Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1492: Ceci n’est pas un parc, or surrealism in the Town of Vienna

 

With apologies to the master of surrealist painting, René Magritte.  Source for image above, The Treachery of Images entry in Wikipedia.

In the spirit of surrealism, I offer you this post, Ceci n’est pas un parc.  Which I will roughly translate as “this here isn’t a park”.  And, according to a Town of Vienna official, stated clearly and unambiguously at the 4/18/2022 Town Council session, this tract I’ll be looking at, it’s not a park, it has never been a park, and those who keep calling it a park are just stirring up trouble.

Because, I repeat, the thing I am going to describe is not, and never has been a duck.  I mean park.  Even if, at some point, it appeared to have walked like one, quacked like one, and so on.

The subtle surrealism of the current Town of Vienna on-line Zoning Map.

Let’s start in the present, then look at some history.  Right here, right now, the Town of Vienna maintains a current(-ish) on-line version of its official Zoning Map.  This Map, in its official form, has significant Legal Implications for this, that, and the other.  But the on-line version is just so citizens can look up the status of a piece of land.

You can find that map by clicking this link to this this Town of Vienna web page.

If you look in the northern part of town, you’d see this.  The various colors represent different types of zoning in Vienna.

But there’s writing underneath the zoning layer.  If you strip off the zoning layer, you’d see this:

To save you the squinting, let me blow up the relevant portion.  The black annotation is mine.

How anyone could possibly have gotten the notion that the area in question was, at one time, called and considered to be a park, I cannot imagine.  If you are somehow so delusional as believe what is literally written on the Town’s own on-line zoning map, just keep repeating to yourself:  Ceci n’est pas un parc.  Because you’ve been told that is isn’t, and never was, a park.  Eventually you will believe it.

In all fairness, that’s not currently zoned as a park.  But “park” zoning is a recent phenomenon in the Town of Vienna. And that’s after the Town quietly decided it wanted to use that land for another purpose.

Instead, that’s called a park — on the Town’s current map — because — see below — that’s how the Town of Vienna classified it for decades, and that’s how it was used for decades.

If you wish to verify that the Town’s map actually says this, I suggest you hop to it.  This may disappear now that TOV officials are aware of it.  I just couldn’t resist pointing out the irony.  For as long as it lasts.

No, wait, scratch that.  That’s inconvenient.  Just keep repeating:  Ceci n’est pas un parc.

And, also to be fair, if zoning is the sole arbiter of park status, then the W&OD Park isn’t a park, either.  That’s the curved arc cutting through the middle of this view of the TOV on-line zoning map.

Apparently, once a zoning category for “park” was established (late 1990’s?), for whatever reason, the Town did not change the zoning on either of those.  I’m sure there’s some reason for it, in both cases.  Possibly the W&OD exists solely as an easement?  Beats me.  All I know is, it’s not zoned as a park.

Four decades of ancient history and the middle ages.

Before the Town adopted a separate zoning category for parks, the only way to tell that the Town considered a parcel of land to be park land was from the official Land Use Map.  That dates back into ancient history.   And then, at some point, in the Town of Vienna’s middle ages, that map became part of the Town’s Comprehensive Plan. Both of these have Significant Legal Implications for allowable land use in the Town of Vienna.

The oldest such map on-line on the Town of Vienna website is the 1957 Town of Vienna proposed land use map.  You can find that by clicking this link for the .pdf on the Town’s website.  The orientation is a bit odd, with Maple Avenue runs left-to-right in the graphic below, but you can probably recognize the shape of the-thing-that-was-never-a-park.   Apparently.  Despite the green color, well … the annotation says it all.

Source:  Town of Vienna 1957 proposed land use map, link given above, annotation in black mine.

If we fast-forward two decades, to the 1979 Town of Vienna official land use map (available by clicking this link to the Town of Vienna website), drawn during the Town’s Crayola Period, you’ll get yet another view of that thing which, despite clearly having been lovingly hand-colored in green crayon, is not and never has been a park.  Like so:

Source:  TOV 1979 official land use map, link cited above, annotation in black is mine.

You’ll have to trust me that every official map between those two tells the same story.  (And that I picked 1979 solely because it sorts to the top if you search for land use map on the TOV website.)

It doesn’t stop with the maps.  If you look at official inventories of park land in the Town of Vienna, in their five-year Comprehensive Plans, this same thing — that never was a park — somehow manages to end up on the list of parks, a counterfeit among all the real and true parks.

To understand the truth, you just have to be able to separate the true parks from the fake parks.  But that’s easy.  Allow me to demonstrate.

Just to pick one, like so, yet another couple of decades later, from the 1995 Town of Vienna comprehensive plan, you can find a tabular view of that thing which never was a park.   It somehow smuggled itself onto the Town’s official inventory of parks, with the word park attached to it.

Source:  Town of Vienna 1995 Comprehensive Plan, annotations mine.

See?  Easy-peasy.  Now, that was never a park.

Conclusion

So, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?   Remember, all I’m doing here is agreeing with the Official Party Line of the Town of Vienna.  How anyone in the Town of Vienna could possibly have gotten the notion that this was ever a park is just beyond me.  This was never a park, therefore all the people in that neighborhood who keep saying that are just a bunch of liars.   Trouble-making liars, at that.  Just keep repeating, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, or parc, or maybe duck, and eventually the you will able to double-think your way into total agreement with the official Town of Vienna position on this matter.

Post G22-014: Plastic tote food dehydrator, version 2: Construction.

 

Edit:  See Post G22-015. Skip the drying racks, just place the food directly on the floor of the tote.  Replace the ventilation “chimney” with a computer fan.  With those changes, two days in the sun produced perfectly dry potato slices.

Last fall I came up with what I hoped would be a cheap and simple solar food dryer capable of drying tomatoes in the humid climate of Virginia. Continue reading Post G22-014: Plastic tote food dehydrator, version 2: Construction.

Post #G22-013: Toward a theological and horticultural theory of parthenocarpic zucchini.

Edit 7/29/2022:  Read post G22-050 first.

Theological and horticultural background

A parthenocarpic plant is one that produces fruit without fertilization, that is, without pollination.  The resulting fruits are sterile and lack fully-developed seeds.

Without getting into the deeper theological aspects, the word derives from the Greek “parthenos”, meaning virgin.   And “carp”,  meaning to complain.  Thus,  the Parthenon is a temple to Athena, who was virgin who had few complaints.

(Technically, carp means seed.  So parthenocarp means “virgin seed”.  I like my version better.)

Of course, now that you know the word, examples crop up everywhere.  The banana is almost surely the most familiar example of a parthenocarpic fruit.  If you’ve ever wondered why bananas are seedless, now you know.  It’s due to their parthenocarpic nature.

Every parthenocarpic fruit is more-or-less seedless, but not every seedless fruit is parthenocarpic.  Some still require fertilization, they just don’t (or rarely) produce fully mature seeds.  Seedless watermelons fall into that category.  Unlike true parthenocarpic plants, seedless watermelons must be pollinated to bear fruit.  The term of art there is “stenospermocarpic”, which seems to be Greek for narrow fertilized seeds.

This is also not to be confused with plants that require pollination, but not pollinators.  Those include plants that are “wind pollinated” (like most cereal grains), and plants that may be “self-pollinating” due to perfect flowers containing both male and female parts, so that simply shaking the flower may sometimes pollinate it.  (This is the source of the electric toothbrush hack for ensuring good tomato pollination.)

Parthenocarpic cucumbers and summer squash.

Greenhouse and poly-tunnel farmers provide the commercial demand for parthenocarpic varieties of common garden plants such as cucumbers and squash.  In those enclosed environments, without bees, those crops would otherwise have to be pollinated by hand.  That’s an obviously labor-intensive step, and may be a practical impossibility for crops grown under low “hoop house” type row covers.

Several different varieties of parthenocarpic cucumbers and squash are available to the U.S. home gardener. I’ve been compiling a list, but I’ve limited it to the small subset of fruits that appear more-or-less identical to their seeded, pollination-requiring cousins.  The subset of interest to me includes:

Cucumbers:  H-19 Little Leaf, Corintino, Dive, Excelsior, Piccolino, Quirk

Squash: Venus, Part(h)enon, Burpee’s Sure Thing, Defender, Duntoo, Dunja, Cavili, Golden Glory.

(Parthenon or Partenon, sure.  But Venus?  Singularly inappropriate.)

As far as I can tell, these are exclusively F1 (first-generation) hybrids.  (Because, seedless, right?)  So if you will only grown heirloom plants, or those from which seeds can be saved, this is not for you.

To determine which varieties to grow I will apply the Tomato Paralysis cure from Post G22-001.  List in hand, I’ll cruise the seed racks at my local garden center and grow whichever of those they carry locally.

As a bonus, I can have my very own guilt-free arena of death.

I ended up here because I had such a dismal time trying to grow cucumbers and summer squash for the last couple of years.

The squash vine borer is present in this area (Virginia Zone 7) for a couple of months.  That is, more-or-less for the entire squash growing season.  If you restrict yourself to relatively short-lived pesticides (I used spinosad), controlling it requires careful spraying at five-to-seven day intervals. See Post #G27, A Treatise on the Squash Vine Borer.

The cucumber beetle was essentially absent from my first year of gardening, and I had a bounteous crop of cukes.  But by my second year I had built up an unstoppable population of them, and got almost no cucumbers whatsoever.  I never found a way to control the cucumber beetle that a) worked and b) was acceptable to me, in terms of environmental impact.

The damned things are like vampires:  All it takes is one bite.  Cucumber beetles spread bacterial wilt.  So it’s not the actual leaf and blossom damage from their feeding that matters.  It’s that any feeding at all infects the plant and kills it.  As far as I can tell, a) once bacterial wilt starts, it’s just a short while until the entire cucumber plant is dead, and b) “wilt-resistant” cucumber varieties aren’t, they end up just as dead as non-resistant varieties.

But if I don’t need pollinators, I can grow summer squash and cucumbers under insect netting/row cover.  In theory, if I can sterilize the soil under the plants (with a neem oil soil drench, perhaps), and keep a bug-proof enclosure over the plants, I can physically prevent those pests from reaching the plants.  And yet have a crop, because barring the bees entry does these plants no harm.

I’ve been hesitant to try this.  Not just because it seems like a lot of work to set up, and a lot of hassle to maintain.  But because of the “vampire” nature of cucumber beetles.  It’s not their feeding that matters directly, it’s the disease they carry.  If a single beetle breaches the defensive perimeter, it’s game over for the cucumbers.  Do I really think I can (e.g.) lift the cover off to pick the ripe fruit and set it back again without letting in a single cucumber beetle?

It seemed to be a fairly non-robust setup.  I understand that insect netting can greatly reduce insect damage.  But because of the nature of the beast — bacterial wilt — I really need to eliminate it entirely.  If the endpoint is going to be a bed of deceased cucumber plants, I know ways to achieve that with a lot less effort.

But if the bees and butterflies can’t get in … then nothing bars me from making that enclosed garden bed an arena of death.  All of those highly-effective (i.e., deadly) pesticides that I normally won’t touch due to bee toxicity are now back on the table.  Subject to some constraints, nothing need stop me from hosing the bed down with (e.g.) pyrethrins on a regular basis (subject to controlling runoff).  This means I can install a secondary, chemical line of defense beneath the primary (physical) barrier.   If need be.

I’m looking for parthenocarpic, not carcinogenic.  So it’s not like any pesticide is fair game.  But cheap, short-lived and effective organics like pyrethrins would seem to be plausible.  Once I screen in the bed, I no longer have to worry about killing off my local bees and butterflies.  More-or-less any bug that gets through the outer defenses is fair game.

Conclusion

Anything worth doing is worth over-doing.  Given how much hassle it’s likely to be to do this at all, I think I’ll go for more, rather than less.

My plan is to dedicate one entire raised bed to parthenocarpic cucumbers and squash.  Roughly 4′ x 16′ or so.

Plausibly the major expense will be for the requisite statue of Athena, so that I may dedicate my parthenocarpic garden appropriately.  And some large-economy-sized Bucket-o’-Death, to ensure that any bug making it past the cover will die ASAP.

Otherwise, for me, this requires no investment in materials.  I already own a more-than-lifetime supply of thin floating row cover.  As well as a pile of loose PVC pipe and fittings, which is to adults what Tinker-Toys are to kids.

A year ago, I didn’t even know that such a thing as parthenocarpic squash existed.  This year, I’m going to grow a bed of it.   I’ll let you know how it turns out.

 

Post #1490: COVID-19, 14 /100K / day, but the Northeast is already starting to peak.

 

The U.S. is now at 14 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 23% in the past seven days.  The weekly growth has been in that neighborhood for a while now.

This second U.S. Omicron wave secondary peak of the U.S. Omicron wave started mostly in the U.S. northeast and mid-Atlantic, with New York being the epicenter.  The interesting development today is that the Northeast has visibly reached an inflection point.  If that’s worst that the latest Omicron variant (BA.2.12.1) can bring on, then this second Omicron wave may go on for a while  yet, but it’s not likely to amount to much.

 

Continue reading Post #1490: COVID-19, 14 /100K / day, but the Northeast is already starting to peak.

Post #1489: Town of Vienna, do you really think DPW routinely featherbeds?

 

Featherbedding (v):  The practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers.

Source:  Wikipedia

This is my usual TLDR posting style.  Just skip to the conclusion if you just want the bottom line of what I think I heard at the 4/18/2022 Town Council session on leaf collection and disposal.  With the understanding that it might be just so much wishful thinking. Continue reading Post #1489: Town of Vienna, do you really think DPW routinely featherbeds?

Post #1488: COVID-19 trend to 4-20-2022, BA.2.12.1 variant-of-concern

 

Still around 13 new cases per 100K per day, still climbing at about 30 percent per week.  The only change today is that now, all the regions of the U.S. are showing increases in cases.

The more interesting news is that CDC is tracking a new sub-strain of Omicron (BA.2.12.1).  The incidence of this new strain appears to explain why New York/New England has had such a rise in cases, while much of the rest of the country has not.

Continue reading Post #1488: COVID-19 trend to 4-20-2022, BA.2.12.1 variant-of-concern

Post G22-011: Canning lids, from shortage to wide-mouth surcharge.

Above:  Used Ball lids.  The one on the left clearly shows the groove left by the canning jar.  The one on the right was boiled for 20 minutes, which flattened that groove considerably.  I picked up this tip boiling lids if you plan to re-use them from the blog A Traditional Life.

One of the many U.S. shortages that occurred during  the COVID-19 pandemic was a shortage of lids for use in home canning.  I’ve posted extensively on that here. Continue reading Post G22-011: Canning lids, from shortage to wide-mouth surcharge.