Vigor

Posted on October 31, 2015 by prd

or perhaps vigor with no outlet. Perhaps all revved up with no place to go.

In this case we have the resolution of the matter of Box 17, which spent a week in limbo, unclear as to whether it would take up local residence as a plant pot or would have to take its chances in the great big world. Long story short, the local authorities issued a variance in the grand design, and so it was deployed.

The main focus of this post though is on the captive plants, those that reach a point where their captivity is much at odds with their instinctual drives. Plants want to grow. The palm tree here had pushed up the soil in its previous pot easily four inches above the brim. Transplanting it I could see how. These are the roots I pruned off.

What a tremendous amount of vigor in that root system.

I’ve never done any root pruning before and I hope not to again. I can see it in the context of having a plant that grew mal-adaptive roots because of unnatural constraints, as here. I hope not to put plants in that position. The current placement of that palm tree in Box 17 could well keep it satisfied for five to seven years. I can note on my list of accomplishments that I temporarily removed one invisible stress. How I would like rather to say that I had fundamentally aligned vigor with opportunity. Maybe to small extent, but it does make one think.

Box 17, the Cincinnati Connection

Posted on October 18, 2015 by prd

or maybe it’s the Blob connection. We’re talking about a big box here, at least compared to the size of any previous box I’ve made. Greater than 16 cubic feet.. Only two previous boxes (4 + 6, the tool box and the tombstone planter) vaguely pushed at a cubic foot. The idea of it kept whispering ‘Cincinnati, Cincinnati’ to me, as if something that big was meant to consume something even bigger, to grow, a force unto itself. There was a movie. Actually, here I was about to insert a hyperlink to a move called “The Blob that ate Cincinnati” – HOWEVER – apparently there never was such a movie. There was a movie about a cockroach that ate Cincinnati, and apparently the Blob was not as vigorous as I’d imagined, eating whole municipalities, so the connection must have to something to do with rational proteins making a memory where none existed. I could have sworn till moments ago that I could picture said Blob (from memory) overwhelming the skyline of Cincinnati on its way to heaven knows where. So this connection, this whispering by an idea of a (false) memory. Subtle are the workings and non-workings in the mind. First things first though.

Going back to early 2004 I was in Santa Barbara after a long project. I spent a day collecting seeds, since they have such beautiful things growing there. One was a palm seed that eventually sprouted and has thrived since.

Of course every year it gets bigger. The last few years I’ve not re-potted and I guess the roots keep growing, they’ve pushed it up in pot till the soil is over the top of the pot.

Also the pot itself is crumbling. Long story short it needs a new pot, but there are not so many pots that would be a fit step up. Flash now to 2010, in Hawaii, stopping somewhere near Punalu’u at a roadside coffee farm where also there were lots of macadamia trees. Took a bunch of the nuts home, planted a few, one took and for a few years each year did better and better. This year though it too was getting tired of it’s pot and something happened too where it dropped most of its leaves.

It too, therefore, was in the new pot market. Maybe a pot big enough for both of them? Cincinnati, Cincinnati! The existing pots, truncated cones, were about eighteen inches in height and also 18 inches in diameter at the top. I wanted not to do this every year or two. Twenty four? For each, as cubes, 2 x 2 x 2, x2, or 2 x 4 x 2. It’s only sixteen cubic feet. How much could that weigh? I looked it up…

Weights of Other Materials in Pounds Per *Cubic Foot

Earth, Common Loam 75.00-90.00
Earth, Dry/Loose 76.00
Earth, Dry/Packed 95.00
Earth, Mud/Packed 115.00

Hmm. How much does a milk cow weigh? About 1500 pounds, it is reported. Light dirt would bring it in at 1200. Packed mud at 1840. Somewhere in the middle, about a cow’s worth. It’s hard to believe though. And the box itself probably adds 100 pounds. Mud + box plus a few decorative rocks on top? Perhaps a ton. Sounds like a realistic plan, so.

Notched 4 x 4’s for strength. No screws, so nothing can be screwed up. Dowels. Can’t rust either.

Two end frames.

I was pleased with this, only having four foot long pipe clamps, that by using the middle bars I could effectively brace the whole thing for assembly. I had a bunch of 1 x 6 fir tongue and groove boards left over from a dozen years ago, had to supplement a bit.

Got a feeling of building a barn or an ark. A mighty thing it seems, initially, but would a cow just laugh at it? Clearly the design banks on the inertness of the soil. A ton of earth is not a ton of live and kicking muscle.

Here it is emerging from the workshop into the world. So uncertain, these first steps.

Stood up nicely, first on one side then the other, for a final sanding in a well ventilated area. The lowest two slats worth of cladding and the bottom are lined with plastic sheeting, to keep water off the wood and to force it to drain out that center opening you see. A catch pan will sit under that. During this sanding process it started to snow – this being October 18th, mind you, and the first frost only having been the previous evening. I had taken the sanding outside both for the open air and also to see what my assistant wanted to contribute.

The assistant first has gone to get some lumber, but then he saw (see the white streak in the picture) the snow flakes. He decided instead then to contemplate them

Tonight Box 17 sits outside on the deck waiting domestic blessing. The palm and macadamia, had they eyes, would be able to see it just on the other side of the window. I don’t know what they know, if a plant knows it has a mentor.

Another post on this will follow, showing either the rejected box, no doubt angry, hitching a ride for Cincinnati, or a box living a purpose driven life, holding the world together for two trees and probably a ton of smaller experimental plantings.

Until soon

That under which

Posted on October 17, 2015 by prd

It is almost dark on the night when the first frost will visit. Not that it is not an integral part of the circle of life, yet doom it is to so many. This cosmos, for example,

was late in being planted. It managed one bloom, but will not seed. Tomorrow it will have fallen. Next to it some blue flower, also late planted, also bloomed but will not seed.

I have taken also a photo of the sky under which is here.

It’s almost as if it could snow. May the winter be gentle to you, dear readers, and the spring find you strong and ready.

Anôhcumunsh micuwak mushaniqak

Posted on October 5, 2015 by prd

Really. In many ways this missive will miss many marks, yet squirrels do eat acorns.

First, to translate, the Mohegans, a Northeastern US tribe of Native Americans, whose language is in the Algonquin family, might declare “Anôhcumunsh micuwak mushaniqak” if they meant to indicate that squirrels eat acorns. I get to this for several reasons and in several ways, but first, myself not being much of a Native American, wish to briefly go on record against the titling of this post as being an wicked act of cultural appropriation. I don’t think I even need to testify that my respect of all indigenous peoples in the practice of their culture far exceeds my respect of we in the practice of rabid modernity.

OK. It was my intent this week to gather a great mass of acorns and make them into cookies and acorn butter. I had done this once before three years ago and it turned out plausibly well, but that was before I had this ability to document such an enterprise so readily. I figured that this experience ought to be preserved that others might benefit (I do have to wonder how my imagination comes up with such hypotheses). Let me start with the process of gathering the acorns. Even though it’s really a pretty straight forward thing I found so many points on the way that were not acorns yet held related interest.

I set forth with my dog one morning near the end of September to the local woods. It’s a big woods, well, in this suburban area a woods of 1000 acres is considered big. It’s no wilderness. Much of it is forested in pine, maple and oak. Knowing when the right time is is very important. Too early and nary an acorn. Too late and the acorn weevils have won the day. Acorn weevils, you ask? Yes. I’ve never seen an adult, but I’ve seen the larvae. The larvae are planted into the acorns by their mothers. They eat their way out and drop to the forest floor. Funny looking things, supposedly.

Anyway, I know to avoid acorns with a tell-tale little hole in them – that’s where the weevil larvae have eaten their way out and wreaked important havoc on the integrity of the acorn, especially for eating. I’ve not always noticed the hole that gets the larvae eggs in there. I was encountering about a 1 in thirty ratio of acorns with larvae. Maybe one in twenty where somehow there had been a larvae, you could tell from black marks in the nut flesh itself, but no larvae to be found. Most were clear though, of those I picked up, but if I picked up all I think most would not have been clear.

Now the actual looking for the acorns – of course they are near to oak trees, and in the woods I was in these would be red and white oaks, so named for the tones of the wood they yield. Red oaks drop acorns every second year, while white oaks produce new ones each year. The actual looking involves looking for the recently fallen, so to see a few recently fallen ones together suggests some sort of active drop zone, as soon the squirrels will come, and they can tell the good ones. Thankfully the squirrel population in this woods is low, as we have just enough wild cover that we have natural predators. Foxes, coyotes, an occasional lynx. Now and then a bear proves that he’s more than a myth, but I don’t see the bears as really gobbling up all the squirrels. Remember the fox who ran by in the early spring? I think that’s a squirrel in her mouth. The looking for acorns though, as one goes quietly in the underbrush, guided by what seem nearer or further oak-like silhouettes and the occasional sudden messenger sound of an acorn falling close or just a little farther away – should I go and pick that one up? Has it fallen just for me? Quercus, Quercus, can you hear me – do you laugh that I would think to call you Quercus? Might the Algonquins who called you mitigomij, the Abenaki who called you wachilmezi, the Cherokee who called you tsu-s-ga – might they know your real name?

And here I stopped for a moment. Real name. How powerfully romantic. And for what, the ancestor spirit of all oaks? Still present? Are you here, can you hear me? If I could speak your name, if you had a name, would you answer? Will you open the door for me, the door to where the great oaks live powerfully ideal oak lives,raining apple-sized acorns down, fit for dire Pleistocene mega-squirrels, the door to where abundance and magic dwell? If only I knew your name. Even the earth-wise natives who roamed the forests and lived on the acorns, did they know your name, and if so how, how is it that they had different names, unless a name is only a name for the limited experience we can have, so that a name is like “I encountering what I imagine you to be” and is more colored with our imagination than the real oak or object named. Maybe names are the weakest things, a device of megalomaniacal monkeys, a tool perhaps for them to refer to some cluster of phenomenon (and thereby hopefully control them), but by no means possessed of the magic and truth they’d like to imagine. Quercus, can you open the door? If there were true names, names inseparable from the being they named, what would it be? There’s another challenge I’ll mention, that of this oak vs. that oak. It is easier to imagine that a given oak has a given name. The tree Orgovius. The tree Reefshnees. One might never know how they got such names, but it could be that only the given tree could have such a name. All trees though, especially trees, are connected in time and space through the seeds, that the first tree morphed and gave life to ten or a thousand trees – I think it is right to consider those children very much like branches, and those children then each another thousand, until somewhere some one of them was Oak, and the millions of children and progeny are also oak and that invisible tree which spawned them all lives in them and (it taunts the imagination) in many ways is presently here, is a giant thing that is more than spirit, and the name of that – perhaps such a name, were it to exist, would be not something rendered in a narrow frequency of sound, but maybe in smells and a music of sounds and patterns of growth and decay, or maybe (the name) is just not a thing for it, that while it is real and immense and present it has no recognition whatsoever of our puny magic of names.

Without true names I am only as good as my attentiveness to what is here. If there is an available magic it is found in being present. I hear you, though I know you not. Look, there are a bunch of, why they are practically watermelons they are such big acorns, and there, where the path rolls down, look how the fallen acorns have gathered in clumps, and here, in this hollow with last years leaves, so many, so many fat and good ones. The more I looked the more the blessings I received until I had filled the five pound bag almost all at once it seemed, and indeed, could have gone on had I a village of helpers to un-shell them, but for now, this business of gathering acorns, accomplished, and with wonder and thankfulness.

Before going on I do must have to say that another branch of the thought on names, their true-ness (as inseparable from the being so named), and even leaving aside for a moment the comparatively new idea to me that no true names may exist, a rush of thoughts were drawn along the line of the ancient story of the Tower of Babel. Remember that thing with the tower? Supposedly at that time all persons spoke the same language. Perhaps not a language of “true” names but one shared by all. The word for oak, whatever that was, was never in dispute, there was only one name. A very amazing circumstance. That across the whole of the earth all monkeys shared the same words for the same things. And it was arbitrary? The word was somehow randomly chosen? Or is it that the names came from our nature, as I suggested above, I encountering both you and what I imagine you to be. Tiger. What a grave muddle, not a random thing nor necessarily a true thing, yet from our nature. Something perhaps of a necessary consequence. Anyway I’ve not even gotten to the point yet, that here supposedly we were, all sharing a language and building towers and other monkey what not when supposedly God takes notice. Not liking the look of that, he says. I shall confound your tongues so that you will no longer understand each other. Is this why I cannot talk to a tree? Back before this confounding, if there was only one language, did all creatures understand it? There’s a lot one gets into when gathering acorns, or at least that one can. The forest is full of avenues of wonder.

This story of the confounding of tongues has always sat ill with me. If we’re gonna go for an omnipotent creator God, could that God really be so piddling that he was afraid that people might understand each other? Or was the message subtler, that since perhaps there really are no true names, that therefore to rely on truths that can be gotten to via language alone, is to be deceived from the start, is to be self-enchanted, too much in a land of monkeyshines and too little in the immense sea of what is possible. Maybe even knowledge, if this is the metaphysical digression paragraph, is like that too. In the grand scheme it’s either small or wrong or both. Whether the reason we don’t have true names is because such just aren’t available, or because the almighty creator got wigged out at us very tricky monkeys, the facts are that neither do we understand each other nor do we understand things with a keen and magical precision. It’s not going to happen soon either. The long and long of it is that I gathered up a bunch of acorns.

So finally I can get on to the story of what I did with these acorns, but it could be that most of you will not get here. Oh wait – I’m having a reflective moment. Maybe, oh, no – I won’t go that way. Really – we get to progress on the acorn channel. Here I am preparing philosophical cookies. I know beforehand that unless great care is taken they will come out objectionable to modern man. Bitter. But this is a little ahead of the story line. Shelling. Five pounds of acorns. About three hours. Here are the tools I used.

The nut cracker is excellent with that backing plate. The knife is good too in that it’s not too sharp. It’s pretty easy to stab or slash oneself accidentally when applying what sometimes is more than a little force. The array of bowls follows.

Cracking one acorn then prying out the nutmeat was a very slow way to go. Better to crack thirty or fifty in a row, then pry out the batch. The cost of changing the tools in your hand fifty times pays back well. Also more force on the crushing better than delicate. They are not brittle, so it’s not like a little crack in the shell means the resistance is broken. Crush quickly and strongly. Next.

Three hours later, a bowl of shelled acorns. I did not take photos of the acorns containing acorn weevil larvae, that is too visceral a negative association.. Google it if you must.

I set the acorns in water and set them down to leach. When the water got red I dumped and re-filled, about every four hours.

I think the last time I did this step I leached with a low simmer of heat. This time I did not. It took six rinses to get the tannins out, or so I thought. Foreshadowing.

I then took the acorns and put them under a towel and beat them. It was nothing personal. I think this step would have been better before the leaching, so as to expose more surface area. After roasting they looked great.

And I ate a few but they were still quite tannic – bitter. I plowed forward though, for sugar and honey were on the other side – what is not fixed by sugar and honey, oh America? Tell me!

I used a blender to grind them to a peanut butter like consistency. About half of them actually.

In the first cup above are just a few shelled acorns, as I said, noteworthily bitter, not a flat stop don’t eat it bitter, but only for those not against real bitter. The second cup is just a dry grind of same. The third adding honey, but not so much, maybe two ounces. The fourth with salt and honey. Overall these all were just a little too bitter for any common taste buds, mine notwithstanding.

Not wanting that the cookies should be a fail, though, I wondered if heat in the leaching would produce a stronger tannin removal. I took the second half of the acorns and gave them two hour long boiling rinses. The water turned heartily brown red the first time and less so the second, so I thought, I think rightly, that the end of the utility of the method was near. I could have ground them more and repeated, but to my taste they now had a nice ‘signature bitterness’ – flavorful, like hops or too long brewed tea, something one could identify and appreciate. Therefore once again, I proceeded. The acorn starch below I got at the same Asian market from which I rescued the radish last year.

Acorn Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies.

1 cup butter, softened
3/4 light brown sugar
3/4 cup coconut sugar
2 eggs medium eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup acorn starch
1 cup rolled oats
11.5 oz milk chocolate chips
1 teaspoon nutmeg
3/4 cup acorns ground to a chunky nut butter consistency
3/4 cup acorns not too much chopped at all – chunky

Mix it all together, use a tablespoon to portion out dough. Bake at 350. Made 36.

Fine milk chocolate chips, a cup and a half of sugar were enough to persuade the majority of tasters, including some very polite Jehovah’s Witnesses who had stopped by, that these were good cookies. Eating a few myself I feel the anticipated benefits – clear vision, increased strength, enhanced clarity of thinking, exuberance, I think I’ll live longer, I’m now impervious to dull axes.

I ground the remainder of the acorns with a hand grinder and mixed them with the initial bitter ground nut butters. I mixed a much more liberal amount of honey with these, and added just enough salt. I am thinking an acorn baklava next, with this surplus. I know it will work.

All in all this was a very satisfying journey. Lots of mistakes, lots of things learned, lots of little surprises and twists, some decent eats, some knowledge of what our ancestors had to negotiate to eat acorns. I’ll close with a link to real native American acorn preparation narrative. Much more grounded and direct than this. At the same time those are California acorns, and this is Massachusetts, and maybe the deal is that you have bring who you are to your acorn process or it won’t come out right. Or maybe not.

Thank you and all the best to you dear readers.

Harvest 2015

Posted on September 29, 2015 by prd

‘Twas a year of not much planting, as other work during the spring took up most of the time. I don’t like the phrase when one door closes one door opens – I think it suggests a balance that while it may exist in the aggregate, like flipping a coin, tells us very little about the likely sequence of events. I could, were I to believe in what such a phrase suggests, believe that the not planting of the usual contingent of seeds and seedling led to this harvest of acorns. I do not choose to believe that.

Many was the year I would gather acorns, never in great quantity, but always far more than for which I had use. It was that each somehow seemed by itself a desirable thing, justifying the gathering. I’ve had that feeling all my life – I don’t know why. I romantically speculate that it has something to do with ancient genes. They say that humans have eaten more acorns than all the crops ever grown since we became farmers. Verify that!

In 2012 there were a lot of acorns where I live, and, compelled as I can be by them, I gathered quite a few, even taking my younger daughter out on a gathering mission. What intrepid hominids we were. We shelled them, leeched out the tannins with multiple soakings in water, roasted them, ground them, and made both acorn butter and acorn chocolate chip cookies. it came out very well, but to say that there was little demand would be to radically exaggerate the demand. Nonetheless, I wanted to do the acorn harvest/make food thing now that I have (since June 2013) a comfortable posting place. I could be that demand was so low because the message really only got to about twelve disinterested souls. Now it can get to thousands of disinterested souls and be memorialized forever wherever it is that internet bits go when they no longer live where first imagined, somewhere where some Spock in future times will say “Computer – tell me the first known internet publication concerning the harvesting of acorns and the making of acorn chocolate chip cookies” and of course, this will pop up like magic and the Federation will glide further toward glory.

Okay, okay – here is a bowl of them. Gathered in about an hour. Perhaps five pounds. A post will soon follow where I take them them through the transformation to foodstuff.

On this gathering mission I took my faithful companion, to see if he had the disposition to perhaps train as an acorn hound.

To and fro he ran with great excitement, never once stopping for an acorn. Even as I scrounged the forest floor picking up acorn after acorn. Even as they fell at times nearly right upon us. He was not interested.

Since this post is nominally about the harvest this year, let me also share the radishes, spoken of here originally.

For them a special fate awaits, to become half-sour Daikon spears. Will advise on that. Also I saved some 75 of their seeds, so next year is at least secure on the radish front. On the one hand, this is not the sort of a harvest that will contribute much to getting through the winter. On the other hand though, well, perhaps this prototyping of fringe nutritional pathways will prove to be just the thing somewhere far down the road.

Dancing Mirror Cabinet

Posted on September 27, 2015 by prd

Because really, you did not know that you needed one, but is not the appeal to self-evidence sufficient?

This is 100% upcycled.

See how ready it is. I think it more a dancer than a runner. And it gives something back, like when you look it in the face it shows you something. And it has ample payload capacity.

It sees things too – notice how it reveals THE brass turtle spittoon. You might have to click on the picture. I close with an old poem referencing said turtle.

Melancholy Threshold
The day is waning where pomegranates,
lush and languorous, have blithe dominion
on sultry and indolent afternoons.

The hour is nearly past where languid decay,
like over-ripe fruit, sweetens the absence
of honest reflection and firm resolve.

The moment is fading in an amber
twilight where the imagined animates
the reality of the inanimate.

Now every stone that is thrown
is inseparable from the throwing.
Every intention nurtured becomes
the character of what is perceived.

Now the brass spittoon,
in the form of a turtle,
taunts the ghost of indecision.

Radish Tales

Posted on September 20, 2015 by prd

This story, or these stories, end up starting perhaps eighteen months ago with an accidental rescue operation. I was taking my mother to the new Asian supermarket in the area so she could see all of the wonderfully different things there. We were in the produce area and there were a few vegetables that spoke to me. It was how fresh they were, how not dead, as if they were saying ‘but, but, we want to keep living’. Little leaves were growing even as they lay on the shelves. Man’s inhumanity to vegetables on full display. One was a clump of ginseng roots, the other a fairly large Korean radish. I bought them with no intent except to put them back in the ground. Outside in the parking lot I kept telling them “It’s ok, it’s ok – no one is going to hurt you now”. Perhaps it was March of 2014.

I put them both in my vegetable garden, the ginseng in a shady back corner, the radish in one of the front boxes. By May I had almost forgotten of the rescue operation when up vibrantly came a torrent of shoots from the radish. Because she was mature and had so much radish energy stored these shoots progressed very rapidly to flower, light purple flowers, and lots of them, and all summer long they bloomed. When I noticed the radish activity I check on the ginseng. They too (there were five of them in the package I got) had put up leaves and even looked as if they were fixing to flower (they had buds) in June. I had to consider the rescue a big success. Come mid-June though some critter must have taken a fancy to the ginseng. Chewed off at the ground it was. Rabbits sneak into the garden often enough, they are the number one suspect.

Anyway Momma Radish kept on blooming, as I said, and started then to produce what looked like miniature edamame, pods with multiple seeds – it is probably that I’d just never beheld the radish circle of life before. I gathered some thirty to fifty of these pods from late summer to October. During that summer we had also gotten a puppy and by the time autumn came he was fully enamored of digging. Somewhere along the line he dig up Momma Radish, who was going to die shortly of natural causes anyway, and she served as a retrieval toy for a week or so. A full life indeed.

The winter was among the worst in the memory of the living hereabouts. Ten feet of snow, and often bitter cold too. That’s not exactly part of the radish story, but it sweetens any tale of resurrection or resurgence. When finally winter receded, and it was late, well into April I was quite behind in my normal seed planting rhythms I don’t think I got a seed into the ground until late May. The radish seeds though, they germinated explosively (in a figurative sense). They pushed out leaves and down roots and you’d think they were dandelions on steroids the way they grew. By early July here is one of them.

I had quite a few and so I planted some here and there, did a little more research on them (the basic link is daikon), gave some to family, and stood back in wonder. It was a busy summer work-wise, I did not get to pay attention day to day the way I would have liked. I heard that one that I had given to my mother was doing very well. They harvested it in August I think and it was enormous. I hear that they are pretty low in nutrition though, that one should not be so amazed by their abundant size because they pack about as much nutrition as a regular sized tomato – maybe, if they’re lucky.

I’ve not harvested mine yet. I bought a big bucket of first quality half-sour pickles recently though, really just for the brine, because I think they will pickle well. That’s a lot of radish pickles I’m signing up for. I sure hope they’re good.

A few pictures then, now that you have fuller context. First the protruding mass of one, I think it’s the same one as in the July picture.

Then the seed pods with some purple flowers too. You know I’ll be gathering said pods before pickling time.

and lastly, the dancing swirl of the dervish radish flowers – it would be a music both slow and wild, with a constancy of strength beneath it that belied the light movement and the delicate flowers. Do click on the pictures. Seeing the detail bring the story to life.

Box 16 is a Turtle

Posted on September 13, 2015 by prd

I never would have predicted this – I mean, boxes are generally not turtles. I guess there is a kind of turtle called a box turtle, but I only knew that in passing and could not tell you much about box turtles before reading the content in the hyperlink you’ve just passed. This started because my sister recently sent me a wooden turtle that had come from my grandfather’s house.

I vaguely recall this guy from when I was a wee lad, as something in the set of forbidden things one was not to touch. Anyway, the turtle comes to my house and I’m honored, that across fifty years finally, it has no better place to go, and now I’m good enough. But really I’m at peace with this turtle, just being a little dramatic. Anyway, looking at it, suddenly it seemed like a great idea to make a new one – this is what ADD is all about – there is a wild delight in chasing that next squirrel.

I noticed that quarter-sawn wood would be a very bad choice for this design, as that would taunt the legs to break off at where they join the body. In fact, selecting a flaw-sawn piece where it was a chord near the edge, such that each of the legs could be with the grain as they came down and out from the body, that would be perfect. I found a piece of black walnut with just such a grain. I probably should have taken pictures of some of these intriguing intermediate steps, but I had not thought the exercise would turn out so happily, so my dry text will have to do for a bit.

Getting the face and feet more right seemed somehow important, as if in keeping with my neo-primitive preferences a little worshipful realism might be the thing. I browsed pictures of turtle tails and turtle feet and turtles faces. My primary model for the face, just to make sure I was honoring the truth about turtle faces, follows.

And thus memorialized –

My attempt was not to mimic the whole turtle photo, merely to use the face as a way of improving the marginally correct face on the wooden original. This is a box, and I even stamped the inside using the railroad spike signature stamp I’d made some time back. The cool thing was, that to make an imprint properly one needs single strong and decisive hammer blow. I still have lying around my grandfather’s sledge hammer. I used that. That made a nice circle, of replicating something he had and applying the signature with the force from his hammer. Rich and strange are these seemingly desirable associations.

Here he is open before getting the tung and orange oil treatment.

The doing of this went very fast using a jig saw, kutzall wheel via angle grinder, kutzall bits via Dremel, rasp, files, sandpaper. Ok, that’s not neo-primitive.

There pretty much you have it. Here he is before donning his shell.

And then two shots of them playing on the kitchen counter.

It’s one of those things. I noticed specifically as I was filing the turtle, shaping the neck and head and legs, a certain deja vu, like I’d done this before, perhaps many times before, that it seemed very natural.

Tobacco 1

Posted on August 19, 2015 by prd

Certainly tobacco has been one of the most significant plants of the last 500 years, in terms of the fascination people have with it (addiction you might call it), and the awful way it has been used by corporations to profit at the expense of abused consumers. Man’s inhumanity to man.

I must confess a fascination though with how it took this place of influence early on. Did Indians chew leaves for strength? The whole idea of smoking it – where did that come from? Our ethnobotanical history intrigues me a great deal. Was the plant itself somehow compelling or spell-binding?

This summer I decided to grow some, as the witnessing of a plant from seed to fruit gives a lot of information, Here are some in my tombstone oak porch planter, where I usually hold the annual Darwin games (wherein some variety of unknown seeds are sown to see which ones emerge the survivor).

It takes what would be called high heat (soil temps >= 70F) for the tiny seeds – I mean tiny seeds, ten times smaller than a poppy seed – to germinate. Once they get started though they do take off. I’ve yet to see anything beyond leafing as yet, the look like lettuce, but I’d like it to flower. It’s another solanaceae – Nicotiniana Tabacum, and I have a long documented interest in this wondrous plant family.

I’ve looked around a little at all the material on the subject, how to cure leaves, how to roll cigars, modern uses (syrup, cocktail garnishes), I have not yet made specific plans for how to use the leaves but I’m delighted with the prospect of starting from the source and seeing what is possible… use them in salads? As with so many things it is not recommended that you try this at home and each use will be well researched before being undertaken. Fun though. More on this as it goes.

Lulo Flowers

Posted on August 19, 2015 by prd

or – finally!

One can’t be impatient with nature, or if one can’t help it, it’s not really going to help, at the very least. You may have read my very bumpy tale of Solanaceae, wherein I recount many experiences of growing tomato cousins, many hopes, many bits of education as hopes and realities are vigorously juxtaposed.

Witness this summer, my final surviving lulo, now three years old, has produced flowers. I am delighted. I am sincerely inclined to hope for fruit, as to bear fruit is the ultimate culmination, yes, that one seeks. Maybe I’ve gotten too patient. I am very happy that it has flowered – no lulo has graced me with such yet. If it should bear fruit I will count a second delight. For the moment though I am happy with the progress. This is a spiny one too.

It’s been a weird summer, hot and dry but then pouring then hot and dry. Further updates will follow. All the best to you dear readers.

Splashdown

It's a strange new world

Author Archives: prd