Jake Esselstyn

I always cook my mixed beans together. It would take a long time to sort them by color and shape. My grex includes about 10 different phenotypes. I suppose if I really wanted to select for the finest details of taste and texture, it might be worth doing. But time is precious and my palate just isn't very sophisticated.

I bought the 5-gallon kit from tea labs 4 or 5 years ago. I brew a few batches per year and everything is holding up fine. The aerator produces such a vigorous bubble that I wouldn't worry at all about too much stagnation in a straight-sided bucket. In fact, the pump moves so much air I've figured I could upscale and put the thing in a 55 gallon drum. I haven't tried it, but it looks viable. Four gallons of tea diluted for foliar application goes a long way.

I've never tested my teas, so my continued use of them is faith-based.

I can't confirm that it is true, but a friend told me that a friend told him that bananas need to produce 31 leaves before they will fruit, so in a marginal climate you need to cut off the leaves to get the tree to the needed leaf count and then it will fruit. This is 3rd hand info, but I'm going to try it because I've been growing big healthy looking banana trees for a couple years now without any fruit.

I live in the other LA, i.e., Louisiana. Once a friend was sending me a package from Malaysia. I provided the address with the state abbreviation. My friend thought it would be helpful for the courier if he spelled out LA, so he sent the package to Baton Rouge, Los Angeles... Thankfully, it arrived anyway. I guess that's what postal codes are for. I wonder why we even need to write out the city and state.

For those of us in warmer climates, this is actually the most intensive time of year. There's a lot to harvest from long season hot weather crops (winter squash, cowpeas, okra, and sweet potatoes for me), but there's also an urgent need to get the fall vegetables (mustards, beets, carrots, brassicas, peas, Irish potatoes) in the ground. I am often conflicted about whether I should leave the summer plants in to continue producing at the risk of being too late getting the fall plants in. This year I compromised by harvesting half of my sweet potatoes to make some space. Anyway, my point is that there is no rest season for the garden here, so adding compost, mulch, etc happens at various times throughout the year. I add mulch in the form of poultry bedding or lawn clippings under growing plants or a few weeks before planting heavy feeders. I also chop and drop crop residue at harvest time and this can be a lot of biomass for things like sweet potatoes. It's a constant churn.

Am I naïve to expect that poultry feed should be very cheap in the USA right now? American farmers are stockpiling their crops of all the major commodity grains because prices are so low with the loss of international buyers. So when does the price of a sack of all flock in the USA go down?

Where did the bad DNA come from if it's cloning?

Clones still accumulate mutations, and most mutations are either bad or neutral. Without sexual reproduction, there's no means for the mutations to be removed. Imagine a parental plant that has a deleterious mutation in one allele, but not in the other allele (in other words, it's heterozygous at that particular gene). All of its cloned offspring will carry that deleterious mutation, but only half of its sexually produced offspring will have the bad allele. Selection can then eliminate the mutation in the sexual line.

If you feed them EVERY evening in the same shelter, they will return. Otherwise, they will probably prefer to spend the night outside. Lots of breeds out there. Depends on what you want (meat, eggs, pretty birds?).

J Lovejoy wrote:
I'm currently thinking about finding plants that will grow well in the strip of shade along that side of my house, but also curious about what other uses it might have, other things people do in spots that don't necessarily grow well. Storage or other productive projects.

Your spot sounds perfect from growing mushrooms. A few stacks of small logs inoculated with shiitake or oyster spawn will produce a lot of good food.

Ah yes, the acidity would do it. In the gizzard though, which is quite acidic. Thanks for clarifying.