Author: chogan@directresearch.com

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.

Post #1594: Dysfunctional acorn lights. Maybe it’s time to start getting rid of them.

Source:  Fairfax County, VA

Consider the following proposal.  Instead of installing regular overhead streetlights, I proposed to light the road and adjacent sidewalk with spotlights, aimed directly into the eyes of oncoming drivers. Continue reading Post #1594: Dysfunctional acorn lights. Maybe it’s time to start getting rid of them.

Post #1593, COVID-19, finishing out the data week at 19 new cases per 100K per day.

 

The slow post-Labor Day decline in reported new U.S. COVID-19 cases continues.  The latest reading rounds to 19 new case per 100K per day, down from 21 just a couple of days ago.

Still under 400 deaths a day, hospitalizations stand at 4300 per day. Continue reading Post #1593, COVID-19, finishing out the data week at 19 new cases per 100K per day.