Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.
This post is an anecdote about a shopping incident that snowballed. And, incidentally, how to assemble a whiskey barrel planter, should you happen to have one that has fallen apart. Continue reading Post #1964: Scraping the bottom of the barrel, for artichokes.
I happened to glance at the fire extinguisher in my garage today. As shown above, it has lost pressure, and the needle on the gauge is no longer in the green zone.
Question 1: This means (choose one):
I think the takeaway is that I obviously want to chit my potatoes.
Sometimes, you do your best to set up an experiment, but Nature intervenes in ways that you didn’t anticipate. This isn’t my first failed garden experiment. But it’s a pretty spectacular fail, in a way that ends up being informative. Continue reading Post G24-012: Gang aft a-gley. Shutting down the Great Potato Chit-Off.
I, like many Americans, have a plastic watering can with no rosette. Rosette being the term-of-art for “sprinkler head”. The rosette was lost years ago, but the watering can itself remains in fine shape. Continue reading Post G24-011: Replacing a lost watering can rosette.
Ginger and I have had a difficult relationship.
It’s not because I tried to murder her, early on, shown above (Post G24-003, addendum). We’ve moved past that.
It’s not because her Tinder profile looked so different from her appearance in real life. I said I’d take her warts and all.
The problem is, she did not disclose that she likes it hot and dirty. And I’m just not able to deliver that kind of action. Not in my current situation.
Turns out, ginger thrives at a soil temperature of around 90F, with a minimum acceptable soil temperature of 70F.
Currently (mid-April) the dirt in my garden is around 50F. And there’s no way it’s going to get to 90F. Heck, it’s not even warm enough in my house to grow it. Which I think explains why, more than two months after I started down this path, my ginger plants are alive, but only a few inches tall.
This whole “grow ginger in a temperate climate” thing needs a re-think.
In a nutshell, my garden soil just doesn’t get hot enough, here in Zone 7. So, I’m going to make a planter designed to get the soil as warm as possible.
Maybe. This post is just Part 1, where I pin down the issue by (finally) looking up the actual data on soil temperature in my region.
This year, on a whim, I decided to grow some ginger.
To be clear, ginger is a tropical plant. Worse, it’s a tropical plant with a 10-month growing season.
But the internet told me that it’s easy to grow it in a temperate climate. YouTube told me the same. Which makes it unanimous. So it must be true, right?
After toting a couple of trays of scraggly-looking ginger plants into and out of the house over the past month, it has finally dawned on me that, eh, maybe I got some bad advice somewhere along the line.
I now realize that:
1) Everybody who told me I could grow it in a cool climate actually lives in a warm climate. Australia, Arizona, and similar places. A mix of hot desert, tropical, and sub-tropical climates. So the folks I actually observe growing ginger, and being happy about it, all live where it’s very hot.
2) They all casually mention that, oh, by the way, ginger does well in pots, in cooler areas.
I finally put two and two together to realize that ginger is never going to grow adequately in a Virginia Zone 7 garden. The soil is just too cool.
Survive, yes. With enough work, you can get almost any plant to survive. For example, I have a lime tree that survives in my climate, via moving into and out of the garage all winter long. But thrive? In the dirt in my garden? That’s not looking promising.
And bullshit.
Sometimes I am amazed by the things I’ll take at face value, just because everybody repeats them, and they seem reasonable.
That, rather than getting off my duff and doing the tiniest bit of actual investigation.
We all know that one of the advantages of raised garden beds is that they allow the soil to warm up faster in the spring. And we all know that because every site on the internet discussing raised garden beds repeats that.
In this case, the “investigation” involved sticking an instant-read thermometer a few inches into the dirt in my garden. This, from about a week ago:
Maybe very tall raised beds result in markedly earlier warming of the soil. But short raised beds (around 1′ tall) do squat for spring soil temperature. Even the surface warming from covering the soil in black plastic was minimal.
Seems like my dirt is going to be the temperature it wants to be, and that’s that.
But the fact is, I didn’t do that. So I’m going to have to take some generic soil temperature data and take some reasoned guesses.
This site discussing ground-source heat pumps is probably adequate, with the underlying data ultimately cited to Virginia Tech.
Source: Builditsolar.com, underlying data are from Virginia Tech.
The year-round average soil temperature where I live (which is also the deep down soil temperature) is around 57F. As shown above.
Source: Same as above, but highly simplified from the original diagram.
Near-surface soil temperatures ought to vary about 20F above and 20F below that average, as shown above. Right now (mid-April), that chart predicts that my near-surface soil temperature should be about 50F. Which is spot on. So let me now use the rest of the chart.
Based on the chart above, for my locale:
The bottom line is that if I treat ginger as a houseplant until mid-June, then plant it in my garden, I might get some growth out of it. But my garden soil is never going hit temperatures at which ginger thrives.
Sure, I can grow ginger in my garden, in my climate. Just like the internet said.
I just can’t grow it very well.
Funny how nobody ever titled their video “how to expend enormous effort to grow a small amount of ginger in a temperate climate”. All I got were these subtle little hints, along the lines of “ginger does well in pots in cooler climates”.
Now that my eyes have been opened, the obvious and sensible next step is to wish my ginger seedlings the best of luck.
As I toss them on the compost heap.
Instead, I’m going to look at what scraps of materials I have lying around and see if i can come up with a planter designed to overheat the soil. Which, even as I say that, sounds really stupid. But actually kind of makes sense, in this context.
You’ll have to stay tuned for the actual build.
Yes, you can grow ginger in a USDA Zone 7 temperate climate.
Nope, you can’t do it well, in the dirt, outdoors. The soil does not get warm enough for optimal growth.
This will almost certainly grow better in a pot than in the ground, because the soil in a pot will get a lot warmer. Hence the often-repeated hint that ginger does well in pots.
I’m still pondering what to do next. One obvious step is just to transplant to some planters, and wait. One step up from would be to put together a planter that’s designed to overheat the soil. That’s an interesting if somewhat oddball challenge.
Or maybe just to toss ginger into the compost heap. Because the basic notion that I can grow this well, in my garden, in my climate, now appears to be dead wrong.
I guess the last straw was figuring out that it’s too cold in my house to grow ginger. I was OK with growing it as a house plant. But now I realize that I’m going to have to run electric heating pads indoors and/or build a greenhouse outdoors, just to prolong my relationship with ginger through mid-June . That’s just out of the question.
I considered going all-in for some sort of fancy planter design that would use solar heating to try to boost soil heat. But when looked up planter designs, it seems that nobody has any thoughts on building a planter designed to overheat the soil. That strongly suggests it’s a truly dumb idea, if you can’t even find a mention of it on the internet.
For soil warming, the sole option seems to be electric heating cables. If I’m not willing to run electric heat inside the house, that goes double for running it outside.
The ideal planter for ginger is broad and relatively shallow. Depending on the source, ginger needs between 8″ and 12″ of soil depth in a planter. But it needs horizontal room for the rhizome to grow. The combination of those factors means that an efficient planter for ginger is basically a flat, deep tray.
Given that, it’s more-or-less a fools’ errand to try to keep that heated above ambient temperatures. Even if I insulated the bottom and sides, the heat losses through the top would, in the long run, mean that the planter is going to match the average air temperature around it, plus or minus.
So I did the best for ginger that I could do. Above you see some 10″ deep crates, lined, filled with loose, well-draining potting soil, topped with about an inch of my finest kitchen-scrap compost. These now sit against a southeast-facing wall, and get sun from roughly solar 9 AM to solar 1 PM. The loose clear sheet on the front will eventually be taped up to provide a kind of double-insulated window effect along the sunward-facing edge.
By 5 PM, after a few hours in the shade, the soil in those planters is still around 80F. So maybe, just by luck, I may finally be giving ginger just what she needs.
I’ve now extended a simple irrigation setup to include these planters. That’s run off a timer, because I inevitably forget to water my potted plants. Beyond that, I’m going to put together some “box tops” out of radiant barrier material — simple caps to fit over these trays and reflect the heat back to the tray overnight. But that’s for tomorrow.
If ginger survives and prospers in that location, then it was meant to be. If not, I’ll chalk it up as a failed relationship, and move on to the next new thing.
Above, the Bluebell Trail, in Bull Run Regional Park, Fairfax County, VA, as of a couple of days ago. That has nothing to do with this post. It’s just well worth the visit, this time of year, if you’re in Northern Virginia.
On to business. Continue reading Post G24-009: The Great Potato Chit-Off, Chits win round 1.
I did my Federal and state income taxes yesterday.
This post is a bit of a potpourri regarding filing taxes in the modern world.
Source: Calculated from U.S. Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement.
Back when I ran my own small business, I understood my taxes because I did them in my own spreadsheet. That evolved from doing my business accounts in Excel. It just seemed easier to build a Form 1040 onto those than to figure out how to move all my business financial data into somebody else’s system.
As a side-effect, a) I knew where every number came from, b) I knew how the taxes were calculated. For example, I could calculate my true marginal tax rate (including income tax, self-employment tax, and Medicare tax, and so on) by jiggling the income number by a dollar and seeing how that affected the taxes owed.
This year, using Turbotax, I finally reached total tax ignorance. The Turbotax software talks to my financial institutions. This provides the dollar figures that populate various IRS forms (e.g., 1099-INT for interest earned.). Got a W2 this year? Chances are, Turbotax already has it in its database, so you don’t even have to type in the dollar amounts. Turbotax then chats with the IRS to tell them how much it thinks I owe. Assuming the IRS agrees, the IRS software talks to my bank and withdraws the agreed-upon amount from my account.
I’m starting to wonder why I’m involved in this process at all. I have no choice but to pay my taxes. At this point, I have no clue where the numbers come from or how the calculations work. I don’t even have to know any of the dollar amounts. The software just magically generates a number that it says I owe to Uncle Sam. And so long as it’s ballpark, who am I to argue with it, or with the IRS?
My fate is in the hands of Skynet.
Is this how most people go through life?
Source: Pew charitable trusts.
Helpful note is in red, at the end of this section.
I, like most Virginians, got an IRS Form 1099-G from from the Commonwealth.
And, like most Virginians, I had no clue what I was supposed to do with it. I was completely flummoxed by the bafflegab that accompanied it.
Virginia told me “This is important tax information … a negligence penalty or other sanction may be imposed … “. But that’s it. On-line explanations were lacking. The instructions in Turbotax were unclear. All I knew is that once I entered the information, Turbotax showed that my tax forms were in error. But I didn’t know why.
Turns out, Virginia was not alone. A whole lot of states issued tax refunds for the 2022 tax year. And that’s not a coincidence. It is the flip side of the big Federal deficit that year. Because a big chunk of what the Feds did is ship money to the States, in various forms, mid-2021, in their attempt to keep the economy from tanking. That’s why, above, collectively, the “rainy day funds” (cumulative budget surpluses) of the states swelled in 2022. And those states then shipped money to their citizens in 2023, labeled as refund of 2022 taxes.
All of the tax guidance for dealing with this was ludicrously ambiguous. Even the guidance within Turbotax itself was not enough to lead me to the correct way to enter and deal with this.
Let me try to explain it, because it has two significant parts. But it all boils down doing proper cash accounting of your tax payments and refunds. You account for your state tax payments and refunds in the year that you receive them (cash accounting), and not by tax year (the tax year for which they were actually due.)
In the pre-Trump era, the rule for dealing with a state tax refund was simple and logical.
If you used the standard deduction in Year 1, just ignore any state tax refund in Year 2. State taxes paid in Year 1 didn’t affect your Federal return, so the refund doesn’t either.
But if you itemized your deductions in Year 1, and one of those itemized deductions was for state taxes paid in Year 1, then you have to balance your books in the event of a state tax refund. And it’s pretty obvious what you had to do. If you subtracted your state tax payments from taxable income in Year 1, then you have to add any refund to your taxable income in Year 2.
The logic is that, in the long run, you only get to deduct the net amount that you actually paid in state taxes. As a result, the tax instructions were an unambiguous if-then statement. If you itemized in Year 1 (and took off your state taxes as an itemized deduction), then you have to add any state tax refund to your taxable income in Year 2.
Post-Trump, there’s a $10K cap on the state and local tax deduction. And this is why the resulting tax advice is no longer obvious and clear. Then simple if-then gets replaced by a more complicated set of logic. Everything is conditional on hitting that $10K threshold.
If you itemized deductions in Year 1, and the state tax deduction mattered in Year 1, then you have to deal with the state tax refund, in some fashion, in Year 2. This boils down to having the state and local taxes line, on last year’s tax return, at or near that $10K threshold.
If you were below the $10K threshold last year, and you itemized, then the logic is the same as in the pre-Trump era. Yep, you’re going to owe taxes on your state tax refund paid in 2023. One way or the other.
If you exceeded the $10K threshold last year, by more than your state tax refund, then your state tax refund will not affect this year’s taxes. That’s because your actual payments, net of the refund, would still have exceeded the maximum allowable $10K.
The only tricky part is that Turbotax wouldn’t let me just skate by, because, apparently there’s some further twist to the law that allows you to spread the state tax refund over several years of tax reporting, if that’s to your advantage. In any case, after several attempts at fussing with the state and local tax worksheet in Turbotax, I finally clicked the right box that said, just reduce my state and local taxes paid this year by the full amount of the state tax refund I received this year. And that finally cleared the error.
It was weirdly complicated, in that, no matter what box I checked, my Federal taxes remained the same. And the default under Turbotax was to spread the Virginia $400 tax rebate over several years. But in fact, I could net out the full $400 this year, and be done with it, without paying any more tax. So a) Turbotax flagged this as an error under its defaults, and b) I had to override the default manually, to clear that, even though c) I owed the same amount of taxes this year, regardless. The Turbotax default minimized current-year taxes for all taxpayers. But it did not minimize future-year taxes for all taxpayers. If you’re well above the $10K threshold, check the box that tells Turbotax to subtract the full value of the rebate from this year’s state and local taxes paid.
Or do what I did, which was to keep checking and unchecking boxes on the state and local tax worksheet until the error message went away. Then figure out why it went away, after-the-fact.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
If you listen to nothing but right-wing media, you’re supposed to recall — and be incredibly angry about — the big Federal budget deficit that occurred during the pandemic. But you’re supposed to forget — right down the old memory hole — that much of that deficit was incurred because Uncle Sam sent big checks to (nearly) every taxpayer. (It goes without saying that you’re supposed to forget which budget was passed under which President.)
It was, arguably, the last truly egalitarian act that you’re ever likely to see from your Federal government. Anyone who had managed to file a tax return in the prior year, and was still breathing, got the same fat check(s). The only exception was for the well-to-do, who got squat, at least for some of the rounds of rebates. It was the sole exception you’re ever likely to see, in your lifetime, to the rule that the rich get richer.
As a side note, that policy demonstrates what every economist knows, but nobody is willing to acknowledge these days. The rich have an exceptionally low marginal propensity to consume out of current income. Or, in plain language, if you want to prop up spending in the economy, the last thing you want to do is give more money to the wealthy. That’s because they won’t spend it, they’ll save it. If you want to boost current spending, give money to the middle and lower classes.
The other thing you’re supposed to forget about that deficit is what it accomplished. When the pandemic hit, people panicked, and (God forbid!) stopped spending every penny they earned. This resulted in the unprecedented spike in the U.S. savings rate in 2000 (above), which, as night follows day, immediately began to tip the economy into a recession. Because money you save is money you don’t spend, and one person’s spending is another person’s income. The next Great Depression was avoided by the expedient of just mailing out money. Repeatedly. Until people started spending it.
Source: McKinsey.
Sure, it seems crude and expensive. Unless you are smart enough to compare it to the alternative, which was the total collapse of the economy. And it worked. The same scenario played out in more-or-less every civilized nation on earth. U.S. pandemic emergency fiscal policy was middle-of-the-road, in terms of overall size. The result was a short, sharp recession followed by immediate recover.
Next time you see an economist, thank them. Or, in the words of the patron saint of reactionary economics, Saint Milton, “We are all Keynesians now”. As evidenced by the near-universal adoption of strong stimulus measures in response to the pandemic-induced decrease in spending.
This post shows you how to build a little purpose-made sawbuck for use in chopping up vines and green twigs. That, plus an electric hedge clipper, and you can efficiently chop vines and similar material into pieces just a few inches long, suitable for composting.
The results aren’t “shredded”, but you control the size of the pieces. If you want shorter pieces, it just takes more passes with the hedge clipper. Continue reading Post G24-009: Chipping/shredding vines and green twigs.
This post is about putting up a bluebird house, and rehabbing my Home Depot bee hotel for another year of use. Continue reading G24-008: The (blue) birds and the (mason) bees.
This year I’m doing a small test of whether chitting (sprouting) potatoes makes much difference. The raised garden bed above is planted with gold and red potatoes. Flags mark the rows where chitted potatoes were planted. Between the flags are rows of un-chitted potatoes. I’ll dig them up around mid-June and (maybe) see whether or how much chitting improved my yield.
And that’s why I plant my Irish potatoes on St. Patrick’s day. That sounds like folklore, but it’s not. In climate Zone 7, March 17 is just about four weeks before our expected last frost date. That’s commonly-recommended time to get potatoes, peas, and a few other cool-weather crops into the ground.
Instead, the folklore in this process is chitting, that is, sprouting the potatoes before planting them. Everybody tells you to chit your potatoes. But when you look carefully, nobody tests whether or not chitting makes much difference.
In theory, sprouting the potatoes before planting gives you a jump-start on the growing season. This matters — particularly in the South — as potatoes really do not like the heat. And it’s not just that the mid-summer heat kills them. It’s that once soil temperatures reach a certain level, they stop producing anything useful, and all you get is a few small, knobby potatoes.
In practice, chitting potatoes has all the earmarks of gardening folklore. It seems reasonable but a) commercial potato growers don’t chit, b) there’s little-to-no systematic evidence that chitting increases yields, and c) how-to-chit advice is all over the map — warm/cold, dark/light, short period/months — as if it didn’t really matter. That’s all laid out in Post G24-002.
One thing I’ve learned is that much frequently-repeated gardening advice is simply folklore. It’s something that made some sense to somebody somewhere, and then got mindlessly repeated without ever being tested. Some of it may be true. Most of it is not. For example, many commonly-cited methods for frost protection do nothing, including covering plants with plastic sheeting or thin floating row cover. But a mason jar provides excellent frost protection, Post G22-006.
This year I decided to do a little controlled trial of chitting. I bought two bags of organic potatoes at the grocery store, and randomized the potatoes into chit and no-chit groups. The no-chits went into the fridge for a month, the chits stayed out to sprout.
You don’t get a lot of “statistical power” out of the resulting 60-odd potato plants. But this little trial ought to be enough to tell me whether or not chitting has some profound impact on my potato yields (Post G24-002, Addendum).
I’ve now put those potatoes into the ground in as even a fashion as possible, to try to eliminate any difference between the chit and no-chit groups in terms of location, water, nutrients, and sunlight. To do that, I inter-planted the chit and no-chit potatoes, using surveyor’s flags to mark the rows with chitted potatoes. That’s as close as I can get to growing the two groups of potatoes under identical conditions.
If chitting matters greatly, it should show up as a “statistically significant” difference in yield, when I dig these up in June or so. In other words, a difference in yield so great that it is unlikely to have arisen merely by chance. But I’ve already done the math to show that any small difference between the chit and no-chit groups will be indistinguishable from random variation.
There’s only so much you can learn from a small bed of potatoes.
After four years of growing potatoes with varying rates of success, I think I finally understand what I should be doing, in Zone 7. So I thought I’d take a minute to lay out my rules for growing potatoes in a warm climate like that of Virginia.
To grow potatoes, in your back-yard garden, in Virginia:
My advice for growing potatoes in Virginia mostly focuses on the main drawback of this climate, for potatoes: The heat. The list of top potato-growing states should give you a clue that the South is not a great place for growing potatoes.
Source: Potatopro.com
Here’s the reasoning behind my rules:
Rule 1 — buy organic potatoes at the grocery store — is based on the understanding that non-organic potatoes are typically sprayed with the potent herbicide chlorpropham (reference) to inhibit sprouting. That permanently damages the ability of the potato to grow. You can’t use that chemical on organic potatoes (see Post G22-004). Which is why, if you want to plant grocery-store potatoes, you should buy organic potatoes.
Rule 2 — buy gold potatoes. Potatoes come in short-season, medium-season and main-season (long-season) varieties. In Virginia, if you want your potatoes to finish before the heat of mid-summer, you want short-season potatoes. Based on my observation, the gold potatoes from the grocery store are short-season potatoes. They sprout sooner, come up quicker, and are ready sooner than the other commonly available varieties. (And, the Yukon Gold variety is, in fact, a short-season potato.) By the same reasoning, you should avoid russets (Post G23-035), as those are all main-season (long-season) potatoes that take about five months from planting to harvest. In Virginia, the heat will kill them before they are mature.
3: Chit? Well, that’s what I’m testing this year, but chitting is consistent with getting the biggest head-start on growing that you can.
4: Plant them early. Same logic. You want them to grow while its cool, and you want them to be as big as they are going to get before the heat of summer arrives. Sooner is preferred to later.
5: Light-colored mulch. The point of this is that, after the potatoes produce green above-ground sprouts, you want to keep the soil as cool as possible, for as long as possible. That’s because potatoes will not set new tubers once the soil is sufficiently warm, and they will produce few, small, knobby tubers if they are trying to set and grow tubers in very warm soil.
Rule 6: Everything else is standard. You can get the rest of the advice you need on potato-growing anywhere. Everything else is standard. Depending on your soil conditions, you’ll want to add fertilizer (particularly potassium). Weed and water. “Hill” them once the shoots are well up, to ensure that the base of the plant is covered with soil (or opaque mulch). Most people say you should nip off the flowers before they produce seeds (berries). Dig up potatoes at any time, but for maximum yield, let the foliage droop and die back before you harvest.
In any case, you can get the rest of the advice you need anywhere. It’s not as if I have any special insight into that. My only value added here is in (finally) figuring out that heat is the enemy of this crop, in Virginia, and for best results, you should plan every aspect of planting and harvest with that in mind.
