Winter Gardening

I planted several cool-weather vegetables out back in mid-September. I wanted to get them out in August, but weather and time did not coincide to let that happen. Las week we had 2 nights in the low 20s. The chard looks gone. The tomatoes and limas are long gone.

But I have been pleasantly surprised by the lettuces and broccoli. I saw the frost on their leaves. I saw them looking frozen solid. And look! They live! No protection! I may or may not get any more than the 127 pounds I harvested this year, but it is interesting to watch and experiment.

"Climategate", Cash, and Scientific Integrity

It has been an interesting week in the scientific community, reading about the hacked emails from CRU, to say the least. As a Christian and a graduate student, I am interested in how the affected parties respond, and if any scientific revision will take place. The answer to the latter, at least so far, seems to be "no". I've seen interesting posts from programmers indicating that the code in the hacked documents is not good, and was designed to generate the results it did.

I've seen stories in top journals defending the investigators, for doing things that would get me hanged (or at least kicked out) as a grad student. Subverting peer review is a huge one. Sure there are some people in every field who produce suspect work sometimes, but you subject their papers to appropriate public scrutiny; you do not block their publication. Avoiding releasing raw data is another. If I told my boss I had lost YEARS of raw data in a move and tried to shrug it off, I would be toast. If I refused to show him my notebooks, or altered them before he could view them, again a very hot seat (or a cold kick out the door) would be mine. People paid with taxpayer money are employees of the taxpayer. Their data should be (and by law is) public property. Yet these guys, and the ones in the US, have avoided FOIA requests for years.

The "adjustment" of the raw data is another issue. According to surfacestations.org, most of the North American temperature stations do not meet standards in terms of siting. A lot of pavement has been laid down in the last 50 years, some of it close to these stations. My own backyard did not get hit by frost this year until November 30; the heat island effect of cities is very real. Let's face it- people would naturally put a station where they could get to it easily for maintenance, and way out in the boonies an hour from any road is not an accessible place. Next to a parking lot-much better. And if the parking lot gets paved and the numbers shoot up after 1970, so much better for you!

What about the satellite data from NASA and NOAA? Reading through layers of the atmosphere, in which the temperature rises and falls for each layer until you reach bottom, and even there the read temperature would depend on the surface over which it is read, and the time of day, etc.? It would be a lot like trying to read the back page of a newspaper section through the upper ones, if the pages were transparent, but not the ink. Tricky, and controversial. That the satellite data agrees with "adjusted" ground data does not make either one right. Precise but inaccurate leaves the hunter very hungry, even if all the arrows fall in the same place.

Modern science is funded by the acquisition of government grants from committees of scientists evaluating and rating the grants, then administrators doing their thing. For decades (at least in the biological sciences, according to multiple scientists I have met in various places), grants have had to include certain key words (cyclic AMP, siRNA, high-throughput screening, tumorigenesis, etc.) to get funding. If you d0 not have the "right" keywords, it has become increasingly difficult over the past several years to get grants, unless you are at the top of the field and are GENERATING the key words. In which case you shape the future of the field for years to come. If you are right or if you are wrong, everyone else will be too.

The scientists implicated at East Anglia were some of the top ones in their field. They and a few others at NASA and NOAA and in a center in Japan were generating the key words. It will be interesting to see how these investigations unfold (or not) and what they mean for climate science.

Semi-Local Dinner

There's a good probability of frost tonight, so I went out and collected tomatoes (2 lb 9 oz worth!), lettuce, radishes, and lima beans tonight by the light of the full moon, and the neighbor's motion sensors.

We had a completely backyard salad of radishes, lettuce, and a window-sill-ripened tomato. The grocery-store baked potato was topped with onion, mushrooms, and greens from the radishes sauteed in butter. The sweet-potato-pear salad contained our sweet potatoes and home-canned pears from a neighbor's yard, and pecans from the farmer's market (recipe: Peel and cube a few cups of sweet potatoes. Microwave in the sugar syrup from the canned pears until soft. Add the pears (cubed) and cook 2 more minutes. Add chopped pecans and dried cranberries or golden raisins. Pour off the syrup and sauce with unsweetened plain yogurt. MMM). The catfish was American, and probably from Mississippi, where much of it is grown in ponds near the river. The corn was from a grocery-store frozen bag. So dinner was as semi-local as I could make it.

It is fun to try and figure out how much you can do with what you have. I'm really glad I do not have to live on what I can grow, but it is fun to grow it.

Hypercompe scribonia

While I was digging up the sweet potatoes I found this little wooly caterpillar in the leaves and carefully set it aside for further study. It will hopefully grow up into a Giant Leopard Moth!

God had fun making insects, undeniably. The larva has long, fur-like shiny bristles and red rings on its skin. The adult is white with black leopard spots, iridescent blue, white, and black legs, and an orange, blue, and black body. What a magnificent creature! It is worth the loss of a few marigolds to find one of these.

Sweet Potatoes, Baby!

Here is last year's crop of sweet potatoes. I was pleased to find that planting the slips sprouting from a store-bought sweet potato gone too long in the pantry actually produced potatoes in our clay soil!

Here is this year's crop (plus a few more dug this afternoon). It is now

drying/curing in the attic. This is a little over 10 pounds of sweet potatoes. Why so many more? I dug 2 or 3 bags of store-bought "garden soil" into the main bed this year, along with compost and lots of leaves. Also and more critically, I buried the roots of each slip in a large clump of potting soil, so the roots could push through. Even so, I found some larger narrow ones growing in the clay, so the soil is gradually improving. It would take years of patient soil amendment to really get this right. I planted these in the shade, in the wettest part of the bed in a very wet year, and it has been quite cool, so I did not expect much. I only dug up 2 rotten ones! God blesses us in many ways.

Quiet Days

We've had our first frost, but it was light here in the city and hit very few of my plants. It seemed to knock back the cabbage worms a little, though. We actually had a full week of sun this past week for the first time in ages! Gorgeous weather. I've only harvested a few ounces of tomatoes so far this month. I wanted to bring in the sweet potatoes today, but it probably will not happen.

Husband and I are both sick. No, it is not the over-hyped swine flu, though I'm sure every sniffle at the doctors' offices is being reported as swine flu. This is a sinus infection, without fever or GI involvement. We're sleeping it off, and using lots of tissues, and hoping to get back out in the sun soon.

Kids These Days

Imagine! November first, and the jack o'lanterns escaped unscathed! Gorgeous day. We went to the park again to watch happy dogs chase balls and humans chase frisbees. People were reading and napping in the warm sunshine. Costumed percussionists grooved up at the edge of the war memorial. A fire breather was there, spitting fire for the masses. The ice cream truck was available in case of emergency. What fun!