“My thoughts expand and flourish on this most barren hill…” ~Thoreau
In the summertime we get a regular weather phenomenon known as a ‘marine layer’ that appears in the later afternoon. This brings in a layer of moist wet foggy low-clouds that roll in from the sea. By late afternoon the fog has reached inland enough to blot out the sun. While this might seem a disadvantage… actually, when other places are broiling in the summertime, our coastal areas can have very nice and cool temperatures. And in wintertime, we often have much sunnier weather than we do in the summertime…. go figure!
At any rate…. the spread of this fog layer normally extends only to the first row of hills that are a prominent feature of the landscape along much of the California coast. The relatively flat areas between the hills and the sea are known as a ‘Coastal Plain’. The Coastal Plain is heavily influenced by the moderating of the sea. In the winter time, the relatively warm waters keep the coastal plain a bit warmer than the hill areas and inland deserts. In the summertime, the relatively cool waters will keep the coastal plain area from being too hot.
We live inland beyond the coastal range of hills. So while we have clear skies in general, we can often look at the hills along the coast and see the fog backed up on the coastal side.. trying to reach over the hills. When it does, it slides down the low spots (saddles) and drifts down like a stream… slowly the warmer drier inland environment will break up the mist and vaporize it… you can watch as it slowly dissipates and turns into a vapor and drifts off into the air…. vaporizing and disappearing as it drifts….
They say that each Hydrogen and each Nitrogen, and each Oxygen molecule has been around the world a number of times…. been breathed into and out of the lungs of great numbers of people and animals in the last billion or so years….. each of these molecules is something that is, was, and will be. Eternal as matter can be.
The fog creeps in from the sea, behind the grassy knoll
Big Sky
Fog
Panorama from the Rivenrock Cactus Plantation
Fog creeps over the Coastal Hills in California
The importance of this fog layer cannot be discounted. The fog keeps the local dry environment cool enough so plants transpire less, it reduces soil moisture loss, and as a great bonus, the fog often leaves the plants wet with dew by morning. This dew and fog being caught by the plants and dropping to the ground gives the local environment a bit of moisture in the heart of an otherwise dry summer.
The Scorpion is as black as soot,
He dearly loves to bite;
He is a most unpleasant brute
To find in bed at night.
I found this fellow running across my desk in the house today.
Luckily I had my mug to trap him, so I could take him outside.
Scorpion
Paruroctonus silvestrii …. These are the common little scorpions here in California.
They are not terribly poisonous… I’ve been stung by one once….
It feels like a nail has been driven into your skin. It really hurts….
The local site of my strike suffered a necrosis…
in ten days I had a small half pea-sized chunk of skin and meat slough off, leaving a half-healed crater in my finger. But it grew back in OK.
I got stung while digging a hole and not wearing gloves..
always wear your protective gear… if I’d had strong gloves on, I’d not have been stung….
just like when the tarantula or the Black Widow bit me… gloves would have been nice then too! LOL
Scorpion
Click to embiggen,
you can see the hairs on this dude.
A Scorpion, Paruroctonus silvestrii
I let him go in the front yard… which is just a weed-whacked wilderness really.
We have deer and quail wandering daily in the front yard….
We see tarantulas and scorpions and rattlesnakes here often enough….
there’s no need to run this guy a mile away to ‘release’ him….
but when I got close to take his picture… he got shy and curled up, all scared
when I backed the camera off he’d jump up and start to run away.
A Scorpion
Yeah, he’s a pretty nice looking little animal.
He reminds me of a lobster
Our lobsters here in California don’t have big claws….
These guys hold their prey with their claws.. and their stinging tail comes up and over their head… they will push the spike into their prey… it pushes in and holds there… you can see they will often make several little pushes to fully embed the stinger.
When I got stung, it happened very quickly….
I think in my case it just wanted to give me a ‘short, sharp shock’ so I’d know I was crushing it while digging bare-handed in the soil. In the case of a bug that it captures, it has the ability to hold and restrain the prey animal while it very deliberately injects its poison to maximum effect.
Pismo Heights is a section of Pismo Beach that extends up the steep hills overlooking the pier.
Pismo is a resort town….
Plenty of folks live in other places, but maintain a house in Pismo for use as a vacation property. These homes are also often rented out to others who wish to live in a palace for a week.
The dolphin motif is used extensively thorough this area… both in paint and statuary.
Fourth of July decoration
This is a little fourth of July decoration I whipped up using my paint program and a US flag in Pismo.
Pismo staircase
Land is at a premium in a resort town. Due to this, through the years the building activity works higher and higher up the hills overlooking town and the sea. While the views become more spectacular the higher you go, the difficulties of building grow exponentially. Near the very top, where you can see from Point Sal to Diablo, the homes must be very narrow as the land is steep…. driveways are difficult and ‘bottom’ most vehicles out…the west side of the house might be three stories high, while on the East side only one story shows…. the ground is very rocky…. most of the topsoil washes downhill as it unravels from the rocks…. most of the builders try to maintain the original rock mass in the newly-designed landscape. In the case above we can see that the original rock was maintained…. the house was built and a cement stairway winds to the door through the rocks.
Pismo house
Many of the older homes were built by Portuguese families….they tend to follow the old building styles of the Iberian Peninsula…
Pismo Beach can give a traveler memories of sun-drenched Spanish summertimes.
We went to check on the ladybugs by the creek.
They’ve spent the winter clinging to these bushes… sometimes they fall to the ground and stay in a thick mat all packed deeply.
They are like red jewels moving slowly and dripping from the leaves to the moist cool earth.
They have to move to regulate their temperatures, they move in and out of the sun which just this week started peeking into the canyon. They are starting to awaken from their dormancy.
I suppose they don’t want to leave too early though… they have a secluded safe spot here in which to rest through the winter…. once they become active they will need to eat. In the great scheme of life, they probably time their dispersion with the hatching of aphids. This will give them some food while they start their own egg-laying. The youngsters will hatch amid a plethora of food. Thousands of ladybugs will spread for ‘who-knows-how-far’ from this one tiny little spot in the middle of nowhere.
Here’s a little video I took showing the ladybugs.
And below we have some photos.
See the next post before this to find some info and links on ladybugs.
One of the odd things with video is the big music companies trying to shut off display and sharing of their music videos, or the music they own rights to being used in personal videos and shared over the Internet through services such as YouTube.
I don’t know much about digital music…. but it seems to me that most folks aren’t going to know how to take the songs from the videos in a manner that will allow them to be kept on a player so they can listen whenever they want. So it’s not like they’re likely to lose a lot of business from potential customers. On the other hand, it could well be that many people will find out about an artists music through the Internet and listening a few times might be compelled to look the artist up and purchase the music online for their own collection.
I was happy to find one of my favorite current artists label has done such a thing with her music. Kerli’s tunes are now on VEVO through YouTube, and they give the code out so people can embed them legally into their web posts and share the music with others.
Now, I’m not ‘hip’. .. So I’m not often current on anything happening…. but I was asked to audition once for a music video for a young Estonian girl named Kerli. They wanted a ‘Creepy Guy’ for a song about a Creepy World. I didn’t get the role… maybe I wasn’t creepy enough… sometimes not getting what you want is good. But at any rate I became familiar with a young girl with loads of talent, a good heart and as Lancelot mused “She has a pretty face”.
The comments section was even more interesting…. there were folks on both sides of the ‘meat divide’ making their own (sometimes) reasoned, and usually passionate arguments for and against the basic premise of the article…. One particular comment I found was made by ‘presidio’ who brings up the fact that almost any occurrence or danger can be manipulated by anyone to gain control or compliance from others who they wish to force into their manner of action….
This is too much.
The Marxists are using Climate Change to promote a Proletariat agricultural revolution
The Maoists are using Climate Change to get us back to year zero
The Corporates are using Climate Change to promote carbon trading
The Govts are using Climate Change to tax us until the pips squeak
The Vegans are using Climate Change to promote vegetarianism
The One Worlders are using Climate Change to promote one govt with a single point of tax and control
The West is using Climate Change to dump pollution on the Third World
The Eugenicist/Malthusians are using Climate Change to cull the population.
The Greens are being used by all of the above, and they don’t realise it.
I suppose anyone with a more-extreme concept can seize onto almost any concept to show it has to be implemented ‘this way and that way’ to prevent catastrophe… otherwise we are all doomed. Usually it is the more extreme portion of population that will do this. In this way… the demand by Nazis for ‘living space’ can be used to gain approval from the masses for foreign conquest… in the same way the ‘domino-theory’ gained approval for troops in Vietnam…. and the outright rejection of violence will enable easy conquest by oppressors. Of course this all depends on with whom you are dealing. Gandhi was able to use non-violent means to defeat the British in India…. they are a cultured civilized people… the same would not work with the Nazis… laying before panzers would just enable an easy takeover….
Like many things that are important…. the fringes attract the radicals… the middle of the road is full of the masses…. understanding and caring little about the matter… yet in order to enable real action, it is the masses that you need behind you…. so the radical fringe will cry havoc and try to instill a sense of fear-and-doom onto the masses to be given approval and ability (legislation, money and manpower) to enforce their vision upon the masses. The opposite can also occur…. absolute denials of potential problems is sometimes the easiest course for the public to follow. When a fortress city has defended itself for generations, the people crying that an invading army has been seen approaching may not merit the demands the structure be fortified further… “it’s been fine this long, it’ll be fine” is the declaration from those needed to stack the stones. Surveillance might be cherry-picked to support either side of argument. Those demanding the building of structure will show the data that this army has new siege machinery, so the old fortifications need upgrading to meet new demands. The ones not wishing the outlay of expenditures and the disruption to their lives will look at the data that showed some of the machines mired in mud en route… “those machines are too complex, and won’t ever make it here.”
Sometimes a matter is a high threat, the public will see it as such and respond with full approval and their ‘hearts-and-minds’ to enable the full effect of effort to be made…. this happened in WWII when the US population, not wanting to get embroiled in “their fight” steadfastly refused the appeals (through the political process) from Britain for involvement, and our own President’s entreaties and arm wrangling to join forces with the Allied Powers and defeat the Axis Powers. It took a sneak attack along with a delayed declaration of war from Japan to gain the enmity of the US populace allowing the politicians to marshal forces.
It is often said “The only thing you find in the ‘middle of the road’ is road-kill”. But it is the masses that any movement needs to gain momentum. And any fact that is found can be twisted around to suit your own needs…. an image can be manipulated with other images around it to appear deceiving…. but the facts remain the same….it just requires a skilled tongue to turn black into white if you open your eyes to only the facts as they are laid out. Deep reasoning and suspicion of the motives of others might be seen as distrust… but the world is so full of manipulations that it is unwise to not look at the facts as given by both sides…. and on the far fringes the facts are loosely interpreted, and data left out if not conducive to the goal… which is control of the people.
The people are the real driving force behind the world economies and politics. We usually don’t think about that, because we are in the middle of the road…. it’s easier going… you don’t have to worry as much about threats implied or real….. the cars whizz on by at speed… but you’re straddling the line…. no hard bushes and spiny plants to push through… not like those folks on the edges that desperatly meander through the brush, concealed while they gaze across the expanse of road… looking at the masses in their endless line… following one another….. unknowing of the dangers that lurk in these bushes…. they just need to reach them…. what a power that would be!
These are Elephant Garlic bulbs. Elephant Garlic is actually a type of giant leek that forms bulbs. I’m not sure it has the regular medicinal qualities of its more sharp-tasting garlic-brothers…. but I am sure it is a still a very healthy thing to eat. I’ve eaten a half pound or more of these at a time… roasted over fire, wrapped in foil and saturated with olive oil. I got the original bulbs from some fellow from whom I had purchased a Roto-tiller about 25 years ago. Ever since I’ve kept the original strain going. I don’t always harvest them yearly… I often let a single bulb grow into a clump for a few years…. Above is a sample clump that resulted from a single clove being planted some four years ago. I now need to break it apart much like you’d divide flower bulbs. These ones should have had this done BEFORE the rains came and got the roots going….
In the photos above we see the clump has been hosed off, to remove most of the soil, and let the roots separate more easily. Separating the roots is much like de-tangling long hair after a four day motorcycle ride.
In our area with the mild winters, it is usual to plant garlic in the middle of October, so I am two months behind. They’ll still grow well though…. and again I’ll likely not harvest in June when they haveripened. So they’ll grow on again for another couple of years in the new spots on two terraces on the hill side
This is how I load the bulbs into the soil…. I just raked the terrace of the excess brush, and then sliced into the soil with a flat spade, pushed it forward to open a little slice into which I dropped the bulbs. I then removed the spade, and pushed the soil around the growing shoot.After this they should be watered to let the soil settle around the newly disturbed and broken roots. Elephant garlic likes good soil…. In our area the garlic does pretty well with just the usual rainfall. It grows through the winter, and matures in the spring when the rains stop. As the early spring comes in, and the foliage starts to die all watering must cease. The bulbs should be harvested and stored in a totally dry, airy and dark location…. We don’t have much of a place like that, so I leave them in the ground where they can be dug as needed through the summer.
Once winter comes again, the bulbs remaining in the soil will start to grow new roots and then foliage…. this is the time you can’t eat the sprouted bulbs…. so if we do need garlic and don’t have any stored, I can harvest the occasional bulb with stalk…. they look much like a giant green onion or leek, slice nicely into a stir-fry or fresh salad. Later when the stalks have become more mature and starting to become pithy, the plants will put out their flower heads…. these can be eaten in several stages of growth….
So even though we only eat the garlic bulbs for half the year… we still get really fine eating out of the other parts of the plants during the rest of the year.
This is one of the clumps of garlic. It is at the stage where the flowers are dead, the stalk has decayed… and the bulbs are going dormant. At this stage they should not be watered anymore. But these ones were growing in the cactus patch, so they did get watered a bit each summer, and survived through well for four years.
This is how large these bulbs can become. This one was about one pound.
They only get this size when grown under optimal conditions. In this case I planted the largest bulbs at the proper time, in perfect soil… rich and loamy. I water a few times until the autumn rains came and kepot them moist through the entire winter….. then as March came, the rains stopped… the seed stalks were harvested as they came out to direct growth to the bulbs, and I did not water. When the foliage showed four or five leaves drying well on the plants, I took them all up and stored them away. But since then I’ve decided it is so much easier to let them store in the ground, grown in the large clumps. We can harvest a bit when we need some, and not haveto worry about a bunch of garlic stored in the attic. Less work, lazier, easier… the bulbs aren’t as pretty though. Grown in the clumps they do not get as large, and as they sit throughthe summer in the ground, they get stained by the soil, so they’re not as clean and pristine. Sometimes the bulbs will separate into the individual cloves, this will allow a lot of dirt to get into the bulb, reducing its use cooked whole in foil. But my stomach doesn’t know the difference.. they still taste the same.
We got temps that dipped into 29 degrees by 1 AM. It stayed right there for another six hours until seven AM. Temps remained below freezing for another few hours until the sun rose high enough to reach into the canyon.
Cold weather is such a novelty to us, that I had to take photos.
We had a lot of rain fall in a 24 hour period. Then the sky cleared, the stars shone through like diamonds, and the night went deadly cold. The fresh water that had leaked into the car’s rubber gaskets froze into ice.
For the first time I ever recall, I had to defrost the car doors to open them… they were all frozen stuck. Not having ever had this happen to me I searched for solutions… and came up with using a propane torch…. I am sure a hair dry would have been safer… but the torch was easier to find. I just tried to make sure I didn’t really heat things like I’d usually do, but just warm them a bit to melt the ice gently without melting rubber.
It worked, in a couple of minutes the door opened. The locks would not work, all the mechanisms were stuck, but five minutes of idling defrosted the windshield of the thick coat of ice and made the car drivable.
The photos show one of our cats, Lizbeth sleeping in the cat condo on the porch. One shows the odd ice pattern in the windshield. One shows the torch melting the ice, and one shows ice in the cupped leaf of a robusta cactus.
The next set of photos were taken almost a year ago on Dec 18 2008 when we got the first freeze of that season. So the freeze this year came nine days earlier… yesterday was the first we had this year.
We expect night time temps to be even colder tomorrow morning.
After some five or six months with no rain, we got a two day gully-washer
that dropped some five to six inches on the area.
This was the largest October storm system to hit the state in 45 years.
The combination of warm temperatures and moisture has led
to an explosive growth of weeds.
The photo above was taken only five days after the rain started. Very fast sprouting!
Keep in mind, when I say ‘Weed’, I merely mean a plant that is growing where I do not want it.
These plants in the photos are right in front of our house where we want nothing growing so that we have no flammable vegetation near the house. We’re better off having the ground bare and clear all around the house to lower wildfire risks.
We could have a lawn there, but that takes a lot of water, water I’d rather use to grow food, both to sell and to eat.
The plants in the photo are the types that need to be growing on the hillsides where they can help to bind the soil reducing erosion.
It is when plants are in this young and tender stage that they are the easiest to kill. A simple swipe with a hoe will scrape them from the soil surface, slicing them from their roots and leaving the leaves to dry in the sun. A nice day that will be sunny is said to be the best to scrape these weeds from the ground. The sun will hasten their demise. A rainy day might allow them to get their roots going again.
If you let the weeds grow, they will set their roots firmly in the ground, and you will have a harder time removing them, if scraped with a hoe, the roots might set up a new stalk…. you might have to pull them from the ground by hand.
Take care of your weeds before they get out of hand.
“A stitch in time saves nine” Old Proverb
deer path weeds
This is a deerpath in the wilderness, the photos taken the same day as the one above.
We can see that even though the plants are different, they have the same germination speed, although perhaps a lower rate of germination due to the rougher soil.
There are several factors we can learn form in the two photos….
Notice the deerpath has a lot of debris on it… leaves and duff from the nearby bushes.
These have lowered the germination rate.. perhaps some weeds were under a large leaf that did not allow the small sprout to grow properly.
When you hunt an animal you have to learn its habits….
when you have weeds, you should learn how to control them
by knowing their growth habits, and vulnerabilities.
A seed is a marvel of life…
it has the accumulated nutrition and energy given to it by its parent for its early life…..Just as most humans and animals will do anything for their young, so too did the parents of these annual weeds sacrifice themselves for their progeny.
The parents of these annual weeds grew during the moist winter in our mild climate… they waxed through the winter. And when the springtime came and the rains stopped, the plants, programmed to seed at the beginning of the dry season, took every bit of energy they had in their roots, stalk and leaves and packed every bit of this essence and energy into the seeds they carried. This is why seeds are so nutritious. Every bit of fat, protein and carbohydrate the plant can manufacture is given to the seeds, so that they will have a good chance to grow in the next generation.
So now we are left with a seed that has lain in the ground for five or six months, waiting for the right environmental conditions to sprout.
Plants are grown and adapted to their area….. the plants here ‘know’ they should not sprout before the rainy season has began. In order to make sure that a stream of urine from a passing deer or a short unseasoable sprinkling in July will not cause them to sprout, the seeds are coated with a hard ’seedcoat’ that will keep out short-term moisture.
When it has rained for a couple of days the moisture will seep into the seed itself.
This will start the seed’s germination. To germinate too soon would mean death for the seedling, nature sets these effects in place to ensure enough plants grow to continue the process.
It is when they are newly growing that they are easiest to destroy…. if you have a space in which you don’t want any new plants growing, this is the time to take care of them, when they are young tender seedlings that have no large root system, nor copious leaves to cause interference.
~Lao Tzu~
Chapter 63
Accomplish the hard task while it is still easy.
Handle large affairs while they are still small.
For even the most difficult and large of tasks and affairs
have a point where they are still easy and small
Here we see a photo of a large hoe being used to scrape the newly-grown weeds.
What means you use to destroy these young seedlings depends on your resources.
One method used for nearly a century is ‘flame-weeding’.
Some tractors are adapted with systems that shoot a flame
onto the ground beneath the crop plants.
Just a second of heat from the flame will cause the moisture in the small leaves to boil,
rupturing cells and resulting in dessication and eventual death.
You can also purchase hand held flamers that will run from a small propane bottle.
I prefer using mechanical means….
if the ground is not covered with a mulch,
I use a hoe, gently scraping along the soil surface,
scraping the plants from the ground.
This does not require hacking if the plants are young enough….
gently scrape the plants from the ground in a space a foot or so…
then push the scraped soil back to cover the ground.
This results in what the old-timers used to call a ‘dust mulch’.
The broken soil will reduce the wicking action of the soil surface
and act much as a mulch of leaves would…
covering the soil with a blanket of soil shading it from the sun etc.
If you have a mulch of leaves, straw or some other organic material, you can use a rake and be able to kill the weeds trying to grow on top of the mulch.
These are the weed seeds brought onto the mulch by wind or animals.
If left unchallenged, they might possible be able to grow through the mulch and enjoy the same healthy conditions you desire for your crops plants.
weeds scraped from the ground
Here we see the ground scraped across the entire photo.
The left-hand side is scraped, and the right-hand side is scraped
and the removed soil put back onto the soil as a mulch.
It is generally seen as better for the environment overall to keep the soil covered with plants.
Plants cover the soil keeping the nearby areas cooler. Bare open ground tends to be hotter, and much more susceptible to erosion by rain or wind. Here in the summertime we often see ‘dust-devils’ on open fields, and even on our own clean scraped driveway.
~Lao Tzu~
‘Chapter 48′
Common learning consists in doing something new each day,
In pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped.
Day after day something else is not done,
until one reaches the point where one is able to do much by doing nothing.
Less and less you work and desire, until you reach the state of non-action.
By not striving to control the world, it offers itself to you.
You cannot master the world by trying to enforce change on it.
Unless there is an overwhelming need for clean-cultivation, I argue against it. We remove all vegetation from near our house because of the high fire danger in our area. We want no organic materials next to the house. Clean and open rocky ground is what I want… the small pebbles are unlikely to blow away with the wind. We also have some garden area that is clean-cultivated. Some of our cactus species are small, and would be overtaken by allowing other species to grow with them.
Most annual gardens do well with clean cultivation… before you plant, prepare the soil in the usual way…and then water as if you had planted… in a few days you will see weed seedlings sprout… rake the soil to kill the emerging seedlings, and water again. Within the next two weeks, water and rake four or five times…. you will kill most of the weed seeds near the surface…. then when you plant, do not dig the soil again, you will bring up seeds from deeper…. just make your tiny seed plantings, and cover them…. hopefully you’ll have very few weeds growing when your vegetables emerge.
It is hard for many people to not do all the work at once… but there are times it pays to do less now… and take much longer, doing a little bit here and there… don’t rush nature, she usually doesn’t rush much… and you can’t push her hard.
“When you throw Mother Nature out the window,
She comes back in the door with a pitchfork”
