The Delta 46-460 mid sized lathe arrived ahead of schedule, and so far it’s a beauty. Now I don’t have a lot of experience with lathes, but to me going from the piece of junk I had to this is like going from a Model-T to a Porsche 911. Holy cow it’s nice! Beautifully machined, everything fits flawlessly, bearings are perfect, heavy, nicely machined cast iron and steel. It was even boxed beautifully. It was double boxed, with a heavy duty cardboard box on the outside, a 2nd even heavier duty box inside of that with foam spacers to protect the inner box, then about 6 inches of dense styrofoam inside of that encasing the whole thing. Set up took no time at all. Just wiped it down to get rid of the excess oil, checked everything over, put the banjo in place and it was ready to go. It is a pretty hefty beast, though. Shipping weight is about 120 pounds, but all that weight helps to damp down vibration.
I had to try it right away of course, so I put in a scrap piece of wood and fired it up, and oh, my… Smooth as silk. Motor has lots of torque. It’s fantastic.
It has three belt positions to make big speed changes, but also has electronic variable motor speed so I’ll rarely have to change the belt position. It is very, very nice.
Anyway I’ll talk more about this thing in the future as I get a chance to use it for an actual project. Now I have to start scrounging around for wood!
Flowers Everywhere!
I could go crazy with the camera just taking photos of all the flowers in the gardens this time of year. I haven’t processed any of these yet, these are the unedited images.
And people wonder why I love gardening so much…
Zombie Lily
Well, that’s what I call ’em. These things:
I call them zombie lilies because this is what they look like when they first emerge from the ground.
They are the most bizarre looking things I’ve ever seen. There’s absolutely no indication that there is anything growing there at all, and then these weird asparagus like looking stalks suddenly pop up and a few days later they put out these beautiful flowers.
What they actually are is amaryllis belladonna. They’re sometimes called naked lady lilies because they just have the bare stalks with no leaves. They’re native to South Africa but are widely grown as ornamentals.
We have no idea where they came from. We certainly never planted them. They popped up a few years ago, but we hadn’t seen them since then, and this year we now have three large clumps of them. They really shouldn’t be growing here because they don’t like Wisconsin’s cold winters, but there they are.
I should also point out that every part of the plant is poisonous, especially the bulbs, and they are very dangerous for dogs and cats. So I’m not sure I really want them out in the garden at all to be honest.
I have a ton of stuff going on around here, but none of it is important enough to make a single post so I’m just going to shovel everything into this one [grin].
Cheap crappy lathe
I’m working on another lathe project, this one a bit larger than the last two, and that cheap Harbor Freight lathe is showing the strain rather badly. I got this as a gift so I shouldn’t complain… Oh, hell, sure I should complain. This thing is just plain nasty.
Harbor Freight has a reputation for selling cheap, cheap tools of questionable quality. My experience with HF tools has not been good, and this lathe certainly hasn’t improved my opinion of their stuff. While it worked fairly well for tiny stuff, putting a substantial chunk of wood on it has brought out all of its faults. I already knew it was made from cheap, thin, stamped sheet metal, including the base. In a real lathe, the bases are made from heavy, cast and carefully machined cast iron or steel. So this thing flexes and vibrates and shakes and rattles. The bearing are worse than awful. The motor is woefully underpowered. According to the label on the motor it’s rated at 1 HP. I’d be willing to bet it’s not even a quarter of that.
So I have to decide now if I like woodturning enough, and will do it enough, to justify dropping about $500 – $700 on a good lathe. I still haven’t made up my mind.
MrsGF tried something new this year, pattypan squash. We really like squash, but we haven’t had much luck growing it here. Last year our acorn squash was overcome by powdery mildew, and other years we had other issues. So she thought to try this. And it seems to be working beautifully. The plants are ridiculously healthy and absolutely loaded with fruit. We’ve never eaten this variety before so we’re looking forward to trying it. We have about three now that are ready to eat so this week we’re going to try them.
Biking as Meditation?
Everyone thought I was nuts when I dropped about $600 on a bicycle after I retired, figuring it was something I’d do for a couple of days and then it would end up hanging in the garage and getting in the way. Instead, several years and about three sets of tires and three thousand miles later, I’m still at it. And I have to admit that even I am a bit surprised at how much I enjoy it. But I’ve always been a bit of an outdoors person. I spent most of my childhood at the farm down in the woods, watching tadpoles in the streams, sitting in the woods watching chipmunks gathering acorns, watching frogs, listening to birds and trying to spot them in the trees… It was a journey of learning, amazement, wonder, and beauty. Well, except for the mosquitos. And somewhere along the way I lost that, only to have rediscovered it now. I get out on the country roads around here, especially down on the trail, and I can start to lose track of time.
And birds everywhere! Especially down along the river by the old stone bridge on Irish Road. Herons, ducks, egrets, even pelicans come down to the river. Yesterday I was watching a belted kingfisher perched on a telephone line running across the river, eyeing the water, and every once in a while diving down to try to snatch a small fish. I can hear the cardinals calling in the trees, but rarely see that flash of red. I see more of those in town where the trees are more sparse and it’s easier to catch sight of them.
And the smells… I am blessed with (or cursed with, sometimes) a hypersensitive sense of smell. As I’m out riding I can smell everything – the chicory and clover along the side of the road, the corn, the alfalfa fields, people mowing their lawns or cutting hay, a whiff of tractor exhaust wafting across a field from a distant farm, the fuel the RC airplane guys use in their planes as I get close to their flying field off Hwy 57, the wood preservative on the wooden bridge over the river on the trail, the occasional dead animal in the ditch, the asphalt outgassing on a hot day. And more often than not, an undercurrent of manure from some farm emptying its storage pits miles away.
I took up biking originally for the exercise. I went from a job where I was on my feet all day, walking for miles a day, to essentially nothing, almost literally overnight. So I figured I needed to do something or I was going to blow up like a balloon. And while the exercise is important, yes, the other benefits of being outside, the sights and smells and sounds and all that goes along with it, probably does more to keep me healthy than putting on 10 miles or so a day.
Gardening Stuff
It’s been a spectacular year for growing stuff this season. Weather has been just about perfect so far. We’ve had an unusually high amount of rain so we’ve only rarely had to resort to dragging out the hose and watering cans. We’ve been blanching and freezing wax and pole beans about three times a week for a couple of weeks now. We’re rather sick of it, to be honest. MrsGF came up with a bean salad recipe that is absolutely fantastic, so she’s been using up the beans, along with some of the peppers and onions we’re also growing, and canning that. Holy cow that stuff is good.
The tomatoes are just starting to come in. Not enough to process into a batch of sauce or soup, so I’ve been dicing them up and throwing them in the freezer. Just wash ’em, core ’em, slice or dice them, throw them in freezer bags, and then pull them out whenever we need tomatoes for something.
Pretty soon though we’re going to be deluged with tomatoes, so we need to decide what we’re going to do with those.
And flowers. The whole yard is alive with flowers this time of year.
Anyway, that’s about it for now. Stay safe out there.
Panoramic shot that shows almost the entire backyard. Makes it look a lot smaller than it really is. That central island surrounded by blocks is about 25 feet long and 16 feet wide. Tomatoes in raised beds off to the far right. Garage off to the left showing the “garage garden” where we have raspberries squash and ornamentals.
If this time of year could be described by a single word, it would probably be “color”.
Almost everything is in full flower this time of year except for the autumn flowering plants. Just walking outside is a feast for the eyes.
So, let’s get caught up on what’s been going on. I haven’t talked about it much but one of the things I do is build furniture like, well, like this:
It looks a bit beat up now, especially the upholstery, but considering it’s lived through two teenaged boys, a rambunctious golden retriever and several assorted cats, it’s doing pretty good. Over the years I’ve built chairs, coffee tables, wardrobes, bookcases, decorative chests and I don’t know what all else. A few years ago one of my sons gave me a cheap wood lathe from Harbor Freight and I finally started fiddling around with it. It was super cheap and to be honest the build quality isn’t exactly what I’d call good. But I’ve messed around with it a bit, bought a decent set of tools for it and I’m going to see if I can add woodturning to my skill set. We’ll see how that goes. I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.
We’ve been spending a lot of time out in the gardens, of course. Where else would we be this time of year and with the pandemic still raging? Gardening is probably the safest and most satisfying activity we can do right now. But we’re still dabbling in radio. And I mean “we”. MrsGF is a licensed amateur radio operator as well. She’s more into the emergency services aspect of it while I’m more into the technical stuff.
It looks like the Great Radio Fiasco Project is back on the agenda. I was finally able to get the toroids I needed to wind the coils I need. But considering how busy we are with other things this time of year it’s likely that will be pushed back until the fall.
Let’s see, what else… Oh, I’m working on an upcoming post that answers some questions about amateur radio that people have asked. That will be coming up in the near future.
I’ve been working on getting better at CW (morse code). I’m still struggling, especially with receiving. I’m nowhere near good enough to be able to actually use it out in the field. If someone sends at like, oh, one word per minute or slower, I can generally figure it out. But any faster than that and everything sort of blurs together and I start to fall so far behind I have to give up.
Someone asked me if I was going to do anything for the ARRL Field Day exercise. Nope. Don’t have the time. This is probably the worst time of year for me to try to participate in an event like that.
We’re going to be doing some major renovations to the house this summer, replacing a bunch of windows, the front entrance and some other stuff. That’s going to be a mess, but it needs to get done. And expensive. Sigh… Oh, well. Owning a house is great. Until you start seeing the bills for maintaining it.
These little guys are amazing critters. They’re tiny little things. That cable you see there is less than a half inch thick so you can see just how small he/she is. Frogs are some of the most amazing and, I think beautiful creatures around. I’m still astonished that we have these little tree frogs around here.
Speaking of trees, the pear tree looks like it’s getting a good start.
It is absolutely loaded with baby pears. That ought to make up for last year when we got maybe a dozen pears total off the whole tree.
The ornamental gardens are looking great here. The recent rains and warm weather has everything growing like crazy right now. Most of these plants have tripled in size in the last week or so. You can almost see them getting bigger. Oh, and the bird houses are occupied again this year. Looks like some type of wren?
We restrained ourselves and didn’t crowd things into the two raised beds this year. Just 6 tomato plants and the outer edges with onions. Even six is probably too many because we probably still have six months worth of canned tomatoes of various types on the shelf. But the lure of fresh tomatoes is something we just can’t ignore. And we can always give ’em away if we have too may.
This is garden faces south and west and is the most productive spot we have. Sheltered from the wind, with light concentrated here, it gets warm early and stays warm late into the fall. Have to be careful what’s planted here because the warm, sunny conditions means a lot of stuff like lettuce and radishes will bolt. Also it has to be watered a lot. But we usually get ridiculously amounts of produce out of this corner. The tripods in the back are for pole beans. There are various baby pepper plants protected with #10 cans, and more beans and parsley seeded down in front.
Time for a musical interlude. You may want to turn your volume up. Or maybe not?
When I start getting bored I take this thing out on the road. Great fun 🙂
People sometimes ask me what I’ve been doing since we can’t really travel or do much except putter in the garden. I’ve been playing amateur radio, of course, and trying to get better at CW. That’s morse code for you non radio people out there.
Doing CW is something I never really thought I’d get into. I’ve always been far more interested in the digital modes like PSK and JS8Call. But I also love QRP, using extremely small amounts of power to try to communicate, and what works best for QRP is CW. And unlike the digital modes, CW doesn’t require you to lug a computer along. So I’ve been spending about a half hour or more a day trying to learn and get better at this. I’m up to, oh, maybe two words a minute?
Then there’s this thing.
I’ve been looking at solar power and batteries to power my QRP gear and even my full power radios for some time but never got around to actually getting involved with solar because A) I’m lazy, B) I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually use it, and C) the stuff can get a bit expensive. But then this deal came along…
I have to admit I have very little experience with solar power. I never even heard of this company before this deal came along. But the stuff seems to get decent reviews and the price, well, I picked up the 20 Ah LiPo battery pack, with a built in 120V inverter (sort of), USB and 12V power outlets, built in high intensity LED lights, LCD display and other goodies, and a folding 40W solar panel for less than, well, let’s just say that I’ve dropped more money on a meal at a nice restaurant than I spent on this deal.
Anyway, I’ll be taking a closer look at this in the near future to see if it’s a real deal or not. I’ve only just taken a quick look at it, but right now it looks pretty good. Especially that folding solar panel. That thing looks like it’s very high quality. Well, we’ll see.
If you’re like me, you’re ready to scream because of the 24/7 fear, panic and everything else you’re seeing on the news and internet. So here’s some photos to distract you. Well, if my internet connection stays up, that is. It’s been down a half dozen times already today.
Yes, it’s a dead horse. No, not a real one. This was a tourist trap in S.D. that we stopped at that apparently bought up all of the movie props from Dances with Wolves. Although I don’t remember there being a stuffed dead horse in that movie.Skunks in S.D. are very friendly, it seems. This little stinker wasn’t much more than a baby and decided I was his mother and began following me around. He couldn’t understand why I retreated very quickly.Ooo, it’s orange!We found some odd things when we cleaned out the buildings on the farm, including a complete 1940s or 1950s era bowling machine.I had no idea eggplant flowers were so pretty until we grew some one year.I don’t need to tell you these are cats, do I?The big telescope and its little brotherOverlooking the MississippiDorms at my old college.Copper Falls park in north western Wisconsin. Beautiful place. Highly recommended. Somewhere in the Big Horn mountains. I think.
That’s enough for now. I’m pushing my luck with my internet connection here, I think. It went down three times while I was uploading photos.
They’re claiming another major storm will roll through here starting to night. We have flood warnings, winter storm warnings, ice warnings, heavy snow… Well, considering they totally blew their last storm warning, we remain skeptical. Last Sunday we were supposed to have 8 or more inches of snow, high winds and blizzard like conditions and we got bright sun and mild winds. So we’ll see. But this time of year I always find myself paging through photos from warmer weather because I’m getting very impatient for spring to get here. So here goes. I’ve probably put some of these up before, but what the heck…
They’d had forest fires in this part of Yellowstone a year or two before I took this photo and you can still see the aftereffects here. There were dead trees everywhere in this part of the park.I probably have more photos of irises than any other flower. I just love the shapes and colorsI had this funny looking cat following me around in South Dakota. Cute little guy. MrsGF wouldn’t let me take him home, though.
Apparently Mother Nature wasn’t satisfied with deluging us with snow a month early, now she’s trying to freeze us with temperatures we usually don’t see until well into January. It’s about 3 degrees (F) out there, with windchills down in the -10 range. Sheesh…
Meanwhile, MrsGF has this growing in the living room. Just took these photos the other day-
Yeah, roses. I’ve put up photos of this before, but I figured this plant would go dormant or something by now. But it just keeps right on blooming.
This thing started out as one of those goofy little teacup roses, a tiny plant in a cheap cup that they sell for a few bucks on Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day. Think I paid all of $7 for it, oh, must be at least two or three years ago. And after we got sick of it sitting around the house MrsGF said what the heck, let’s put it in a big pot and see what happens and the dopey thing just kept growing and flowering. We were putting it in the basement, letting it go dormant over winter, but this year she thought she’d put it in the living room where it could get some light and keep watering it, and well, it apparently likes it there, and it’s been flowering on a regular basis all winter so far.
I asked her how she’s keeping it flowering and she swears she’s just watering it and isn’t doing anything else. Personally I figure witchcraft is involved.
The MagLoop Antenna
I talked about this antenna before, and I continue to be more than pleased with it. Since my dipole came down in the last snowstorm it’s been the main antenna for my TS-990, sitting on the floor behind me in the office. And it is doing ridiculously good.
This is putting 15 watts into an antenna sitting just behind me in my office this morning.
The Great Radio Fiasco Project
I mentioned this before, but let me summarize what I’m trying to do here. For reasons I won’t get into right now, I challenged myself to build, from scratch, a decent radio receiver, preferably shortwave. Emphasis on the word “decent” because I could throw together a few parts and end up with – well, with something that would receive, well, something that might be a radio signal, and pump it into a speaker and you’d hear some sound that might be interpreted as a radio transmission by someone with bad hearing. It could technically be called a radio receiver, but, well, let’s face it, it wouldn’t exactly be useful.
When I first conceived of this project I was like how hard can this be? In those WWII movies the Resistance throws together a radio out of bits of string, a piece of wire, an old cigar box and bits off a horse (don’t ask me what bits, I don’t know, ask them, they built the thing) and call up Churchill at Bomber Command and call in an air strike on Hitler’s outhouse. And the Good Ole Boys in amateur radio weep bitter tears of disappointment over the fact that modern day hams don’t build stuff any more like they did, when they’d throw together a 1,500 watt amplifier, transmitter and superhet receiver in an afternoon, out of parts they salvaged from old washing machines. And bits off a horse for all I know.
Here’s the thing, though – 95% of that (maybe even 98%) is pure BS. I’m sorry, but it just is.
The days of being able to salvage anything useful from discarded electronics are long gone. Modern SMD (surface mount devices) and robotic assembly methods make it virtually impossible to salvage anything useful from relatively modern equipment. And while you can buy discrete components like resistors, capacitors, etc. in the more common values, increasingly it is difficult to find a lot of stuff in anything but SMD form, and in quantities of 1,000 or more. I was trying to find what had once been a very common opamp the other day. It is still available. But if I want to get it from a US supplier I can only buy it in quantities of 1,000 or more, and in SMD format. If I want it in the traditional 6 pin IC form, and only want a few of them, it looks like I’m going to have to order it from China and it won’t get here until mid-March.
Nor are parts cheap. Oh, some are, true, but not the kind of stuff I’m looking for. A single variable capacitor I need for a project sells for $25. And I need two of them. So I’m going to have $50 stuck in that project before I even get started on it.
And then there’s the design of the equipment you want to build. If you were going to set out to build your own radio receiver, probably the first thing you’d do is fire up Google and look for something like “build your own radio” and find, well, hundreds and hundreds of hits that are utterly worthless, along with a few sites that might have actual plans to build something. Only most of those plans are for useless crystal radios and other nonsense. And the designs that do look useful are probably going to be wrong and no one is going to tell you how to fix it when you build it and it doesn’t work. In fact, most of the designs I saw out there were copies of stuff pulled out of old radio or electronics magazines from the 1960s or 70s that didn’t work in the first place.
(Sidenote: I’m convinced that the building plans in all those electronics magazines published in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc. were never actually built by anyone because about six or eight months after the plans were published there’d be a “corrections” item pointing out that they forgot this part, or the wiring was wrong and if you’d actually build the thing it would have exploded, electrocuted your cat or something.)
So the question is, can I build a decent radio receiver from scratch? Probably. Will it work? Maybe. Can I do it for less than what it would cost to just go buy one? No way in hell. Will it work as good as even a cheap piece of junk commercial radio? Almost certainly not.
So why am I doing this? Uh, because I’m a stubborn old goat?
I don’t physically print a lot of the images I take but this is one that I think I’m going to run through the big photo printer and hang up somewhere.
I’d just got back from an early morning bike ride, about, oh, 6:30 or 7 AM, and the sun was just hitting the gardens in the backyard when I snapped this one with the iPhone. The colors were so intense it looked like it was glowing. I absolutely love those ‘dinner plate’ dahlias. It’s always worth taking a look for things on sale after the spring planting rush is over. I picked these up for half the price they were at the start of the spring season.
It’s thistle season!These were taken early in the morning as well, probably around 6:30 – 7 AM when I was out on the backroads with the bike. For whatever reason I’ve turned into one of those hated ‘morning people’ who is up before dawn. Not sure what happened there. For almost 20 years I worked 2nd shift, going to bed about 1 AM and not getting up until 8 or 9, and I liked it that way. I hated getting up early in the morning. But as soon as I retired, here I am, up at 5 in the morning. Sheesh…
When I was farming, thistles were a noxious weed that needed to be controlled. Now I think they’re one of the prettiest looking plants we have. Just look at those flowers. The structure, the color, everything about them is just stunning.
Then there are these goofy things – MrsGF cleaned out the flower beds along the south side of the garage the other week, taking almost everything out, and a few days later we noticed what looked like small asparagus stalks poking up through the soil. The weirdest looking things, just slender stalks with a bulbous end and the nastiest color you could think of. Sort of looked like zombie asparagus. Then we remembered these things had popped up a few years ago and surprised the heck out of us then. We didn’t plant these and we have no idea where they came from, but holy cow the flowers are stunning!
People sometimes ask us why we have huge sunflowers growing along the side of the house. Here’s why –
Goldfinches absolutely love these things and they swarm them as the flowers begin to fade and the seeds begin to develop. They are an absolute riot to watch, squabbling and leaping around, flitting around, hanging from the plants upside down like little acrobats. They don’t seem to notice that we’re standing on the other side of the window watching them. We’ll have a dozen or more of the little goofs working over the flowers at one time this time of year.
This is the time of year when all the work we put in on the gardens really begins to pay off. The bell peppers are beautiful this year. We have ’em tucked into a corner facing the south and west where the garage is built onto the house and they love it there. It’s warm and sunny and as long as we remember to keep them well watered they (and the wax beans planted near them) have been thriving. We go through a lot of sweet bell peppers around here. Everyone loves them. Most will end up diced and frozen, but we eat a lot of them fresh in salads, ingredients in sauces, stir fry, etc.
Hi there. I’m a goat.I’m not a goat.
Youngest Son and I had nothing else to do Saturday so we went to the Manitowoc county fair. Both of us don’t care about rides or that stuff, we’re more interested in A) weird food, and B) the exhibits. I get ridiculous sense of satisfaction to see how much better my produce and flowers look than the prize winners do. Petty of me, true, but it’s still satisfying.
Anyway, goats have become a big thing around here in the last ten or fifteen years. You almost never would see goats around here before then. Now there are more goat exhibitors than than sheep and pigs. I have to admit they’re fun. They’re charming and curious and don’t seem afraid of anything, and they all seem to have this ridiculous, goofy attitude about them.
For a while llamas and then alpacas were “the next big thing” that were going to make people tons of money. They didn’t, of course. None of these fads ever pan out. We’ve gone through bison, emu, llamas, alpacas and elk as “the next big thing” since, oh, the 1980s. (Emus are nasty. Think of a giant chicken, taller than you are, with a bad attitude. An emu would gleefully kill you and dance on your corpse if it thought it could get away with it.) There are still people in some parts of the state who think emus are going to be financially successful if only they could get a foot in the door with their emu products. You’ll still find gas stations and farmers markets where people are trying to sell emu jerky (shudder), emu oil which is useful for – well, hell, I don’t know what the hell emu oil is good for. Lubricating emus? Emu meat (tastes like chicken?) and I don’t know what all else.
Eldest son and his girlfriend took a short vacation way up along Lake Superior where the air is clear and there are no lights, and asked if they could take the big 11″ Celestron telescope along. I was glad to let them have it. The poor thing has been sitting under its cover in the closet for an embarrassingly long time. I love the scope but the thing is huge and heavy (the tube assembly weighs around 60 lbs). It’s almost impossible for me to lug it up and down the stairs and maneuver it through the doors to get it outside. And when I do get it outside the air quality here has gotten so bad and we now have so much light pollution from streetlights, houses and businesses that it hardly pays to even bother taking it out at all.
Anyway he sent me a text message telling me the scope has been working very well and he sent along the photo above. Very glad they like it. I hated seeing it sit unused. I was thinking of donating it to the school district I used to work at for their new STEM center. That’s what I did with my big camera drone when I got tired of playing with it. If ES is having fun with it, he’s more than welcome to keep it. Otherwise I may donate it to the science program at the high school.
… those rare days that seem too beautiful to be real. I got out on the bike early, right after sunrise, in order to avoid the heat, and I’m glad I did because wow, it was amazing out there. The air was thick and heavy which helped to mute and soften the sunlight and make everything seem to glow.
Even more surprising was how quiet it was. Because it was so early Sunday morning there was almost no traffic at all on the nearby highway. The only sounds I could hear were the calls of hundreds of birds – cardinals, mourning doves, finches, jays, sparrows, killdeer, blackbirds, the raucous call of the cranes… It was one of those days that I wished I could freeze in my memory forever so I could keep revisiting it.
We live in an environment where we are constantly deluged with artificial sounds twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Every minute of our lives we’re bombarded with noise from traffic, aircraft over head, construction equipment, trains, heavy trucks, motorcycles, the drone of air conditioners. Even here, where I live in a small town in a fairly rural area, it’s impossible to get away from the noise.
I talked with a psychology professor once – oh, must be at least 10 or more years ago, when I was out in Sundance WY one summer. We’d both come stumbling down to the motel lobby early in the morning looking for coffee and started chatting and I learned she was trying to get funding for research on how the sounds that surround us can cause elevated stress levels that are detrimental to our physical and mental health. She was out there looking for what she called ‘quiet zones’, areas where there was as little man made noise as possible. She told me that even though our brains might filter out the noises around us to the point where we hardly even notice them consciously, they still have an adverse effect on us. We evolved to become alarmed by loud noise. It’s a survival trait. When you hear a loud noise, you become startled and your body responds by flooding you with hormones like adrenaline to prime you to run or fight. And even though the noises around us don’t alarm us consciously, our bodies are still reacting by trickling low levels of those hormones into our blood stream. That, in turn, keeps us over stimulated, so to speak, so we are under a constant level of stress.
But all good things must come to an end, as the old saying goes, and eventually I ran across this:
That is a corn field and, unfortunately, a lot of the corn around here looks like that – lots of bare spots, not even knee high. Hell, some of it is just barely ankle high. This stuff should be as tall as I am this time of year. The hay crop isn’t much better around here. It isn’t all this bad, thank goodness, but the amount of corn I see that looks like this is scary. The way some of these fields look it isn’t going to pay to even try to make silage out of it.
But then when I got home, I found these in the backyard…
These are called “dinner plate” dahlias. Back in early June I found these at Walmart as bare root stock being sold at half price, so I bought a couple of bags of them for the heck of it, and wow, I’m glad I did. They call ’em “dinner plate” because the flowers are so big. They’re huge. It’s impossible to tell from that photo but that flower up there is easily as big as my hand. I got two different colors, the yellow/orange ones here, and purple ones that are just starting to flower.
I don’t normally shop at Walmart unless I have to. I’ve had mixed results with plants from their garden department. But the thing with the store is that have to move that stuff out fast. They can’t keep it sitting around because they have to make room for other seasonal merchandise. That means that they start discounting the stuff pretty quickly. By early June a lot of their plants and root stock was already heavily discounted, and by mid-June most of their plants, seeds and roots were half price or even less.
So if you’re patient and don’t need to be the first one in the neighborhood to get plants in the ground, you can get some pretty good deals after the peak planting season passes.
grouchyfarmer 