r ranson

I've been experimenting with tiny painting to see if it's for me.  I'm not sure it is.

These note books are usually 2 inches square, with ink and watercolour.



Here's the set up I'm playing with.



It would be truely pocket size if not needing a pencil, pen, and waterbrush.

This would be awesome for practicing composition and values.  The thing I like least is having to wait for the painting to dry before closing the book and putting everything back in my pencil case. That's often 40 min or longer.

They stopped using soy in the local small (under 10k) flock chicken feed production about 10 years ago due to "long term health issues".  When pushed, the unofficial stance of the feed company hinted at cancer, reproductive issues, and antinutrients in soy that blocked the absorbed of important nutrients. And suggested fermenting soy and limiting it to less than 5% of a chickens diet as filler, not nutrition, if we still wanted to use soy.

This is also the time we stopped getting cancer in our chickens.

Also, it's more profitable to sell soy overseas or use it in bioplastics industry than to sell it to a feed company.

The planting of the peas



24 min They talk about the quality of the soil to show it's ready for ploughing for peas (interesting it's more about moisture content than temperature).  

at 36:30 ish, they are finally ploughing the soil.  It looks like the later medieval system rather than the early, anglo-saxon style that left the deep, permanent ridges.  They eventually harrow the soil, once the oxen are agreeable to helping.  

47 min in, they are broadcasting the seeds.  

I forgot how much I enjoy this series.

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I live with glacial tilth which is basically 400plus feet of sandy rocks.  It's terrible for building soil as the orgaics break down and wash away.  

I would like to try clay as I hear it keeps a shape well enough I could make a raised area for a garden and alter the drainage by shaping the land.  

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0ZhDt2i2eQ_PEvg

I seem to remember there being a field pea crop in the Tudor farm show.  But I haven't watched it lately, so I'm not sure.

Depends on where and when in the medieval period as farming was adapted to local conditions.  In the southern half of England, 1100-1400 (and in parts a hundreds of years either way as this was still in practice in parts of east Anglia by at least the 1930s as my great grandfather and his generation were part of that farming system), it was a combination of market gardening and field monoculture.  The land owners would have several acres of monoculture crop and part of the rent of the farmers would be labour to help grow the field crops.

Likewise, the farmer might have half an acre or so (1/8th for widows for example, maybe 10 or more for the "boy", our equivalent would be farm manager, but more).  Most of that would be low labour staple crops. With maybe a small kitchen garden that needed high labour.

The spanish books I mention, some of them go into indepth explanations on the standard ridge and furrow system common in Europe at the time of al Andalusian conquest (circa 750ad).  The seed is broadcast uniformly, some landing on top of the ridges, some landing in the furrows.  This made agriculture more sustainable against poor weather as on dry years, the furrowed grain grew and on wet years the ridge grain grew best.  

The agriculturalist Jethrow Tull (like the music group) has some interesting insights into where farming in europe was at when he introduced changes to the system.

But again, it wasn't uniform across europe, or even in one country, or even in one village.  They adapted to the land and what it could provide.  

What was universal was the need for a staple crop for the village, considerably more for selling, and quite a bit to give to the monarch.  And a bunch to keep a reserve of at least three years of bad harvest so the population didn't starve if the weather turned.

https://www.saltspringseeds.com/collections/non-staking-pea-seeds-pisum-sativum

These are considered non-staking peas.  Although if grown in a solitary row, they do like a net.  When growned in a block, they self support. Most traditional drying peas are like this as they would be harvested by scythe and thrashed.   Sticks would risk damaging the scythe.

Soup peas is another common term here.  Some container or dwarf varieties that sell for a lot here, look suspiciously like field peas.  Maybe it's part of being raised in canada, we spent a lot of schooling watching documentaries of what the other parts of the country produced, so the arial footage of vast fields of peas and canola stuck in my mind.


Another issue, most of the medieval period in Christian europe didn't document mundane things like farming until about 1500, so there was a lot of interchangeable language between peas, chick peas, pulces, beans, lentils, favas, etc.  It was pasent food and usually got lumped in legume (or a variation on that spelling).  For more info, the scientific studies in Arab spain circa 1100 to 1450 has some great info, but very little translated into english when last I looked.  

Fun fact, peas was both singular and plural for most of English history.  It's not until the latter part of the 20th century that we get the word pea coming into common use.   A bit like sheep and the new word, sheeps.  

It turns out, one of my favourite places to buy fine art supplies is phasing them out.  There is no sale yet, they are just selling down the existing stock first.

This is a shame because it's one of the easiest places to go to pick up an emergency tube of paint, or go to when the supply list for a class doesn't come out early enough to get stuff shipped from Vancouver. It's also a very locally owned shop, as opposed to the others I like best which are still Canadian, but not specifically this town.

It is also on the same block of the best fish and chip spot in town!  So it's easy to get a ride if I primise the driver lunch.

There is no sale yet and no promise of a sale.

And yet, one of my favourite brands of paint is only available there, and for a very decent price.  If they don't sell it, it will be less easy to buy it in the future as customs and shipping sucks.  

My impulse is to go there and buy all the paints!  Now! What if I miss out and can't get my favourite colour again?

That doesn't seem the best plan.

I did an inventory of the paints I have of that brand.  Looked at how much paint I've used so far and what colours.  Looked at colours that are specific to the brand and ones that are more generic.

And thinking about how I use this brand.  The colours are vibrant and the walnut oil makes them much slower drying than regular oil paint, so I use this a lot for the last layers, keeping cheaper paint for underpainting.   So there is an advantage to having a stash of more generic colours.

And then there is the idea of a possible sale in the future...

I don't know.  I'm at war with myself as to whether I buy all the things now or wait and risk missing out on my favourite colours. Either way, I'm about to break my no buy hard.