Category: Garden

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

Post G24-023: Taste test of tromboncino, cucuzzi, and yellow summer squash.

 

 

Background:  I’m trying two alternatives to traditional summer squash in my garden this year.

For this post, I steamed immature fruits from tromboncino and cucuzzi (a.k.a. zucchetta a.k.a.  guinea bean), along with yellow summer squash from the store.

Above:  Top is zuchetta, middle is yellow summer squash, bottom is tromboncino.

Here are my impressions

Steamed immature tromboncino squash tastes quite similar to yellow summer squash.  The only giveaway is a slightly bitter note that yellow summer squash completely lacks.  I’d phrase that as yellow summer squash tastes “sweeter” or perhaps “nuttier” than tromboncino.

(I’ve seen tromboncino described as having a “cucumber” note, and in hindsight, maybe I’m tasting a bitterness similar to that found in the undesirable part of a cucumber.  But only a touch.)

Immature cucuzzi gourds?  Quite a bit different from yellow summer squash.  Charitably, even steamed, they have sort of a raw-green-bean note.  Uncharitably, they kinda taste a little like dirt.

Not much. Not even close to spit-it-out bad.  But a little goes a long way, when it comes to tasting like dirt.

In times of famine, sure, I’d eat either one.

The upshot is that if I were pining for summer squash, I’d get it at the grocery store.  Second choice, I’d eat immature tromboncino.  It’s not bad.  Put some pasta sauce on it, and I wouldn’t know it wasn’t summer squash.  But if the only option were guinea bean, I’d find something else to eat.

All of this, because the presence of squash vine borer in my area makes it a real chore to grow “regular” summer squash.  Either I spray my plants for weeks on end, or I lose them to the vine borer.

Or I try something weirder, of which, growing then eating these two immature fruits as if they were summer squash, is one.  Because, in theory, the squash vine borer won’t bother these alternatives.  Or, at least, won’t outright kill them, usually.

Taste aside, the icing on the cake is poor productivity.  At least, so far, for me, both have had abysmal yield.  They are both sprawling, large-leaved squash/gourd vines that take up a lot of space.  But fruits are few and far-between.  (At least, in my garden, this year.)

Edit 9/8/2024:  My two tromboncino vines finally started producing a reasonable number of fruit in late August.  Large fruit.  Very large fruit.  If these will mature before first frost, tromboncino will have redeemed itself as a reasonably productive butternut-type winter squash.  I still wouldn’t grow it as a summer-squash substitute. 

Edit 2/5/2025:  My tromboncini vines did, in fact, produced a pile of winter squash.  So, good yield, even though my garden is not terribly sunny.  And, as a winter squash, it’s OK.  Keeps reasonably well.  Perfectly edible.  You can peel it with a vegetable peeler, then dice-and-boil, or bake it in the skin.  But it’s bland.  (Bland-er than other types of winter squash, I mean.)  Not nearly as good as plain old Waltham butternut.  (Also, noticeably paler flesh than Waltham butternut.)  Maybe with more sunlight or better soil, tromboncino would work well.  But I’m not going to grow it again, in my back yard, USDA Zone 7b, Virginia.  For the amount of space these vines take up, I’d rather grow a standard butternut squash.

For both plants, I can now stop eating the immature fruit and let some of it mature.  Maybe. Tromboncino is in the butternut squash family, and apparently produces pretty good winter squash.  So, mature, it ought to taste more like a butternut squash, which would be fine.  The cucuzzi, it’s a gourd, but in theory I think you can eat that one once it’s mature, as well.  I’m not sure I’m looking forward to that.

So the cucuzzi’s days may be numbered.  I think I’d rather let the trombincino take over its space.  (Edit 8/10/2024:  About a week ago, I sliced through both cucuzzi (gourd) vines that I planted, at the roots.  And yet, a small part of the cucuzzi vine appears to be alive.  I know not how.  But, for sure, that’s one tough plant.) 

Edit 2/5/2025:  I let one cucuzzi grow to full maturity.  It did the same thing that birdhouse gourds do — it dried out and developed a mottled brown skin.  You end up with a 3′ long, 5″ wide hollow gourd.  It’s interesting looking — I might even go so far as to say decorative — but I can think of no practical use for it.

YMMV.

Post G24-022: Time is nonlinear in the garden.

 

I don’t mean anything cosmic or metaphysical by saying that time is nonlinear in the garden.

I’m just trying to figure out when I should start clipping the flowers off my tomatoes.

And I come up with the ridiculous answer of “now”.

This post explains how I arrived at that answer.

 

Please remember to phrase it in the form of a question.

Image source:  WalMart.

Answer:  Now.

Question:  When should I start clipping the flowers off my tomato plants?

Really?

Yep.

The theory is ridiculously simple

For the sake of argument, assume it takes 55 days to manufacture a ripe tomato, under ideal growing conditions.  That is, 55 days elapse between the time the flower opens, and the time the ripe tomato is ready to be picked.

Further assume, correctly, that I place little value on green tomatoes.

How late can my tomatoes flower, and still give me ripe fruit?

For sure, frost kills tomato plants.  Halloween is my expected fall first frost date.  So, any tomato flowers opening after September 6 are probably useless to me.  That’s 55 days prior to expected first frost.  If first frost occurs on time, those late flowers won’t give me any usable fruit.

First complication:  Mere 50F cold damages green tomatoes.

During last year’s bumper crop of green tomatoes, I learned a lot.  Mostly, I learned to plant my tomatoes earlier.

But in addition, I learned that green tomatoes are permanently damaged by 50F nighttime temperatures.  This and other fun facts are summarized in:

Post G23-060: Gardening’s booby prize.

So if I want ripe fruit, it needs to ripen up before nighttime temperatures routinely drop to 50F or lower.  Eyeballing the weather for the past five Octobers, that happens around October 7 in my area.  Or 21 days before typical first frost.

As a result, the entire tomato-ripening timeline needs to shift back by 21 days.   Because I don’t merely need to avoid frost.  I need to avoid nights under 50F.   I need to start cutting the flowers off my tomato plants not on September 6, but on August 16.

If I want to pick ripe tomatoes before nights begin dipping below 50F, flowers opening after August 16 are useless to me.

Second complication:  Time is non-linear in the garden.

Source:  Gencraft AI

Everything in the garden slows as we slip into fall.  It slows, in part, because we see less sunlight.  It slows, in part, because temperatures drop.

Back-of-the-envelope, I guess that October days produce about one-third as much plant growth as August days.  In my climate (Zone 7).  That compounds a roughly 50% decline in growth due to temperature (October around here is about 10C less than August, which cuts the speed of a typical chemical reaction in half), along with having only about 70% of the sunlight that we see in August.  I’d then guesstimate that September days produce perhaps two-thirds the growth that August days do.

This means that the entire month of September accomplishes only 20 days’ worth of growing and ripening under ideal conditions.  And October only adds 10 days’ worth.  More formally, if October 7 is my end-of-season date (beyond which I can expect 50F and lower nights), then to get the equivalent of 55 days of perfect growing conditions, I have to start clipping off my tomato flowers on July 30.  Or, two days from now.

Conclusion

If my tomatoes take 55 days to go from flower to fruit, under ideal growing conditions, then I should start clipping the flowers off approximately 93 days before expected first-frost date.

Or, more-or-less now.

This sounds absolutely ridiculous.  But I swear it’s true.

Of the additional (93 – 55 =) 38 days that arise from the factors discussed above:

The flower-kill date moves up by 21 days, because the actual practical no-damage cutoff is 50F nights, not frost.

The flower-kill date moves up by a further 17 days because fall growing conditions are not ideal, and everything in the garden slows down in September and October.

Afterward:  A controlled observation is a form of an experiment.

I, like most gardeners, have a hard time cutting new flowers off my tomatoes.  Or, off my vegetable plants in general.  If nothing else, it’s an admission of finality for the year.  The only fruits I’m going to get this year are the ones that are already set, on those plants.

This year, I’m going to test the theory by marking a selection of flower bracts on my tomatoes now.  (Probably just put a twist-tie around them).  Then letting one or more rounds of new flowers survive, beyond the marked bracts.  Then seeing which of those led to mature fruits, before nights turn cold in the fall.

I’m pretty sure, for example, that cherry tomatoes take less time to develop than full-sized (slicing) tomatoes.  And I’m pretty sure that my early-season tomatoes also take less time to mature than slicing tomatoes.  And so I strongly suspect that the right time to start clipping the flowers is directly correlated with the size of the final tomatoes.

If so, that should come out clearly in my end-of-season observations.

Post #1989: What fraction of U.S. gasoline consumption is for lawn mowing?

 

I should preface this by stating that I drive an EV and heat my house with a ground-source heat pump.  So I’m hardly against substituting electricity for direct combustion of fossil fuels.

But the data are what they are.

Best guess is that all types of lawn-care type activities, both residential and commercial, including mowing, leaf blowing, and so on, together account for as much as 2% of U.S. gasoline consumption.  Residential (non-commercial) yard care of all sorts accounts for maybe 0.6% of U.S. gasoline consumption.

Since C02 production is directly proportional to gasoline use, that means residential lawn mowing is rounding error in terms of global warming impact.

For the average American, using an electric lawn mower in no material way offsets the global warming impact of driving an SUV, truck, or car.  Choice of car is more than 100 times as important as your choice of lawn mower.

I hope nobody is surprised by that, despite the ludicrous estimates of the environmental impact of lawn mowing that can be found on the internet.

Source:  Saint Philip Neri and the chicken, 16th century, as quoted by Pope Francis.

Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Often attributed to Mark Twain, circa 1900.

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.

Jonathan Swift, 1710

Lawn mowers, yet again.

The point of this post is to estimate what fraction of U.S. gasoline use is attributable to lawn mowers. 

Each gallon of gas burned creates roughly the same 20 pounds or so of C02.  Therefore (ignoring NOx, nitrogen oxides), the fraction of gasoline consumption attributable to lawn-mowing will tell me the contribution that gasoline-based lawn mowing makes to global warming, relative to gasoline-driven passenger vehicles, in the U.S.

In other words, residential lawn mowing’s share of gasoline burned is lawn mower’s share of C02 released.  And that shows how U.S. gas lawn mowers (in aggregate) compare to our passenger vehicles (in aggregate), in contributing the world’s warming.

In previous posts, I showed how a modern (overhead-valve) lawn mower engine stacks up against a typical car, in terms of pollution per hour (Post #1775 and related posts).   (Pollution being defined in various traditional ways (e.g, particulates, nitrogen oxides.)  In round numbers, an hour of mowing produces roughly the same pollution as an hour of driving a typical car.  

While “pollution” as used above includes particulates and smog-forming emissions, it doesn’t include C02 at all.  Yet, while most smog-forming emissions are relatively short-lived, the increase in atmospheric C02 from fossil-fuel combustion is a nearly-permanent addition to atmospheric greenhouse gasses, in the context of a human lifespan.  (As in, like, forever — here’s a little something published in Nature Climate Change to brighten your day REFERENCE).  Most of it will still be affecting climate 300 years from now.  A good chunk of it — say a quarter — will still be warming the climate millenia from now.

(Separately, the big shocker to me was finding out that gas in gas cans is major source of pollution. Per my actual test, old plastic gas cans (“Blitz cans”) are ridiculously permeable to gasoline, and gas stored in old plastic cans is a large source of smog-forming gasoline vapor.  This, apparently, is why the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has such stringent standards for gas cans.  And why, until recently, “CARB-compliant gas can” was synonymous with “awkward to use”.)

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

For the estimate above, I did my own number-crunching, with clear documentation as to sources of data and details of calculation, because estimates on the internet are all over the map.  The plausible estimates were mostly published by state governments.  The ludicrous ones appear to come from fanatical but innumerate environmentalists.

And, of course, it’s the ludicrous ones that get recirculated the most.  You might think that’s something unique to the internet, but per the quotes above, the internet merely speeds up and amps up long-noticed aspect of human nature.  Lies are juicer than the truth, and propagate accordingly, seemingly regardless of the medium of propagation.

In any case, to validate my prior estimate (an hour of mowing is like an hour of driving), I decided to look at estimates of the fraction of U.S. gasoline consumption that goes to lawn care.

And — no big surprise — those estimates seem to have the somewhat the same bullshit nonsense level as the estimates of the pollution generated by an hour of mowing.  So I thought I’d take an hour this morning and try to separate fact from fiction, on this question.

Some calculations, and some citations, regarding the fraction of U.S. gasoline use attributable to lawn mowing.

Crude per-household use calculation, lawn mowers: 0.6%.

Source:  OFF-HIGHWAY AND PUBLIC-USE GASOLINE CONSUMPTION ESTIMATION MODELS USED IN THE FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION Final Report for the 2014 Model Revisions and Recalibrations,Publication Number – FHWA-PL-17-012 June 2015

The U.S. consumes about 136 billion gallons of gasoline per year, of which 91% is for light cars and trucks (Cite:  US Energy Information Agency).

The U.S. has about 130M households (Cite: U.S. Census Bureau, via Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).

Ergo, by the magic of long division, average annual U.S. gasoline consumption works out to be a nice round (136B/130M =~) 1000 gallons per household.

(Separately, this squares with survey-based estimates showing about 650 gallons of gasoline consumed annually per licensed U.S. driver (CITE), and, based on harder statistics, about 230M licensed drivers (CITE).  (That is, 650 x 230M drivers /130M households =~ 1150 gallons of gas per year, per household).

I use about 2 gallons of gas per year, mowing my large suburban lawn, using a mower with a modern overhead-valve Honda engine.  I’m guessing that’s an upper bound for per-household use, as my yard is larger than average.

This suggests that gasoline use, attributable to household lawn mowing, accounts for somewhere around (2/1000 =~) 0.2% of total U.S. gasoline use. 

But, per the EPA graphic above, households only account for about a third of all gasoline use, for all types of lawn care (e.g., mowing, leaf blowing, snow blowing, and so on).  So total U.S. gasoline consumption for lawn care, of all types, by all sources, would therefore be about 0.6% of all U.S. gasoline consumption.

EPA, 2015:  2.7B gallons for all lawn care activities, residential and commercial, about 2% of total U.S. gasoline consumption. 

Separately, the same EPA source (for the graphic, above, Table 42) directly estimates 0.9B gallons of gas used for residential lawn care activities annually, and a further 1.8B used for all types of commercial lawn care, for a total of about 2.7B gallons of gasoline use for all types of lawn-care type activities.  This would therefore amount to (2.7B for lawn care/137B total =~) 2% of total U.S. gasoline consumption.

U.S. Department of Energy (2011):  Mowers alone, residential and commercial, 1%.

” Mowers consume 1.2 billion gallons of gasoline annually, about 1% of U.S. motor gasoline consumption.”

Source:  Clean Cities Guide to Alternative Fuel Commercial Lawn
Equipment, U.S. DOE, 2011.

Conclusion

Source:  RC groups.com

I’d say that’s more than enough research to get a usable answer.

Almost all gasoline in the U.S. is used for private on-road light vehicles (cars, trucks, SUVs).  Per the EPA cite above, 91% of it.

From the perspective of global warming, that’s the problem.

The amount of gas used by household lawn mowing is regrettable, but it’s rounding error in the big picture.

Buying an electric lawn mower in no way expiates the sin of driving a gas-guzzling car.  Or, really, any car, for that matter.

Keep your eye on the ball.  Despite what you may read on the internet.

Addendum:  Lawn services that do residences are classified as what, exactly?

I never did find a direct answer to this via the U.S. EPA.  By looking at the earliest versions of their work, I infer that the original split between residential and commercial yard work is by ownership of the equipment.  Initially, it was referred to as “privately owned” versus commercial equipment.

The upshot is that if a commercial service cuts somebody’s yard, the EPA likely counts that as commercial use.  So to get apples to apples, I likely need to move some part of the EPA’s commercial use back to the residential sector.  That is, if I really intend to assess the impact of mowing one’s yard / having one’s yard mown, relative to the impact of cars.

This will increase my initially-cited estimate of 0.6% of using gasoline being used for mowing. But, by how much?

Best I can tell, something like three-quarters to four-fifths of Americans mow their own lawn.  (You know what I mean: Of those who have a lawn … e.g., CITE).  But that really ought be to weighted by lawn area, as it’s almost certainly true that the larger the private lawn, the more likely it is to be cut by a professional.  I did not find that information anywhere, so …

If I stick with the lower cited number and pretend that only three-quarters of residential lawn mowing is done by individuals (that is, using privately-owned mowing equipment), because three-quarters of people with lawns mow their own,  I need to adjust the initial 0.6% upward to 0.8%. (The EPA residential sector estimate omits about a quarter of U.S. residential lawn mowing, because a quarter of private lawns are commercially mown.)

The conclusion is unchanged.  In the U.S., gasoline used in lawn care is trivial compared to the gasoline used by passenger vehicles.

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

 

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

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

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

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

Source:  Weather Underground, historical weather for Vienna VA

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

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

Dry, no matter how you squeeze it.

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Post G24-018: Where are the bugs?

 

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

Where are the bugs?

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

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

Source:  Cornell University.

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

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

A clue from Purdue U

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

Source:  Purdue University landscaper report, emphasis mine.

The paragraph above was for 2022, for Indiana.

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

Source:  Cornell University.

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

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

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

x

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

 

Post #1979: Catching up with a few things.

 

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

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

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

Roses are red, boysenberries are purple.

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

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

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

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

Bike rehab success.

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

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

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

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

Poor garlic yield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sketchy no more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultivating my first deadly toxic plant.

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