Category: Garden

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

Post #1969: Rainy-day this and that.

 

It has turned into a cool and rainy spring, here in Northern Virginia.

This post is a hodgepodge:

  • Microwave “energy saver” mode?
  • Ace hardware watering can.
  • Vegetative propagation:  still rootless at four weeks
  • Learning a new computer language.

Microwave energy saver mode?

Hey, my new microwave has an “energy saver” mode.  This turns off the display, and so reduces the electricity the microwave uses when sitting idle, the so-called “parasitic draw” or standby energy use.

Conspicuous by its absence, however, is any mention of how much energy this saves.  So I put a meter on it.  Without energy saver, the parasitic draw is two watts.  With energy saver, the parasitic draw is two watts.  In other words, energy save reduces standby electricity consumption by less than 1 watt (else the digits on my meter would have changed).

Observation 1:  I am old enough that, once upon a time, I thought it odd that every new appliance had a clock, and those clocks were constantly on.    Now, having lived with that for decades, my gut reaction to a microwave without a lit clock is “oh no, the microwave is broken”.  My brain no longer understands the concept of a working microwave without a clock.  No clock showing instantly registers as “oh crap, the microwave is dead”.

Perhaps my brain will adapt.  But the easier solution is to ignore the “energy saver” feature, and needlessly burn an additional 9 KWH per year in clock-lighting energy.

Observation 2:  There was a time when electronics used tubes, and electronic devices literally had to warm up before they would function.  As I recall, for a TV, this would typically take on-order-of 15 seconds or so.  The only way to avoid that delay was to use “instant-on” technology, which simply ran electricity through the tubes all the time, to keep the filaments hot.  Instant-on devices consumed so much energy in standby mode that this was banned, for new electronics, as part of the Carter administration’s grappling with the fallout from the Arab oil embargoes and the resulting 1970s energy crises.

Observation 3:  And yet, now that everything is solid-state (no tubes), you can still find electronics with pretty substantial parasitic draws.  Here, I think the worst offenders are computers (where “sleep” mode keeps all the chips hot, versus “hibernate” mode that writes the internal state of the computer to disk, then turns it off), and game consoles (same notion).

For some reason, the Crazy Right got bent out of shape when Microsoft updated its Xbox game console software to make (low-energy) hibernate the default temporary shutdown mode, rather than sleep mode, which consumed 15 watts, continuously, even when the game console appeared to be off (see Post #1696).  I have never figured out the logical reason why anything that reduces fuel use is deemed Evil by the nutso right, but that surely seems to be the case.

Observation 4:  This energy-saver feature is just one more instance of the all-hype, all-the-time society.  The reality is that this microwave has an energy-saver mode that does almost nothing.  So the manufacturer simply advertised that it had an energy-saver mode.  Full stop. Thus validating the rule-of-thumb that when a key bit of information is missing  — in this case, the actual energy savings — that was done on purpose.

Ace hardware watering can breaks the replacement-purchase rule.

The only interesting story here is that this breaks the replacement-purchase rule: Any time you go to replace an item that you really like, you will find that item is no longer being made. 

I bought two Ace hardware plastic watering cans somewhere around 15 years ago.  They have held up remarkably well (plus or minus one missing rosette, which is probably the result of operator error).

These function well, but are otherwise unremarkable.  The Jerrycan-like design is perfect for watering a vegetable garden.  (Even when full, you can hold them by the back handle, nozzle-down, for fast, intense watering.)

I had assumed that after all this time, Ace would have changed the can.  Just because the Gods of Eternal Change for Change’s Sake would demand it.  But no.  Ace still sells the exact same plastic 2-gallon watering can.  I just bought another one, above, from Ace Hardware.

Only when I got it home did I realize they’d redone the rosette to make it a much slower can, with a much finer, more delicate spray.   That’s the old rosette on the left, and the new one on the right, above.  This is easily fixed with about a minute of time and a drill/bit.

Vegetative propagation:  Alive but rootless.

Like a retiree living in a motor home.

Four weeks ago, I set out to try two different approaches to growing new plants by taking cuttings of old plants:  Air layering, and snip-dip-stick. With air layering, you girdle a branch, then pack wet potting soil around the injury, wrap in plastic, and hope that the branch will set new roots in that potting soil.  With snip-dip-stick, you snip off a green branch end, dip it in rooting hormone, and stick it in potting soil.  Again, in the hope that roots will form.

The good news is that four weeks into it, and almost all the cuttings are still alive.  That’s a surprise to me.

The bad news is that none of my cuttings has grown roots yet.

This despite the fact that the internet swore I’d have a humongous root ball on these things after just four weeks.

Note the total absence of roots, above.  That said, I potted them up anyway.  When you get down to it, sitting in wet potting soil in your own pot is not very different from sitting in wet potting soil with a bunch of other cuttings.

In any case, “four weeks” to have a nicely-rooted cutting now seems wildly optimistic.  These things are still basically sticks with leaves on them.  But they are most definitely still alive.

So now they are sticks, in their own pots, with leaves on them.

We’ll see how it goes from here.  I still have one air-layered branch still attached to the mother plant.  I’m leaving that be, for the time being, and maybe at 8 weeks I’ll see some root development there.

Learning a new computer language.

I have no interest in learning a new computer language. My brain is full. Anything I learn now requires forgetting something I already know.

In fact, I’ve never had any interest in learning any computer language.  But that’s the price of admission if you intend to write computer programs to (e.g.) perform data analysis.  I’m an “applications programmer”, that is, a person who uses some sort of higher-level computer language, as opposed to a “systems programmer”, the sort of person who creates and writes a higher-level computer language.

I mean, there are nerds, and then there are nerds.  I’m just an applications-programming nerd, not a systems-programming nerd.

Actually, I have exactly $3400 worth of interest in learning a new computer language this year.  That’s what the annual license costs, for the program that I’m fluent in — SAS (Statistical Analysis System).

My continued use of SAS — and the annual fee — are holdovers from my years of running my own small business.  Back when custom data analysis using SAS was the core of my business, that expense was easily justified.  Now it’s just an expensive hobby.  I used SAS quite a bit during the pandemic, to track and analyze COVID-19 data.  But since that time, I rarely ever boot up the program.

And yet, I can’t quite let it go.  After spending most of my life doing data analysis, I just can’t go cold turkey.  I’m just not going to feel comfortable without something at my disposal that’s a step up from using Excel.

In terms of open-source freeware for statistical analysis, my options seem to be R or Python.  Having taken a brief peek at both, and seen way too many C-like curly brackets {{{  }}} in Python, I downloaded and installed R on my Windows 7 laptop.  Eventually, successfully, one Windows tweak required.

This did not preclude downloading Python as well.  The clincher is that, when asked, my daughter said R was the better choice if my intended use is statistical analysis.  The response was sufficiently terse and on-point that I’m pretty sure it was her genuine opinion, and not the product of an AI.

In any case, that, and running readily under Windows 7, clinched the deal for R.  It looked to me as if the latest versions of Python do not run (or run right) under Windows 7.  Or getting them to do so was beyond my skill level.

Now I just need to see if I can make R do what I used to make SAS do.

The oddity here is not that I’m learning a new higher-level computer language.  It’s that a) I’m 65 years old, b) I’m doing this for $3400 a year and some sense of connection with my professional past.

Old dog.  New trick.  We’ll see how well it works.

Post G24-015: Gardening in shorts.

 

That is, a few short items on gardening, since it seems as if all I do these days is garden.

These include:

  • The FROGS.  OMG, the FROGS.
  • Recycling campaign signs into temporary raised beds.
  • Solarizing lawn to convert it to garden beds.
  • Heating the soil by covering with black plastic.

Continue reading Post G24-015: Gardening in shorts.

Post G24-014: Creeping Charlie puller and other garden items.

 

Creeping Charley is a weed, also know as ground ivy.  When mature, it forms masses of thin vines (stolons), loosely rooted to the ground.  My “puller” is a bow rake paired with a paint roller.  It’s crude, but this allowed me to pull masses of Creeping Charlie out of a garden bed that I was preparing, without having to stoop over and pull it by hand.  Details are below.

Continue reading Post G24-014: Creeping Charlie puller and other garden items.

Post #1967: Friday/Saturday this-n-that. Part 3: Vegetative propagation via air layering.

 

The set-up:  Yardwork postponed is yardwork delayed.

I would have gone done a bunch of gardening tasks yesterday morning, were it not for the fact that there was a bunch of guys building a fence in my back yard.

I didn’t invite them.  The house across my back fence was torn down a couple of months back.  That old house has been replaced by a new, much bigger, house.  The builders of that new, much bigger, house are now tearing down the rotting fence between our yards, and replacing it.

It’s their fence.  It was falling down.  No one will mourn the loss.

But while that work crew is there, I’m not comfortable going out and engaging in a leisure-time activity like gardening.

I have dug a foot in his boots.  Or something.

That said, I can see that to make the post holes, they have a guy with a post-hole digger.  A manual post-hole digger, as pictured above.

Unsurprisingly — to me, anyway — he’s having a hard time of it.  The look on his face is about the same as the look on mine, when I try to dig holes in that area, using a post-hole digger.  It’s a cross between “you’re kidding me, right” and “I have to hack my way through this with a post-hole digger”?

The dirt in that area is packed with roots of every size and description, from 60-year-old-maples to the neighbor’s bamboo.  No single tool will do the complete job of making a hole in that.  (OK,a utility company truck with a power augur would likely have no trouble.  But not much short of that.)  I resort to (and dull the edges of) an entire array of tools when I dig there, starting with an axe.

In short, digging a nice neat hole in that location is going to be a total pain.

I do not envy the man his job.  I share his pain.

But he powered on through it, I guess, as the fence is now up.

Vegetative propagation.

Now that fence is in, I need to plant something that will plausibly block my view of the new, much bigger, house.

I ideally want to plant something that doesn’t require a big hole.   Not in that location.  And yet isn’t tiny, implying years before it grows adequately to fill the space.

And if the builder plants his side in the meantime, I need to leave an open gap there for sunlight. So I may want to plant nothing.  At the least, this argues against buying a big expensive plant for this location.

In any case, I decided to use this odd need — it boils down to wanting a big plant in a small container — as an excuse to try out vegetative propagation to grow some new plants.

Old-school, this would have been stated as “I’m taking some cuttings”.  But to me, that doesn’t sound quite macho enough.  So vegetative propagation it is.

I’m trying to grow new skip laurels (and some new fig trees) from cuttings.  And I’m trying two methods of vegetative propagation:  Air layering some branches, and (what I think of as) snip, dip-and-stick on some twigs.  I vaguely believe the first is a form of brown-wood propagation, the latter is a form of green-wood propagation.  But I am unsure.  I’ve never done any of this before, and I have no clue about much of anything yet.  Let alone the accepted nomenclature.

Air layering.

With air layering, you intentionally girdle a small branch, hoping to force it to grow roots where you girdled it.  You cleanly remove a tube of bark about 1″ long, circling the branch.  Scrape the inch of branch to bare wood, optionally dust the wound with Rootone (or equivalent rooting hormone), pack a wad of wet potting soil around the wound.  Tightly wrap that wad in a layer of plastic.  Finish with a layer of aluminum foil.  The plastic is there to retain water.  The tin foil, to exclude light.

Note that, implied in all this is the idea of a branch with bark you can easily remove.  Likely second-year (possibly later) wood, with brown bark.  Likely not first-year green-barked shoots.  Thus, as practiced, an example of brown-wood vegetative reproduction.

Why not do this to a big tree limb, and produce yourself a brand-new big tree in one year?   I’m not sure.  I’m guessing the practical upper limit is set by the imbalance between leaf area and roots.  So I’d guess there’s a practical upper limit to how big a branch would survive this to become a new plant.  I’d say the norm is to do this on two-year-old wood.

Edit:  Upon reflection, that’s probably not the right reason.  Seems like leaf area and water transmission area should be in balance on the growing plant, no matter what age or diameter the branch is.  Each branch or stem would itself be balanced in this regard.  Maybe the limitation on survival is elsewhere, such as the point in time where the branch must survive on its own (new) roots.

In any case, then you wait.  Check your wad o’ dirt weekly.  Add water as required.

In a month, you’ll have a ball of roots running through that potting soil.  So they  say.

If all goes well, you then cut the air-layered branch just below the root ball, and hey presto, the branch is now a sapling.  Pot it up with TLC for one year, put it in the ground the next.   

Snip, dip, and stick.

With snip-dip-stick, you snip off a green branch end, dip the cut end in an inch or so of Rootone (-equivalent) powdered rooting agent, then stick that into a few inches of wet potting soil, in a flower pot.  Keep the pot well watered and out of direct sunlight.  Reduce to just a leaf or two per snip, so that they don’t dry out.

The theory is that (some of) these snips will grow roots in a month, at which time they can be pulled from the communal flower pot and potted up individually.  My dozen or so snips are sharing a north-facing, well-watered, never-in-the-sun flower pot.  Easy enough to water one pot.

As with the air-layered plant, they should remain potted up for a year, with TLC, and then should be ready to put in the ground next year.

In the end, these are two different ways to create something to plant next year.   I have no clue whether either method will work for me.  I’ll know more in a couple of weeks.

Addendum:  Why doesn’t air-layering kill the branch?

Here’s the part that could not believe: Girdling does not kill the branch.  The air-layered branches — stripped of their living bark for an inch — appear fine.  On both sides of the complete break in the bark.

Really?  I always heard that doing this to the trunk of a tree would kill it. And, it will.  But I figured that, by analogy, if you did that to a branch of a tree, the branch would necessarily die.

That turns out to be an incorrect analogy.  The leaves on the girdled, air-layered branches in my back yard remain green. All the way out to the end of the branch.  This is presumably from water transported to the leaves via the pith (inside) of the stem. 

Which, in my ignorance, I didn’t realize was a thing.  I thought all transport was via the cambium, the growth layer just under the bark.  But that’s wrong.  At the branch tips, water and nutrients flow from roots to leaves via the branch central pith, and finished products of photosynthesis (starches, sugars, and so on) flow from leaves to roots via the surface cambium layer.

Again, so they say.  I skipped biology in school.  Seems true, as those air-layered branches appear undisturbed by this approach.

The key point is that the branch won’t die for lack of water, even as you are preparing it for full independence from the mother plant.  That’s because you leave the water-distribution vasculature of the branch — the stem pith — intact.  Meanwhile, it takes the energy of photosynthesis, nutrients from the tree roots, and uses that to produce new roots, at the break in the outer bark.

At least, that’s the theory.  I’m reserving judgment, but this seems like an obviously better approach than snip-dip-stick.  I should know, for these plants, in a couple of weeks.

Post #1962: Fire drill

 

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):

  1. It’s time to get it recharged.
  2. It’s time to throw it away.
  3. It’s time to fertilize my garden.

Continue reading Post #1962: Fire drill

Post G24-012: Gang aft a-gley. Shutting down the Great Potato Chit-Off.

 

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.

Post G24-010: Growing ginger in Virginia? This needs a rethink.

 

Update 12/24/2024:  This turned out remarkably well.  From the three boxes below (about 7 square feet total) I got about 7 pounds of usable ginger root. 

But it’s not mature ginger.  This may be what’s sold in grocery stores as “baby ginger”.  No tough skin.  No tough fibers.  Few fibers, period.  And yet, peppery enough for me.

The only downside is that the roots don’t keep, as mature ginger roots will, so they have to be processed in some way.  

See Post G24-028 for the harvest-and-use portion of this year’s ginger crop.

Post G24-028: How’d that ginger turn out?

Update 6/25/2024:

The standard advice for growing ginger runs something like this:  Ginger is a tropical plant with a ten-month growing season in its native climate.  Therefore, if you are in a temperate, non-tropical climate, you should start your ginger plants ten months before your expected first fall frost. 

Which, in my climate (Virginia, USDA zone 7) means starting ginger in … January?  And then growing your ginger as a house plant for some months, until it can survive outside?

Yep, that’s the standard advice.  I did that, as shown below.  And I think that’s bad advice. Continue reading Post G24-010: Growing ginger in Virginia? This needs a rethink.