wiredfool

Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap:

…biofuel crops demand vast amounts of land to produce quite limited energy yield. he notes that once upon a time the human race generated nearly all its energy from biomass fuel, but that only worked with a Middle Ages living-standard and population.

One of the things that annoys me about the global warming/renewable energy/hydrodgen economy arguments are that some attractive arguments aren’t terribly well grounded in numbers, the sort of numbers that tell us what would need to happen to make a significant difference at our current rate of energy consumption.

I’ve never been convinced that crop based biofuels are a good idea from a net energy perspective, and I’m really not convinced about hydrogen as a power source, unless there’s fission or fusion involved. Biofuels are great for turning a waste stream into usable fuel, but it doesn’t scale. There’s just not that much waste product to make a dent in the oil stream.

Now that it’s June, it was time to put in the hot weather plantings. Tomatoes got in under cover a week ago, with peppers and a tomatillo. This just past weekend, we prepared the two additional gardens that had been rototilled earlier with a light round of rototilling to knock down the new grass and weeds, and a little compost to cover the surface. Now, the nevada shaped garden is planted in 5 1/2 rows of corn and 1/2 row of quinoa. These are experimental, the corn because it’s so cold here, and the quinoa because while i have seen evidence that it grows here (at the county fair), I’ve never actually seen a plant of it in the ground. The other garden, known as the sprawly one, has sunflowers, pole beans, and various squashy things planted.

If it all grows, there may be 10+foot tall sunflowers, 6′ bean vines, and 20′ pumpkin vines. This is a scale that doesn’t really work for the littler raised beds that we have in the main garden patch.

In the other garden patch, something ate most of the beans. We need to replant. The spinach is going berserk, as is the lettuce. Somehow the latest plantings of salad stuff wound up pretty unevenly distributed, so I have to redo some of that. Most of the cauliflower came up from the first planting, and the two remaining hills got replanted and are showing tiny leaves. The biggest is about 4″ tall now. Broccoli is coming up, as are the leeks, carrots, parsnips, turnips and rutabagas. Not so sure about the lavender or the wildflowers, but the other flower bed is showing some activity. The kale that was transplanted in last fall, and then moved this spring is just about done, to be replanted at the end of the month. And the potatoes are going nuts. They like this weather. The two first plantings are about neck and neck, the one from mid May is pretty short still. The radishes have all been eaten, and now replanted to have more things for Ben to pull up. It’s good to have things that we’d prefer he pulls up, rather than going after the stuff that we wish he didn’t.

It’s a little nerve wracking when the seeds haven’t come up in a bed, and you don’t know if it’s something that you did or if the weather is just against you or what. So far though, we’ve only completely lost one planting of peas (which I suspect something ate). And most of this stuff can be replanted a few weeks later without too much trouble.

This is the main patch as of about a week ago: And Really Large: a 4000 px wide version of the original 11k pixel wide panorama.

I haven’t been in Iowa in the spring in a long time. In fact, it’s probably been since I was 5 or so, when we moved away. What I remember of the countryside is growing fields, corn as tall as me, and rows of soybeans converging on the horizon. This time, we were there in planting season, so everything was brown. Plowed and in the process of planting. And in that process, i realized some of the scale of the place. Three large tractors plowing one field. Looking very small in the process. The pattern of farmland with a corner carved out and surrounded by old oak trees, to provide a little shelter from the heat. A farm house, with an old dilapidated wood barn, and a couple of newer smaller metal buildings. repeated here and there to the horizon, over and over and over.

One thing that I know I don’t remember is the wind farms. Every so often, there would be a cluster of little windmills out in the fields. Then we saw one of the blades being trucked down the road, and realized that they’re probably 75 foot blades on 150 foot towers. And our experience last month is that wind is a really good idea. There’s not a lot to stop it once you’re in the flat lands of northern Iowa.

The most surreal moment was when I needed to get a power adapter replaced at the Apple Store. Mine died in a warm burny smelling way, and I had enough battery power to find out where the apple store was before lights out. They had no problem replacing it under Applecare, I expected to have to argue a little bit, but no, simply no problem at all. Then, as the paperwork was printing out, I recognized the music. The Talking Heads, The Big Country. Not a big hit, sort of an obscure little tune from the end of their second album. All about the fly over country, and how they wouldn’t live there.

Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas.
And I have learned how these things work together.
I see the parkway that passes through them all.
And I have learned how to look at these things and I say,
(chorus)
I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.
I couldn’t live like that, no siree!
I couldn’t do the things the way those people do.
I couldn’t live there if you paid me to.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard that on the radio. And to hear it in an Apple Store, in Iowa.

For the first time, I’ve spent $4.00 (well, actually 3.999) for a gallon of gas. 7 of them actually, for the Miata. At this rate, I think we’ve finally crossed the point where we’re both driving enough and gas is that expensive that we’re going to spend more on gas than insurance. For a long time, we just haven’t driven that much, and with 2 or 3 cars sharing the 8k miles a year, the insurance worked out to be more. But I think that’s changing.

And speaking of expensive, I got the Miata back from the shop where it had it’s crank replaced. The 90-91 1/2 Miatas had a design bug where the timing belt pulley could get a little loose and wear out it’s raceway that keeps it aligned. While this is happening, typically the car feels like it has no power till 4k rpm, and all sorts of other bad performance things that I could just tick off as having seen. And once that happens, you’re due for a crank replacement, which means taking the engine out, apart, and putting it all back together again. On the bright side, once the engine is apart, replacing a bunch of other stuff that’s near the end of it’s life because it’s 18 years old is really cheap because the labor is already spent getting the engine in and out. Like the clutch, water pump, timing belt, oil pump, slave cylinder, hoses. Little things. Lots of little things. Happy Economic Stimulus Package Mr Mechanic.

And wow. It really has power now. OMG. And a grabby clutch. I nearly peeled out in the mechanic’s parking lot because I was used to the old performance. I can’t remember the last time I was even close to breaking the tires loose on dry pavement, or even wet pavement. I really had forgotten how much fun that car was (and is).

The fire circle continues to yield Morels, Ben found one today, and one was left in the ground to get a bit bigger. We also found a false morel (reported to be poisonous, it’s lobed rather than ribbed) over in the clearing outside the fence. We looked around a bit in the forest, but got too cold before giving up.

Supposedly they come up on warm days after it’s been cold. So far, we’ve had a lot of this cold weather, punctuated by a few nice warm days. we’re up to 6 or 7 morels, including one in the forest that we didn’t harvest before it got old and soggy. I’m hoping that we find a few more before the season is up.

I haven’t been making sourdough for the last month or more, since i got a little discouraged at making either unintentional sourdough flatbreads or bricks. I tried again yesterday, and this time, I think I got it right. It was one of the better efforts so far, good texture, strong crust, and a pleasantly sour flavor. It also rose and proofed well, and had a nice freeform shape out of the oven.

What was different? Not totally sure. I did add 1/16 tsp of yeast per batch (non-sourdough gets 1tsp), and that was probably a help. I started early in the evening, Didn’t mix the dough all that much. After mixing in the salt and yeast, I kneaded by hand for a few minutes. That didn’t seem to do a whole lot, but when folding the dough over later in the evening, it got very smooth and elastic. It rose overnight in a cold house, and in the morning, I formed the loaves, left them on the counter to proof, and baked around noon.

We’ve been reading the book Zen Shorts to the kids, and in it, there are three classic Zen stories that are told for kids. One of them, involving a robber and the gift of a robe, seems to have played itself out in real life recently, when a Social Worker gave his mugger his coat, then took him to dinner. And in the process, got his wallet back so that it was his treat. Link: A Victim Treats His Mugger Right

As amazing as it sounds, I think that the next thing to to in the garden is hang around and wait for a couple of weeks to plant some more stuff. The March salad bed is in, the March potatoes are in, and the beds for the next batch of planting are in pretty good shape. I may throw out some cover crop to crowd out the weeds germination, but there’s just not that much more heavy lifting that needs to happen for the near future.

Also: take pictures. Been too busy working to take pics of the garden.

Way back when I was first on the internet, before these blog things, people talked on usenet, and some people talked a lot on usenet. I was a part of the bicycling community at rec.bicycles.tech, and I remember the contributions of Sheldon Brown. (I think I remember 3 or 4 names from that era now.) He always had an answer, and almost always had the part you needed. He built some crazy tandems and fixed gears, welded together out of whatever junkers crossed his path. I ordered a few things from hish shop, and I think even biked by it once while I was in the area.

I left that community for the web, or it disappeared, or something around the time of the 1999 internet boom, so I never knew that Sheldon Brown had MS, or that he was in failing health. He died last month.

Sheldon Brown obituary - Times Online

Our garden has been humming along, until it hit a full stop last Saturday. Two weeks ago, we rented a big roto-tiller (two cylinder, 16hp. Now that’s power) and attacked the mess of gourse and blackberry roots in our large garden location, as well as a killing off the sod in a couple of other spots (one called and shaped like nevada, one like a pie wedge) for some other garden uses.

Last Friday evening and Saturday, I defined the beds in the big garden, and then put in one load of compost over half the garden. Then, stoppage struck, as the compost loading tractor wouldn’t start when I went back for the second load, and half the family got quite sick, and remained that way for most of the week.

The big garden is a rectangle, with 16 3 foot wide beds on each side of a center aisle, each bed about 10 - 14 feet long. There are some smaller ones on the north side, and the ones on the south side tend to be on the longer side. At about 30-40 square foot per bed, there’s a good amount of space for smaller stuff, and there are enough beds to give the bigger stuff its space as well.

Helpfully, I had put the compost into the ‘later in the summer’ area of the garden first, and not where I was planning on putting the early season stuff. One more trip to the compost place, no luck — they’re out for 2 more weeks. So. Garden plans are reversed, and I’m now planting early season where I intended later season stuff.

So, Today (Saturday) I mixed up the fertilizer (following Steve Solomon’s complete organic recipe — 4x seed meal, 1/2x lime, 1/2x rock phosphate, 1/2x kelp meal) raked it into the 8 beds, and planted the first seeds (and starts). There’s a bed of Walla Walla onion starts, a bed of chard, one of peas, and one of favas. Ben has a garden bed of his own with radishes, peas, and onions. Tomorrow we’re expecting to put in a bed of spinach and lettuce, and 2 of potatoes.

Next month, we’ll start more peas, more potatoes, more salad stuff, and probably some brassicas.

In May, another batch of potatoes, more salad stuff, and who knows what else. Probably beans.

Memorial day, we go for hot weather loving plants, tomatoes and peppers. Sweet Corn too, in the nevada plot.

And in mid summer, in go the overwintering things, more brassicas, leeks, favas.

Obviously, there are big plans here, but I think we’re past a large part of the early work.