Category: Analysis

Anything that I have tested empirically, or explain with detailed calculations, or just generally bother to get all the facts straight.

Post G23-067: Garlic and soil sulfur.

 

I’m going to plant some garlic soon.

For that, I figured I’d add sulfur to my garden soil.  Everybody says that’s a good idea.  And if it says it on the Internet, it has to be true, right?

Yeah, well, there’s a little more nuance to the story.  Near as I can tell:

  1. Sulfur only helps if your soil is truly sulfur-deficient.   I.e., you can’t create “super-garlic” by loading your soil with sulfur.
  2. As a home gardener, you have no good way to tell whether or not your soil is sulfur-deficient.
  3. So a modest addition of sulfur to your garlic bed is a form of cheap (and mostly harmless) insurance against growing “bland garlic”.

With soil sulfur, as long as you meet the minimums that garlic requires, any excess is wasted.  You just have no easy way to know what that minimum is.

Soil sulfur and garlic flavor, an interpretation of the scholarly literature.

Above:  The heartbreak of bland garlic.

Garlic is about 0.5% by weight sulfur (reference).  Give or take.  Allicin is the main chemical that gives garlic pungency when cut or crushed (reference).   About 40% of the weight of the allicin in garlic is sulfur (calculated from this reference).  So, for sure, you need sulfur to make garlic pungent.

Gardening folklore says that garlic grown in sulfur-deficient soil will be bland.  Presumably that’s due to reduced alliin/allicin content.  Given the chemical composition of allicin, that makes some sense.

While this is frequently repeated on the internet, it’s hard to demonstrate empirically.  Research results appear mixed.  Some research shows that garlic allicin content rises strongly with application of sulfur.  Some research shows no effect at all.

A plausible explanation offered for these mixed results is that most soil already has adequate sulfur for garlic cultivation, and that additions beyond the level have no effect.  Interestingly, the sole study of hydroponically-grown garlic showed a strong positive relationship between sulfur provided to the plant, and allicin content of the finished garlic (contrast Table 1 and Figure 3 of this reference).  If I’ve interpreted those findings correctly, then you can’t produce super-garlic by loading your soil with sulfur.  But you can produce bland garlic if your soil is truly sulfur deficient.

In this case, then, there’s probably some truth to this bit of gardening folklore.  Sulfur soil amendments don’t appear to be a path to growing extra-garlicy garlic.    Instead, sulfur soil amendments are more like insurance against a poor crop of garlic.

Fun factoids about garlic and sulfur

Weird fact #1:  Once upon a time, rain provided all the sulfur you needed.   Eastern U.S. farmers didn’t used to have to worry about having adequate soil sulfur.  Acid rain saw to that.  Go back a few decades, and rain falling through the ambient air pollution — including sulfur dioxide — deposited more than adequate sulfur annually.

Weird fact #2:  Rainfall now removes sulfur from the soil.  Plants can absorb sulfur once it forms sulfate, that is, a mineral salt containing sulfur.  These sulfates are typically so water-soluble that they wash out of well-watered soils.  And now that we’ve cleaned up most of our acid rain problem, rain water leaches sulfur out of the soil, instead of providing it to the soil.

This same phenomenon leads to:

Weird fact #3:  Hilltops tend to have sulfur-deficient soil.  It gets leached out as rain runs through and out of the hilltop soil.  More generally, sulfur levels can vary considerably within a given farm plot, both horizontally (from area to area) and vertically (within the soil profile).  All those phenomena are driven by the high water-solubility of sulfates, and so, by the typical flow of water in a field.  The upshot of that is that a home gardener, taking a soil sample, and getting a reading on sulfur, may not know much about the level of sulfur in the garden as a whole.

Weird fact #4:  Plants can’t use pure sulfur, but you can buy and apply pure sulfur to your soil.  Plants can only absorb the sulfur after it’s converted to sulfate, that is, a metallic salt of sulfur.  That conversion is done mostly by the action of soil bacteria.  In effect, elemental sulfur is slow-release sulfur, with the rate of release being controlled by the rate of bacterial action, which depends on size of the sulfur particles, soil temperature, moisture, and acidity.

Weird fact #5:  There’s no easy test for it in your soil.  I looked up the for-real tests for sulfur levels in the soil, and it took me right back to college chemistry classes.  Use of carefully measured reagents, long periods of agitation, followed by careful (drop-by-drop) titration to get a quantitative estimate, and so on.

Few soil tests available to the home gardener measure sulfur.  On Amazon, I found just two options, and both involved mailing a soil sample to a laboratory.For example, this test kit, $30 on Amazon, will show you the nutrient levels — including the sulfur level — in one soil sample.  As will this $100 soil test kit.  Both are mail-in kits, with the testing provided by some centralized lab.

Here, in Fairfax County, the soil tests provided via Virginia Tech’s extension service do not measure sulfur (per this listing on the Fairfax County website).  I don’t know whether that’s because sulfur isn’t an issue in the heavy clay soils of Virginia, or whether it just rarely matters to the home gardener.

In fact, there’s an argument that there’s no one, universal good test for the bio-availability of sulfur in the soil.  (That’s my take on this discussion.)  It seems plausible that even if you “test your soil for sulfur”, the results will be a poor guide to the amount of sulfur available to plants grown in that soil.

The upshot is that you, as a home gardener, can throw 30 bucks at it, and get a number back, for the amount of sulfur in your soil.  Whether or not that number actually tells you anything useful is debatable.

Weird fact #6:  Mostly harmless?.  Apparently you need little enough of it, for most plants, that it’s often applied pro-actively, without testing, in commercial farming.  And it doesn’t lead to (e.g.) algae blooms when it runs off with the storm water, the way nitrogen and phosphorus do.

Weird fact #7:  If you add organic matter to your soil on a routine basis (e.g., compost, mulch, etc.), you probably have adequate sulfur for most of the plants you would care to grow.  That seemed to be almost regardless of the exact organic matter that you are adding.  In any case, that’s the way I interpret the gist of what I’ve been reading.

Bonus fact:  The allicin in freshly-cut garlic has such strong antibiotic properties that it earned the nickname “Russian penicillin”, for its use in expedient wound dressings, by the Russian army, in WWII.

My upshot:  Gardening via Swedish death cleaning.

When I run all that through the blender, my take on it is that the home gardener is mostly flying blind on this one.  You can pay for a one-shot, mail in soil test that will show you the sulfur level in one soil sample.  It’s not clear that’s going to tell you what you really need to know about the sulfur in your garden, generally.

Instead, you might add some sulfur to your soil, when growing garlic, just in case.  Just in case your soil is so deficient in sulfur that it will reduce the quality of the resulting garlic.

As far as I can tell, it’s pretty hard to over-sulfur you soil, at the levels we’re talking about.  For my 8’x4′ bed of garlic, a bumper crop of garlic would take up about 32 grams of sulfur.  Replacing that, at 2 grams per cubic centimeter, would require just about one tablespoon of pure powdered sulfur. 

My bottom line is that I’m going to rely on Espoma Holly-Tone as the sulfur source for my garlic.  (See prior post).  That decision is based on the time-tested gardening rule of  “I already own a big bag of it.”  I can’t buy less than a one-pound bag of elemental sulfur.  At the rate I would use it, that’s way more than a lifetime supply of it.  I’d end up with yet another bag of gardening stuff, sitting on the shelf.  As I am currently in a round of Swedish death cleaning, that’s not the direction I want to take.

So Espoma Holly-Tone it is.

Ancient folklore instructs me to pour an uninterrupted circle of Holly-Tone around the perimeter of the garden bed, moving widdershins.  This both ensures a good crop and keeps vampires out.  It’s 5% sulfur, and, best guess, a scant three cups (1.5 pound) of it, on a 4’x8′ bed, should provide the 32 grams of sulfur I might plausibly need for complete garlic and vampire insurance.

Photos are from Gencraft.com and Freepik.com AIs.

Post G23-066: A little fertilizer calculation, or why I #leavetheleaves.

 

It takes a surprisingly small depth of fall leaf litter to provide an adequate supply some key nutrients for your vegetable garden.  Leaves-as-fertilizer is just another reason to #leavetheleaves.

 

A time to plant garlic, and a time to refrain from planting garlic.

It may be difficult to believe, but some versions of the Bible actually omit that line from Ecclesiastes 3.1-11.

I’m getting ready to plant a 4′ x 8′ area with hard-neck garlic, for harvest next year.  Plant the cloves in the fall, once the soil is good and cold, and, with any luck, they’ll come up next spring and give you nice big heads of garlic by mid-summer.  I wouldn’t know, because, typically, I plant them too early, by contrast, and they’ll sprout now.  They may survive into next year, but I can tell you from experience, the result will be puny, unusable heads of garlic.

(Weird garlic fact:  If you plant bigger cloves, of a given variety, you’ll harvest  bigger heads of garlic.  I’ve seen this result replicated enough times that I’m fairly certain it’s true. E.g., Red Gardens stumbled across this effect, but you can find it in many scholarly sources as well.  This is arguably the only reason not to plant grocery-store garlic.  As it turns out, “culinary grade” garlic, found in the grocery store, has smaller cloves than the garlic reserved to become “garlic seed”.)

Two options for Nitrogen fertilizer

The lowest recommended fertilizer application I found, for commercial garlic growing, was from Cornell University.  Their most recent study said that that 50 pounds of nitrogen per acre would be sufficient, and that yields did not increase if you added more than that.  Essentially, you should expect your garlic to pull that much nitrogen out of the soil, so that’s what you need to replace.

I could supply this using 30-0-0- lawn fertilizer.  To be clear, I think that putting lawn fertilizer on your lawn is crazy and environmentally destructive.  But it’s a good source of nitrogen. I own a 10-pound bag of it.  I’ve owned that particular bag for maybe a couple of decades now.

To supply the complete nitrogen needs of by 4’x8′ garlic bed, I would need four level tablespoons of lawn fertilizer.  Like so:

If nothing else, this shows you why you shouldn’t just wing it, when it comes to concentrated chemical fertilizers.  You only need trace amounts.  That’s such a small quantity of material that it would be difficult to spread that evenly over the bed.

But, in fact, I’m going to supply this using fallen leaves.  Because a) why not, and b) the leaves serve as both mulch (before they decompose) and fertilizer (after they decompose).

How deeply must I bury that bed in fallen leaves, to supply all the nitrogen the garlic requires?  Take a guess:

  1. An impractically large layer (e.g. feet of depth).
  2. An inconveniently large layer (e.g., one foot of depth).
  3. A few inches of leaves.

The answer is C, a few inches.  In this exact calculation, the answer is that about half-an-inch of fallen leaves should be adequate. Surprise.  That’s based on leaf litter containing about 1% nitrogen by weight, as shown here.

To double-check that, I can start from an alternative data source. At a mean of 10 grams of nitrogen per kilogram of leaves, I would need about 1.5 kilograms, or maybe 3.5 pounds of leaves, to supply the required nitrogen.  Same as the calculation above.

Source:  American Journal of Horticultural Science.

Unlike the water-soluble lawn fertilizer, where excess will run off with the rainfall, it’s probably close to harmless to err on the upside with leaves.  Some sources suggest fertilizing at up to three times the rate recommended by Cornell.  And, to be sure, the actual N content of my particular leaves might be less than average.  And maybe there’s some catch here, such as the N in fallen leaves being less readily available than the N in commercial fertilizer.  So, in theory, if I wanted some insurance, I could pile (say) three inches of leaves on that garden bed let them rot over the winter.

The term of art for this — for letting a relatively thin layer of leaves rot over a large area — is sheet composting.  By calculation, I can easily supply the required nitrogen for my garlic by sheet composting my fallen tree leaves on that bed.

In fact, fall leaf litter contains so much nutrient, in total, that in well-watered climates, centralized leaf collection reduces nutrient runoff into the surrounding surface water.  So says the USGS, in this piece.  I count that as the sole potential environmental benefit of centralized leaf collection.

During the growing season, it’s better to compost the leaves first, then add that to the bed.  The act of breaking down the leaves temporarily draws nitrogen out of the very top layer of the soil (explained per this reference).  But by the time the garlic needs nitrogen in the spring and summer, that thin layer of leaves will have already broken down.

Like sulfur for garlic?

Finally, this year, I’m going to give my garlic a little sulfur.  If I can figure out how to do it.

It seems like a not-unreasonable thing to do.

First, sulfur is a key component of allicin, the chemical that makes garlic, garlic.  Some research suggests that sulfur-deficient soil results in garlic with less allicin, which I think has to mean, less garlic-y.  And, possibly, smaller bulbs, to boot.  I see no point in growing small, bland garlic bulbs.

For sure, garlic withdraws sulfur from the soil.  Whether or not the soil is actually deficient, it seems prudent to put the expected amount of the sulfur withdrawal into the soil head of time.

By my estimate, if all goes well, I’ll need to replace about a gram of sulfur per square foot of garlic bed.  Or, in this case, 32 grams of sulfur, just bit over an ounce of weight, in the 4’x8′ bed I’m planning to use. That’s assuming I get lots of garlic out of this patch, two 100-gram bulbs per square foot.  More realistically, this is an upper bound on what I need.

The hard number is that garlic is about 0.5 percent sulfur, by weight (this reference).  The naive assumption is that I can grow 6400 grams of garlic in 32 square feet of bed.  (Then 0.5% of 6400 = 32 grams).  That seems to ballpark with other published estimates.

Can I do this with Espoma Holly-Tone?  Maybe.

Source:  Espoma.com, used without permission.

Turns out, I own a big, almost-unused bag of Espoma Holly Tone.  Why, I cannot recall.

Which probably explains why the full bag is still here.  It’s a result of a reverse-Darwinism, survival-of-the-un-fittest process.  If the duds are allowed to linger, they eventually dominate fill your storage space, for the simple reason that they don’t get used.  Likely, whatever I bought this for, long ago, did not pan out.

Will it work here, to give me my 32 grams of sulfur?  Because I sure won’t mind using some of that up. To get 32 grams of sulfur, I need about a pound and a half of Espoma Holly Tone.

That seems like a lot, and that’s a problem.  If I do that, I add too much nitrogen.  The Espoma mix is 4% N.  When I do the math, that 1.5 pounds of Espoma H-T- provides 0.06 pounds of N, or about twice what the Cornell-derived estimate suggests that the garlic needs.

Given that I am going to cover this bed in fall leaves, I may have to buy something else for sulfur.  Looks like the Espoma H-T can provide enough sulfur, but it brings along too much N (etc.) that I’d rather provide by sheet-composting leaves.

Maybe a reduced amount is called for.  Maybe some different product entirely.  We’ll see.  There are still things about sulfur as a soil amendment that I clearly do not yet grasp.

Finally, I have to find a cheap test for soil sulfur, if such exists.  For now, I’m still feeling my way through the whole sulfur-for-garlic thing.

Conclusion.

Am I going to rake my leaves to the curb this year, for vacuum pickup by the Town of Vienna.  No.

Do I need to add chemical fertilizers to my spring garden?  No.

Are those flip sides of the same coin?  Yes.

Add sulfur to garlic bed?  Not clear yet.

Post #1863: Overthinking winter composting.

 

Yeah, no joke, that’s what this one is about.

After N pages of thinking it through, my solution is to toss two layers of clear plastic over my tumbling composter (below), and hope it buys me a few weeks.

As I have learned from Watch Wes Work, it’s only temporary, unless it works.

It’s a long and winding road, to end up with that.  But sometimes you have to assess the options, even if nothing new jumps out at you.

With my redneck double-glazing, the plastic surface of the composter reached about 110F, on a roughly 70F day.  There’s no way that’s going to get me through the winter.  But maybe it gives me some time to think about it.

Background

Source:  Amazon.

I use the composter shown above.

It has two weird features.

First, it’s made in Canada. 

Second, it doesn’t work in cold weather.  At all.

I guess that’s why they send them down here, eh?

Turns out , wintertime composting is a problem for anyone who composts small amounts of material, in a colder climate.  The heat given off by decomposition isn’t enough to keep the compost warm.  Composting grinds to a halt as temperatures fall.

My dad claimed that when he was a kid, dairy farmers in upstate New York would mound up cow manure around their barns for winter.  This was not for the aesthetics of it.  Instead, this was done to take advantage of the heat generated by large volumes of rotting manure.

In hindsight, that was a lot funnier the way my dad told it.

For two decades now, I’ve stopped composting kitchen scraps each fall, and resumed in the spring.  Today it occurred to me … instead of just putting up with it, I should … maybe look for a solution?

What a radical thought.

What’s that garbage worth to you?

Generically, the problem has two parts:  Get rid of your kitchen scraps responsibly, and produce desirable compost for the garden.

Here’s the thing:  I want the compost.  In my experience, compost is nature’s Miracle-Gro(r).  Or maybe vice-versa.  It’s good for what ails a plant, and then some.  It’s inexplicably helpful.  Gardening black magic.

Otherwise, merely disposing of kitchen scraps responsibly is not an issue for me.  I think.  Elsewhere in the U.S., those scraps might be landfilled, at which point their anaerobic decomposition would generate methane.  If vented to the atmosphere, that’s a bad thing.  By contrast, Fairfax County VA incinerates its garbage, generates electricity from that, recovers metals as possible, then landfills the ashes. Here, food waste in the household garbage is just more biomass fuel for the electrical grid.

There’s some minor benefit in recovering the plant nutrients in those kitchen scraps.  But not much.  You only need trace amounts of those in the garden, and until the world runs out, those nutrients are cheap.  At present, looks like 10-10-10 fertilizer (10% (by weight?) each of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus) runs about a dollar a pound, retail.  I’m finally getting to the bottom of the 10-pound bag of that stuff that I bought fifteen years ago. 

Should I fry in Hell for all eternity on account of that?  I’m thinking, probably not, but it’s debatable.  Conservation of mass says that N, P, and K went somewhere.  If not stored in the soil in my yard, or gone down the sewer pipes, they’ve run off to the Chesapeake.  But is that a large, medium, or small contribution of those nutrients, on a per-person-year basis?  No clue.

Plenty of ways to get rid of household kitchen waste

If it were just a matter of getting rid of kitchen waste, without putting it in the household garbage, I have numerous free and paid disposal options in my area.  Practically speaking, these would require me to store my kitchen scraps for a week at a time. But no longer than that.

Reportedly (my wife did the homework here): In Fairfax County, VA, I have at least these following locations for dropping off my kitchen compostables, for free.  This includes animal products and plate waste, items you would not typically compost at home.

  • The Fairfax County I-66 and I-95 transfer stations/landfills (documented, here).
  • plus all ten farmers’ markets run by Fairfax County (same document).
  • Selected Mom’s Organic Markets (Moms) (documented, here)
  • Whole Foods in Vienna (solely an internet rumor, not documented).

In addition, there’s the option of weekly composting home pickup for  $360/year.  Around here, one may subscribe to a privately-run once-a-week compost pickup service.  Apparently the dominant local service is highly recommended by its users.  It costs ~$30 a month for weekly composting service, and there is no mention of seasonal contracts, so I’m assuming it’s an annual contract.  They’ll even throw in a couple of 20 pound bags of compost, per year, if you ask for it.

The free drop-offs lack appeal for a few reasons.  One, for some reason, my wife isn’t keen on my routinely transporting buckets of decomposing garbage in her car.  Two, I’d be on the hook for making that trip weekly, without fail.   Three, these would require a dedicated car trip just for dumping the kitchen scraps, as I don’t routinely visit any of those places.

The energy required for my part of these options isn’t a big deal, but …  It’s about an 18-mile round trip to the I-66 transfer station.  That would use about the same amount of electricity as drying an extra load of laundry, a week, in the wintertime.  (Call it 3.5 KWH/week.)  Doing that for three wintertime months would generate around 40 pounds of additional C02 release. That 40 pounds is within rounding error on my household carbon footprint.  Not a big deal.

I do wonder about, and am clueless about, the fossil fuels required for the paid pickup option.  Near as I can tell, customers of that service are spread thin.  The service provider has a distinctive bin, and I’ve only noticed one household in my broad neighborhood that puts a bin like that on the curb.  That implies that there are a lot of truck-miles per pickup, but I have no clue just how many, or how large the carbon footprint of that is.

But mostly, where I live, the decisive factor is that putting kitchen scraps in the trash is more-or-less environmentally harmless.  As noted above, they end up as biomass for electrical generation.  They seem to have what economists term “free disposal”, environmentally.  You can convert them back to carbon at virtually zero net cost.  Spending any fossil fuels to get rid of those scraps seems like a losing proposition, from a carbon-footprint perspective.  Let alone the time, effort (and potential car-stink residual) of any of the free dropoffs.

Why go to a lot of trouble, or some trouble and expense, just to shoot yourself in the foot, environmentally?  Even if you’re only shooting yourself a little bit.  If my options are to haul it myself, pay someone to haul it separately, or just put it in the household garbage, it makes more sense to chuck it in the garbage.  At least in Fairfax County.  YMMV.

You know you’re a suburban gardener when …

Source:  Ace Hardware.  Not AI.

You find yourself buying shrink-wrapped shit.  That is, packages of manure.  Off the hardware store shelf.  And not for cheap, either.

I think that was near the low point of my organic-gardening phase.  In the distant past, I was a gardening purist and sought natural sources of nutrients for my garden. No Matter What.

Until one day, after transporting an entire 4’x8’x2′ utility trailer of horse bedding from the exurbs to my garden, I did the math and realized I could have bought the same amount of nitrogen for about $1*, in a nice, clean bag, at the hardware store.  With far less expenditure of fossil fuels for transport.  And far less effort.

* Calculated from data in this reference.  Typical used straw bedding weighs in at maybe 4 lbs/cubic foot, and is one-fourth horse manure.  Manure from a sedentary horse comes in around 7 pounds nitrogen per ton.  My trailer would have held ((4x8x2 cubic fee, * 4 lbs/cu ft.)*(.25% manure * 7 lbs nitrogen per ton for manure / 2000 lbs per ton) = ) about a quarter-pound of nitrogen.   Which is slightly less than you get in a pound of 30-0-0 lawn fertilizer.  Which costs about a buck at Home Depot.  You don’t believe me?  Read the N-P-K percentages on the shrink-wrapped manure, above.

Organic sources of garden nutrients are nice because they are typically slow-release and low-nutrient-density.  That makes it just about impossible to shock your plants with over-fertilization.  (Or goof-proof, said as one who has goofed.) These also add carbon if worked into the soil, which improves its tilth.  But the flip side of low nutrient density is inevitably a relatively high environmental cost in transportation energy.  Finally, I would guess there’s less likelihood the nutrients will be transported by rain runoff, rather than being used by your plants.

Despite that, I decided that it was smarter to use artificial fertilizers sparingly than it was to lug around tons of low-nutrient-density organic matter.  Hence the soil test kit comes out every spring.  And I limit my organic materials to those I can gather at home.  Including kitchen compost.

I’m all for organic sources of garden nutrients.  I just don’t want to haul them any significant distance.  Let alone dispose of the packaging.

A tempest in a compost tea pot?

Before I go to any significant cost to fix this problem, I need to have a quantitative handle on the benefit.  Just how much kitchen-waste compost do I typically produce, in the (roughly) nine months a year that the composter actually works.  And by inference, how much will I gain from an additional three months.

On the output side of the equation, I’d guess that my composter produces about a cubic foot of finished kitchen-scraps compost every three months.  I seem to empty one side of the composter about that often, and each emptying yields one and a half five-gallon buckets of compost.  (N.B. a cubic foot is about 7.5 gallons).  Working it in the other direction, that’s about a third of my estimated initial volume of kitchen waste, which seems about right. (I mix “brown” material 50/50 with the kitchen waste, so in theory, in three months, six cubic feet of total composter input ends up generating one cubic fit of finished compost, or just under an 85%) reduction in volume.  Not sure if that’s a reasonable figure or not.)

So that’s the question.  Where I live, there’s no particular environmental harm in chucking food scraps in the garbage.  The only real benefit of not doing that is the highly desirable compost.  So as I work through this problem, the issue boils down to how much effort should I go to, to obtain an extra cubic foot of high-quality kitchen-scrap compost, per year?

Stuff I’m not going to do.

Countertop electric composter. 

I recall this coming out as a new product just a few years ago.  Now there’s an entire industry segment for countertop electric composters.   These dry and grind your kitchen scraps, resulting in “shelf-stable” dehydrated material.

Looks like your typical countertop electric composter will:

  • cost about $350.
  • hold maybe three quarts of kitchen scraps maximum
  • dry and grind that in 6-10 hours
  • produce a dry, shelf-stable product.
  • reduce the volume by about 90%.
  • produce odors as they work.
  • Use about 0.8 KWH per quart of scraps.

That last one is my estimate.  The manufacturers say somewhere around that much electricity per batch.  But they must be counting on the machine to be only about a third full when run, typically.  (Calculation not shown.  It was boring.)

From the gardening perspective, the end product seems a bit weird to me, in that, well, it’s still food.  It’s not composted, as in rotted.  It’s dehydrated, ground food scraps.

Really, the only difference between this and a food dehydrator is that this dries your food (scraps) and grinds them up.

It’s as if someone mated a hair dryer and a garbage disposal.  I can’t help but think that the (stressed) moving parts predict a relatively short lifespan. 

If I had to work up a figure for my expected electrical use over the winter, for this device, I’d guess that I’d run this for three months (90 days), producing about two quarts of kitchen scraps per day.  If that then takes 1.5KWH per load, over the course of the winter season this would use 135 KWH.  In Virginia, that would result in about 90 pounds of additional C02 emissions per season, from the electrical generation.  (I can’t count on any reduction in landfill methane from not putting my scraps in the trash, because Fairfax County incinerates everything.  I think.)

Aside from the cost, the smell when operating, the potential for the results to attract vermin when used outside, the electricity consumed, and the likely short lifespan of the device, this seems like a pretty good option.

Ew.  Just ew.

One common nugget of internet wisdom is to freeze and store your winter garbage, and compost it later.

Another alternative is indoor worm composting.

Nope.

Groping toward a solution

First, all the internet gives me, for fixing my current composter, is lame advice.  Ooh, just move the composter to a sunnier spot.  That should help with daytime warmth.  Aah, what you need is some insulation, so the heat of decomposition isn’t lost.

Qualitatively, those make sense.  Yeah, you got it, I want my compost to be warmer.

Quantitatively, there’s not a chance either one will do the trick.  As a solar heater, my composter sucks.  That’s not what it was designed for.  It has a lot of mass, but little sun-absorbing surface area.  It doesn’t trap any hot air (it’s not glazed), it’s just black plastic sitting in the sun.  And did I mention it’s plastic, yet it relies on conduction of heat through the durable plastic walls into the composting material.  Separately, as a heat-retaining compost holder, it sucks.  For one thing, the container of compost is suspended, allowing cold air to contact the container from all sides and both ends, all the time.  And you literally can’t insulate the ends or the thing won’t spin.

Let me now discount some out-of-the-blue solution to this.  For example, it might be possible to purchase bacteria that operate efficiently at lower temperatures.  I’ve seen hints that such exist, but I haven’t really hit upon a product aimed at the home market.   Or, surely I could use electricity to warm the composter, but (see “free disposal” above) that surely increases my carbon footprint.   Let me ignore things of that nature.  One’s over my head, the other seems like outright stupidity.

And yet, the internet is kind-of right, because, practically speaking, it comes down to finding a cheap way to keep that composter warm.  Cheap, because my total reward from this is to reap a whole extra cubic foot of compost per year.

And so, first shot, I covered my composter, as I might cover a plant.   In effect, I mocked up a little greenhouse for it, where it stood.  Just like my tomatoes.

Maybe the bricks behind it provide thermal mass.  Maybe that’s where the composter sat and I didn’t want to try moving it when full.

Having looked at solar air heaters, I now know to classify this as a direct solar heater, and as such, probably low-powered.  So I don’t think this, by itself, will do it.  It’s still a lot of mass, and not a lot of surface.  (Plus, if it does, I’m going to kick myself for not having done this sooner.)

But, in my back pocket, I have the notion that it’s not hard to add an indirect solar air heater to that.  And once you go that route, you can, to a limited degree, pick your power to match your application.  So the obvious next step, if and when this fails, is to take the one I just built, mod as required, and see what temperature it can produce inside that composter “tent”.

But that’s as far as I go, today.  Maybe this will do the trick for the next few weeks.  As with my tomatoes, it’s a season-extender.  I doubt this is going to get me through the winter.

Post #1862: AI-generated pictures and theft of intellectual property.

 

There’s a lot of ambiguity right now regarding the extent to which AI steals intellectual property.  To the point where I have a hard time figuring out what’s theft and what’s not.  If not legally, at least morally.

Not that the idea of theft will stop me, necessarily.  A law unenforced is not a law.  But I would like to know here I stand.

Luckily, the last few posts illustrate one reasonably clear line, I think.

If you read the just-prior post, you probably recognized the characters in some of the pictures.  This, even though the pictures were brand-new, created by Gencraft.com’s AI, and are not perfect likenesses of their intended subjects.

My intent was a visual “running joke”, consisting of a string of famous green characters, in a post on eating green tomatoes.  From start to finish, those were: Incredible Hulk, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Shrek, Kermit the Frog, and Yoda.

I think we can all agree that five pictures of random green creatures would not have been anywhere near as interesting.  The entire joke, such as it was, leaned heavily on the stardom of those pictured.

Even though AI created the pictures on-the-fly, the fact that I played off your knowledge of these created and copyrighted characters means that my use of those recognizable characters was clearly theft of intellectual property.  If the original creators and subsequent owners hadn’t made them famous, they’d be all-but-useless for the visual joke.

By contrast, the AI pictures from another recent post largely depicted public figures.  As such, I’m pretty sure that nobody owns the copyright to their image, other than copyright to a specific and identifiable painting or photograph of that individual.

These were intended to be, in order:  Lincoln, Czar Nicholas II, Aristotle, Elizabeth I of England, Shakespeare, the Pope, Typical White-Guy/Country Singer Jesus, and Einstein.

The Gencraft AI provided most of those, as well.  And, as with the first batch, I was trying to use these to humorous effect.  And the humor relied on your being able to recognize (or at least guess) at most of them.  The only difference is that because these are public figures, and no image here specifically mimics a well-know copyrighted image, I’m pretty sure I have not, even in theory, engaged in theft of intellectual property.

So, mea culpa. I think.  A bit.  For that last post.  I’m still trying to get the hang of this whole AI thing.

My understanding, from talking to a friend who’s in the business, is that the actual debate in this area is about far-more-subtle aspects of intellectual property rights.  And I realize that nobody is likely to come looking for me, for the misuse of copyrighted material.

Still, at least for my own benefit, I want to be clear about what I’m doing.  And capitalizing on a created, copyrighted character surely has to counted as theft, even if my accomplice is an AI.  No matter what the details of the law actually say.

 

Post #1853: Urban bicycling really is as dangerous as it looks.

 

Bottom line:  Per mile, risk of death on a bicycle is about thirteen times higher than risk of death in a car/SUV/van.  Calculation shown below.

Background

I read a story in the Washington Post today, about a woman who was killed while bicycling, in the bike lane, alongside River Road in Bethesda.  Crushed by a careless commercial truck driver making a right turn.  Leaving behind a husband and two young kids.

The truck driver was given the maximum sentence allowed by law, which in this case was a $2000 fine.  And a brief moment of shame in court.  He’s still on the road, driving a truck.

I looked up the accident scene on Google, and it was the worst kind of grudging, cheap, zero-effort retrofit urban bike lane that the very least of your tax dollars can produce. Based on historical images, they took a narrow, disused shoulder of a 35-MPH urban arterial highway, and painted little arrows and bike icons in it. 

Well, there’s your bike lane, right there.  Problem solved.   The result of that zero-effort accommodation of bicyclists is every bit as safe as you might reasonably expect.

Above, the middle red circle is the site of death.  It’s just one of many driveways opening into the busy commercial establishments that line the road.  It’s located just 500 feet from the Capital Crescent Trail, a dedicated bike path whose road-crossing bridge can be seen circled in the background.  Which is almost certainly why they bothered to re-paint the road shoulder.

In the foreground is a sign.  Based on Google street view, that sign was only placed there a few months ago.  If you don’t routinely bike in an urban area, you’d think that sign was there to remind motorists to use caution, and look before they turn.  But for that purpose, in this context, a sign like that is useless.  Motorists don’t even perceive signs like that, in the crowded visual field of an urban motorway, at 35 MPH and up.  The actual, practical purpose of the sign is to warn bicyclists and pedestrians that they are in the middle of a war zone, and that they should act accordingly if and as possible.

But in this situation, there’s not much a bicyclist can do.  The bike lane appears to be just under 3′ wide.  The curb is about a foot to your right, so there’s no escape in that direction.  Your life depends on the caution and good sense of the drivers passing a couple of feet to your left.

A slender reed, for sure.

But is it really as dangerous as it looks?

Yes it is. 

And, for some reason, this appears to be an answer that absolutely infuriates bicycle advocates.  Not because they don’t want to make roadways safer for bikes.  But simply because they don’t want to believe that there are significant downsides to bicycle transport in America.  This, even if everybody grasps what a drag it is to (e.g.) bike in bad weather.

(And, to be clear, I’m a lifetime bicycling enthusiast.  But I’m also a realist.)

Years ago, I did the homework to answer this question, to my own satisfaction.  I came up with an estimate that bicycling is about ten times as dangerous as driving, per mile traveled.  That’s in terms of risk of death.  It’s even higher in terms of risk of injury requiring medical attention.  Those specific calculations are lost in the mists of time.  So I thought I might update and document that here.

Any estimate of bicycling safety ends up combining data from two separate sources. That’s always a risk for accuracy, but it is what it is.

Information on traffic-related deaths comes from a motor vehicle crash reporting system maintained by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.  Whatever its limitations, that’s the U.S. gold standard for counting traffic-related fatalities in the U.S.

(Secondarily, if you have an interest, you can use nationally-available hospital statistics from the U.S. Public Health Service’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project to find the number of hospitalizations and outpatient visits related to bicycle accidents.  But non-fatal injuries actually show an even grimmer picture for bicycling versus driving, so it’s probably sufficient to settle on an estimate of risk-of-death while bicycling versus driving, per mile.)

So, bicyclists accounted for about 2.4% of all U.S. traffic deaths in 2020.  That figure is roughly constant over time.

Information on bicycle-miles traveled comes from the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS).  This is based on a log-diary survey of thousands of U.S. households, capturing how and why they traveled over the course of a week.  Near as I can tell, it’s the only nationally-representative information on actual use of bicycles versus other modes of transportation.

Source:  2017 National Household Travel Survey

Based on that large, nationally-representative log-diary survey, bicycle transport accounted for 0.2% of all U.S. household transportation, or about 8.5 billion bicycle-miles per year in 2017.  (Sounds like a lot until you realize there are about 330 million U.S. residents, so that works out to about 25 bike-miles per person per year.)

We have to re-calculate the percentages above, to restrict this to cars versus bikes.  After that, it’s just simple math.

Summary.

Yes, bicycle transportation really is as dangerous as it looks, as you drive along the road.

Using two gold-standard U.S. databases, bicycling appears vastly riskier than driving a car.  In this most recent calculation, I estimate about 13 times higher risk of death, per mile, on a bike, versus in a car.  That’s reasonably consistent with the estimate I got years ago. 

And, as I recall, if you expand to non-fatal injuries requiring medical attention, the relative risk is actually much higher.  More like 50 or 60 times the risk, per mile.  That’s for the obvious reason that a collision that produces only minor bumps and scrapes to car occupants can produce severe wounds to an unprotected bicyclist.

Four things are worth noting.

First, the absolute risk is low.  If you bicycle 1000 miles a year — which is a lot — your risk of death-via-bike is about 0.01% per year.

Second, for older adults, the exercise benefit vastly outweighs the crash risk.  This is another one that I did the homework years ago, then lost the analysis somewhere.  For the average 65-year-old man, all-causes risk of death is about 2% per year.  Best available research suggests that frequent vigorous exercise roughly cuts that in half.  The health benefits of frequent bicycling likely outweigh the risk-of-traffic-death by an order of magnitude or two.

Third, on paper at least, walking around traffic is more hazardous than bicycling. I’m not sure to the extent this is driven solely by work-related pedestrian accidents in big cities.  But whatever the cause, this too seems plausible.  In effect, we let amateurs drive 3-ton pieces of machinery, at high speed, around crowds, with virtually no enforcement of rules or penalties for engaging in risky behavior.  It’s a wonder that so few pedestrian deaths result.

Finally, if you do a deep dive in the FARS database, you’ll find that dead pedestrians and dead bicyclists have something in common with dead drivers.  An astounding fraction of them are dead drunk at the time.  Roughly half, in each case.  The moral of the story is that BUI and WUI are maybe not as deadly to others as DUI, but they clearly up your risk of death on the roadways.

But in this case, that’s irrelevant.  It was broad daylight, and the victim was returning from a school function for her kids.  The death was just the result of a toxic combination of thoughtless, zero-effort bike lane design, and bad luck.  Ten seconds sooner, or ten seconds later, and she’d have been fine.  It’s just an unavoidable risk of bicycling in most urban areas of the U.S.

Post #1849: Virginia still collects COVID-19 case data? Yep, sure does.

 

There is no new big surge of COVID-19 cases in Virginia.  We don’t have to guess about that because Virginia continues to gather the same benchmark PCR test data that it did all throughout the pandemic.

At present, Virginia is showing 10 new cases (new positive COVID-19 PCR tests) per 100K population per day.  That’s up from our normal summertime minimum of around 2 / 100K day. And is a level we saw off and on throughout the pandemic.

But the point is, it’s normal.  In so far as anything about the post-pandemic U.S. can be considered normal. Continue reading Post #1849: Virginia still collects COVID-19 case data? Yep, sure does.

Post #1848: Housing market data.

 

It’s funny how catastrophes linger in our collective memory, but near-catastrophes fade.

Fifteen years ago, the “housing bubble” that developed during the Bush administration finally collapsed, and almost took down the U.S. banking system with it.  To the point where the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) ran a negative fund balance, due to the wave of bank failures (below).

Source:  FDIC, , courtesy of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), s

By now, most have forgotten how crazy housing prices were in some parts of the country.  And what extraordinary measures the Federal Reserve took to avoid a complete collapse of the U.S. financial system.

We’re still dealing with the fallout from the  2008 near-catastrophe.  In particular, that led to more than a decade during which the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. Lower than the underlying rate of inflation, in fact.  As I see it, the Fed recapitalized a bankrupt U.S. banking industry on the backs of U.S. savers.

But that era of below-zero real interest began to end a couple of years ago.

And nothing much has happened.  Yet.

Yesterday, a friend pointed out that some economic analysts see the U.S. housing market as once again ripe for a collapse in prices.  Given that I own a house, I thought it was well worth taking the time to look at current U.S. housing market data.  And while I was originally skeptical, I’d now have to say, he has a point.  There’s not a lot of sunshine in the current housing market data.

Continue reading Post #1848: Housing market data.