.  They weren’t exactly dry, as we’ve gotten a fair bit of rain in the past few weeks.  But they aren’t guaranteed to be moist, as would be the case for seeds from intact fruit.

Separately, you have to chill them.  Commonly, they spend the winter in your fridge, inside something that will keep them moist.  I see recommendations of keeping them on damp paper towels, moist sand/peat moss mix, moist sphagnum moss, moist potting mix, or some similar sterile medium.  Inside a zip-lock bag seems to be the most common technique.

But you can also plant them outside, keep their planted area moist, and let the winter chill them for you.

Third, the common recommendation is to remove all traces of pulp and membrane from the seeds.  Apparently, there’s something in the pulp that inhibits growth.

Finally, if you plant in containers, for eventual transplanting into the ground, those containers need to be deep, as these produce a long and fragile taproot.  That much I already knew as these are reputed to be almost impossible to transplant out of the ground.  I’ll be using my paper bag technique from Post G22-012.

References also say that a) the seeds need high (75F to 85F) temperatures to germinate, one source specifies a soil temperature of 70F to 75F, b) they typically take a month to germinate in any case, C) they can do with a 24-hour warm water soak to speed germination, and d) you don’t get much foliage for the first couple of years.  All told, this seems like a project for somebody with more patience than I have.

One source — and only one source — says that wild pawpaw seeds need to be planted in soil taken from around the parent tree.  Something about microbes.  Not sure I believe that one.  That same source — and only that source — says to store them inside in a paper bag for a couple of months, then moisten and refrigerate.

References vary on whether or not you can freeze them.  Some say yes, some say absolutely not.  I am dead sure that these would freeze over the winter, naturally, so I find it hard to believe that freezing them would kill them.

Finally, the “float test” to separate viable and non-viable seeds does not appear to work on pawpaws (reference).  Which, to me, goes hand-in-hand with having to keep them moist.  This is just not a normal seed.

In any case, here are a few internet references on what you are supposed to do.

The plan

At this point, given that I want to try this, my plan is to prep a large number of seeds for overwintering in the fridge, and give away bags of prepped seeds.  If I do this again next year, I’ll know enough to collect the whole fruit before they rot, to ensure that the seeds do not dry out.

So, the plan is:

  • Start with whole fruit where possible.
  • Scrub the pulp and membrane off the seeds
  • Give the seeds the recommended soak in dilute bleach solution.
  • Bag them up in ziplock bags of moist potting soil.

Then they go into the fridge until next spring.

Edit:  Addendum

These are now done and stored away in the fridge.  All told, it took me maybe an hour and a half to process about 100 pawpaw seeds for storage over the winter.

I took the advice of several internet sites and “scrubbed” the seeds and pulp against a piece of hardware cloth, set over a bucket.  This was the most time-consuming step, mostly because I didn’t quite grasp just how hard you had to scrub, to part the seed from the surrounding membrane.  It went a lot faster once I decided to put more effort into it.  And it was obvious when I had managed to get a seed out of its membrane jacket.

I soaked the mostly-clean seeds a few minutes, then cleaned off any remaining pulp one-by-one.

Five minutes in a weak bleach solution (10-to-1 dilution of standard laundry bleach), several rinses to remove the bleach, and the seeds got tossed into Ziplock bags filled with damp potting soil.  And the bags got tossed into the back of the fridge.

The next challenge will be planting them in the spring.  As I understand it, pawpaw seedlings really don’t like to be transplanted.  They grow a long, fragile tap root before they even begin to break the surface of the soil.

Direct-sowing into the soil is preferred.   But I’m planning to raise seedlings to give away in next spring.  So I need to find or make some suitable containers.

You can find any number of very tall plant pots and containers specifically designed for growing tree seedlings.  But it is far harder to find very tall biodegradable pots, so that you can plant the seedling without disturbing the plant roots.  In particular, rumor has it that pawpaws can put out a one-foot tap root before you even see any leaves.  So I was looking for slender biodegradable pots at least one foot tall.

The best of the bunch seemed to be the lightweight Zipset (r) plant bands, 14″ x 3″ (reference).  These are more-or-less open-ended un-waxed lightweight milk cartons, and should degrade in less than a year.   They seemed to have the exact right combination of size, stiffness, and biodegradability.  They are cheap if bought in bulk, but the smallest quantity I could buy was a carton of 500.  That was far too many.

Instead, I’m going with 17″ tall biodegradable fabric grow bags (reference).  I can pick up 50 for $15.  The big unknown there is whether or not they really will degrade once planted.  I’ll bury a few this winter and dig them up before I decide whether or not to start my pawpaw seedlings in them.

In any case, at that price, the cost of the potting soil to fill them will far exceed the cost of the grow bags.  So it’s not like the bags represent a big money gamble in the overall scheme of things.  .

I decided against several varieties of home-made pots, just because I didn’t think they would be sturdy enough.  I could, in theory, make a foot-tall paper pot, out of newspaper.  Or use grocery bags, cut up and re-glued.  Maybe wrapped with jute netting, for strength. And so on and so on.

But all of those seemed to be a risk, and none of them seemed to be worth the trouble when I appear to be able to buy usable containers for 30 cents apiece.  After going to all this trouble, it didn’t seem very bright to take a gamble on the containers used to grow the seedlings.

So, tall grow bags it is.  We’ll see how this all turns out, next spring.

G22-061: Okrapocalypse, or, how does your garden slow?

Okrapocalypse

For the past month or two, when I looked out my bedroom window in the morning, I could see a half-dozen okra blossoms.  Every morning.  They are quite striking, for a vegetable flower.  They only last a day.  And for the past couple of months, my row of okra set a handful of new blossoms and seed pods daily, just like clockwork.

A few days ago, the clock stopped.  The weather finally turned a bit cooler, and I haven’t seen an okra blossom since.  Zero.  Production of new okra didn’t slow down.  It ceased overnight.

Source:  Weather underground.

Of course I knew that okra was a warm-season plant.  Everybody says that.  And the plants themselves are fine.  Just no new flowers or pods.  Our first frost date is probably at least a month away.  So maybe if we get another warm spell, that will pick right back up.

The surprise to me was how knife-edged the pod production is, as a function of temperature.  One day my okra patch was chugging right along.  The next day, everything having to do with flowers, seeds, and pods had ground to a halt.  All due to a roughly 10F drop in the average temperature.

By contrast, tomatoes and peppers are also warm-weather plants.  But they’re still putting out flowers and ripening fruit.  Albeit quite slowly, now that things are cooler.

And, of course, I’ve taken advantage of the cooler weather with a fall sowing of lettuce, spinach, and some beets.

So it’s not a total loss.  Greens are food.  Sort of.

But we do like okra in this household.  It shall be missed.

Is this mother nature’s way of telling me to get a greenhouse?

At this point, I was going to go off on a tangent about degree days, and how those can be calculated specific to individual crops.  And other such technical stuff.

But, in fact, one can just sidestep a lot of degree-day issues by growing in a greenhouse.  Why be at the mercy of the weather when you can make your own?

In fact, when you get right down to it, this early end of okra production is just another example of what I observed last spring:  It’s not very smart to provide frost protection alone, for plants (Post G22-009).  Even if plants will grow in cold spring weather, they sure don’t grow very fast.  By providing frost protection only, you go to a lot of effort to keep plants alive.  But you get very little in the way of net production, because growth is so slow.

As exemplified by the 100+ days it took my 49-day early season tomatoes to begin producing.

Not that I regret that — those early-season tomatoes produced as advertised (before the 4th of July).  They are still producing.  But I bet they would have produced earlier still if I’d had them in a greenhouse.  (N.B., tomatoes have perfect flowers (both male and female parts in the same flower), and can be pollinated just by flicking the flowers or buzzing them with an electric toothbrush.  So no bees needed.)

I have resisted getting a greenhouse, for many reasons.  Durable ones are expensive, cheap ones are just so much eventual landfill fodder.  They require that you install irrigation.  They require maintenance.  And with common plastic greenhouses, you still need frost protection, as the greenhouse itself will typically do little to warm the plants at night.

Plus, they seem like cheating, for the home gardener.  What’s the point of marking the passage of the year if you’re monkeying around with the seasons by installing a greenhouse?

That said, I already have irrigation set up (Post G22-037).  Plus, I have a roll of clear plastic that looks like a more-than-lifetime supply at this point.

And I sure wouldn’t mind getting a little more okra this year.

Not to mention the pests.  A greenhouse might keep the @#$@# deer out, so I could grow without setting up my backyard like an armed camp.

All things considered, I feel myself sliding down that slippery slope, from growing in open beds, to being the kind of backyard gardener who puts in a greenhouse.

I never thought it would end up like this.

(‿|‿)

But.

But what fraction of the slow spring and fall growth is due to temperature, and what fraction is due to reduced sunlight?   Farmers around here grow their spring crops in poly tunnels, so I know it works.  But I’d still like to know that split before proceeding.

Turns out, it’s fairly easy to get information on typical total solar energy by month.  This is from the National Renewable Energy Labs PVWatts calculator:

Doing the math, you can see that over the course of the growing season, lack of sunlight is a trivial factor at the start of the growing season, but a reasonably important one by the end of the growing season.  In October, my garden would get 30 percent less solar energy than it does at the peak of the summer.

Fair enough, that all makes sense.  Lack of sunlight isn’t an issue for early spring crops.  But for fall crops, a greenhouse might have more utility in letting existing crops fruit longer, rather than for growing new crops late in the year.

As I ponder my healthy-but-podless okra plants, I believe I’d settle for that.

Post G22-060, two gardening fails

 

Here are a couple of cases of “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

Does a weak citric acid solution kill powdery mildew?

No.

See Post G22-039 for background.  This is based on a product offered on Amazon that said it would kill powdery mildew on plants.  That product was merely a very dilute solution of citric acid in water.  I was originally going to do a formal test, with a “control” patch, but the powdery mildew didn’t show up on time.

Instead, here it is firmly established on what’s left of my summer squash.  Near as I can tell, a dilute citric acid solution had no impact on well-established powdery mildew.  Here are two pictures, one before spraying citric acid, and one about a week after.  Any apparent difference is just an artifact of the lighting, compounded by the complete loss of some of the leaves.

Do bamboo leaves make a good weed killer?

No.  Or, at least, not good enough.  Or maybe it’s just very slow at it.  All of which is a pity, as bamboo surely kills lots of useful plants.

See Post G22-052 for background.  Bamboo is one of many allelopathic plants, that is, plants that produce poisons to keep competing plants in check.  I figured, why not give it a shot as weed killer.

Before:

Roughly seven weeks later, I pulled back half of the now-brown bamboo.  Unfortunately, there’s still plenty of live weeds growing through the driveway, like so:

 

 

Post #1598, COVID-19, ending the data week at 17 new cases per 100K per day

 

The U.S. now stands at  17 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, unchanged from three days ago.

Deaths remain around 350 per day.  Hospitalizations have finally fallen below 4000 per day.

The slow post-Labor Day decline in new cases continues.

Continue reading Post #1598, COVID-19, ending the data week at 17 new cases per 100K per day

Post #1597: Vienna sports fans, it’s time to start asking for your new ball fields.

 

The Town of Vienna and the surrounding areas of Fairfax County are chronically short of ball fields for organized youth and amateur sports.  This is a complaint you’ll hear from anyone tasked with finding field time for practice, let alone for competition.   The ball fields around here are pretty well booked up at peak periods.

With the completion of the Town of Vienna’s large new police station, Vienna now has a rare opportunity to add to the stock of public ball fields in town.  A few years back, the Town bought the former Baptist Church on Center Street, for $5.5M of your tax dollars.  That was used as the temporary police station, as the new police station was built.  But now, that 3-acre tract of land — located directly across from existing Waters and Caffi fields — is no longer needed for that purpose.

If you’d be in favor of turning that land into playing fields, you’d better start speaking up right now.  Get your preferences known.  Because, as sure as night follows day, and as sure as every new building in Vienna will be absolutely as large as the law and the lot allow, if sports advocates don’t get dibs on this plot of land soon, somebody’s going to find an excuse to put a great big taxpayer-financed building on it.

I’d bet money on that.

Dimensions, please.

A U.S. football field is 360′ long and 160′ wide (reference).  That’s a fairly big chunk of land in an urban environment, amounting to about 1.2 acres.

Below, you can see a standard football field laid out in the Astroturf outfield of Waters field, in the heart of the Town of Vienna.  (You can verify the dimensions using (e.g.) Google Maps).  You can also see the now-idle three-acre former Baptist church tract, owned by the Town, directly across the street.  You can verify those dimensions using the Fairfax County tax map.

Source: Google Earth, annotations mine.

Just in case it’s not readable, the former Baptist Church lot measures out to be 400′ deep and 325′ wide.  There’s probably a bit of ambiguity on the depth, regarding the exact location of the Town right-of-way.  So the usable space may exceed that by a bit.  But those dimensions are good enough for doing a bit of rough planning.

First, that former Baptist Church tract is a nice size and shape.  As a matter of arithmetic, it would be feasible to squeeze in not one, but two full-sized football fields.  

Admittedly, that would leave room for just about nothing else.  The combined dimensions of two standard U.S. football fields, would be 360′ x 320′.  That leaves a total of five feet left over, at the sidelines, and 40 feet, at the end zones.  Two football fields would fill the lot from side-to-side, more-or-less lot-line-to-lot line.

So, practically speaking, it would probably be inadvisable to put two full-sized football fields in.  But, for sure, one football field would fit.  You’d have 20′ of running room past the end of each end zone, and plenty of room for a parking lot on one of sidelines.  Likely, you’d put the parking lot adjacent to the existing homes, to put some space between the field and the nearby housing.

Soccer fields for high-school aged kids are about the same size as a football field.  So, more-or-less ditto for a standard high-school soccer field.

But soccer fields for younger kids are smaller.  For ages 12 and under, a soccer field can be as small as 255′ x 120′ (reference). You could fit a two “youth” soccer fields in there with room to spare.  In that configuration, there’d be room for a couple of rows of parking directly adjacent to Center Street.

Finally, baseball and softball fields are a bit more flexible, but I see a recommended length of 275′ for each foul line for a Little League field (reference).  So you could put in one Little League baseball diamond and still have plenty of room for (e.g.) a small parking area, perhaps a row of cars along Center and a row adjacent to the nearby housing.

FWIW, under no circumstances would I suggest that these fields be lit, because they are directly adjacent to housing.  I’d be thinking more along the lines of a set of low-key daytime-use ball fields.  Something more akin to the baseball diamond at Meadow Lane, which sits directly across from single-family homes.  And not a clone of the lit-and-Astroturfed Waters Field.

 

Isn’t fitness one of our town goals?

In any case, I think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to convert that land to open green space, in the form of ball fields, before somebody thinks up an alternative use for it.  If you think that’s a good use of your tax dollars, you should start talking that up sooner rather than later.

Think of it as the Town’s tangible commitment to youth fitness.

As the Town proceeds with its rezoning, and likely opens the door to a whole lot of new housing along Maple Avenue, it seems like there needs to be some balance to offset all that population growth.  Part of the balance needs to be some effort to increase the amount of land available for recreational purposes.  And if this particular track of land gets built on, the opportunity to include this green space in an ever-more-crowded Vienna will be lost for good.