Blaine Clark

May be it's time to kick start this topic.
What I know so far:

Walnut trees spread Juglone. I've noticed that it doesn't affect Tulips, Daffodils and most grass at all, and Garlic a bit. It stunts Asparagus.

Sunchokes spread Coumarin (raw Coumadin) and Salicylic acid (raw aspirin). Most grasses get stunted after a couple years. Lambsquarters get stunted from 4'/5' to 18". Wild Strawberries aren't affected and neither is Garlic. Horseradish petered out after about four years. Periwinkle ground cover spreads like crazy. Cleaver weed is stunted. A squirrel buried a Walnut in one patch several years ago and I only dug around it. It's made it to about 2' in 3 years, so Walnut gets stunted too. I'm seriously thinking about pruning it into a Bonsai! What would I call that process? 'Choke choked Walnut Bonsai? Too cool!

OK, now how about someone else.

AI warning: Don't accept any AI produced nude photos of the Muppets.
Spoiler - it's just hands sticking up behind their stage.

This afternoon I pulled some stalks of the Stampede or Supernova(?) in a spot about 1' x 2', didn't dig, just pulled the tubers that came up with the stalks. I got 2 1/2 gallons. I'm sure I could have doubled that if I'd-a dug. Brought them in and covered with water for overnight. That coaxes the critters out or drowns them, plus it makes the dirt sticking to the tubers mud and much easier to brush off/out. Sometimes I toss some salt in, that brine cures the slugs. They seem to get all wizzled and leathery though, probably tough.
I cut one medium sized one about the size of a tennis ball, and my worries about all the rain were only a bit warranted. Just the stem end was pithy, about 1/2". The rest of the tuber was crispy crunchy and go-o-od!
One of the biggest from this sample weighed 9.3 oz. or 263 grams. And of course the others went down to thumb sized. The tiny ones went back into the dirt.
Thinking about some roasted 'choke country fries for breakfast! BTW, we never peel 'em.

Ac, take care with that IBS. Start back up really low and slow. One bite to start. Wait several hours then another if there isn't too much reaction.

Kelly, zone 3 is the max range for 'chokes. A guy I knew in upper Canada had to cover his every fall with over a foot of straw mulch for his zone 2 area and most tubers overwintered OK. One thing to consider is tracking down a short maturation term variety. The white/tan knobby ones I have are fairly short term, around 135 to 140 days if I remember. The reddish ones are about 155 days. My white ones are pretty nearly all dead and fully brown but the reddish ones are still blooming. We had hard frost the last two nights and the flowers are starting to wilt today. Some online suppliers show the maturation term of what they sell and I think there are varieties that mature in around 120 days. Might be what you're looking for.
I've heard several say that deadheading before the flowers open makes more and better tubers, well, I've trimmed the flowers as soon as they opened to make wine off of half of one patch. There was no difference in tuber growth or quality between the trimmed half and the untrimmed half. There could easily be a difference between varieties ... so ... Note; the flowers from the white/tan ones taste like squash after they're boiled, but the reddish one smell musty and taste musty. Years and years ago I gave a family in a nearby town a sample of the 12' tall with obnoxiously strong turnip/herbal tubers. They weren't interested in the tubers, they wanted the massive tops for their bunnies. Don't know about that cutting affecting tuber production, but the area has stalks as thick as bunny fur! It'd be difficult for a bunny to run through the patch! The stalks get well over 1", up to nearly 1 1/2".

William, I've thought about bagging them with lightly moistened sawdust overwinter but haven't tried it yet. Let us know how you make out.

Walter Byrd wrote:

I do not have the best vision either. One thing I especially like about the MATE desktop, I can make it look just like I want it to look. I can make the icons, the sidebars, and the fonts, as big as I like. I can make the background and the fonts in the terminal whatever color and size I want. I have found this to be difficult to impossible with Windows or MacOS.

Yes!! And Linux doesn't reset those settings on any updates, even major kernel updates. You actually own and control your PC! Only have to mess around with the settings and themes after a clean install. I like High contrast but Low contrast is better for my wife.
I use the Cinnamon DE, used to use Mate and it was great too. I've tried a couple other DEs, but Mate and Cinnamon take top billing for us. There's really only one item that we need to change and that's the size of the text cursor. It's usually too small to pick out when re-editing and I lose it in the text field. There's no native setting for it, so, if you'd like, search "adjust text cursor weight in <distro+version+DE>". In LMDE 7 Cinnamon I had to sudo edit a config file and add three lines. One line contained a number for the weight, the other two lines were just an opening bracket and a closing bracket. I adjusted that number just a few times, logged out and logged back in to activate and I've got a text cursor I can see in most every package. The Brave browser doesn't play nice with this, so here, the cursor is that thin little blinking bit, so easy to lose until I hit shift and either the left or right arrows to highlight its location. You can set the mouse cursor to 'halo' for a second when you hit a Ctrl key, it'd be nice if we could do that with the text cursor too!
Yeah, I'm there too. Traipsed around that sun 71 times and my eyes ain't what they used to be.
One thing I didn't mention before is that this new laptop has that blasted Copilot key instead of a right side Ctrl key. The Copilot key issues a special three part MS macro, so it can't be remapped normally. I had to install a little package, then edit its config file and enable it to set that Copilot key as a Ctrl key. I love keyboard shortcuts and use the right Ctrl key quite a bit, Ctrl and p for printing, Ctrl and +++ for occasional magnification and a few more. Note; Ctrl and zero resets magnification so you don't have to remember how many times you hit + to backtrack with Ctrl -.

Kelly Ravner wrote:All of my sunchoke tops go to the bunnies while still green - they absolutely love them! (Unless the deer get them first.) I grow them for the tops much more than the tubers because they are such good bunny food.

Dry Matter Basis: Protein content ranges from 5% to 23%, with an average of 15.3% in fresh aerial biomass.
Quality: The protein contains essential amino acids and a high proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), making it comparable to alfalfa.

Dry Matter Basis: Crude fiber and neutral detergent fiber (NDF) vary by harvest time, with NDF ranging between 30% and 50%.
Variability: Fiber content increases significantly as the plant matures; crude fiber can rise from 48.4% to 67.7% from the early bud stage to complete flowering.

Protein content is highest during the vegetative stage and decreases by approximately 33% during the flowering stage, while fiber content increases. Consequently, earlier harvesting maximizes the protein-to-fiber ratio for nutritional or feed purposes.

I missed one other of your questions, backups. I've tried TimeShift, rsync, even cp (copy) in the command line and in BASH scripts. What I've settled on is cheating. I simply hook up my external drive, open the file manager, highlight and copy my /home folder, move focus to the external drive, make a new dated folder and paste my home folder into that. I wait for the file manager to quit and job done.
On occasion I'll do the same with the /etc folder. The /etc directory contains host-specific system configuration files for the operating system and installed applications. It serves as the central repository for settings that control system behavior, network configuration, user accounts, and service daemons. Backing it up can save you some time re-configuring your programs and network settings. If you want to. Purely optional.
If you find you need your file manager to be root, open the terminal and enter:
pkexec <file_manager_name>
If pkexec isn't installed on your Fedora, use:
run0 <file_manager_name>
BTW!! Don't EVER enter a command you haven't checked out first. There are plenty of A-holes out there that gleefully try to get you to trash your system. And be careful while you've got your file manager open in root. Close it as soon as it's done.

Sara, you can install Privacy Badger too. It's developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as a tracking control, available in the extensions library of most browsers. I use Linux-Mint Debian Edition v.7 with the Cinnamon Desktop Environment and also use both Firefox and Brave. I also use Thunderbird for email accounts as it can easily log in to several email accounts at once, giving me a local utility for all of my email accounts. To set up Proton on T-bird you have to download Proton's app. Proton has a how-to on their site. T-bird has a good spam filter, plus you can easily build your own filters to sort emails. T-bird can optionally identify probable phishing emails for you too.
One of the first things I do after an installation is to make sure ufw (uncomplicated firewall is enabled with default filters. That's basically all I use for system security. I also have my browsers set to delete all data when they're closed, cache, history, cookies, etc. Yeah, I have to log into all accounts when I start the browsers up again, but it helps cut down unknown tracking.
As for reducing or eliminating your online ID ... Between each state's DMV and courthouse records as well as some other surprising sources of publicly available private info, which are amazingly accessible to the public in several ways, removing your ID from the 'net is a waste of time, and if you use one of the ID removing services, you're throwing your money away. Most state DMVs even sell your info to insurance companies and licensed private investigative services including firms that offer background checks for employment and insurance screenings. Your ID is out there and there's not a darned thing you can do about it.
Another good source is Kim Komando. She's built herself into quite the know-it-all, but in a good way.
Several months ago I was notified that a slug of my personal health and probably financial info was hijacked from a health care central info bank. I'm now reviewing my credit records regularly through the 'big three' plus a couple other sources. I'm checking into my bank site regularly to look over all transactions, and the site that was hacked has also offered to put me on a financial security watch program, which I accepted of course. So, between all the publicly available 'private' information available for sale and the hacking going on, you've got no privacy in actuality. The best you can do is to keep big tech tracking at bay as best you can and avoid as many targeted ads as possible.
For those few people who don't own a PC or a cell phone and think they're safe, got some really bad news for them.

LMDE 7 user here. That's Linux Mint Debian Edition. Almost two months ago I had to recycle a 15 year old Lenovo laptop because butter fingers dropped it. Dinged one corner and the keys on that corner didn't work. Try to repair a 15 year old laptop? Nah. I shopped around at several stores and shops. At Walmart, the floor man heard what I wanted and headed for a cabinet in the back. It was the HP I'm using right now, marked way down because they were moving it to out-stock. Microscrap didn't get a chance to start. I got into the UEFI and did the needed resets and plugged in a USB with LMDE-7. Installed and updated in much less than an hour. Spent another hour making some preference settings and adding some preferred software and applets, then about 5 minutes restoring my files and away we went.
My wife and I have used one flavor or another of Linux for 19 years. Around that time I did a bit of website hard-coding; html, css, php with a touch of javascript.
Our Linux journey started in 2007 when one critical update from Microsoft repeatedly crashed my 18 month old XP desktop requiring a Restore, if it would let me, or else a full reinstall. I went round after round with MS 'Support' trying to get it to take. No good, so MS 'Support' told me my 18+ month old PC was obsolete. Hmph! My wife had just bought a brand new Vista desktop. She's blind in one eye and has slightly distorted vision in the other. Her desktop settings are critical for her comfort, preventing eye strain and headaches. Well, nearly every MS update reset her settings to Microsux's favorite default settings and I'd have to get back into her settings and fix them. PITA! Pain In The Astericks! Who owns this PC, us or Microsh!t? Obviously not us. I started looking around for a Mac, but I won't buy a pig in a poke and no one would let me take one for a test drive. Desperation time. Take a look at this Linux stuff I'd heard a wee bit about. I went with Ubuntu. Tried it from a DVD without installing it for two hours. I put it through it's paces and learned that the only real differences were program names and menu layouts. I installed it cold-turkey, erasing Microslop, and restored my files and got back into a web project. I tried several coding editors and found one that felt good. My wife noticed the huge improvement in my vocabulary almost immediately. She started looking over my shoulder.
What's that?
Linux.
What's that?
It ain't Winblows.
Can I have it too?
I dual-booted MS and Ubuntu so she could pick which one she wanted when she started her PC. I showed her some of the programs. We had already been using Thunderbird for emails and LibreOffice which are included with most Linux installations. I showed her how to browse the files on the Windows partition. The only obstacle was the desktop settings. A few hours on a couple Linux forums and I had them worked out and she took off. About two months in and I noticed she hadn't asked me to reset her desktop settings in quite a while.
How's it going?
Great!
How's Linux?
Great!
What about Vista?
Haven't used it in weeks.
Want me to remove it?
Sure.
I moved her files over to the Linux partition and erased Vista with glee!
At that time we were both officers in the local chapter of a blind association. We had no trouble making/sharing documents or joining video calls. Goodbye Microsoft! And now we own our PCs, not MS or Linux!
The only major problem we've had was when Robin went looking for more word games. She found one on a well known major news website and installed it as a browser extension. It turned out to be a home page hijacker AND it was persistent. That was before those became illegal. Remove it and it would come right back. The cure? There are two methods to uninstall software in Linux: one removes the software, leaving configuration files or purging, which removes the software and all of its configuration files. I purged her browser, restarted her PC in case the problem would reload from memory and reinstalled the browser. Hijacker gone! So much easier than using an antivirus! I've never installed an antivirus on her PCs. With care, they're not needed!
Will we ever go back to Windoze? Nope!

I have two varieties, both collected locally in west-central PA. USA. One, a white/tan skinned knobby tuber, possibly either a Stampede or Supernova type, behaves well. After about 1/2 hour cooking, cooking with an acid, fermenting or freezing loses its Inulin and gas production. The other, a reddish skinned smooth tuber, possibly a Fuseau variety, doesn't play nice. After a long zone 5 winter freeze, long cooking, etc. still has the power to blow your bloomers off!
We keep the red ones because they taste even better than the white ones and my wife and I take a daily Inulin supplement for gut health. We're pretty tolerant of the Inulin. We just make sure not to serve the red ones to anyone else. The white ones we harvest in the fall for pickles and relishes and we can eat them raw. We then harvest in early spring for eating raw and for dehydrating and blender-grinding for flour. The fall harvest is for cooking, dehydrating for soups, stews, roasts, instant mashed 'chokes etc. We don't worry about sabotaging others who eat the depleted Inulin. Like radioactive isotopes, it seems that 'choke tuber varieties have a different type of Inulin with different fart-lives, I mean half-lives!
I'll repeat, we keep the red ones for ourselves and only serve or give away the white ones after a winter freeze or after canning.
It's the first week of October and the white one's tops, about 5' to 6', have died and have nearly turned brown. I'll be digging some in a week or so. The red ones, about 8' to 9', are still blooming and on warm days, the Honeybees hit them hard. They have a longer maturing time. I'm not sure if it's the longer maturing time or the variety that makes the more powerful Inulin. I also harvest them like potatoes, I always wait until the tops have died and fully browned. That's when all the nutrients in the greens have drained into the tubers, making them their biggest and best tasting. It could also be the nutrients from the larger greens that make the stouter Inulin?
We've had quite a bit of rain this summer and I'm hoping they aren't going to be pithy from too much water. That's happened a couple other wet summers. Other pithy root veggies are due to too much water too.
One advantage of being intolerant to Inulin is Bedtime Football.  ??  What's Bedtime Football you ask? That's the two of you, side by side, ripping off the longest and loudest farts you can. You'll know it's halftime, time to switch sides, when one of you soils the sheets.
I'll bet none of you ever thought you could cringe, shudder, laugh and go eeewww at the same time. Eh?

A few years late, but worth posting. We follow standard jelly recipes but we mix in blueberries. It's tanfastic!!