Repost: Threshing and Winnowing Beans

    This is a re-post of my November 6, 2010 post "Farmer Bills Threshing and Winnowing" I am once again blessed with a large amount of beans drying in the pods. 

     Last week I harvested the driest of both my "Rattlesnake" and "Kentucky Wonder" pole beans.  Some remain on both trellises of beans to dry further before harvest. 

     I placed the harvested beans on the burlap sheet I have and formed the sheet into a sort of bag, just as in the threshing process described below. Then I placed the bag inside of an old nylon mesh bag I have from my days as a youth soccer coach to carry the balls and cones etc. to practices. I then used the drawstring of the outer bag to hang the beans in the garage for further drying. 

     The threshing is for later when the rest of the beans dry and have been harvested. 

   Yesterday afternoon I went out to do something about the dried bean pods hanging from the foliage free trellised pole bean vines. Picking them all off the remains of the stems 1 by 1 is tedious enough but shelling them bean by bean afterward is beyond endurance. Trying the latter for a while I gave up and went in to find a better way. 
    In a few minutes on line I found it, using burlap as the "threshing medium" see the facebook capture.  I hot footed it to the Ace as soon as I found out they had 1 package of burlap left. I adapted the process from bags to the sheet burlap I could get quickly. I just laid out a 3' x 4' piece of it on the patio table, piled the bean plants and pods on it, and gathered the edges of the sheet into a bag tied closed with a length of twine. I found a video of the general method of threshing on You tube. I wasn't about to walk on the bag I made though. I just squished it around a bunch on the patio table, a little like kneading a big hunk of bread dough, until it felt like all the pods were broken up and emptied. A few shakes up and down later to get the beans to the bottom, grabbing handfuls of the loose plant matter out of the opened bag until I couldn't anymore without getting the beans & the THRESHING was done
     There was just enough wind after I finished threshing to try a little WINNOWING by opening the bag and forming the loaded burlap into sort of a hammock and shaking it up and down just enough to get the chaff but not much plant or pod airborne and floating away in the wind. The chaff kind of hangs in the air like dry snow. Then the wind died. Complete winnowing awaits tomorrow. See the facebook image above for the process to be used

50 years later: the "Dream" yet unfulfilled?

    Today is the 50th anniversary of a very great event for the general populace of this nation. Whereas the plight of the Negro population of this country may be somewhat less oppressive, at least in the bowels of what was considered then to be the centers of that oppression, the fact is that the separation of the people has never, not even then, been more dramatic nor more unjust. Though the racial separation may not be as dramatic, the separation of a privileged few vs the masses in the USA is far greater than 50 years ago! Who now stands as the Martin Luther King of our age of possibly even greater economic and political injustice? 

  As he said the evening before is death 5 years later, he may have "seen the promised land" but we have yet to reach it!

The Killing of a "Survivor Elm"

 OUR ONCE MAGNIFICENT 80 + Y/O ELM

   First lets answer the question the title probably gets you pondering, what's a "Survivor Elm"? It's an example of the infinitesimal percentage of the American Elm population of the United States from the beginning of the 20th century that had genetic resistance to "Dutch Elm Disease" the source of the epidemic that decimated the population of these wonderful trees in the mid to late 20th century all across the United States. "Only about one in 100,000 elms may be naturally resistant to the pathogen." 
    It's called Dutch Elm Disease here in the U.S. because "The disease was first reported in the United States in 1928, with the beetles believed to have arrived in a shipment of logs from The Netherlands destined for use as veneer in the Ohio furniture industry." The disease peaked in our Chicago area around 1960 so most of "our" survivors are 60+ years old. 
    The one dying on the parkway of my home here in La Grange Park IL, a suburb of Chicago, is probably in the 80-90 years old range. It's that magnificent specimen of the species at the center of the picture above, taken in May of 2011. This is all about that tree and what has happened to it since that photo was taken. Here it is today in the picture below, clearly dying.

    It's DYING HULK TODAY

    As soon as the white X appeared on the street side of it's main trunk that same May of 2011, I began to investigate what the reasoning was for such an obviously healthy and valuable tree being marked for removal. In that spring and the previous fall it had survived, virtually unscathed, through some of the most violent weather we had experienced since moving to our house ~30 years earlier.

1 WEEK AFTER IT'S "MARKING FOR DEATH"

    I contacted the Village about it and the Director of Public Works, the person who "marked it for death" came out to talk to me about it. His reasoning was that the "wound" shown below, that had survived the fore mentioned remarkably severe weather and he viewed as a beginning split, was likely to fail in a storm and be a Village liability risk per possible damages to property or persons under it in such an event and they had to avoid that risk.

THE "OFFENDING WOUND"

    That wound was in fact the not yet completely closed over wound inflicted by some vandal a decade and a half earlier. That vandal had used something to rip off about a 1" wide strip of bark from that crotch to the ground as well as another strip from about that height to ground on the side facing the house. He or she had also done similar damage to the Norfolk Pine that used to stand tall in the middle of our front yard. The pine had died and been removed by us years earlier.

    Almost immediately I began a campaign to save the tree. In the process came across the then US Forest Service run program to identify, map, clone and propagate "Survivor Elm" trees for the preservation of the arboreal heritage and environmental health of our nation. I registered it but never managed  to catch, remove and send the budding stage cuttings from it they were using to clone them.      

     I also began a series of contacts with the Village and got a local paper's reporter to do a piece on the whole business including some info about the Survivor Elm project.  The article made page 2 of the paper and included the picture of  3 generations of  "The von Rentzell boys" shown below. 

 THE VON RENTZELL BOYS

    I contacted and got an evaluation from a professional arborist of my own and got the Village to have their arborist to take a second look at the "problem". I had also investigated by observation and come up with a trimming plan to relieve specific torsion from exposure to the dominant winds from summer storms when it's fully leafed out limbs would be most affected by them and which would be the likeliest source of any such "failure" of the crotch involved. See the picture below of that plan which I e-mailed to the Public Works director and Village manager as well as that reporter.

The "PLAN"

    The "plan" didn't fly with the Village but all that effort I put forth plus the publicity did convince them not to take the whole tree. They did, however, insist on removal of the whole portion of the tree pointed over the street. I agreed to accept that which appears now to have been contributory to the tree's demise. Here it is after the major sub-trunk removal by the Village's tree service.

 The Village's SURGERY results

 

    Obviously, the amount of the tree's live tissue removal was HUGE. 2012 brought a severe, nearly endless mid-summer heat wave. The combination of the 2 factors left the tree severely stressed and vulnerable to infestation, hence it's current, DOOMED to removal state.

My Coffee: Prescribed by Dr. "Kona Joe" Alban

     Well, it seems to be a "coffee" kind of morning. Lower G.I. thunderstorms are 24 hrs past and I can again enjoy a good "cup of joe". It is as of yet not "Kona Joe" though. The simple fact is that the Kona coast is home to a host of coffee farms that grow some of the best coffee beans in the world. 

 

   "Kona Joe" is grown in a unique style by a practicing  Orthopedic surgeon from a family known for producing some excellent wines in California.

 

   He appreciated the potential in using growing methods very similar to that of grape vines as nobody else had ever. Increased yield volume and quality resulted. It is VERY appealing to my techie / gardener mindset.

 

   As one might expect from a blog by an orthopedic surgeon who just happens to run a coffee farm in a region known for some of the best coffee in the world, I found a post on the positive effects of coffee drinking on long term mental health, specifically reduction in the odds of contacting Alzheimer's Disease. 

   Now I need to find somewhere around here to purchase  "Dr Alban's finest". Ofcourse I could make trips to "the Big Island" a yearly routine....Not likely.

Lawnmower Motor Maintenance: NOT!

      Motor maintenance....motor maintenance...we don't need no stinking motor maintenance! "We" are all of us who've made the wise move from gasoline engine power to cordless electric lawn mowers. It's all about the gasoline engine and involves messy / smelly motor oil, gasoline, fuel stabilizers and air filters and cleaning and adjusting spark plugs. NONE of that has ANY place in the lives of cordless electric lawnmower owners /operators!  

     For the majority of homeowners, size and power options are every bit as good today for cordless electrics as for gas engine models, unlike ~ 6-10 years ago. Their electric motors require NO MAINTENANCE! And quiet? My Neuton 14" cordless electric is so quiet I need not worry about waking neighbors with early morning mowing.

      One important detail to look for which not all models employ is an in-use removable battery pack. NONE of these batteries for cordless electric function like to be "short cycled" (run for less than complete discharge before being re-charged) Buy a spare battery with the mower so you can run it to full discharge and then swap battery packs. That is pretty much just like refilling the old mower's gas tank from the can of spare gas all gas powered mower owners are OBLIGATED to keep around. 

      One more thing to look for: Rechargeable batteries don't like to be "overcharged" ( being  charged even after they are at full charge) and are robbed of energy storage capacity and lifespan by it just like with “short cycling”, so look for one with a battery charger that has either or both auto-shutoff at full charge and /or full charge indication. The latter is usually color change of an LED light on the charger. Most makers have figured this out and met the need with both features but I'm not sure all have.

      If you choose a Neuton, as a bonus there's a trimmer edger attachment that works really well and is super easy to operate.