John Weiland

Les Frijo wrote:

John F Dean wrote:I have had it in the house for a while. It lights up, but it doesn’t run.  Yes, I checked the chain break.

Interesting! That would suggest the condensation theory. Maybe more time inside will lead to more functionality. Sounds like a design flaw to me. Maybe worth trying to contact someone at Makita and see what they say.

John,   I'm going to assume that you have pulled on the chain to rotate the chain and the cog wheel around a few times?....  I ask because I have two more legacy corded Makita tools, a drill and an angled buffing tool, that also sit for months, sometimes years, without use in an unheated garage with humid summers and frigid winters.  This past summer I need the angle tool and it would not run when I activated the trigger.  After several rounds of adjusting the speed control and rotating the head by hand, it finally started running and ran fine after that.  But I'm wondering now as others have stated about the condensation possibility.  Just a thought...

John F Dean wrote:.....if I can only have one handful a year in present times, I will grab the candy corn for the flashback to my childhood.

Yet inquiring minds want to know:  When younger, did you nibble one color of each kernal at a time, starting with the yellow portion at the end and progressing to the white tip?  Somehow in those early years, my impressionable mind was convinced that the yellow portion tasted more buttery.... :-)

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:...............
[i]"Sunchokes thrive in full sun and loose, well-drained soil with a pH between \(5.8\) and \(6.2\). While they are hardy and grow in many conditions, they produce the best crop in loose soil that allows for tuber expansion, making harvesting easier. Sunchokes are adapted to a wide range of climates, growing well from USDA hardiness zones 3 through 8. Soil Ideal: Sunchokes prefer loose, well-drained soil. Adding aged compost or sand can improve heavier soils.
pH: An ideal soil pH is between \(5.8\) and \(6.2\). They can tolerate a wider range from \(4.5\) to \(8.2\).
Tolerance: The plants will grow in a wide variety of soil types, even poor or rocky ones.
Drainage: Avoid heavy, waterlogged clay soil, as this can result in smaller tubers and make harvesting difficult. Climate Sunlight: They do best in full sun but will tolerate partial shade.

This would explain why our decades-old patch produces such puny tubers.  They aren't bad to eat and can be relatively abundant in certain years, but rarely are larger than your thumb.  Our soil (zone 4/3)   is on the heavy side of clay and poor in drainage even as the organic matter is quite high. Soil pH hovers around 7-8.  I think our sunchokes are feeling the insults of these conditions....and the presence of a little invasive worm/grub in many of the tubers doesn't help matters.  But none of this effects its hardiness and intentions on taking over the garden! ;-)

paul wheaton wrote:I had huge hopes that we would embrace the scenario I laid out, and then explore permaculture solutions.  

With a humble home and a huge garden ...

  - maybe it doesn't matter if you lose your job

  - maybe you have a MASSIVE advantage

  - maybe all this stuff becomes interesting rather than scary

  - is better than living in the city with a lot of money ...  which will drain away

  - maybe you can share your bounty with friends

I think all of the above is possible, but always run into the issue of property taxes and costs regarding infrastructure and health emergencies of all kinds.  How this impacts the orginal topic of college or not will depend much on the person's ability to weigh costs, benefits, and sources of goods and services they both need vs. desire.  When I ponder, based on my family of origin's history, my life NOT having gone to college and grad school, I do shudder a bit.  That experience not only gave me some reasoning tools quite valuable in my adult life, but navigating the educational world itself was a lesson in frugality.  Not to say all of this couldn't have been come by outside of educational institutions, but some of it made easier by their existence.  Like the cost of owning and maintaining land itself, the changes underfoot in higher ed are troubling....just seeing the degree to which costs are rising is disheartening.  But as I've told many families whose kids are grappling with these decisions, you don't need to go to Harvard/Stanford for your education to be decent and worthwhile.  A quick tuition perusal locally showed many state colleges still coming in around $10k per year (don't get me wrong...I consider that exhorbitant relative to my 1980s annual tuition at UW-Madison of $1K!) and graduate work payed me a living-wage stipend.  Compromises surely must be made to go this route, but there can be some real payoffs in certain job areas and even more crucial and tangential payoffs in finding out what is important to YOU in your life through the process.  Thus, what started off as a more urban life, but with much socking away of income in early years, led to the realization that using that capital to gain a rural situation made much more sense for wife and I....and allowed for early retirement to bring it to fruition.  So just another view for the discussion...

Suzette Thib wrote:...... We Cajuns love our red beans and rice!

If all else fails, use them for a bean mural called "Cajun Love!"....???  

Accompanying photo from  https://www.pbsutah.org/blogs/pbs-kids-utah/bean-art-craft/

I would prefer licorice and its anti-inflammatory properties make it a double for the win! :-)

On the other hand, I really like salted nut roll candy bars.......

....... and cramming a handful of virginia peanuts and candy corn at once in your mouth provides the same satisfaction quite frugally...  Ha!

Many here will be familiar with the typical appearance of an aspen grove:  Older, often dying trees in the middle with younger trees sprouting at the outer edge of the grove.  For a small grove in our front yard, there seems to be little, if any, new young trees growing up in the middle where the older trees have died, even though plenty of light is getting through at this point.  Is there some aspect of an aspen grove that inhibits new sapling production?  If they transplant easily, I have plenty of small saplings at the perimeter of the grove that I would prefer to move back to the middle. But I was wonder if this is futile due to some inhibitory aspect of the mature core of the grove??    Thanks for any insights into this issue....

Christopher Weeks wrote:I guess it was this time last year that I got a box of Joseph's apricot seeds. They grew like bonkers here in Northern Minnesota -- just super-vigorous. And now we'll be testing to see if they can survive our winter!

Hmmm.....this has me thinking now.  I can't recall what variety of apricot my wife planted on the NW corner of our house many moons ago, but in good years, the yield is pretty nice and fruit size very acceptable for being on the Minnesota-side of the Fargo, ND location.  There are 3 trees in a row there and all are miraculously still alive, although only one is the good yielder, the others being so-so.  But production from them is very sporadic and year-dependent.  I was so excited this year at its fruit set exhibited in May, but then early June saw some very hot weather and the fruit all fell off while still green! Grrrrr!!!  I do wonder if planting of some of Joseph's stock nearby would provide some sort of shift in fruit set via novel pollination, even if not for all flowers....??

If successful, I can begin to move on to the artichoke X Canada thistle and macadamia X filbert projects.....should see the results when I reach ~130 years of age!.     (kidding...)

John F Dean wrote:........I finally figured how to get an old water heater out of my basement without me falling or the darned thing ending up on top of me. It took 2 come-alongs and a tow strap. But, the water heater is on the back deck and I am not in the hospital

Glad to hear of the success, John!  I will be doing the same soon enough with a rusty and aged water heater....hopefully not until next year.  What is the plan now that it's out on the deck?  I have an old wood-burning stove sitting out of the front deck....for the third straight year! :-/  Wife says gotta go before the snow flies, so I'm thinking it will be on Craigslist or FB Marketplace soon.  So grateful for tractors and winches available.  Along those lines, if you don't have one, I can much recommend the 'Pullz-All' style plug-in winches.  Cost is a few hundred bucks, but another good helper to save your back.  We've even used it to pull large deceased animals out of stalls when the tractor would have had no room to aid in the tasks.  That said, I continue to use come-alongs as well with tow straps and chains as you noted.  They come in especially handy when you don't want a tree you are felling to land on the house!

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:I will dig some tomorrow for sharing. I also expect to harvest seeds this year. I'll post an offer tomorrow.

My population started by crossing wild sunroots from Kansas with a domestic sunroot.

Joseph,    Could you please post as well how you ship them?  I can dig up some tubers from a population that we've maintained outside of Fargo ND for the past 20 years, so should have different genetics, though I can't say how diverse within the population those genetics might be.  The founder population was from a riverbank near our home.   Alison, please PM me if you are interested and I can send ~10 - 20 tubers.