Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post G24-020: (Not quite the) driest June on record.

 

Today is one of those sultry summer days where Nature just can’t quite seem to make up its mind to rain.  Or not.  It’s overcast, humid, hot, and windless.

Not that a little bit of rain is going to make much difference at this point.  My garden water barrels have been empty for most of June.

June 2024 is going to be the second-driest June on record in this area.  The records, in this case, go back to circa 1960, for Dulles Airport.  Even if it does finally manage to rain, it’s not going to rain enough to change that.

According to NOAA, Dulles Airport (one of the weather stations of record for my area) has received a total of just 0.69 inches of rain, so far, this June:

Source:  Weather Underground, historical weather for Vienna VA

National weather service monthly precipitation data (Google link for Dulles) show the following:

For Washington, DC, the NOAA precipitation record goes back to the 1930s.  There, 2024 is shaping up to be the third-driest June, edged out by 1988 (as above) and by 1940.

Dry, no matter how you squeeze it.

Conclusion

If if have learned nothing else from back-yard vegetable gardening, it’s that I would surely starve if I had to grow my own food. 

So far this year, I’ve had poor yields of peas, potatoes, and garlic.  My 100-square-foot potato bed yielded just under 50 pounds of potatoes, most of which were small (but still edible) potatoes.   (Thus giving me the potato yield assumed in the movie The Martian, see Post G23-016.  If I eat 2000 calories per day, my 100-square-foot potato bed generated enough food for nine days.)  For my garlic, I suspect I’ll be lucky to end up with a half- ounce of usable garlic per square foot, from a roughly 64-square-foot bed.

And now, my little patch of garden is surviving courtesy of my municipal water supply.  Absent that, pretty much everything in the garden would be dead, given the drought.

On the plus side, my investment in surface-laid irrigation is paying off (e.g., Post G22-027).  Right now, I’m using a mix of 1/2″ dripline, 1/2″ drip tape, and some “bubblers”.  To water my garden, I dial in an hour on my hose timer, and walk away.  Beats the heck out of toting watering cans in the heat.

Post G24-019: Photosynthetic efficiency, or finally understanding the back-yard garden trellis.

 

Most plants can’t make use of anywhere near the full intensity of summer sunlight.  Perhaps you knew that, but I didn’t.  Depending on the plant and the conditions, photosynthesis maxes out at as little as one-seventh or -eighth of the intensity of noon-day sunlight (at my latitude). Anything beyond that is wasted. Continue reading Post G24-019: Photosynthetic efficiency, or finally understanding the back-yard garden trellis.

Post G24-018: Where are the bugs?

 

Edit 7/16/2024:  The cucumber beetles finally showed up this morning.  And, we had a few Japanese beetles.  Still no sign of the squash vine borer, though, despite having several varieties of cucurbits in my garden.

Where are the bugs?

I guess I shouldn’t complain, but certain of my garden insect pests are missing.  And — see below — that’s likely due to drought in this area.

It’s now way past time for Japanese beetles (left), cucumber beetles (center), and squash vine borers (right) to show up.  These should all appear when we’ve reached ~1000 growing-degree-days of accumulated warmth for the year.  That occurred in this area almost two weeks ago.  We’ve now accumulated somewhere in excess of 1300 growing-degree-days of warmth.  So these pests are way overdue, no matter how I figure it.

Source:  Cornell University.

And yet, so far, I’ve seen a total of three Japanese beetles.  Cucumber beetles — normally found in my squash blossoms every morning — are nowhere to be seen.  Ditto for the squash vine borer, which should be fairly easy to spot due to its bright orange coloring.

Does that mean they aren’t going to show up this year?  Or are they merely delayed for some reason?

A clue from Purdue U

Nothing heralds summer like the hum of Japanese beetles ravenously descending on a flower garden. Cool weather this spring has slowed emergence of adults from the soil. Heavy spring rains early followed by relatively drier weather in late June, may have trapped adult Japanese beetles under a crusty layer of hardened soil. Due to their large numbers in many parts of Indiana last year, they are very likely just waiting for a good rain to soften the surface, so they can dig themselves into the light of day and on to your flowers. So, if we get a little more rain by the time this article comes out, we are likely to be awash in adult beetles.

Source:  Purdue University landscaper report, emphasis mine.

The paragraph above was for 2022, for Indiana.

But it describes 2024 in Virginia well.  This spring was characterized by plenty of rain, followed by drought that kicked in just as we were approaching 1000 degree-days of warmth.

For Japanese beetles, at least, the bottom line is that they have probably been delayed by the drought.  For the other two, by analogy, it’s plausible that they, too, have been delayed by crusty topsoil resulting from weeks of no rain.

The bottom line is that I can’t count on having dodged these pests for the year.  Likely they are just waiting for enough rain to soften the topsoil, so they can dig themselves up into the light of day.

We had a welcome half-inch of rain last night.  Perhaps I’ll be seeing these old friends soon.

 

Post #1982: Will the real political donation limit please stand up?

 

 

It has reached the point where half of my incoming emails are spam from the Biden campaign. 

These emails are all solicitations for donations.  Given that this is all coming from the same source, you’d think they could figure out a way to limit it to one-a-day, or some such.  With this volume, they have crossed the line between persistent reminders and simply being annoying.

In any case, today it finally dawned on me that I could unsubscribe.  This is an odd thing to do, given that I never subscribed to anything in the first place.  But, semantics aside, as long as it gets them to stop, that’ll do.

The point of this is that I am baffled by Federal campaign finance limits.  Every time I hear about the latest multi-million-dollar fund raiser by either candidate, I keep coming back to what I thought the law said, regarding contribution limits:  $3,300 per person, per candidate, per election.  Like so:

Source:  FEC.

Normally, I’d just chalk that up to the norm for modern America, which is that there are no binding rules for the rich, only for the little people.  So, of course candidates can hold $100K/plate fund-raising dinners, for their campaigns.  At the same time that hoi polloi are limited, by law, to $3,300, if donated to to a candidate’s campaign.

I would do that, except that among my emails from the Biden campaign is a request to donate $5K. Like so, from my in-box:

How on earth can the Biden campaign solicit a donation for $5K, from a mere commoner like myself, when the legal limit on donations to a political campaign, for an election, is $3,300?

I realize there are no binding limits on what the wealthy can spend to try to influence politics.  But if there are no real limits to what the average Joe or Jane can spend, I sure wish they’d revise the law to make that clear.  The current situation — a $3,300 limit which just about everyone seems to be able to avoid, one way or the other — turns Federal campaign spending limits into more of a joke than they already are.

 

Post G24-017: First Japanese beetle and first red tomato. A first.

 

The Japanese beetle and the squash vine borer both show up somewhere around 1000 growing-degree-days into the year.

Source:  Cornell University.

This year being pretty close to average, temperature-wise, the Japanese beetles are right on time.  I saw my first one this afternoon.  Last year’s version of this post occurred on June 20.  The year before that, June 18.

It’s not so much that the Japanese beetles do a lot of damage in my garden.  It’s that, around here, they are easy to spot, and their appearance means that many other pestiferous bugs will soon be arriving.  Relatively pest-free gardening is over for the year.

While Japanese beetles arrive like clockwork, not so the tomatoes.  Every year, I plant some short-season/cold-tolerant tomatoes, including Burpee’s aptly-named Fourth of July.  And, owing to the warm weather, and maybe an early start indoors, for the first time ever, I have my first red tomato on the same day as my first Japanese beetle.  I believe this year’s winning variety is Glacier.

x

This early ripening is kind of a good-news, bad-news joke.  Good news is, it’s been so warm that the early-season tomatoes are extra early.  (E.g., a neighbor of mine has had ripe cherry tomatoes for about two weeks now.)  The bad news is that it’s been so hot, we’re already having nigh-time lows in the 70’s F, which is too warm for tomatoes to begin the ripening process.  So I’m guessing that I may get a few ripe tomatoes soon, but the bulk of what’s growing is going to remain green until temperatures cool off a bit.

 

Post #1981: Have you ever wondered why fat guys hang their gut over their belt?

 

It is not from being too cheap to buy a new belt.  In most cases.

In reality, a guy with a beer gut has no choice.  Belts seek the geodesic, that is, the path of least distance.  In this case, the path is around your midsection at the belt line.  If you have big gut, and buckle your belt at your navel, it’ll sag.  Maybe not immediately, but soon.

 

Left to its own devices, your belt ends up below your gut, at your personal geodesic. Continue reading Post #1981: Have you ever wondered why fat guys hang their gut over their belt?

Post #1979: Catching up with a few things.

 

Day trips:  Great Falls, Maryland and Sky Meadows, VA.

Sky Meadows is one of our under-appreciated Virginia State Parks.  The main hike at Sky Meadows (above) is a seemingly-easy half-mile walk up a hillside meadow with nice views.  It’s only a half-mile to the top, but that’s at a constant 18% grade. 

We (pant) took many (pant) pauses to (pant) admire the view.  On a clear day (e.g., without forest fire smoke), you can see the tall buildings at Reston, VA, roughly 50 miles away.

Roses are red, boysenberries are purple.

My little patch of berries is doing well.  Black raspberries have peaked.  Blackberries (above) are doing OK.  Currants and gooseberries are about done.  Wineberries are still to come.

My boysenberries are now ripening.  Three years ago I put in a few boysenberry plants.  I did this for the novelty, as I can’t recall ever having seen boysenberries for sale in this area (Virginia).  Now, having grown some, I understand why.  Technically, they are cane fruits.  In some climates, they may in fact produce stout canes.  But in my yard, they are low, creeping, sprawling plants.  They are hard to grow, in that it’s all-but-impossible to weed around them.  They’re a pain to pick, as the berries are borne just a few inches off the ground.

A ripe boysenberry looks like a purple blackberry, as shown above.   When less than totally and fully ripe, boysenberries and blackberries taste about the same to me.  But fully ripe, each berry yields a few seconds of its own distinct flavor.  Boysenberries are different from blackberries, but I would not say that a fully-ripe boysenberry is better than a fully-ripe blackberry.  And blackberries are vastly easier to grow, in my climate.

In both cases, once the fruit is fully ripe, it’s very soft and won’t travel.  Near as I can tell, the only way to taste a fully-ripe blackberry is to grow it.  And around here, the only way to taste a fresh boysenberry, at all, is to grow it.

Bike rehab success.

I must have made the right choices in rehabbing my wife’s BikeE recumbent bike (Post #1978 and earlier).  This, because she was gadding about town, on that bike, for a couple of hours today.  There’s the bike, on the W&OD trail this morning.

My sole useful advice was to mind her coccyx, in the sense that a long bike ride on a recumbent can leave you with a sore butt, particularly if you haven’t done any riding in a while.

This bike rehab project remains unfinished.  I managed to get the bike into ride-able condition, but I have been unable to get the three-speed rear hub and other bearings serviced.  My local bike shop took on the task, then declined to work on the bike due to a damaged shock mount.  (Apparently my 15-year-old repair of that mount left them unimpressed.)

This is the problem with riding what is, in effect, an antique.  I need to find another bike shop in my area that can rebuild a Sachs 3×7 rear hub.  That’s a bit of a trick, given that every part for those has been out of production for a couple of decades.

Poor garlic yield

This year marks my fourth attempt at growing garlic in my back yard garden.  This year I bought seed garlic (i.e., big heads with big cloves) from a local grower, made sure the soil had adequate nutrients including sulfur, and generally I Did What They Told Me To Do.  Including planting after our nominal first frost date in the fall.

Once again, my dreams of growing garlic heads the size of my fist are unrealized.  In fact, this is shaping up to be my fourth failure at growing garlic.  As with my prior attempts, my heads of garlic are tiny.  About half of my garlic is still in the ground, but it’s clear that most or all of my garlic heads will be on order of 1.5″ diameter or so.  Almost but not quite unusable.

At this point, I’ve tried using different garlic varieties, planting times, backyard locations, and soil amendments and fertilizers.  But I always get the same result.

I suspect that I just don’t have enough sunlight to grow full-sized garlic.  My garlic bed gets about 5 hours of direct sunlight a day.  Growing guides variously recommend “at least six hours”, and in some cases, eight-to-ten hours of direct sunlight per day.  Garlic doesn’t have a whole lot of leaf area, and as a consequence, I’m guessing it really needs more direct sunlight than is available in my back yard.

Plant propagation:  Snip-and-dip success, air layering fail.

Seven weeks ago, I started to propagate some schip (skip) laurels by two methods:  Air-layering, and snip-and-dip (Post #1967).

The snip-and-dip plants are thriving, as shown above.  Seven weeks ago, these were green branch tips that I snipped off, dipped in rooting hormone, stuck in wet potting soil, then kept moist and out of direct sunlight.  These cuttings are obviously thriving.

Air layering skip laurels, by contrast, has been a total dud (above).  The internet told me I’d have a big ball of roots at the end of that cutting after just four weeks.  After four weeks, I had nothing.  After seven weeks, there are some little bumps on the bark that might, eventually, become roots.  My guess is that for a schip (skip) laurel, I’d have to tend to that air-layered branch all summer to have any hope of having a root ball form.  Snip-and-dip is a lot easier and in this case a lot more effective.

Sketchy no more.

The scene on the left is a particularly sketchy bit of sidewalk in my neighborhood, as of March 2024 (Post #1950).  The scene on the right is the same stretch of sidewalk, now.  Presumably, in the interim, the Town of Vienna Department of Public Works has been at work.

That was good to see, given that the Town, in Its infinite wisdom, has decided to tear up my street next year.  This, due to free money from Covid. 

The plan is to bury the roadside swales that have been there for half a century, widen the street, and almost manage to convert it into just another cookie-cutter suburban street.  The point of which is to provide “a sidewalk” on my street.  In this case, for reasons only apparent to DPW, the sidewalk will cross the street mid-block.  Thus, when they are done, anyone wishing to walk down my block, on the sidewalk, will be required to cross the street in front of my house.

My bet is that nobody is going to use the sidewalk beyond that ridiculous crossing.  Other than the geezers in the 100+ bed assisted living facility that the town permitted at the end of the block.

Which, although nobody will admit it, is why this one-block-long sidewalk has to cross the street mid-block.  Because it’s not for residents on the block to use, it’s for benefit of the commercial establishment at the end of the block.  (The sidewalk crosses the street in order to attach to the sidewalk directly adjacent to the assisted living facility).

But hey, if somebody else is paying for it, and you are in a use-it-or-lose-it situation, the more money it wastes, the better.

Anyway, kudos to the Town for putting the this particularly run-down bit of local sidewalk back into good repair.

I am not looking forward to next year’s makeover of my street.  But the Town owns the right-of-way, and they can do pretty much whatever they damn well please with it.  Which, apparently, is pretty much the Town’s view of the issue, as well.

Cultivating my first deadly toxic plant.

To the casual observer, that looks like a bunch of un-ripe cherry tomatoes.  Those are actually potato fruit, what you get if you allow your potatoes to flower.  These are quite toxic due to their high solanine content.

 

 

Post #1978: Bike E Rehab, part 2

In which I construct a pannier rack for the back of the bike.  Only after which did I find out that this bike is dead.  Or maybe not.

Rear pannier mount for the BikeE

My wife and I own two BikeE’s.  These are semi-recumbent bikes that were popular (ish) about 25 years ago.

As part of this rehab process (Post #1976), I removed the wire baskets from both bikes, along with their under-seat mounts.  They never worked well.  And after a couple of decades, the rust adds nothing to their charm.

To replace those, on my BikeE, I mounted a far easier-to-use (and better-looking) set of cloth panniers across the tail of the bike frame.  As shown above.  (The product can be seen at this link, from Amazon.)

I bought a similar set for my wife’s BikeE.  Sort of a get-out-of-rehab present.  (Her bike is currently at the bike shop, for an overhaul of the 3-speed rear hub and other items.)

To hang those new cloth panniers on her bike, I need a rear rack.  Which basically no longer exists, for the BikeE.  Unobtainium, or close enough to it.

So I made one, like so:

This BikeE rear rack slides onto the aluminum-extrusion frame, behind the seat, to form a 6″ x 13″ shelf.  Tightening the bolts clamps it firmly to the frame.  (For those in-the-know, I may yet have to drill a clearance hole or two for the seat-limit rivet that’s part of the frame.)

This serves as the mount for the cloth panniers.  The panniers attach to this rear rack via Velcro straps fed through the polished metal strap-eyes screwed to the corners.

To keep the panniers off the rear wheel, I wove a 48″ bungee cord (green, above) between the rear arm of the bike and the rack.  This forms an elastic “V” on both sides.  The panniers rest against, and Velcro to, this “V”, instead of rubbing the rear tire.  In addition, the panniers themselves have a stiff back, as if from a thin sheet of plywood, which helps to keep them from the back tire.

Panniers in this position can’t stably hold as much weight as panniers mounted under the front seat.  But rear-mounted panniers on this bike are adequate for (e.g.) a bag of groceries.  And that’s about all I intend to use them for.

Here’s the rack, mounted and strung with a bungee.  And then in final form, with the panniers installed.

Addendum:  Preferred bungee routing shown below left, in torquoise.  In hindsight, the bungee is more effective at keeping the panniers away from the rear wheel when it is routed as shown below.  Just drill a couple of holes in the main plate to stick the metal bungee ends into, and pass the middle of the bungee around the front of the plastic rack.

(As a reminder, in the picture below, a shock absorber allows the gray swing arm and tire to move up-and-down relative to the blue frame/white rack.  That’s why any connection between the two must be flexible, and is among the many reasons why a normal bike rear rack will not work in this situation.)

Details of construction:  I made mine out of a 1/2″ thick piece of HDPE board, only because I had that sitting around.  It’s more-or-less a half-inch thick plastic cutting board.  Plywood would probably have been lighter. 

The top board is 6″ x  13″, sized to match the particular panniers I bought, plus an inch of length for mounting the strap eyes to either end of the board. 

Beneath that to board are two “rails”, each consisting of a “clamp” and a “spacer”.  The larger piece that clamps onto the bike is 1.5″ wide, and is the full 1/2″ thickness of the material I’m using.  The smaller “spacer” piece is about 3/4″ wide, and has been thinned down to about 5/16″ thickness, so that it is exactly as thick as the lip on the aluminum bike frame.   To keep them together, the spacer has been screwed to the clamp piece in a couple of places.

To assemble, mark lines on the top that are 1.25″ away from the center of the bicycle.  Drill them out to accept your hardware (1/4-20 bolts, in my case).  Put the bolts through the top, and place that on top of the bike frame by straddling the frame with those bolts.  Center the plastic top on the bike frame and clamp it down so that it can’t move.

Remove the bolts, hold one rail under the top, tight against the aluminum frame, and clamp that rail assembly to the bike rack top.  Then drill down through the empty bolt holes, into the immobilized rail assembly.  Run the bolts through top and rail on that side, loosely put on the nuts.  Do the same for the other side.

Tighten the bolts/nuts until the bike rack is clamped firmly to the aluminum bike frame.  For final assembly, it’s probably not a bad idea to use lockwashers, Locktite, doubling up the nuts, or similar, to keep the nuts from backing off the bolts.

It works, in the sense that I clamped it to my bike frame, and I couldn’t budge it.  I’m sure it’ll be adequate to handle the stress of 20 pounds of groceries in the panniers.

Not shown:  Cut a couple of slots in the end so you can route the bungee cord efficiently, as discussed above.  Any connection between the frame and the rear swing arm has to be flexible, because the swing arm/shock move relative to the frame, as the bike goes over bumps.  Hence the bungee cord.

I would put the cart before the horse, but the horse is dead.

The irony here is that about 30 minutes after I finished the above, I got an email from my local bike shop.  Said email telling me that the bike is dead.   My wife’s BikeE has a crack in the frame, where the suspension is attached.  And because of that, my local bike shop will not do any repairs on this bike.

And yet, there has been a crack in that location for a couple of decades or so.  The metal of the shock mount failed after just a few years.  When BikeE wouldn’t do anything about it, I made my own repair with a piece of angle iron and a U-bolt.  And continued to use the bike.  This repair transmits the stress from the shock to the frame, effectively bypassing the shock mounting.

The upshot is that tomorrow, I need to clarify what the reality of the putative death of my wife’s BikeE is.

Are we talking about the failure that occurred 20 years ago,  and the fix that has held up in the interim?  Or is this some new failure that I did not notice, despite turning the bike every-which-way as I (e.g.) changed tires and brakes, and lubed cables?

Is the bike unsafe for use, in the opinion of the repair guy? 

Or is this just a liability issue, same as you hear from car repair operations on YouTube.  Simply as a matter of corporate policy, do they not work on bikes with frame damage, for fear that something will go wrong down the road, and they would be held liable.

That’s one of those questions that I’m not sure I can get a straight answer to.  If the shop is afraid of the liability of working on a bike with frame damage, then they aren’t going to take on the liability of telling me the bike is OK to use.  So I’m not sure it’s even worth asking.

Oddly, if I’d stuck to the original plan, none of this would have come up.  At first, the plan was just to bring them the rear wheel for rebuild.  (In which case, this issue would never have arisen, because they’d never see the bike frame.)  I wonder if they’ll still rebuild the wheel/hub if I ask them to, as long as I take the rear wheel off the offending frame myself?

 

Conclusion:  The second greatest waste of time in the U.S.A. …

… is doing something really well, that doesn’t need to be done at all.

In effect, I may have just made that fancy new saddle for a dead horse.

Or maybe not.  If the issue is the decades-old damage, I think we’ll keep using the bike.  If the issue is something new, then I’m not sure what happens next.

Addendum, the next day:  It’s only temporary, unless it works.  The bike mechanic did, indeed, point to the nearly-20-year-old shock mount failure as the reason the bike was un-rideable.  He either missed (or dismissed) my 20-year-old expedient repair, using a U-bolt and a chunk of angle iron to transfer force from the bottom of the shock to the frame, effectively bypassing the shock mount.  Near as I can tell, a U-bolt of that size should have a breaking load somewhere around a ton, and so is adequate to support a rider.  

In any case, my temporary repair held up through years of riding, and nothing about it has changed.  I guess I proceed by going elsewhere to get the rear hub rebuilt.