Tag: garden

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That Which Can’t Be Found…

…can be built!

I’m growing increasingly weary of the construction quality of purchased products. It’s nothing new, of course. Every product, once popular, is imitated by other manufacturers (patents allowing). And what begins as a consumer-friendly price reduction quickly turns into marketing gimmicks to build brand loyalty, followed by a race to the bottom. The prices stabilize somewhere beneath the original price, and then once that maximum price a consumer is willing to pay for the product is determined, the profit margin can only increase by reducing manufacturing costs. Ergo, in capitalism, a good idea turns into a readily-available mediocre product that breaks much sooner than it should. And we put up with it.

But what really irks me is when I can’t even throw money at the problem and find a luxury-priced version of an item that’s actually built better – what I call the “lazy tax”. Apparently I’m an aberration to consumer spending habits, for what I want usually doesn’t even exist. And in the time I spend searching for the unicorn, I could have built it myself.

So fine! Here’s my new cucumber trellis:

Constructed with treated lumber, PVC-coated fencing wire, and deck screws; this bad boy certainly isn’t going anywhere. Especially since it’s mounted to stakes driven 3 feet into the soil. Total price? I dunno, maybe around $40? Certainly no more than $50, considering I had some materials on hand already.

A flimsy bent wire prefab? Definitely more.

Don’t stand for this people! By all means, be lazy and spend your money. That helps the economy and drives up shareholder stock values (hopefully mine, most importantly). But don’t settle for cheapness!

Wasting your money on cheap imported good is definitely American, but so is ingenuity.

Lecture over.

–Simon

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Gardens and Greenspace

Let’s do some outdoor updates, yeah!

The squash patch which was new last year proved to be one garden too many to maintain, so it’s been converted into a pollinator patch, with every annual flower seed I had in my collection and wanted to clear out, plus clover.
A new maple, to bring back some frontyard shade.
Indeterminate tomatoes went in.
And a new sugar maple for the backyard.
Determinate tomatoes and sunflowers.

And that was Mother’s Day.

–Simon

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Pawpaw Patch in the Making

We planted a pawpaw tree about 3 years or so ago, and now it’s finally bloomed! It does, however, require pollination from another tree, and I’m hoping the neighbor’s trees are close enough, and of a different genetic variety. We shall see, if a fruit appears.

The pawpaw is a bit of a culinary curiosity. Despite their prevalence in eastern North America, I’ve never seen them on menus, probably because the fruit seeds are poisonous and the fruits don’t ripen once picked. That makes commercial operations non-viable, relegating this native to local cuisine. They’re also a bit of an acquired taste, sort of like a mild mango. I used to pick them at the old farm and grandma would make them into pies. A unique slice of Americana.

–Simon

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Crocus Expansion

More crocuses were planted last fall, and now they are starting to arrive.

This throws off my phenological records, since these ones are out in the sun and warmer soil. Oh the problems I endure.

–Simon

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AI Search and Cotyledonic Polyembryony

I’ve started to embrace AI engines. The aging crank that I am has been reluctant to jump aboard too soon, but it turns out I was thinking about it all wrong. Instead of using it to lazily bypass the process of basic internet research, as its main purpose appears to be, I discovered that I can instead use it to bypass the bullshit copy/paste non-researched web articles themselves. A simple query returns aggregated, compiled, and distilled information; which I can then use to better refine my internet searches to find the actual information that most websites simply scrape and regurgitate. It was, perhaps, a slow revelationary process on my part.

Here’s a good example. One of my tomato starters had three initial leaves. I had never seen that before. My standard internet searching revealed that these first leaves that reside within the seed are called cotyledons. Sounds like a dinosaur to me, but okay. And as a seasoned gardener, I know that tomato seedlings have two cotyledons, not three. What was going on? It was time for Wikipedia to bestow me with closure.

But it didn’t. It just talked about the leaves themselves and their purpose, though not why there would be a non-standard number on a plant. Genetic mutation? Monsanto? Government conspiracy? Tell me!

That isn’t right! It’s some Damien shit right there. Mark of the beast!

But again, it didn’t. So I used an AI engine, and asked it why a tomato seedling would have 3 cotyledons. And it promptly told me that it’s rare, sometimes from genetic mutation, but usually resulting from polyembryony, which happens when more than one embryo forms within a single seed. Furthermore, it’s apparently a non-issue long term, though it causes early variations in normal growth patterns. Now that’s useful information, and also kind of fascinating.

And to drive the point home further, another one germinated, from a completely different variety!

Something in the water?

Most of the seeds I plant are ones I’ve saved, so this double occurrence is intriguing. Perhaps attributed to a statistical Poisson distribution, it could be an unintentional result of my decades-long solanum eugenics project.

Whatever the cause, I’ll be keeping a close eye on these samples. Maybe I’ll have developed new varieties! Or, more likely, the bigger achievement here is that I’ve finally dabbled in AI.

–Simon