Category: Garden

Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.

Post #1786: Least-effort applesauce

 

Peel, core, and quarter apples.

Way too much work.

  • Wash, peel off the plastic produce stickers.
  • Toss into a pressure cooker.  Add a cup of water.  Heat slowly to avoid scorching.  Cook for eight minutes at pressure, followed by natural release.
  • Mash the results.
  • Run that through a Foley mill.
  • Sweeten to taste.
  • If necessary, boil to reduce to the desired thickness.

The back story here is that I got a great deal on pears at my local Safeway, a few weeks back.  I thought I was buying green-skinned pears for 99 cents a pound.  What I actually bought was a bag of completely unripe yellow-skinned pears.  Which I then set aside for just a bit too long.  Hence, the need for a quick way to turn them into pear sauce.

In any case, I’m not one of those people who truly enjoys cooking.  I cook in order to have something to eat.  The less effort and less energy input, the better.

To be clear, I didn’t think this up.   My wife routinely makes apple sauce by quartering the apples, tossing them in a slow-cooker, and then running the results through a Foley mill.

My key innovations were to be too lazy to quarter my over-ripe pears, and too impatient to let them cook in a slow cooker.

Thus, pressure-cooker-Foley-mill pear sauce.  The results are a bit “rustic”, in that the occasional particle of cooked pear skin makes it into the sauce.  IMHO, it’ s not worth the effort of peeling them, to avoid that.  YMMV.

G23-16: No-dig potatoes using leaf mulch, and how manure increases potato yields.

 

The second part of the title is a joke.  See below.

The first part of this post just verifies that you can, in fact, grow no-dig potatoes in leaf mulch.

The second part examines the astounding levels of internet-based bullshit manure regarding vegetable yields, and in particular, potato yields.

Edit, 7/12/2023:  Near-total failure.  Never going to do this again.  See post G23-041. Edit 2/10/2024:  If I had to guess why this failed (but an earlier try using straw bales worked fine),  I think that the dark, compacted leaf mulch allowed the potato tubers to get too warm.  That would explain every aspect of the harvest — few, small, knobby potatoes.  Potatoes are a difficult crop at best in the South, due to high summer temperatures.  Trying to grow them in Virginia, with just a thin, dark mulch covering the tubers — in hindsight, that was a bad idea.

Continue reading G23-16: No-dig potatoes using leaf mulch, and how manure increases potato yields.

Post G23-013: Bee hotel success, Part 1

Edit 5/19/2024:  This year, I made my own bee hotels, and those worked out a lot better than the off-the-shelf bee hotel that I discuss in this post.  See Post G24-014 for this year’s bee hotel results, and Post G24-008 for construction details, such as they are.

Original post follows:

I try to maintain a reasonably bee-friendly property, out here in the wilds of Northern Virginia.

It’s not just that I need them to pollinate my vegetable garden. Or that bumblebees do, in fact, sleep in squash blossoms (aw!).  Or that the hum of bees at work in my garden marked the never-to-be-repeated peak of mid-pandemic suburban quiet (Post #G11).

It’s more bee-as-coal-mine-canary. If I’m doing something in the yard or garden that’s likely to be killing off my bees, odds are I shouldn’t be doing that.  It’s a quick way to rule out some environmentally stupid behavior.

In any case, I’ve had a couple of bee hotels (native bee nesting boxes) kicking around my yard for a few years now.  Shown above.  But those were never very successful.  It took years to get the first bees to use them.  And I might get a one or two tubes filled, per year.  There are clear exit holes on some tubes, so some new bees were produced.

But not a big hit, over all.

This year, on a whim, I bought a different model of bee hotel, at my local Home Depot.  The Home Depot mason bee box is already working vastly better than the previous model.  It’s been up a few days and I already have more tubes filled than I got in the first few years of the other model.  In short, my bees love this new bee hotel.

Now that I’m finally doing something right, I’d like to keep that going.  In a radical and very un-guy-like step, I actually read the directions.    And — surprise — I’ve been clueless as to how these things actually work. 

But now that I know, I realize this new bee motel is a fundamentally terrible design.  Not for what you can see — that part’s OK.  And, as noted, it’s definitely attracting bees.  The problem is that those bamboo tubes are permanently attached.  As discussed below, that’s a no-no.  You want nice clean new nesting tubes each year.  And that means that, unless I tear it apart next year, this lovely little bee hotel is a single-use disposable item.

So this post is going to summarize everything I think I learned about mason bee nest boxes (“bee hotels”).  And about the difficulty of making smooth-ended splinter-free replacement tubes for this, from bamboo I have on hand.

Three-minute tutorial:  Bee hotel or roach motel?

Key point: For best results, you need two bee hotels (or equivalent) for every site at which you wish to maintain a bee hotel.

You ideally want the female bees to use clean, new nesting materials each year.  The use of new (or carefully sanitized) nesting tubes each year minimizes the presence of diseases and parasites in the nest.  If you don’t keep the premises clean, your bee hotel can end up as the bee equivalent of a roach motel.  With poor enough conditions, the bees check in, but they never check out.  Your bee hotel becomes a catch-and-kill trap. 

The problem is that each spring, some bees are ready to check into your bee hotel before your existing guests have checked out.  Some are ready to lay their eggs before others have emerged from their cocoons.  The reason for this chaos is that these bees are quite short-lived.  The emerge, mate, forage for food, lay their eggs, and die, all in the course of a few weeks in the spring.

The solution is to put last year’s bee hotel (or, at least, the nesting tubes) aside in an “emergence box”, to give the bees time to emerge from their cocoons.  At the same time, you need fresh, new nesting tubes nearby, for the emerging bees to lay the next generation of eggs.  An emergence box is just an opaque weather-protected box with a small opening.  This allows the newly-emerged bees to exit, but prevents bees outside the box from seeing (and therefore attempting to re-use) the old nesting tubes.

No matter how you cut it, you would ideally have two sets of nesting tubes in rotation at each bee hotel site.  One set of clean, new tubes, for this year’s eggs.  And last year’s tubes, from which bees continue to emerge.  You want to keep the emergence box with last year’s nesting tubes near your new bee hotel, because, as noted above, the bees get right down to business as soon as they emerge.

Here are my five Ws for bee hotels.

Who?  These bee hotels provide nesting places for some species of solitary bees, that is, bees that don’t form big communal hives.  Mainly, that means these are NOT for honeybees.  The bees that use these devices are typically referred to as “native bees”, but that’s imprecise.  For one thing, bumblebees are typically native bees, but those are ground-nesting bees, and won’t use these tube-type bee hotels.  Your primary target bee is a “mason bee”, so called exactly because they build those little mud walls at the end of the nesting tube where they’ve laid their eggs.

What?   A bee hotel provides tubular structures into which a mason (or similar) bee lays eggs.  The bee lays a series of eggs in the tube, providing each with food, separating them with mud walls, and capping off the tube with more mud.  Over the course of a year (in some cases, two years), each egg hatches into a larvum (worm), eats the food that its mother left for it, pupates (cocoons itself), and eventually emerges from that cocoon, the subsequent year, as a bee.

When?  The eggs are laid in spring.  The eggs hatch/larvae emerge in summer.  They cocoon in the fall.  And they re-emerge as bees the next spring/summer.  (In some areas, there are species that spend two years in the cocoon, but I’m not sure how relevant that is to most places.)

Place your bee hotel outside in the spring.  It appears to be fairly important not to disturb this during summer, as the larvae are delicate.  That means you attach it to something solid in the spring, so it doesn’t shake around, and you leave it alone.  The larvae pupate in fall.  At that point — late fall, early winter — they are tough enough to be moved.  Place the bee hotel in a sheltered, unheated location (such as an unheated shed).  Then, next spring, place the bee hotel (or the tubes from it) in an “emergence box”, move them back outside, and let the bees emerge as the weather warms. Google “emergence box”, but it’s basically a sheltered box with a hole in it, to let the hatched bees escape.

Some experts “harvest” the cocoons as an extra sanitation measure.  They break open the nesting tubes, remove and possibly clean the cocoons exteriors, and place the cocoons in fresh material for eventual hatch-out in the spring.   The claimed advantage of this is that it separates the bees from various parasites that may linger in the nesting tubes and this allows them to emerge from overwintering parasite-free.  If you are going to do that, you need to use relatively fragile nesting tubes (paper liners, reeds) that allow the cocoons to be removed undamaged, and not sturdy ones such as bamboo tubes shown above.

As of this writing, it’s not clear to me how much of an advantage you gain by harvesting cocoons, or what evidence basis there is for it.  The only obvious advantage is that if certain fungal diseases are present in the nest, you’ll see them if you harvest the cocoon.  As I plan to use all-new materials each year, I’m not sure that’s much of a concern to me.

Where?  These bee nests ought to be protected from rain, protected from getting cooked in the afternoon sun, and so on.  he most common advice is to locate them to catch morning (but not afternoon) sunlight.  They need to be firmly attached to something substantial because the larvae are delicate and don’t want to be tossed about.  In plain sight, so the bees can find it.  And near a ready source of mud.  Because bees need mud to cap off their egg cells.

Upshot:  Facing east-ish, under eaves if possible, firmly attached to something, near water or mud, maybe 5′ off the ground, and plainly visible.

Why and how? Different bee species want different sized tubes.  So from the get-go, a rack of identical tubes limits the species that can use that particular hotel.   The tubes need to be closed off at the back, in some fashion.  The tubes need to be sturdy enough to keep out various bee predators.  Paper straws alone, for example, appear to be frowned upon, thought to be too fragile to keep out certain types of bee predators.  In rare cases, you need to put hardware cloth across the front to keep birds from pecking out the larvae.  That’s only necessary if you wake up one morning and all the previously-filled tubes appear empty.

The simple upshot of all this is:

  • Each Spring, put last year’s nest out in an emergence box.
  • Nearby, place a clean, new nest out to attract bees.
  • Each Fall, refurbish last year’s nest, to be placed out the next spring.

Post #1779: Approaching tax day, so it must be time to start planting

 

I paid my Federal and state income taxes yesterday, so that means it’s almost time for our last frost date.  This, in Northern Virginia, Zone 7.

This post is a bit of a potpourri regarding

  1. taxes,
  2. last frost dates,
  3. paper pots, and
  4. whatever happened to seed starting mix?

1:  The joy of tax-free vegetables, or how to misunderestimate the value of food gardening.

Source:  U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The oddest facts I can recall from my education in economics have to do with the National Income and Product Accounts.  That would be GDP accounting, to you civilians.  Back in the day, I had to memorize most of the major details of how Uncle Sam figures out the value of Gross Domestic Product.  (Back then, Gross National Product, which is a slightly different concept.)  For reasons that totally escape me, bits of that stick with me 40 years later.

Most people have a vague understanding of GDP.  It’s something like the total market value of all final (for-consumption) goods and services produced by U.S. citizens and their capital.  And, in general, things that don’t get traded via a market simply don’t get counted.

Except sometimes.

In some areas where something of value is consumed, but there’s no market transaction, Uncle Sam just kind of makes up a number.  These are the imputations in the GDP calculation.  And these imputations are legion.

So, in 2021, US GDP was $23.3 trillion.  But of that, $3.5 trillion (17%) is made up — that is, imputed.

I’m not here to dump on those imputations.  IMHO, those imputations are necessary, well-thought-out, and about as accurate as they can reasonably be expected to be.  The numbers are better with them than without them.

I just wanted to point out an historical artifact.  One of the formal, major imputations in U.S. GDP accounting is a $200M imputation for the value of food that is grown and consumed on the farm, and never makes it to market.  (That’s circled in red above.)  Without going into the details (about 2% of Americans live on a farm), I make that GDP imputation amounts to about $30 worth of farm products, per-farm-resident-capita, consumed on the farm.

Arguably, we only have that adjustment because farms were a vastly more important part of the economic landscape when GDP accounting was first developed.  That all took place in the Great Depression, at which point we still had about 20% of the U.S. population on farms or ranches.

Source:  Farm bill fairness.org

The key point here isn’t necessarily the size of the adjustment, it’s the reason they had to make an adjustment.   There’s no money transaction for food that is grown and eaten on a farm.

Not sure how accurate the underlying Federal figure is (it doesn’t matter, so I’d be surprised if a lot of effort went into it.)  I’m fairly sure that one of the reasons it’s low is that this only accounts for the products of the farm enterprise.  For a corn farmer in Iowa, it would be an estimate of the fraction of the corn crop they eat, rather than sell.

Just taking that at face value, I’m guessing that my back-yard vegetable garden produces that much.  A few hundred dollars’ worth of vegetables per year, say.

That’s a drop in the bucket, in our overall spending on food in and out of the home.

But it’s a very sweet drop, in that it’s not taxed.  If you buy groceries from the store, you’re paying with after-tax dollars.  Roughly speaking, if you earn wage income, all things considered, depending on your income and where you live, you probably need to earn around $1.50 in order to buy $1.00 worth of groceries.  That’s my rough estimate of the effect of Social Security and Medicare taxes, state and federal income taxes, and sales taxes.

I have just two points here.  If you’re working out the math of value versus expense for your vegetable garden, be sure to multiply the difference by 1.5.  Because that’s how much income you don’t have to earn, if you replace store-bought produce with your garden-raised produce.  In terms of income avoided, it’s worth more than just the prices you’d pay at the store.

Second, don’t just think of home gardening as a way to get exercise and grow fresh produce.  Think of it as a way to stick it to the tax man.  Legally.  As with all forms of D-I-Y production, there’s no money payment for the final product or service (and you are not engaged in a barter-based commercial enterprise), so there’s no tax due.

My tomatoes taste all the better for it.

2:  Last frost dates and improved weather forecasting.

This is just a quick recap of my utterly incomprehensible post G21-005.

Source:  Garden.org.

Springtime last frost dates aren’t hard numbers, they are probabilities.  Briefly, take the last 30 years or so of temperature data for your area.  Take the low temperature recorded for each day.  And, for any given day in the spring, just count how often you saw a frost on that date or later, in the past 30 years.

In my case, over a reference 30-year period, there was a frost in 10% of the years, following April 21st.  So April 21 would be my 10th percentile last frost date.  If the climate is stable, then nine years out of ten, if I plant my frost-sensitive plants on that date, they’ll survive.

But those are simple, crude averages.  They assume that you will plant on a given day, regardless of the coming forecast.  My guess is, they were developed in an era before we had reliable long-range weather forecasting.  Likely you’d get a forecast for a day or two out, but not much more than that.  So weather forecasting just didn’t figure into the picture.

But now, we have reliable five-day forecasts, reasonably reliable 7-day forecasts, and possibly even some forecasting skill in 10-day forecasts.  But the entire process of calculating last-frost dates hasn’t adjusted accordingly.

The upshot of that is that what’s labeled my 30th percentile last-frost date above is actually my 10% percentile or better.  For the simple reason that if there is frost in the forecast, I won’t plant.  But if I hit the 15th with no frost forecast for the next week, excluding major forecasting error, I’m guaranteed to make it to the 21st — my 10th percentile frost date — with no frost.

The presence of an accurate 7-day forecast converts what would have been my 30th percentile last frost date into my 10th percentile.

Either way, having paid off the tax man, it’s now time to start thinking about setting out those frost-sensitive vegetables.  Peas and potatoes went in on St. Patrick’s day.  It’s now time to get the rest of the spring garden planted out.

3.  Paper pots.

Source:  Last year’s garden.

This year I finally gave up on using peat pellets for seed starting.  Those are incredibly convenient, but seem to leave a lot of plants root-bound.  As with the comparable tomatoes grown with and without peat pellets, above.  Note the much more developed root structure on the plant without the peat pellet.

Instead, I’m doing my seed starts in paper bags.  This, as laid out in one of my Wordless Workshop posts (Post G22-012).  I figured, for 2 cents each, it was easier to use a pre-made paper bag than to go through the hassle of making my own paper pots.

But even the smallest commercially-available kraft-paper bags are a bit too large for most of my seed starts.  And potting soil costs money.

So I finally tried making paper pots out of old newspaper.  Only to find out that it’s ridiculously easy.

After reading about a dozen sets of contradictory instructions, and looking at various gizmos for making paper pots, I decided to wing it.  Picked up some some tabloid-style papers that I had on hand, plus a skinny wine bottle, and some sopping-wet potting soil.

There’s no need to wet the paper, no need to use a device, and so on.  Just realize two things.

  1. Until you fill the pot, the only thing holding it together is your hand.
  2. Once you fill it with sopping-wet potting soil, and set it down, it’s nice and solid.

So, in order, and without illustrations, assuming you are right-handed:

  • Rip a tabloid newspaper sheet along the center fold.
  • Fold the resulting half-sheet once, to make a long thin strip.
  • Wrap that long strip around the bottom of a skinny wine bottle, letting the paper extend beyond the end of the bottle, by almost the diameter of the bottle.
  • Fold that extended paper over in three of four places to form the bottom.
  • Briefly mash the bottom against the table top to set the creases.
  • Pull the paper pot off the wine bottle, cradling the bottom of the pot in the palm of your left hand,  and fold down a 1″ “cuff” around the top of the pot with your right hand.  The point of the cuff is to lock in the seam where the paper strip ends.
  • At this point, the pot is still quite fragile and will fall apart if you take it out of your hand.
  • Fill with very wet potting soil, still cradling the bottom in your left hand.
  • Set it down carefully in a tray.

Any idiot can do it.  No device needed.

4:  Woke potting soil?

A final oddity in this whole process is that the “soil” I’m using for seed starts this year is completely different from what I used last year.  Compared to what I used last year, it’s nasty stuff.  Coarse, full of little sticks, and quite clumpy.

I’m pretty sure it’s the same brand I used last year.

And it absorbs water right out of the bag.  The old stuff, I used to have to coax it to get wet.  Pour water into the bag of potting mix and knead it for minutes to get it uniformly damp.  This stuff, I just use the watering can and it’s instantly wet.

It finally dawned on me what has changed.

Best guess, they’ve taken the peat out of the potting soil.  The stuff I got in the past looked so nice — and absorbed water so poorly at first — because it was a peat-based potting soil mix.

Peat — peat moss — is now officially Frowned Upon as being unsustainable.  At least in some circles.  But this is, of course, disputed in other circles.  I haven’t cared enough to try to form an educated opinion.  I guess when it comes to Canadian imports and the environment, I’m far more worried about the Alberta tar sands. (Or whatever they are called these days.)

That said, just by buying a cubic foot of peat-based potting soil each year, I’d have been a typical U.S. consumer of it.  The most recent figure I could find showed that the U.S. imported 420,000 tons of peat moss from Canada in 2022.  That’s down from about 480,000 in 2000.  (That info courtesy of the U.S.G.S.)  That’s (420,000 x 2000 / 360,000,000 = ) 2.3 pounds of peat per capita per year, on average.

In any case, it’s probably just an odd coincidence.  The year I finally swear off peat pellets for seed starting, my potting soil supplier appears to have switched away from peat-based potting soil.

I’m not so attached to the old mix that I’ll even bother to try to hunt some down.  It was just unsettling to find that a product I’d bought for years was now something almost completely different, in the same old bag.

Post #1776: Gas versus electric mowing, Part 6: Why I’m not buying a battery-powered mower

Weird, eh?  I’m happy to rely on a (mostly) battery-powered car.  But I don’t want a battery-powered lawn mower. Even though I used a plug-in electric mower for years.

I swore off battery-driven power tools years ago.  So, for me, it’s not as if this is some new stance.

In this post, I explain why.  Why I’m not going for a battery-powered mower.  And why I no longer buy any power tools that run on batteries.

Let me emphasize that my decision isn’t due to ignorance.  If anything, it’s because I’ve had too much experience with big lithium-ion batteries.

A few things about lithium-ion batteries.

Practically speaking, your sole option for a walk-behind battery-powered mower is lithium-ion batteries.  There have been some riding lawn mowers powered by lead-acid batteries.  But I don’t think there’s anything on the market today not powered by lithium-ion batteries.

Point 1:  Maybe you can recycle them.

Almost no lithium-ion batteries are recycled in the U.S.

I’m acutely aware of this because a) I bought a 200-pound lithium-ion add-on battery pack for my wife’s Prius in 2008, and b) recycling of those big lithium-ion batteries has been just around the corner for the past 15 years.  I think my most recent post on that was Post #1715.

Still don’t believe that lithium-ion is rarely recycled? Here’s a handful of relatively recent references.

That last reference is particularly illuminating.  Read down to the part where the Federal government is still at the point of offering cash prizes for anybody who can figure out how to do it cost-effectively.  Its not merely that lithium-ion batteries aren’t recycled, it’s really that there’s not even one good, standardized, agreed-upon process for doing it, let alone doing it cost-effectively.

Post #1712 has the details, but the reason for the lack of recycling is obvious.  It costs money.  Reportedly, Tesla currently pays $4/pound to recycle is lithium-ion batteries.  Even with that, the cost of post-recycled lithium is higher than that of virgin lithium, making it an uneconomic source for production of new batteries.

Still, some stores — around here, notably Home Depot — have boxes where you can drop off old batteries weighing under 11 pounds.  That should cover most lawn tool batteries.

That’s free to you because Home Depot covers the cost of processing those via call2recycle.  This is an organization whose funding comes from battery- and battery-powered device manufacturers, or from organizations willing to pay to recycle those batteries.   For example, their board of directors has representatives from Panasonic, Sony, Energizer, and Duracell, among others, based on their 2021 annual report.

You can see examples of their retail pricing on this page.  It looks like they charge about $2.50 a pound to take boxes of mixed rechargeable batteries off your hands.  So Home Depot is paying on-order-of $12 to allow you to dispose of a 5-pound lithium-ion lawn mower battery.

What happens after that is a bit unclear to me.  For sure, the value of the materials recovered appears trivial.  Here’s their 2021 Annual Report, showing revenue sources.  Less than five percent of their revenues comes from the materials recovered from those batteries.

Source:  call2recycle 2021 annual report.

They do not break out their collection and recycling costs separately.  Combined, those account for the bulk of their costs.

At any rate, they are clearly at least paying to have those batteries disposed of properly.  What fraction of the materials actually ends up in new products — is actually recycled — is not possible to determine from their annual report.

Interestingly enough, when I look up their lithium-battery recycling partners, the only U.S. partner appears to be a 2021 startup.  Which again seems to emphasize just how iffy lithium battery recycling remains, at this time.

Fifteen years.  For fifteen years, I’ve been living with a 200 pound LiFePO battery pack.   And for fifteen years, large-scale lithium-ion battery recycling has been just around the corner.  Which is right where it is today.

Point 2:  Batteries trade lower fuel cost for higher capital consumption cost.

Which is a fancy way of saying, if you want to keep using the tool, you have to keep buying batteries.

We replaced the nickel-metal-hydride traction battery in my wife’s (now son’s) 2005 Prius somewhere around 178,000 miles.  Doing the math, the cost of that new battery ate up roughly half of the total lifetime savings in gasoline costs, from driving that efficient hybrid compared to a similarly-sized non-hybrid 2005 vehicle.

But it’s not just the dollar cost.  It takes quite a bit of energy to manufacture batteries, something that contributes to the multi-year “payback period” of a Prius relative to a non-hybrid automobile.  For the first couple of years that you drive a hybrid, from a carbon-footprint standpoint, all you are doing with your lower fuel use is paying back the higher energy cost of the vehicle’s manufacturing.

In particular, worst-case (made-in-China, meaning, made using coal-fired electricity), large-format lithium ion batteries result in the release of roughly 200 kilograms of C02 per KWH of battery capacity (calculated from this MIT reference, 16 metric tons per 80 KWH battery pack).

And so, creating a typical lawn-mower battery — 0.3 KW (72 volt, 4 amp-hour)  would result in (200 KG/KW x 0.3 KW * 2.2 lbs/KG = ) 132 pounds of C02 released into the atmosphere.

I use 2 gallons of gas a year to mow my lawn.  That generates about 40 pounds C02 per year.  The upshot is that even if my electricity were carbon-free, I’d spend the first three years of battery-powered lawn mowing merely paying back that initial 132-pounds-of-C02 debt, for the manufacture of that disposable battery.

That’s not a huge surprise, to those of us who have been using big battery-powered objects.  It was an estimated two year payback period for a 2005-era Prius, where the battery and motors didn’t really power the entire car.  So, a three-year payback period for a small tool that’s entirely battery-powered?  To me, based on my experience with the Prius, that seems entirely plausible.

As for the energy cost of the rest of it, I’ll just point to the high energy cost of smelting copper.  Electric motors require quite a bit of that, which is another reason hybrids require more manufacturing energy than non-hybrid cars.  Plausibly, depending on expected lifespan, there may be no manufacturing energy savings in the non-disposable portions of the devices.

For an extremely-long-lived battery, such as one used in a car, that payback period usually isn’t much of a consideration.  You’re saving a ton of fuel, and the battery will typically last well over a decade.  Overall, it’s a winner, even if you fully acknowledge the energy cost of producing the battery.

Here’s the kicker:  How long do those lawn-mower batteries last?  Every website I visit seems to give the same answer of three-to-five years.  So they might last long enough to pay back that initial carbon-footprint debt.

The upshot is that a lithium-ion powered lawn mower is a fine way to reduce local air pollution.  It may not be such a winner from the standpoint of reducing your carbon footprint.  And since global warming/carbon footprint is my main concern, I’m not hugely attracted to those devices from an environmental standpoint.

In addition, knowing what I now know about lithium-ion batteries, I’d bet on the lower end of that three-to-five-year range.  My wife’s new Prius — a Prius Prime — arguably contains a $12,000 lithium battery pack.  With no warranty to speak of.  So I got kind of serious about not trashing that.  And that’s when I learned the rules for lithium-ion batteries.  See Post #1703.

The rules, in brief:  Lithium-ion batteries don’t like heat.  They don’t like to be fast-charged.  They don’t like rapid rates of discharge, either.  And they really don’t like being worked from fully charged to fully dead.  They much prefer shallow charge-discharge cycles.

And yet, every manufacturer seems intent on using them in all the wrong ways, in mowers.  These will see highest use in the heat of summer, and typically be stored in a non-climate-controlled space.  Everybody seems to charge their lawn-mower batteries at a “1 C” rate of charge or higher — from dead to fully charged in one hour.  (Presumably, that’s to all ow you to swap batteries continuously and mow very large lawns.)  I’m pretty sure manufacturers allow the full capacity of the battery to be used, unlike cars that reserve the top and bottom 10 to 15 percent as a buffer against over– and under-charging.  (That’s why a 72-volt battery pack can be advertised as 80 volts, because once you’ve absolutely fully charged it, that’s what it’ll read, despite the fact that charging it to that degree is bad for battery life.)

Point 3:  If you love buying name-brand inkjet cartridges, you’ll enjoy purchasing batteries for your lawn mower.

Here, I’ll just refer to the highest-rated 21″ walk-behind battery powered mower on Amazon.  This is the Greenworks Pro 80V 21″ model, with 4.0 Ah battery.

On Amazon, the complete mower, with battery and charger, is $425.  But the replacement 4.0 Ah battery, by itself, costs almost $300.

In short, your cost of the replacement battery is 70% of the total cost of the functioning lawn mower.  And, as with power tools of all sort, manufacturers go way out of their way to make sure that only their batteries will fit their tools.

This, more than anything else, is why I swore off battery-powered shop tools.  It’s the monopoly-exploitation aspect of the battery replacement.  Once you’ve bought into a particular manufacturer’s line, they’ve got you.  And as far as I was ever able to tell, generic batteries manufactured to fit those tools are all completely dreadful.  So if you want a battery that works, for that name-brand tool, you pay that name-brand price.

Once I bought my third $45 battery pack, for my $60 drill, I did eventually figure out that a battery-powered drill is an expensive way to make holes in stuff.   That drill eventually got to the point where battery packs were no longer available.  (Which, if you own one long enough, will happen.)   At that point, it too became just another particle in our great national solid waste stream.  And was replaced by a corded drill.

Point 4:  Caginess about power.

This is more of an irritation than a point of substance.  But take any battery-powered lawn mower on the market, and try to find out the peak power of the electric motor, expressed either as kilowatts or as horsepower.  Nobody will tell you that basic information.

At some level, the average power output is just basic physics.  The mower above has a 72-volt, 4 amp-hour battery, and claims to be able to run for an hour on that.  That should be sufficient to cut my half-acre lawn.

But do the math.  How much energy is at your disposal, for that hour of mowing?  Well, 72 volts x 4 amps = ~300 watts of average instantaneous output.  Or, over the course of an hour, you have 0.3 KWH of power available to you, to accomplish your hour of mowing.  For sure, your peak power output will be much higher than that.  But if that battery is going to last an hour, it can’t put out more than an average of 300 watts, over that hour.

One horsepower is about 750 watts.  So the average available power output is less than half a horsepower, if you’re going to get your hour of mowing out of that battery.  Again, peak output will clearly be many multiples of that.  But that’s what you have, to get through your lawn, on average, over the course of an hour.

In my case, there are parts of the lawn, at times of the year, that nearly stall the Honda 3.3 KW gas engine that runs my mower.   I would love to know that some prospective battery-powered mower has a peak power output that meets or exceeds that 3.3 KW instantaneous power output.

But here, I bring up the last thing I know about lithium-ion batteries.  If that battery could, in fact, produce 3.3 KW of instantaneous power, it would be discharging at more than a “10 C” rate.  (That is, at that rate, the battery would be dead in less than one-tenth of an hour.)  Discharges at rates like that are unambiguously bad for battery life, for traditional cylindrical-design lithium-ion cells.  So even if it could match the peak power of my current mower, I’m not sure I’d want it to.

In other words, just as was true for my old corded Black-and-Decker, I’m pretty sure that the mower will get through my lawn.  But I’m also pretty sure that I’m going to have to “baby” it when the going gets really tough. 

But short of buying one and using it, there’s no way for me to tell, because manufacturers do not disclose peak power output of these mowers.  And so, how well will some battery-powered mower cut through stands of uber-thick Zoysia grass?

Instead of providing me with the concrete information that would allow me to judge that, manufactures require that I take a guess.  And when I see something like that, I assume it’s because their product would appear in an unfavorable light, if that information were disclosed.

Let me put it this way:  If those battery-powered lawn mowers had peak power that exceeded that of a typical gas mower, you can bet that manufacturers would crow about it.  So I think the absolute silence regarding peak power output tells me more-or-less all I need to know.

Point 5:  Summary

For the time being, I’ve decided to continue using a gas-powered lawn mower.  It’s a modern overhead-valve design, and (best guess, see prior post) mowing produces as much smog-forming pollution per hour as driving a mid-2010s-era sedan for an hour.  That’s clearly a downside, compared to battery-powered mowing, but not an extreme one.  For good measure, I’ve tossing my antiquated gas can in an effort to keep my gas-powered mowing as clean as possible.

My main environmental concern is global warming, and it’s not clear that a battery-powered mower offers much advantage there, compared to gas.  That’s due to the carbon-intensive nature of lithium-ion battery production and the relatively short expected lifetime of those batteries in fairly harsh use conditions.

Otherwise, not switching to battery-powered mowing is mostly a question of avoiding annoyances.  No mower maker will bother to tell me peak power.  So I suspect that will be lacking.  Each mower maker uses proprietary batteries.  So I expect to pay an outrageous amount for them.

And the whole lithium-ion battery-recycling thing is one big question mark.  Yes, you can drop your dead lawn mower batteries off at Home Depot, and Home Depot will cover the cost of getting them recycled, to some degree.  The degree to which the material in these batteries is actually re-used is far from clear.

So that’s it.  I saw a compelling reason and significant gains from switching car transportation to electricity.  There, at issue was a considerable amount of gasoline burned per year, batteries with an extremely long projected life-span, and some guarantee of responsible end-of-life recycling via Toyota.  Maybe. And the driving experience is better under electricity than with gas.  For mowing the lawn, by contrast, at issue is just two gallons of gas a year, there’s no clear benefit in terms of carbon footprint, and I’m betting that it’s harder to mow with a battery-powered mower than with a modern gas mower.

So this is one area where I’m not going to electrify the task.

Post #1775: Gas versus electric mowing, Part 5: Finally, a sensible estimate

To cut to the chase:  I use a 21″ push mower with a modern Honda overhead-valve engine.  Starting from EPA data on emissions for engines of that type, I calculated two simple rules of thumb, for the pollution generated by my lawn mowing.

If the standard of comparison is the typical car on the road — call it a mid-2010s full-sized sedan — then gas lawn mowers are 100 times dirtier than gas cars, per horsepower.  And an hour of mowing generates about as much pollution as an hour of driving.

That’s just the mower.  That doesn’t include emissions from your gas can, as outlined in the just-prior post.

Also see Post #1776, explaining why, despite this level of pollution, I’m not going to switch to an electric mower any time soon.  This, even though I drive an electric car (Post #1924, et seq.) Continue reading Post #1775: Gas versus electric mowing, Part 5: Finally, a sensible estimate

Post #1774: Gas vs. electric mowing, part 4: A correction on vapor recovery, and why you’re not supposed to top off your car’s gas tank.

 

In my just-prior post, I was about a decade out-of-date in my understanding of the gas vapor recovery systems installed on U.S. gas pumps.  I’m going to correct that here.

  1. Gasoline vapors are a major contributor to photochemical smog, and, in particular, to the creation of ground-level ozone.
  2. Once upon a time, the U.S. EPA required that gas pumps in some urban areas have vapor-recovery nozzles.  These were designed to collect the gasoline vapors that would otherwise just pour out of your car’s gas tank as you refilled it.
  3. By and large, these were only mandated in areas that could not meet federal air pollution standards for ground-level ozone.
  4. But by 2006, virtually all new cars and trucks were equipped with on-board vapor recovery systems.  They collected their own gasoline vapors during refueling, stored them, and burned them
  5. In 2012, the EPA dropped its requirement for vapor-recovery nozzles (reference).  At that point, so many cars had the new on-board systems that the vapor-recovery nozzles no longer offered sufficient benefit to justify their cost.
  6. Whether or not gas stations were required to keep up those vapor recovery systems was left up to the states.  For example, Virginia chose to decommission all those vapor recovery systems in 2017 (reference).

The upshot is that gas pumps in my area haven’t had those vapor-recovery nozzles for more than half a decade.  They still have some sort of rubber cup on the fuel nozzle, but I guess that’s just to prevent splashback or possibly to aid the car’s own on-board recovery system.

Some implications

With this, a lot of things now click into place.

Vehicle fuel tank filler necks now have an elastic seal in them.  I’m sure that older cars did not have those.  That seal is required on a modern car because the on-board vapor recovery system needs a tight seal against the gas nozzle.  That’s the only way to make sure that the gas vapors in the tank end up in the on-board charcoal canister.

The standard advice of “Don’t top off your tank” now has a new rationale.  In the ancient past, that was the advice because gas expands as it warms, and if you topped off your tank in summer, you’d end up spilling gas out the fuel filler as you drove down the road.  Now, that advice is there to protect your on-board vapor recovery system.  If you top off you tank, you can end up shoving liquid gasoline into your vapor recovery system, something it was not designed for.

My old two-gallon gas can produced four gallons of gasoline vapors before I even considered spills, venting, and the gasoline-permeability of the plastic.  Every time I filled that at the gas pump (since 2017), that displaced the two gallons of vapors, in the gas can, into the atmosphere.  And then, as I repeatedly filled the tank on the mower, that sums up to another two gallons of gasoline vapor displaced into the atmosphere.

How does that compare to gasoline vapor emissions from cars?

The EPA estimates that these on-board vapor recovery systems capture about 98% of gasoline vapors, at least according to this presentation.  The same source shows that the EPA estimates an average of 0.32 grams of gasoline spilled per gallon dispensed at a typical gas station.

The U.S. averages about 650 gallons of gasoline consumed per licensed driver.  Based on that, a year’s worth of fill-ups, for the typical licensed driver in the U.S., would generate:

  • 13 gallons of gas vapor spilled directly into the atmosphere (2% of that 650 gallons).
  • Another 12 gallons of gas vapor due to the average 208 grams of fuel spilled (0.32 g/ gallon).

In other words, the average driver with properly-functioning vapor recovery equipment and average diligence about spilling gasoline will generate about 25 gallons of gasoline vapors annually.

In that context, the 4+ gallons of gas vapor directly emitted by my old gas can seems quite material.  Particularly because my wife and I now exclusively drive her Prius Prime.  We seem to use on-order-of 40 gallons of gas a year, with the rest of our travel being electric.  From that 40 gallons, based on those EPA averages, we’d only be emitting about 1.5 gallons of gasoline vapor per year.  So that, in our household, the lawn mower and old gas can were responsible for far more gas vapor emissions than our car was.

That said, it’s worth noting that the lawn mower — even with the old gas can — is nowhere as bad as the average American passenger vehicle, in terms of venting gas vapor to the atmosphere as a result of refueling.  That’s not because the lawn equipment is clean — it’s not.  That because the average driver uses such a vast quantity of gasoline.  Even those small fractional losses during refueling add up to far more gasoline vapor than the lawn mower / old gas can emit in a season.

But that’s only for refueling-related gasoline vapor losses.  That does not include any gasoline vapor losses by the mower during operation.  For example, losses through the charcoal-filled gas cap, losses from the vented carb bowl after engine shutoff, and so on.  I still need to track those down.

The new gas can ought to eliminate half of those “displacement” gas vapor emissions.  The new can vents through the end of the pouring spout, so it’s “inhaling” the gas fumes out of the tank as it puts new gas into the tank.

The only gas vapor that will be directly emitted as a result of displacing vapor during refueling will be from refilling the gas can, at the local gas pump.  That, because our gas pumps no longer have vapor-recovery nozzles.  And apparently haven’t had them since 2017.

Post #1773: Gas vs. electric mowing, part 3: Why do all gas cans suck?

Source:  ACE Hardware.

I’m not the sort of person to buy something new, when the old one still works.  But my deep dive into lawn mowers and air pollution has convinced me to buy a new gas can, shown above.

There was nothing wrong with my current gas can.  In the sense that it worked exactly as it did when I bought it about three decades ago.

But technology that was fine three decades ago doesn’t really cut it in the modern world.

In this post, I’m going to explain why I took this momentous step. Continue reading Post #1773: Gas vs. electric mowing, part 3: Why do all gas cans suck?