Post Race!

Well, it's been a big day with plenty of sheer gut blow-outs, Juicy Lucies and a Woozle whose name was Peanut...

None of that sounds good.

A dreary and drizzly day here. Yet idiots are out there driving with pimp-tinted windows and their running lights turned off. One rather brief loop I made for shopping I saw 3 accidents and had a near miss myself.

Clueless idiots are taking over. Forget autonomous cars, people need an AI "thinking aid."

I'd say it's portable devices that are taking over. Distracted driving is nothing new. What's new and improved are the means.

Managed to harvest a good number of beans and some tomatoes. It's mid October. All that should be over with. Heck, I think the irrigation has been shut off for the year, but still I got beans.

We're on a warm streak. Suppose to be 88 today. That works out well, we're having our family pumpkin carving party tonight.

Aren't you suppose to grow squash and corn with those beans?

I tried corn for a couple years. In general, it didn't go well. I don't have a large amount of space, and it's on the wrong side of the house. I think that had something to do with it. I averaged only a meal or two a year, with some years yielding nothing at all. As for squash, that's just been weird. Total failure this year, with everything I planted failing last year, while that which I didn't plant doing really well.

It was a good year for apples here.

I have one tree, but since I don't spray I get only a few clean enough for eating. We have too many fruit trees in the area so even the more bumbling of fruit moths can reach mine.

However the tree is close to a sidewalk that gets lots of traffic, so each year I do a massive cleanup. Not just to keep the sidewalk clear of mush and cobbles to trip up pedestrians, but in recent years the apples attract some kind of wasp. No need for anyone to get stung.

It might be coincidence but since the wasps began to visit I rarely catch any deer out there gobbling apples any more.

Not a peak year, but I've already cleaned up about 6 bushels of fallen apples.

Apparently, it was a good year for peaches out here. Considering how far north I am, one might be surprised that we grow peaches...but you would be wrong. You SHOULD be appalled that people grow peaches in a desert, but no, you're just thinking we're too far north. Silly you, I laugh at such absurdity! HA! HA! HA!

This is such a messed up valley when it comes to agriculture. We are kind of far north, we are a desert, but you can grow just about anything...in the summer...except perennials may not make it through the winter. It isn't that the winters are harsh here. The winters are probably more mild than most of the northern states in the US, or at least they SHOULD be. If we don't have an inversion, snow might fall, but won't last past noon. On the other hand, we can get inversions such that the temperature stays down around 0 F, for weeks on end. So, some winters will just kill off plants that would otherwise survive year round.

I had some cauliflower grow year round, one winter. The next winter, a cold-tolerant Japanese maple was killed by the temperature, as it wasn't quite cold tolerant enough.

We have a few fruit belt areas where climate is moderated by the Great Lakes, but we also have plenty of water.

Before Georgia came along to take the crown, one of these was once the peach growing center of the U.S. Some sort of blight pretty much wiped that out though, and in that area grapes became the major fruit crop over time. That's pretty close to where the Wright Brothers stole the plan of what became their first airplane.

North of there another stretch near the lakeshore took over, growing a lot of peaches, plums, etc. but not at the production levels per acre that the old region once grew. Inland of that a lot of apples are grown, while further north along the shore cherries are the main fruit crop along with some vineyards.

There are also a lot of smaller pockets of orchards near the lakeshore. There is even a stretch called Garden Peninsula, part of the greater Upper Peninsula. Native peoples had used it to plant gardens because it had good soil and some of the most moderate climate in the U.P.

Pecans had been lost to clearing for farms, but in the last 30 years a few hardy varieties have been reintroduced. Black Walnut and Hickory are common enough trees though.

Deodorant sales are up. In theory that means people are returning to in-person work. :p

Either that or they are trying to hint to their colleagues...

There was a family that I was aware of that had the policy of taking a bath once a week, need it or not. Never more than that, though, cause that would be bad. Naturally, that got kind of...interesting, when inside with them on a hot summer day (and there is no other kind around here). The other gals tried to hint at them by gifting them baskets of soap, shampoo, and so forth, but it appears to have had no effect.

I never saw any of that directly, it was just a topic of conversation.

I wonder how good our soil is. In general, it's pretty alkaline. The minerals are there, but the pH can be too high for lots of things to grow well. I was measuring...or not measuring, I suppose, pH levels that were off the top of the scale for the soil tests I tried. That is a treatable problem, of course, but in my case it took MANY bags of sulfur over the course of almost two years to get the pH down below 7 for a time.

Supposedly alkaline soils come from a lack of rainfall and trees.

That was what I was thinking, though I didn't look it up. We have neither rainfall nor trees. I remember learning about the series that clay goes through as it gets washed with weak acids. The clay found in New England was pretty well washed, and relatively gritty. The clay out here....is a misery. You can't walk through the desert during a rain storm. Can't drive, either. Walking, your feet get heavier and heavier as clay clumps onto your shoes, yet your walking gets worse and worse, since it is so slippery. It's one of the reasons I went to raised beds: I couldn't go into the garden for a couple hours after irrigation had stopped, or else I'd come out wearing pounds of soil on my feet.

I was going to blame volcanic ash, but maybe that's more acidic. I didn't check.

So maybe it's eroded limestone and calcium carbonate dust?

There is a fair amount of volcanic ash out here, to be sure. Some of that is pretty recent, as you likely remember well. We have a fair amount of wood ash, too, though not usually out in the desert. That tends to be ultra basic when water is run through it (lye). Still, clay chemistry is complicated stuff. I seem to remember that it starts as super complicated, then as weakly acidic rain is run through it, various items are washed away, others are broken down, and the clay becomes simpler and simpler until you end up with bauxite. My memory may be a bit off on that, though, as that was from a class I took...gad, about 35 years ago.

I thought montmorillonite sounded really cool...until I tried walking in it, or a closely related clay. It's a nuisance dry, it's horrific wet, but at least smectite is a pretty funny word.