Jakewins

To my friends in California

2017-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Letter to the editor of The Daily Californian, about the protests this weekend.

To my friends in California,

“First they came for the Muslims, and we said not this time mother fucker”. The quote set a tone for the national opposition. But the Niemöller original does not start out with ethnic groups. The original starts with “First they came for the Socialists,” and there is a reason Martin begins his list with the political opposition.

The German Communist Party, KPD, was the first political party outlawed. They had organized mass opposition to Hitler and destroying them was easy to do once the German military was at his command.

Popular support for the party had been undermined by its paramilitary arm Red Front (RF), a precursor to today’s Antifa. RF organized violent disruptions of Nazi gatherings and fought back when SA paramilitaries attacked peaceful KPD rallies.

RF were brave German men and women, willing to lay their lives down to stop Nazi rise to power. But in hindsight their violence proved integral to Nazi propaganda. It provided the pretense needed for the Nazi-controlled German military to murder, jail and silence the political opposition. KPD were “terrorists”, “enemies of the people”, and here were the pictures to prove it.

Donald Trump controls the most powerful military the world has seen, and the pictures that came out of Berkeley this weekend bolsters his ability to use it.

From this perspective, it does not matter that outside protesters came to campus wearing shields and gas masks. It does not matter that they pepper sprayed students and beat people with planks. It does not matter that the old man who went viral was instigating fights. It does not matter that he got pepper spray on him by accident.

It is all moot next to the old man on the ground with his red Trump hat, the burning American flag, and the words “Free Speech” engulfed in the flames.

The Democrat Party's become the party of putrid hate, racism, total corruption & misery. #Berkeley #March4Trump

I am so DONE! #DemEXIT!!! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/NVpyIp31w2
— Democrats for Trump (@YoungDems4Trump) March 6, 2017

There’s a reason professional video cut to benefit the Trump narrative of Antifa “terrorists” was online less than an hour after the clashes; Trump organizers are working day and night to shape public opinion. It’s working. His base here in Missouri is eating the propaganda up. Hundreds of thousands have shared the meme-style photos and the slick videos.

As representatives here in Missouri write legislation to allow confiscating our houses and cars for protesting, the propaganda from California is making their case for them.

Independent of morality or truth, there will be fewer attendees at our next rally here in Missouri. And when the time comes, fewer people, like Niemöller, will speak up.

Lenin famously noted the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot, but would reconsider after they got the guns. There may well come a time for violence. If it does we need you with us, not rotting in jail on a riot charge.

It hurts from the bottom of my stomach to ask you this, but I feel I have to. Take the punch. Let them pepper spray you. Let them spew hatred in your face - and stand firm. Document it happening and show the world who they are.

Don’t repeat the mistake of RF. Use the strength we have today to our advantage. Make the next viral article out of Berkeley be “Violent Trump Supporters Attack Peaceful Student Counter-Protest.”

How we use Dynamic Programming to find the best price for our customers.

2016-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know, I could never have guessed what happened next!

2016-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

Caring for blisters on sweaty feet

2016-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve tried most any method I’ve found on caring for hot spots and blisters when hiking. Turns out most outdoor writers don’t have the kind of sweaty feet I do - here’s a list of all the expensive foot treatment I’ve had fall off my feet this summer, and the things that didn’t.

Basics

This post will go through things I’ve tried for protecting my feet and how long each stayed on. Hopefully this will help others bring helpful medical gear into the wilderness.

The crux of keeping your feet in one piece is to minimize two things: friction and moisture. Moleskine, band-aids, tape et cetera protects skin from friction - but note that they do so at the cost of holding on to moisture.

Before encasing your feet in moisture barriers, do what you can to reduce moisture and friction:

Wear shoes that let your feet breathe
Wear shoes that minimize friction against your skin when you walk (eg. shoes that fit well)
Consider a thin sock inside your regular hiking socks to reduce friction (eg. a liner sock)
Take your shoes off every hour or two, and replace your socks with dry ones

The Test

I brought lots of recommended products on two hikes and recorded how long each stayed on. The scenario looks something like:

5 day hike, 8hrs hiking per day
+/- 1500ft elevation change per day
Product goes on same spot on heel each time
Check feet every two hours, replacing socks as needed

The contenders

Nexcare tape
Equate Strong Strips
Moleskine
Band-aid Healing Blister
Band-aid Waterproof
Johnson & Johnson Sports Tape

Nexcare tape

20 minutes of protection

A good example of how different peoples feet are - my wife uses the same model boots and socks as I, and loves Nexcare tape. For me, I’m lucky if it stays on for more than fifteen minutes hiking uphill.

Equate Strong Strips

2 hours of protection

These had slid down by the first two-hour checkup, meaning they did not perform very well at all. I think this was because there is very little room above and below the non-adhesive middle part. If you look at the picture you can see the band-aid held on along the sides, sliding down in the middle to reveal the spot on my heal I was trying to protect.

Moleskine

2-3 hours of protection

Moleskine seems like it should be a smash it - everyone recommends it, and the non-adhesive side has a felted surface that’s perfect for reducing friction. Alas, time after time, I am unable to get Moleskine to stay on for more than a few hours while hiking.

At best, Moleskine stayed on my heel for three hours before coming off, which means I could replace it when I swap socks, but given the price of Moleskine, that makes for a very expensive hike.

I will say this is, no competition, the most comfortable protection while it is on. It’s thick and fuzzy, making the feet feel a lot better.

Band-aid healing Blister

2-3 hours of protection

This product glued the blister and socks together in a horrifically painful blob of flesh, transparent goo and sweaty fabric. I have no picture of this, because the pain of taking the sock off overcame any desire to document the process.

Band-aid Waterproof

4-6 hours of protection

This stayed on very well - I had one that fell off after about four hours of hiking, but two others that stayed until the end of the hike, about six hours in each case. Thus, the staying power of this was very high.

They do come with drawbacks though; being waterproof, they don’t let the skin breathe very well at all, and they are extremely thin, meaning they don’t do much to help with the pain.

Johnson & Johnson Sports Tape

24-48 hours of protection

My wife brought a $3 roll of athletic tape for her knees, and I tried it on my heels only to find it stayed on better than any dedicated blister product I’d tried. The tape did not come off until I took it off at night, once leaving the tape for two full days of hiking without any indication that it was coming off. Doing so was a mistake though, as it did not let the foot dry well overnight - next time I’ll take the tape off when I set camp.

The sticking power seemed brilliantly balanced - it didn’t pull the blistered skin off with it like the Band-aid Healing Blister did, but it also didn’t come off before the hike was over.

The drawback of this is the same as the Band-aid waterproof - it holds in a lot of moisture, and it is very thin. For the thinness issue, I found I could put Moleskine on underneath, using the athletic tape to keep it in place, giving me the comfort of Moleskine without the issues of it falling off.

Summary

The Moleskine/Athletic tape combo was really excellent for me, and will be my go-to for future adventures.

Asynchronous transactional patterns

2016-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

How gun control was solved elsewhere

2016-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

As an immigrant in America, I sometimes feel uncomfortable raising my voice about some of the mine-field political issues that sweep the country; abortion, religion, health care and so on.

I particularly feel uncomfortable when my opinions are so clearly colored by where I grew up. I don’t want to be the person that seems to think things were better where he came from. I’m here for a reason, I love this country very much and am very thankful I’ve been allowed to move here.

But in the case of gun control, I feel I have a legitimate claim to a voice and a less common perspective. I do live here, a resident of the American Heartland, I am a gun owner and, crucial to the point I want to make, I’ve lived in a country with much stricter gun control.

When I bought my gun, a shotgun for hunting waterfowl, there was a background check performed. The store clerk faxed a form to the FBI, it took all but five minutes and whether I knew which side of the weapon was the sharp end or not had no bearing on their decision.

Which, no matter. If I wanted to, I could have skipped that check, since it only applies to gun stores. I bought my shotgun used, so if I’d bought it off of Craigslist, no checks would have been performed.

I feel utterly uncomfortable about this fact. Not because I feel uncomfortable with my own ownership of this gun - my family has hunted as long as I remember, and what my parents didn’t teach me about responsible handling and storage of weapons I learned from more formal, albeit brief, training with the Swedish National Guard.

I feel uncomfortable because this is pure happenstance. My ability to purchase a weapon has no relation to my ability to handle it in a manner that is safe to the people around me or to myself.

On history

There is this odd implicit assumption that these issues are unique to America - that other countries came with comprehensive gun legislation at their inception.

A long time ago, before Sweden introduced the gun legislation it has today, hunting was not a sport for the majority of the population, it was an important source of food. As industrialization and urbanization progressed, this shifted - and at some point, the new urban class started pushing for gun control.

Just like in America, you can imagine that the people who wanted legislation around guns were not generally the same people who used them. Just like here in America, you can imagine how people that’d had guns in the family for many generations felt emasculated by people who did not share their views, who were outsiders of their “tribe”.

But legislation was passed - and it was not passed by steamrolling people on the countryside who used guns in their everyday lives, it was passed by the two groups collaborating and compromising.

Specifically, the compromise is, roughly, this: The federal police is ultimately responsible for issuing licenses for weapons. Licenses are specific to a weapon and to an individual, and are independent of how you acquire the weapon. If you want to own a gun, you must have a license issued to you for that specific gun.

That was the side of the compromise granted to the urban tribe. The other side of the compromise is this: The police outsources the training and certification to a third party - an NGO ran by gun owners, the National Hunters Association (NHA). The training required to get a license is designed by hunters in collaboration with the police, and is then carried out and certified by instructors from the NHA.

The specifics of the requirements are not super important to my point here - the point is that the compromise shows mutual trust and understanding. Licensing is put in place; but beyond ensuring it is fair and thorough, it is handled by people who are directly affected by it.

On compromise

If you’ve read this far, you might guess at what I’m getting towards here.

Americans in general, for good reason, have very little faith in their government. While there are many concerns raised by gun owners against legislation, a common and important one is the depth of distrust in the American Government as the certifying authority and the fear of having guns confiscated by it.

Rather than laugh at this complaint, serious participants in the discussion should listen and recognize that it makes little difference what they think of this concern; instead, respect it as the earnest opinion of the other side of the debate, and find a compromise.

The obvious one, to me, would be to let the NRA design and carry out the training for gun licenses, in collaboration with the FBI. Make the law be such that the FBI must grant a license if a criminal background check is passed and the licensee passes the NRA’s certified training and tests; and make it such that the NRA must collaborate in earnest with the FBI to design fair and thorough tests for applicants to pass.

I realize this misses many, many concerns - like limits on the type of weapons you can purchase, or the number of guns and so on. But this is how we do this - a little bit of change at a time, with mutual respect and mutual reaching across the isles for compromises.

What are hybrid plants?

2016-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

It turns out the wheat I ordered is hybridized. I’ve read all about this now, and it appears that for the greater good my little plot will have to be burned and buried under concrete.

I learn from the internet that hybrid plants are beastly Frankensteinian creations, invented by Monsanto to keep humans from saving seeds and control the food supply. “Hybrid foods will not grow in nature” and “they are not as good as non-hybrid and organic foods”.

As you may or may not know, this is all nonsense. The parts about how hybrids are “unnatural” are hilariously wrong.

The truth is this:

Hybrids are what happens if you don’t apply enormous pressure to inbreed.

That is, when you buy an organic, non-hybrid variety that “breeds true” to its type, what you are buying is a plant that has been heavily inbred for many generations in order to remove genetic variety. Inbred seed will produce a crop where each plant has almost the exact same genes, meaning all things equal they grow into uniformly shaped vegetables.

For a gardener or an aspiring farmer, uniformity is important - it helps to harvest wheat that blooms at the exact same height, or to pick tomatoes that all fit in the same plastic containers.

But there are problems with inbreeding. For instance, parasites will have a much easier time attacking plants in field of near clones. Figure out how to “break into” one plant, and you’ve cracked them all!

This, of course, is why most life on earth does not inbreed. Using sexual reproduction means each individual will have a unique combination of genes - a jumbled combination of the parents genes - making it trickier for parasites to spread from one individual to another.

Alas, the evil geniuses at Ramona Organic Farms, along with thousands of years of evil genius farmers before them, have found a way to eat their wheat and plant it to. For as you will find out, there’s a way to create hybrid seeds that grow into uniform crops.

Detour into a simpletons understanding of genes

I’m assuming at this point that you know we have genes and that you will accept my somewhat spotty but sure-of-myself knowledge of them. If you know about gene things and you want to watch me embarrass myself, keep reading. If you don’t know about gene things, here is a totally accurate primer on gene things.

Genes are like “slots”, spaces where actual genetic material can fit, like this:

So, lets say we have a gene for eye color (which, we don’t, we have lots, I’m simplifying here), a dedicated empty space in our genome where the information about eye color goes. The genome is made up of lots of these “slots”, genes linked one after another:

The actual DNA that goes into the gene slot, like the DNA for “brown eyes”, is called an “allele”. Here’s a lush brown allele plugged into the eye color gene:

If you’re familiar with software, you might think of the gene as an interface and an allele as one of many implementations of that interface.

If you follow so far, you now know more about genetics than most people in the world, congratulations!

There’s one more concept to include before I can get back to the problem with my devil wheat. When we have children, we say that you get some of your DNA from your mom, and some from your dad. What does that actually mean?

Well, it turns out that every gene actually has two slots for DNA, so for every gene in our cells, we have two alleles! When we humans reproduce, the child will need two alleles to fit into the two eye-color gene slots; you get one from your mom, and one from your dad.

This is where simplifications like “dominant” and “recessive” genes comes from. It’s easy to imagine what would happen if both slots for the eye color gene was set to “brown” - but what happens if you have mixed alleles for the same gene?

The answer is “it depends”. Importantly, it is not as simple as one getting “used” and the other somehow disabled - both alleles will be “used”, or expressed. In the case of eye color, the brown allele might “overpower” the green - but the green allele will still be actively in use.

How hybrid devil plants are made

Lets, for the sake of argument, say I’m God. I’m not saying I’m not, or that I am, but that independent of whether I am God or not that we assume I am for the duration of the next paragraph.

I summon into being a cucumber-like plant species named Andy and I decree that Andy contains two genes; one to control Andys color, and the other to control Andys resistance to bugs. Just like a human, for each gene, Andy has two slots for alleles. All in all, something along these lines:

There are two colors of Andy - yellow and green. Green is “dominant”, so if an Andy has both green and yellow alleles, it comes out looking green. And there are two alleles for bug resistence; one for spiders and the other for bees, for whatever reason.

Now, I like both yellow and green Andy, so I’ve inbred two varieties. “Early Bird Yellow Andy” and “Honest Jakes Green Andy”. Here they are now:

Since they are inbred, as long as I keep inbreeding, Honest Jake will give me green Andys, and Early Bird will be yellow. But you might spot a problem. Because I’ve inbred them, the bug resistence genes are also inbred - Honest Jake is resistant to spiders, and Early Bird is resistant to Bees. This is another problem with inbred plants - they have less useful genetic material than hybrids.

Now, what happens if these two inbred varieties where to breed with each other? Well, for each gene, the offspring would get one allele from its mom and one from its dad. For the color gene, it would get one color allele from Early Bird, and one color allele from Honest Jake.

Since both of Early Birds color alleles are yellow, the offspring will always get a yellow allele from Early Bird. Likewise, it will always get a green allele from Honest Jake. This means that all the immediate offspring will always have one green and one yellow allele, one from each parent. Likewise, they will always have one allele for spider resistance and one for bee resistance.

Here’s one way it could play out, with four new plants in the offspring. Notice that, while they all have slightly different DNA, they all have the same general combination; one green and one yellow allele, one bee allele and one spider allele:

You might realize what’s happened here already - since I said green would be dominant over yellow, our hybrid Andy generation will all be lush green.

So all the offspring will all look like Honest Jake green Andys - but they will also all be resistant against both bees and spiders.

Imagine what happens if there are other alleles that work together to make bigger fruits, handle droughts and so on - a hybrid will potentially have a much more broad set of alleles at its “disposal”. This effect, where a hybrid is stronger than an inbred line is called “hybrid vigor”, and is the reason most plants we grow today are hybrids.

But lets keep playing the tape - because what happens next is interesting. The seeds from our hybrid generation are supposed to be sterile, right? Engineered by Monsanto lawyers to convert your soul to intellectual property? Not so, but something interesting happens:

Again, each child gets one allele from its mom and one from its dad. But this time, it’s a 50/50 shot if it will get green or yellow. Some children may get a yellow from the mom and a green allele from the dad. Some might get green from both, or vice versa. In the figure above, three out of the four children have at least one green allele. One has only yellow alleles, so it will turn out yellow.

If you think about this, what’s just happened is that you had a field of Andys that were all green. And then you took seeds from that field and planted it - and now, suddenly, 25% of the plants are yellow!

The fascinating net effect is that when two inbred lines breed, their children will be uniform - but their grand-children will be massively genetically diverse. This is the reason we usually do not save seeds from first-generation hybrids - the second generation is not going to be uniform and and thus they are no good for commercial purposes where we want uniformity.

How you like them wheat berries, then?

On the one hand, my wheat crop is useless for flour. Much of the wheat came out with tiny ears, much too small to make wheat from. But some of it came out with huge ears, and that means this could be a cool opportunity I’ve stumbled upon; I could try inbreeding this wheat back to a stable variety.

The beauty of saving seed from my hybrid wheat would be if I succeed the result would be bred specifically to grow in my climate here in Missouri.

There’s a caveat though - some plants don’t take well to inbreeding. If they become too inbred, they grow useless and sterile, like the Swedish Royal Family. For those plants, you need to keep a large enough crop to keep genetic variety going. I’m not sure if this wheat is one of those plants, but I guess I’ll find out.

Planting wheat

2016-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Any meal fit for human consumption must contain pasta - and home grown meals are no exception. But how do you grow pasta in the back yard?

The most expensive purchase an American family will make is a house and associated yard, and most of our lives will be spent working to pay for it. Intriguingly, the majority of the cost is for the location of the land, not the construction of the house sitting on it. And the majority of the land is not used for the house; it is used to carefully and diligently grow and groom turf grass.

Which is all to say - most of our private wealth is indirectly spent on turf grass. And that makes a surprising amount of sense.

You see, the Greatest Generation had turf grass and a chicken in every pot, and the gridlock generation of Baby Boomers that followed deeply idolize them. Baby Boomers incorrectly inferred that the turf grass was the cause of their parents supposed greatness, and promptly usurped turf grass maintenance as a cornerstone of their mating rituals.

An American male perched on a Big Dog Blackjack zero-turn riding mower is participating in a sexual cargo cult that could school a horny Bowerbird on sexual display any day of the week.

Get in line, ladies.

Where was I?

Right. Point is: we grow an outrageous amounts of grass in this country. And despite this, there is whoefully little to find online about how to grow grass to eat.

Types of wheat

Wheat is actually a family of several species of grass. There are lots of these, but the two that matter for my purposes are Common Wheat and Durum Wheat. So which one should I plant??

A common way to talk about wheat is as hard or soft - soft wheats are high in starch, low in gluten, and vice versa.

Hard wheat with lots of gluten is used for things that need the gluten protein for structure and/or chewiness - like bread and pasta.
Soft wheat, with lots of starch is used for things that need a crisper structure, like pastries.

If you’ve ever tried to bake bread and it sucked, it’s most likely because you bought “all purpose flour”, bleached sawdust. To make awesome bread, buy a hard red wheat flour with lots of gluten, and let organic chemistry do the work for you.

Durum wheat has the highest gluten protein content, meaning it is the “hardest”, of any commercial wheat, which is why it is used for pasta. Those gluten protein strands are what gives the pasta its incredible chewy texture, and what holds the pasta together. So, I needed to get my hands on some durum wheat seeds.

Acquiring seeds

But where do you buy durum wheat seeds?

I looked at several local farm supply stores and garden outlets before turning online. And even online, finding a place to order small packets of durum wheat seeds was really hard.

Until I realized - health food hippies eat wheat seeds, they call them “wheat berries”! With that realization in mind, I found an online store that sold durum wheat ‘berries’, and ordered about a pound.

Preparing and planting

At this point, most things I could find online dealt with industrial wheat planting. So, I went to the library and picked up a copy of Gene Logsdons Small scale grain raising. I was thrilled to find it was endorsed by Carol Deppe who wrote my favorite gardening book, Growing your own vegetable varieties, and after me and Carrie both had read the section on planting wheat, we gave it a go.

Wheat seeds can be spread directly over the soil, but we have a bird feeder nearby, and didn’t want to risk the birds eating our pasta. However, Gene suggested planting wheat 1/2-2 inches below the soil could help protect against birds.

With Genes help, we sowed the seeds in 1-inch deep furrows, about 3 inches apart, and the seeds hapharzardly spaced about 1/8 to 1/2 inch within the furrow. We planted them this closely since we weren’t sure how many would sprout, and I’d rather have too many seedlings and have to thin them than have too few.

In total, we planted 24 square feet of wheat, which according to a shady blog source should be barely enough for a few servings of pasta. I’d have planted more, but I need the rest of the raised bed for my tomatoes.

Sprouting

After about ten days, the first seedlings emerged. They were hit by a frost a few days later, but today, two weeks after they went into the ground, they are looking mighty healthy!

Now I just have to keep horny baby boomers from mowing it down and I’ll be harvesting tagliatelle before long!

First Blood

2016-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

My attempt at not repeating last years seedling mistakes have failed. Hundreds of tomatoes will never see the light of day, they drowned alone in the dark while I was drinking wine a hundred miles away.

The past three weekends I’ve been out of town. I’ll be gone for a week at the end of this month and for two weeks at the end of the next. Keeping seedlings alive is hard enough as it is - so I try not to be hard on myself when my neglect leads to mass death.

However, after leaving a nice batch of Roma Tomatoes like this two weekends ago:

It was heartbreaking to find all of them dead or dying when I came home just three days later:

What happened?

While I’m not entirely sure exactly what went wrong, I can think of three possible culripts:

Water does not drain the way you think it does

It is intuitive to think that water gets pulled down by gravity, and that watering plants is a race against the universe to put water back at the top of the pot, where the plants roots can get to it.

However, there is another force - Capillary Action - which works the other direction. Capillary action is the “wicking” effect that makes oil move up along a wick in an oil lamp. The same thing happens in a flower pot, pulling water up into your pot. Gravity and capillary action work against each other, eventually finding a balance where the force pulling the water up into the pot overcomes gravity, leaving water “hanging” in your pot.

Interestingly, this is why you shouldn’t put gravel or similar material at the bottom of pots to “help them drain” - this just moves the layer of “hanging” water up, suffocating your roots.

So, when I left my beautiful seedlings, I put a good bit of water into the container the pots are sitting in. Unfortunately, it turned out that the capillary force of my soil is amazing, and it pulled water all the way up to the top of the pot. When I got home, the plants were soaking wet - and soaking wet soil leaves no space for oxygen, killing the cells in my plant roots.

If I were to guess, I’d say this is the main cause of my trouble. And it leaves a big issue - what the heck should I do when I leave for a week? Tips welcome!

Transplanting is a deadly business

I planted 48 cells of seedlings, about four seeds per cell, for a total of ~200 tomato seeds this year (which, side note, means I’ve already beat last years murder-record by double the corpse count). I did that because I knew a lot of them would die when I transplanted them to larger pots. However, I still got excited when the first true leaves appeared, and transplanted when only a few of the seedlings had true leaves - the vast majority still only had their cotyledon leaves.

Here’s a seedling I transplanted, the true leaves are the textured inner pair of leaves - ready for transplant!

Unfortunately, her sibling here was nowhere near prepared for the move, but I got too excited. This one only has it’s cotyledons, the leaves the plant “comes out the seed” with.

I think this played a role in their death - small seedlings with poorly established root systems are, according to books, much more sensitive to transplanting.

I need to learn patience.

Tomatoes need sun.. so much sun

I’ve had a light on my seedlings ever since they came out of the soil. However, the light’s been quite far away and is not very strong (800 lumen ‘sunlight’ LED). I think this might’ve further lessened their chances of survival.

Next steps

I’d very much love to grow a meal with plants I’ve grown from seed. However, I’m of course not going to let the whole tomato sauce go to waste if I can’t grow enough seedlings. So, I’ve planted another 150 seeds, this time using three different seed starting methods (more on that later). If this also fails, I will admit (temporary) defeat and buy seedlings at Lowe’s :)

Building a raised bed

2016-02-28T05:20:10+00:00

Four planks and some dirt - how hard can it be? Turns out, building a raised bed involved quite a bit more than I thought!

This is part of my project to grow a meal, so I needed a bed that’s large enough to grow pasta for six people. Obviously I also needed a site that gets as much sun as possible. I’d made the mistake of putting a bed in partial sun before, hoping I could grow shade-tolerant vegetables, I’m not making that mistake this time.

I got an ok from the landlord to put up a raised bed here, right where those stumps are.

Materials

Choosing material was a bit tricky - the frame will be in close contact with moist soil, so it'll rot if you're not careful. The ideal is cedar wood, which is naturally resistant to rot. However, cedar is rather expensive.

Naturally you might then reach for pressure-treated pine - but that is also a dead end, the chemicals they treat the wood with are not good to eat, you don't want to them leaching into your soil and vegetables.

So, what about regular pine? It rots like nobodies business. So I opted to try a middle-path: I built the frame with pine, but lined the inside with plastic. Hopefully that'll act as a barrier that helps keep the pine dry. I ended up paying $40 for the material to build 12x6x1-foot raised bed.

Notice the plastic liner. Also - I'm putting strong steel wire across the middle portion of the bed. When winter comes, the soil will freeze and put significant pressure on the planks outwards, the wire will hold the bed together and keep its shape intact.

Squaring the bed

What really matters when building the bed is that it is level - otherwise water will not distribute evenly in it. But it also helps if it is square, since that makes it easier to keep neat rows. Making a 12x6 rectangle square is surprisingly tricky - and the trick is to measure diagonals. If both the diagonals across the bed are the same length, it is square.

You can use this to your advantage - get a piece of string as long as the diagonal you should have (figure out how long the diagonal is here), and use it together with a 12' and a 6' plank or string to make a triangle. As long as the string is tight, you'll have three corners of your bed perfectly marked out. Then just do the same thing for the last corner.

I used two strings and a plank for my triangle - one for the diagonal, and one for the short side of the bed.

Soil

The whole point of this was to create a space I could fill with real soil. Following recommendations online, it seems a 2-to-1 blend of top soil and compost is a reasonable thing to aim for. I'd hoped to get this from the local city compost, which is free to use for residents. However, after my second shovel of city compost I found a polyester sock in it, and I realized there were no guarantees for what other things might be lurking in the mulch.

So I went to Home Depot, and it turns out that buying good soil is surprisingly expensive - $800 for their mid-line soil to fill my frame. I went back online, and found recommendations for filling the bottom with leaves or mulch, and decided to try filling the bottom part with straw, which I then covered with newspaper to keep the good soil from seeping through:

I regret doing this now for two reasons. One, I am the proud owner of a Ford Focus 2006 model, which the fine engineers at Ford Motor Company never intended once to be used for hauling straw:

But more on point, because I've since learned that straw will make the soil excessively alkaline, hindering my plants from growing properly. It was also really hard to keep the straw an even 6-inches, since it was not uniformly compressed. I've got a soil testing kit that I'll use once it's all settled, and I'll have to try and correct any alkalinity.

The top six inches was then covered by a 2-to-1 mix of cheaper top soil and a manure/peat moss mix.

All in all, the straw and soil cost me about $100. More than I'd anticipated, and I'm still rather worried I cheaped out and that I'll end up having a poor growing season because of it. We'll see!

On raised bed gardens, and holes

2016-02-28T05:16:14+00:00

I've never understood raised beds. Why would it be better to plant in soil that's slightly higher than the soil around it - are people paying hundreds of dollars for the comfort of not having to bend down to their plants?

This is part of my project to grow a meal, and is about how I learned to appreciate raised bed gardens.

When I was nine, some friends, my brother and I embarked on a grand project to dig a hole in the vegetable garden. I'm told that eventually my parents came home to find a two-yard ladder barely reached the bottom of the hole. At the end of the ladder sat my ten-year old partner in crime, Robert, dutifully digging deeper. In order to avoid explaining to the neighbors that their son was entombed two yards underneath our potato patch, dad mandated the project be aborted.

I remember the moment we broke through the black soil and reached a thin layer of clay. It was about a third of a way down the hole and it was a great milestone, granting a much-needed morale boost for everyone involved.

The garden was sometimes a point of contention, usually centered around the mountain of new organic life it produced every year. It was a delicate truce between nature and my parents that the house was allowed to remain in place at all. And I never thought much of that - that's how gardens were, each family fights a never-ending battle against the roses, pear trees and the plums for the right to keep a path to the front door.

I can think back now and realize that by the time we hit the clay, we had worked our way through nearly three feet of top soil.

Raised beds

And so, I never understood raised beds. Why would things grow better if you elevated them a bit? Are they just ornamental? It speaks to my garden-privilege that it was not until last year I learned that all gardens are not as lucky as ours was. My parents garden is two hundred years old. It came with a contract from the 1800s allowing the owner to collect sea weed from the local beach to use as fertilizer.

My garden, on the other hand, is forty years old, and it did not come with a contract to collect anything. When the suburban American duplex I live in was built, the top soil was dutifully scraped away, revealing a brick-hard layer of light brown clay, perfect for placing a house on. When it rains, the water runs over the turf-grass as if it were asphalt. There is no soil in my back yard, and building a raised bed is one of the fastest ways around that predicament.

If I do my job right, perhaps my raised bed will be the seed for some brat spelunker digging a hole and learning about the layers of the earth a few generations from now.

Find out how the raised bed worked out here!

Things I did wrong planting seedlings

2016-02-10T04:29:24+00:00

I never thought there could be so much to sticking seeds in dirt - but most of my seedlings last year died before they made it out the seed starter, so this year I'm planning contingencies.

Things I did wrong last year

I'm going to focus on my Tomato seedlings in this post. I'm planting exclusively Roma tomatoes, since that is what I'm using in my home grown meal.

1. I didn't plant enough

I didn't expect so many of my plants to die at various stages, so I planted way too few seedlings. This meant I had to regrow new batches of seedlings later in the season, eventually leading to most of my tomatoes not ripening before the first frost. This year, I'm planning for actually raising twelve tomato plants. To make sure I have enough to choose from, I've planted four times as many - 48 plants - and I've split that number between a local and a commercial variety of Roma tomato.

2. I didn't plant enough per "cell"

This was, I now know, a newbie mistake. Many seeds don't sprout, or sprout much later than others. I planted a single seed per cell in my seed starter last year, which meant many of the cells were just wasted space. This year, I planted at least four seeds per cell.

3. I planted too many varieties

I planted eight different varieties of tomatoes. I planted bushy, viny, determinate and indeterminate - big beefsteak and tiny currants. These all had completely different needs, and I had no idea how to cater to any of them.

This year I'm planting one main kind: Roma. I'm planting two varieties of it, but they are both Roma. That means I can look up information about Roma tomatoes specifically this year, and focus on learning this one thing well, rather than lots of things poorly.

4. I didn't realize I was supposed to take the plastic lid off

Once the seeds sprout, the lid is supposed to come off, it turns out. The lid helps create a warm and moist environment that encourages the seeds to sprout - this year I've taken the lid off once the seedlings have popped out, minimizing the risk of fungus and maximizing light. Speaking of which..

5. I didn't think I needed a lamp

I was wrong. Tomato seedlings want 16 hours of light per day, which they were not getting on my window sill last year. My tomato plants grew super tall and skinny in a desperate struggle to find light. This year, I have a lamp. Not a big one, not an indoor in-your-closed "tomato" grow light, but regular 800 lumen LED lamp I got at Lowes. My plants still look, I think, a bit skinny, but it's a big difference from last year.

6. Transplant to where?

Tomatoes have this amazing ability to sprout new roots if you bury their stems, and growers exploit this by transplanting the seedlings at least once before they go out to the real world. At each transplant, the plant is buried right up to the bottom set of leaves (or higher, depending on which blogs you read).

Transplanting should, although it remains a mystery to me why, be done when the seedlings have their first set of "real leaves". Real leaves being not the pair they come out of the seed with, but the first pair they grow "on their own", so to speak.

7. I didn't understand why I needed to harden off my plants (and I still don't)

This is similar to the "when to transplant" thing - everyone tells you you need to do it, but the why is frustratingly vague. "Hardening off" your seedlings means putting them outside a little bit at a time, to have them get used to their new climate. I will do this properly this year, because everyone tells me to - but I'm annoyed that I don't know what it is that happens exactly.

I think wind plays a part - being rocked back and fourth supposedly makes the plants produce stronger stems. Maybe there's also something about UV light or pathogens?

Growing a meal is hard work - learn about the purpose of raised beds, and how to build them.

Growing a meal

2016-02-07T03:34:24+00:00

Last year I killed almost one hundred tomato plants. This year, I hope I learned enough to grow a full meal in the back yard. If all goes well, I'll have some friends over for a tomato pasta dinner in August.

I want to cook a meal where the only thing I didn't grow myself is the water. Partially because it's fun and a good reason to get people together, but also because I want to learn the ins and outs of food production.

There are four important components to a good tomato pasta: Pasta, Sauce, Cheese and Wine. I rent an apartment, so both planting a vineyard and raising cattle for milk is, unfortunately, out of reach. But my landlord does allow me to put up a raised bed garden, putting both pasta and sauce squarely within my capabilities. With pasta and sauce in hand, I think I can convince friends to bring cheese and wine with the dinner as a bargaining chip.

Tomato sauce

Roma tomatoes
Yellow onion
Garlic
Scotch Bonnet peppers
Oil
Salt

Most of the above are well known, and should (knock on wood) be fine to make in the yard. Salt and Oil are tricky though. I have plans for both, which I'll explain in a follow up post.

Pasta

Durum wheat flour

Eggs(?)

Water

I grew wheat last year but, cards on the table, it was literally four strands of it. Judging from pasta recipes and reports from others growing wheat on a smaller scale, I need to grow *at least* 24 square feet of wheat to make pasta for 6 people.

I've got limited space, but I'll give it a go and with luck, I'll have some wheat flour in August.

The eggs are a much bigger predicament - I don't have or want chickens (I live in an apartment, remember!). There are recipes for pasta without eggs, simply flour and water - but frankly, the results seem poor. I'm going to try some out with regular store-bought flour, and if I find a good one I'll use it. If not, I'll concede to buy some local eggs.

The seeds

This is (almost) what I'm planting. It's at least all the right types of seeds. The wheat is not the kind that I'm planting, and I'm planting two types of both peppers and tomatoes:

Garlic
Yellow onion
Cayenne Pepper
Scotch Bonnet Pepper
Amish Community Clark Roma
Burpee Roma
Celery
Black Oil Sunflower

So, lets get going!

On professionalism in software

2015-01-11T20:26:49+00:00

Brian Flanagan goes to Ireland

2015-01-07T03:27:54+00:00

Gold, struggle and old philosophers

2015-01-07T03:24:44+00:00

Right now, there is a growing protest movement in Peru against a new gold mine. Building it will include draining four lakes and making the local wells unusable due to chemicals seeping into the ground water.

You can read about the protests in this excellent blog post.

This made me think of two things that I’d like to share. First though, I’d like to give you an idea of how I imagine the two sides viewing the situation.

So the American corporation Newmont wants to build a mine, because it will make them money. A behavior which various laws and company structures has been put in place to incentivise. This is usually argued as a moral practice in two ways. One, that using profit to guide your actions is good, because in theory if everyone acts selfishly, then good things will happen because everyone has been considered. Two, that it doesn’t matter if Newmont builds this mine or not, because if they don’t then someone else will, and so they might as well do it. Kind of a twisted version of the tragedy of the commons.

To the locals, the situation is fundamentally different. To them, they have lived in this region, perhaps for hundreds, even thousands, of generations, and their entire way of life is now threatened. Their crops will not grow in the contaminated ground water, their livestock will die. A few years from now, Newmont will move on, and they will be left with nothing but a hole in the ground where once was their home. The idea of having their lives ruined for American profit must seem like one of the most immoral actions that could be imagined.

Now the locals will fight to stop this mine, which they are doing in a grand way as you saw in the blog post I linked to above. And Newmont, on their part, will lobby the Peruvian government, talking about all the jobs created or the benefits they will bring to Peruvian GDP.

And, like I said earlier, this makes me ponder two things.

The first thing

The Peruvian government is the judge here, it will decide the outcome of this situation. It needs to answer the question “Who is right?”. To them, it might not be such an easy question. They will weigh the supposed benefits of bringing big industry to the country and it’s potential for improvement of the lives of Peruvians, against letting a foreign corporation destroy the lives of thousands of people.

Whenever a government needs to answer a question like this, I hope they turn to John Stewart Mill and his “Harm Principle”, which says:

“the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

When one actor wants to build a mine to make itself wealthier, and it wants to do so at the expense of ruining the lives of thousands of other members of society, then government has the right, indeed the moral obligation, to prevent it.

The second thing

As globalization moves forward, international corporations and organizations will become increasingly powerful players. As they do, it will become ever harder for other actors in society to voice their opinions. Historically, government has served the purpose of solving these disputes by, in theory, acting as an unbiased judge between disagreeing parties. As the power on one side increases, the illusion of an unbiased government becomes clear.

And as one side becomes stronger, the amount of labor and work needed from the other side to argue their case will grow. And so the question is at what point is corruption of government inevitable? How long will the checks and balances work?

Some would argue indefinitely. That modern tools of communication and a growing international redefinition of the term “us” to mean “mankind” and not just “people from my country” will in fact be a strong enough counter balance.

I would argue that we need to re-think how our governments are put together. The classic checks and balances against corruption were put in place in a very different time. I would argue that, as some of these actors in society has gained more power than many governments have, those checks and balances are no longer strong enough to hold wide spread corruption at bay.

Perhaps new tools of communication can help us, to heavily increase transparency and accountability as a way to tip the balance of incentives back towards fair government. Restructuring government to allow stronger local influence would also help, although that would at the same time make national government weaker, perhaps making it unable to force these stronger parties into compliance.

We need to think about how large these actors can become, and we need to think about it before they are so strong that change has become a distant dream.

The end of the market

2012-08-31T02:29:31+00:00