Homestead mailing list

[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

Happy Mothers' Day, Feliz Cinco de Mayo, etc.

Our lucky spring rain continued until Tax Day, then abruptly halted.
Since then we've been fortunate to have a shower or two.  One evening it
rained exactly one-half inch in a very short time; at its height I was
clocking 0.01" every sixteen seconds.  After that a strange, warm
tropical flow started that just hasn't stopped, around a semi-permanent
upper-level low to the west of us.  Today it's raining lightly and
steadily, so there's time to type.

Fixing the peripheral fence has been awfully hard alone.  I have to lean
into it with all my might and pound a post at the same time.  Everywhere
there's poison oak, and berry vine thorns galore.  I used the Tecnu soap
on my arms and legs, and escaped the worst of it.  But my appendages are
criss-crossed with little red berry vine scrapes, to the point where
they all hurt at once when I first stand up.  There was a lot of
profanity, but it all ended satisfyingly.  I was able to pick the
unbroken field fence and barbed wire strand up out of the dirt, where
none was previously visible, and set it upright.

It's always hard to provide enough light for seedlings here in the
gloomy spring.  Happily our most important new plant, Cedrela sinensis
("Chop Suey Tree") plugs along with fairly low light.  But the tomato
seedlings are just a little too tall under the fluorescents.  And I
managed to burn a few seed leaves because I put them in the sun after
they had already been under fluorescents for two days.  I'm thinking we
should get a really high-wattage light for the sole purpose of providing
intense light to seedlings on their first days out.

The little runt calf has already managed to harm two new 'Halls Hardy'
almond trees, just by trying in vain to scratch its head on them.  I
have all the new trees fenced now, and I think they'll be OK.  The
calves have had no new health problems, and are overdue for their
neutering, which is scheduled for today.

The other day four new ewe lambs arrived.  They were really wild at
first, but now they know where the food dish is.  They're even starting
to interact with me in their own crazy way.  The small brown one, who is
actually the boldest, will approach me as their representative, and
bleat to indicate that they'd like me to fill the food dish.  I haven't
let them go to the lower pasture yet, since there's plenty of grass near
the house, and I still have to fix a couple more spots in the fence.

The early warm weather has made hay cutting necessary long before it
will be dry enough to leave it in the field.  This year I dried some in
the lower greenhouse.  Each time I spent only one-half hour to fill one
six cu. ft. cart, using only a sharp machete.  The grass here is taller
than my head, often, thanks to all that darn "fertility" and those
lovely silver rivulets of cascading water everywhere.  So thanks to the
fact that you can face uphill while cutting, it hardly requires any
bending over to grasp a cluster of stalks and cut them at the base.  So
it wasn't long before I had the entire 96' x 24' foot greenhouse floor
covered in drying hay, with only four loads.  It dried fast, and now
it's all raked up and in the cart.

Just since I started writing, Sue came over and we banded the bull
calves.  With my brute force (and the fact that they know me) and her
experience (mostly the latter), it was easy.  I'm already picturing the
carne asada and nettle soup.  We played the piano, and she left with a
jar of raspberries.

I did at least get a new bed of strawberries going last month.  It's in
a nice sunny spot.  All the exotic root crops are sprouting and ready to
go, so later today I'm going to go through them.  It's a good thing to
do on a rainy day.  They really are a nice thing to have.  Tomatoes and
melons may not be around in winter, but neither is it possible to have
cool, crisp yacon on a summer's day, nor even a nutty dish of stir-fried
Chinese artichoke (the only edible tuber in the mint family).  These
pleasures are reserved only for the wintertime.

I found a place online that sells samples of pure elements like iodine.
 I was able to buy a lifetime supply of iodine, selenium, and chromium
for a small amount.  Even though they were one hundred times more
expensive than bulk compounds like sodium selenite, I haven't found any
bulk retail source for selenium.  In fact, they were one hundred times
cheaper than the same minerals would cost in the form of little pills,
or in terms of livestock supplementation, the difference in price
between plain salt and the mineralized version over an entire lifetime.
 Anyway, I had already found that cobalt carbonate was available from
the pottery supply store (cobalt is not necessary for plants, but
bacteria use it to synthesize vitamin B-12 for the benefit of animals).
 In the case of cobalt carbonate, I found that it's easily processed
into the soluble chloride, just by dissolving it in muriatic acid (with
lots of CO2 fizzing away, just as chalk produces).  With these new pure
elements, similar transformations are necessary to make them
nutritionally available.  Iodine is easy to deal with, dissolving in a
lye solution exactly as chlorine would, to create an analog of bleach.
Chromium behaves like iron, dissolving in muriatic acid to form a
chloride.  Selenium behaves much like sulfur, burning in air to form the
dioxide (a solid at room temperature, unlike sulfur dioxide), which
dissolves in water to form selenite ions.  The latter procedure is the
most difficult, because it's as hard to keep lit as sulfur, and you
don't want to inhale the toxic vapor, so a siphon tube and vacuum
chamber apparatus is in order for drawing air past the burning selenium.
 I've tried to find an alternative cold reaction with lye and peroxide,
which is definitely possible, but under high pH and oxidative conditions
selenium eagerly forms the selenate ion, which is more toxic than
selenite.  Selenate ions can be reduced to selenite by _boiling_ with
muriatic acid, but how fun is that?  There are still two more
possibilities.  Amorphous selenium reacts with plain water at 50 deg. C
to form selenite ions, with no lye or peroxide.  To make amorphous
selenium requires evporating it, which is easy because it boils at a low
temperature.  I could also use calcium instead of sodium as the cation,
and since calcium selenite is probably far less soluble than the
selenate, maybe the two could be separated easily, but I couldn't find
solubility data for calcium selenite.  In the meantime, selenium is very
pretty to look at, and I've been testing out the photoelectric effect
with my meter.

We're determined to find some more olive trees for the lower greenhouse.
 For some reason it's hard to find a retail source.  I made a little
progress searching online yesterday.  Apparently 'Pendolino' is a good
pollinator for 'Arbequina'.  Maybe Lee can stop and buy some in the
Central Valley on his way up.

Mel sent me a great website with recipes for garlic mustard (Alliaria
petiolata).  They have a contest in Maryland each spring to see who can
make the best garlic mustard dishes.  In Europe it's a treasured
wildflower and garden herb.  This is one of the plants that has
disappeared from commerce in North America.  The last seed company to
carry it was Seeds of Change.  It's an invasive weed east of the
Mississippi, but there's no trace of it in California (according to the
Jepsen manual).  I suspect it enjoys a wetter summer.  Nevertheless,
like butterfly bush or acacia or silk tree, we're all expected to do
without it because somewhere on earth it might be invasive.  I guess
those of us who don't care much for most greens can just dream of these
great garlic mustard delights:

http://www.patapscoheritagegreenway.org/garlic5/recipes.htm

It's time to utilize some guinea pigs, so I've devised a technique to
minimize stress.  Basically it involves a net and a hammer, or perhaps
eventually a sledge hammer on a hinge, so that it will come down on the
same spot each time.  But the best part is Gauzy Glasses.  These are a
personal version of the "Brian Adams cam", for which a gauzy filter
placed over the lens obscures the finer details of facial features.
This way I won't see anything more than a blurry lump.  Come to think of
it, Gauzy Glasses could be helpful in other areas as well.  I can
picture a whole comedy routine, like a fake SNL ad.  Also available in
rose tint.

The slugs really took me by surprise.  The peas were decimated, but
they've started to come back.  Now they have some sort of mildew, but
peas are known to grow out of that, too.  It makes me think that I
should look into getting some copper sulfate.  I haven't really tried
hard to find it in pound bags, but a cursory inquiry at the feed store
revealed a similar quandary as with the mineral nutrients.  I can either
purchase one tablespoon of copper sulfate dissolved in a 10 oz. spray
bottle for $13.95, or a 50-pound bag for over $100.  Roughly the same
thing is true of pectin, which is no longer sold in bulk at a reasonable
price.

The kitchen sink has been out of commission, so it amazes me that I
continue to _cook_ 3 homemade meals a day.  I owe it all to foil-broil,
griddling, and the microwave.  Lee's frozen homemade bread was a big
help too.  I taught the calves to drink from a pail weeks ago, so that
has made feeding (especially in the evening) a lot easier, without
bottles to wash (in the bathtub).

I went to the garden this morning, and the "mildew" on the pea leaves is
some other sort of light-colored marking that I've seen before, when as
I said, peas grew out of it.  And so it is again.  The 3 P's (peas,
parsnips, and potatoes) all look great.  The 25 varieties of garlic are
more plentiful and huge than ever before.  It's amazing how ordinary
vegetables grown out for seed can be so spontaneously beautiful.  In one
bed there's an enormous burdock that's just beginning to flower, and in
front of it there's a contrasting deep red stem of a beet flower stalk.
 That's Oregon for you; I've hardly done anything yet out there, and
there's a huge garden anyway, without even an inch to grow a bean in.
But before I can even plant a bean I still have to do at least a couple
new beds of Andean tubers.  I think there's some dry weather coming up,
and I'll pour another round (a cement rodent barrier, that is).  I'm
always hoping for the day when there'll be fewer fan hitters to react
to, and more time to spend on my other big personal goal (besides
filling beds and planting trees): writing the best math ed software ever.

This must surely be my favorite month of the year.  Enjoy!

Bill