Lazy Chef

I've got to be the laziest cook! Picked up a cheap cut of pork shoulder steak and threw it into a covered fry pan with 3/4 cup of apricot juice and sliced up that leftover onion I found in the frig. Put it on the woodstove and went back to the internet. Three hours later the smell called me off the web and I had green beans and tender, absolutely delicious pork for dinner. Only thing, I forgot to add the organic rice. Well, I didn't starve without the rice.

Tomatoes For 2005

Since last year was a great year for a tomato crop disaster I have decided to try two varieties with more disease resistance. Although the web is littered with sites that say there are no late blight resistant tomatoes I have decided to try a couple I spotted at Tomato Growers Supply. They should be better than last year's anyway. One is an early variety and the other is a mid-season tomato. However neither is a paste tomato which is a bummer. Here they are:

Legend - Introduced by Dr. James Baggett at Oregon State University, this very early variety sets large fruit that are glossy red and round with a very good flavor that is a nice blend of sugars and acids. What is also exciting about Legend is its strong resistance against the late blight fungus, a problem that has thwarted many a tomato gardener. It sets fruit well under cool temperatures, and contains few seeds. We think this combination of great taste, earliness, and strong disease resistance makes Legend truly memorable.

Floralina VFFFA Hybrid - A cooperative effort between the breeding programs at North Carolina State and University of Florida, this variety is the first available to homeowners with resistance to all 3 races of fusarium wilt. It produces beautiful, smooth 8 to 10 oz. round red tomatoes with very good flavor. Even though it was developed in the South, Floralina grows equally well in other regions.

My theory is that where consumers spend their money businesses will pay attention. Maybe we can have disease resistant tomatoes without having genetically altered ones.

Cucumber Crop for 2005

I'm going through my list of varieties for the 2005 planting season. Starting with cucumbers I plan to plant Country Fair a pickler that was a great success for me last year with all the rain and those cool nights. Country Fair is the only cucumber resistant to bacterial wilt (the last I checked), and is fairly resistant to many other diseases. Normally my cucumbers produce for a while and then die. Last year I actually ate a fresh vine picked cucumber in November! While the cool summer temperatures delayed the start of the crop, production, once started never stopped until the heavy frosts of winter killed them. Another plus for these cucumbers is they also have the bitter-free burpless gene. I would rank their taste as good.
Our cool moist area near the Great Lakes is a haven for plant diseases, especially bacterial wilt, and this variety has proven its place in my garden.

Inert My Dog Fleas!

The October/November National Wildlife Magazine has some interesting information for pet owners. It seems that the “inert” ingredients in dog flea control medicines may actually be petrochemicals! All the more reason to go organic for your pet’s health too. If you are like me, you may wonder what else in hidden by the "inert" lable!

Manufacturers do list active ingredients on packaging, but trademark laws allow them to keep secret so-called “inert” ingredients—dangerous petrochemicals and solvents such as benzene, toluene and xylene—even though they can make up 90 percent of the product. “Inert ingredients are not necessarily safe, nontoxic or even chemically inert,” says Maria Mergel of the Washington Toxics Coalition, a nonprofit organization in Seattle. “The term usually means only that these ingredients are not intended to kill fleas.”

They suggest using citrus oil extracts containing D-limonene and linalool - both are some of the many natural alternatives to chemicals.

Neat Feet

Those who works in boots will appreciate these tips:

For persistent athletes feet soak feet in warm water with 6-8 teabags - almost any kind will do.
For smelly feet soak feet in Kool-Aid.
For sweaty feet and to prevent athletes feet use cornstarch.
For toenail fungus use Vicks Vap-O-Rub.

Windy Project

Wind generators are actually more efficient energy producers than solar cells, and although they require more cost and maintenance, their output is greater. OTHERPOWER.COM is an indespensable source with great information on making you own wind power and they even some energy saving tips for lighting. They have comparison on types of generators and information on how to build them yourself. The three-phase altenator looks like a project I would consider.

Check out their site. They even show how making wind generator blades is not as difficult as one might expect:

The Dark Side Of Lighting

From the folks at REPP (Renewable Energy Policy Project):
How much do you think it costs to have one 100 watt light bulb on? If left on 24/7 it probably costs about $85 dollars a year! Now, add up all your lights. If you were using a Florescent light instead the cost would be about $17, or a $68 savings per light.

“(I)t doesn't cost a whole lot of energy to have a light bulb turned on. A 100-watt bulb, in a home paying about 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, costs about a penny an hour to operate. But leave that bulb on needlessly for 12 hours a day and you just spent an extra $3.50 or so a month for that bulb—about $40 per year. And how many light bulbs do you have in your house right now? Count them—I'll bet your surprised at how many there are. That penny an hour for one bulb can quickly become hundreds of dollars per year for all the bulbs in your home.”

Better Beef

Eat Wild has some interesting nutritional information on feedlot beef:
Mass produced feedlot beef lacks the nutrition of pastured beef. Switching to higher quality food can result in a higher quality life.

Because meat from grass-fed animals is lower in fat than meat from grain-fed animals, it is also lower in calories. (Fat has 9 calories per gram, compared with only 4 calories for protein and carbohydrates. The greater the fat content, the greater the number of calories.) As an example, a 6-ounce steak from a grass-finished steer can have 100 fewer calories than a 6-ounce steak from a grain-fed steer. If you eat a typical amount of beef (66.5 pounds a year), switching to lean grassfed beef will save you 17,733 calories a year—without requiring any willpower or change in your eating habits. If everything else in your diet remains constant, you'll lose about six pounds a year. If all Americans switched to grassfed meat, our national epidemic of obesity might diminish.

Omega-3s are most abundant in seafood and certain nuts and seeds such as flaxseeds and walnuts, but they are also found in animals raised on pasture. The reason is simple. Omega-3s are formed in the chloroplasts of green leaves and algae. Sixty percent of the fatty acids in grass are omega-3s. When cattle are taken off omega-3 rich grass and shipped to a feedlot to be fattened on omega-3 poor grain, they begin losing their store of this beneficial fat. Each day that an animal spends in the feedlot, its supply of omega-3s is diminished.[8] The graph below illustrates this steady decline.

Just A Matter Of A Few Degrees

“Glaciers are melting in the Alps at an unprecedented rate. The polar ice caps are rapidly disappearing. Worst-case scenarios from scientists predict a dramatic increase in temperatures across much of the globe. For parts of the Northern Hemisphere, however, some scientists warn that ocean-current changes could produce radical cooling. Our world, so go such arguments, is about to change radically for the worse.”

Catastrophic floods, hurricanes and heat waves are not figments of our imagination. Record rainfall and cold temperatures throughout the world aren't either. One might suggest that these are normal climatic trends that the earth moves through, but increasingly the skeptics are falling by the wayside. Serious science is gravitating to the global warming theory. On the other hand, Joe Average is just plain confused. A fellow at a country store recently chirped that the seventeen below temperature proved that global warming was nonsense. What he doesn't think about is that heat drives our weather and global warming causes abnormal weather. This poor fellow can't comprehend the South Sea Islander who watches his land disappearing beneath the sea, nor can he fathom why global warming could possibly cause an ice age.
Global warming is about extremes. Insurance companies and some farmers are experiencing deep financial losses caused by extreme weather. Sure we have roller-coaster cycles in our weather, but global warming is like bungee jumping while riding on a roller coaster. Heat flow can suck artic air further into the south or drown the driest deserts in floods.
In reality global warming threat is not about a few degrees in temperature, it's about hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, disease and famine.

Insuring Incompetence

At the Post Office today, I mailed a package to a friend. After I decided to mail the package by regular parcel post the clerk asked if I wanted to insure it. Figuring it would cost just a few cents I said, “sure”- that shows how often I mail via USPS - of course it wasn’t “a few cents”.
Insuring that a parcel delivery service doesn’t damage or lose my package is like insuring the auto mechanic’s brake job. Why pay for a service and pay to insure that they do the job correctly. I actually have a policy about that myself.
When I buy an appliances clerks usually ask if I want an extended policy to cover any failures or breakdowns. I always tell them that if the item doesn’t perform as expected I would be purchasing a different brand that did. A delivery service that loses or damages a package I mail would not see any more of my business.
These service insurance policies aren’t accident policies - they are incompetentancy policies - insurance that they should pay themselves! I might insure myself but I refuse to insure the whole world!

Winter seems to remove the color from the landscape 

Deer Alert Whistles

Tonight, on the way home, just after dark, I noticed a nice whitetail deer standing on a knoll just beside the road. It didn’t move and I passed without incident. Luckily I didn’t have a deer alert whistle on my car. The sudden noise would likely have spooked the deer into jumping. I know about the claims made by the whistle manufacturers but my experience with them has not been good.
When my work required me to drive late at night through an area of high deer population I used deer alerts but not with much success. I noticed that horses and deer would often react to the high pitched whistle by running. On a straight level stretch that was fine, but when rounding a bend or cresting a hill the whistle would often spook deer into running across the road as often as it caused them to run away. Unfortunately my deer kill with the alerts was much higher than without them. I had never hit a deer prior to my late night driving through this area and the deer alerts didn’t help at all - I hit three or four deer, bumped several, not counting the many near misses! In fact, I quit using alerts and have not hit a deer since. Of course, I do not travel through that area at night either.
If you drive on straight level roads alerts may work for you but don’t expect them to work on hilly or winding roads.

Monkeying Around With Disease

According to E-The Environmental Magazine (Connecting The Dots - November/December 2004 issue)- Humans may be the enemy of virtually all species including ourselves!
Ever hear of Monkey Pox? This disease was introduced (As in: Hi, Mom. Meet my date - umm, Death), in to the Midwest by pet traders who brought in a rat infected with monkey pox from Gambia. It infected some prairie dogs who were sold at a “pet swap”
The prairie dogs in turn infected 37 people, some of which died. But it works the other way too.
In Rwanda around the late 1980s a high death rate of mountain gorillas was attributed to measles contracted because they had more contact with humans due to their popularity given to them by the mountain gorilla researcher, Diane Fossey.
More locally rabies is on the increase thanks to human tinkering. As reported by the CDC:

Rabies in raccoons was first described in Florida in the 1950s and spread slowly during the next three decades into Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Through translocation of infected animals, raccoon rabies was unintentionally introduced in the mid-Atlantic states. In 1977, near the Virginia-West Virginia border, reports of a single, rabid raccoon in Hardy County, West Virginia, and three more rabid raccoons in the adjoining counties of Virginia in 1978 initially drew little attention. Since then, this unremarkable focus of rabies in raccoons expanded to form the most intensive rabies outbreak in the United States. More than 45,000 raccoons have died of rabies, as well as over 4,200 cats and nearly 3,000 dogs. Moreover, with the close association of raccoons and humans in suburban settings, an increased number of people have been exposed to potentially rabid animals and have needed post-exposure rabies prophylaxis. At present, an estimated 20,000-40,000 people are exposed to rabies each year in the United States. Raccoon rabies now extends throughout approximately 1 million square km along the eastern states from Florida to Maine, and is now invading the midwest at the Pennsylvania-Ohio border.

Weather it is our activities affecting climate through increased CO2 , pollution, environmental destruction, translocation of animals or just simple travel it appears that humans are a disease’s best friend!