Pruning Day

I checked the weather yesterday and it looked like it wasn't going to get really cold for the next several days. Fruit trees should be pruned in late winter, a few weeks from now but I'm not a patient person. And, I had a 3 day weekend and was looking for something to do. If it gets really cold soon after pruning, you can loose some flower buds but, like I said, the weather said it wasn't going to get real cold. So I did some pruning yesteday afternoon.

Of course it's 24º now, 16 wind chill, and it's supposed to get down to 20º overnight. Did I mention it wasn't supposed to get cold? This is my whole problem with the global warming thing. The same people that can't tell me if it's going to be cold tomorrow somehow know that the polar ice caps will be melted in 10 years. Of course it's not "global warming" anymore. Now it's "climate change". It's good to hedge your bets.

But I digress.

I pruned the peaches and apple trees.

The apples were the worst. I bought a couple of "5-in-1" apple trees a few years ago. Five different varieties are grafted onto one trunk and they're supposed to grow 5 varieties of apples. Not knowing which branch was which, I haven't ever pruned these the way they should be pruned. I was afraid of cutting off a whole variety. But I've only gotten golden delicious apples so this year I pruned. It will take a couple of years to get them right, if I ever do.

apple tree before and after

When trimming peach trees, the goals are to open up the middle to let sunlight in and allow air circulation, reduce the amount of fruit so the tree isn't overwhelmed, and keep everything at picking height. A wide, open, weird looking tree is what you're going for.

peach tree

The real trick is to just cut off almost everything that's growing upward. All of the branches pointing toward the sky were new growth last year. I'll cut the same off again next year.

another peach

I know the "after" picture looks worse than the "before" but that's how the experts do it and they must be right or they couldn't be experts...just like those weather guys.

Help Wanted

Completely unrelated to gardening. But is is January and 32º outside.

I've got a position available for a maintenance mechanic at work. I'm reviewing the roughly 80 applications we've received so far for this position and thought I'd share a few job hunting tips while they're fresh in my mind.

This batch of tips is about filling out the application:

Tip #1: Never say "None"
You know that line on the application that asks you to list your skills? Well you must know how to do something. I would like to have you write that you can troubleshoot something, preferably stuff with important sounding names but I may settle for less. I know you have some skill. Obviously you can write if you're filling this out so write "read and write English" or anything. Don't write in that you have no skills. Even if it's true, leave this line blank.

Tip #2: You may have to embellish a little.
If you've had 6 jobs in the past 3 years, and were fired from each one, find a creative way to say that. Don't lie, I'll call your references and find out but at least a creative answer may get your foot in the door. That little box that says "Reason for Leaving" can be the end of your chances if you write the word "Terminated" six consecutive times on the same page. Tip #2a. Writing "Terminated because I don't have a ride to work" is also a poor idea.

Tip #3: Color inside the lines
I have 80 applications to look at. Each application is three pages. That's more reading than I did in my entire education from Kindergarten through College. If you write more, I won't read it. We give you enough space to make your point, be conservative. Don't waste paper, it doesn't grow on trees. If you make your three page application 6 pages long by adding more stuff than fits, I will assume you have a problem following directions or that you might not do well working in an environment with rules. But mostly I'm going to think that you're an awful bore and I don't want to work with you.

Tip #4 Don't confuse me
Writing "I grew up learning everything I know" makes me think that your learning may have stopped early. Both because you say so and because I can tell so.

Tip #5 Anticipate my questions.
If you live in a different state, not even one that's within a full tank of gas from the job, why are you applying?

The Worst Purchase Ever

Not much gardening happening now. It's in the 30's on most days and 20's at night. We just came out of a few days in the teens so gardening is on hold. But I have something related to write about anyway. It may be a stretch but I'm going to write about a food chopper.

I bought this food chopper this evening at Walmart to chop vegetables so it is 's at least some what garden related; since my garden is where I fail to grow vegetables that I could, at least in theory, chop.

I've seen these on TV. You put an onion on the cutting board, slip this "handiest kitchen gadget you'll ever own" over the onion, hit the handle a few times and a matrix of blades turns the onion into minced onion in seconds. It's all done inside the chopper so there's no mess and I don't have to cry.




Well I got my $8 prize home and decided to give it a try. Had half an onion left over from dinner in the fridge, put it on the chopping board, and opened the box my new chopper came in. I spent the next 15 minutes trying to figure out where all these parts go. Me. I actually once attended college for engineering and I fix mechanical things for a living and I was practically beaten by a late night TV kitchen gadget.

After a couple of false starts, I figured out where all the parts went and started chopping. After the first chop, having spent 20 years fixing all sorts of things mechanical, I realized something wasn't right. My onion wasn't chopped, it was stuck in the blades going up and down with each press of the "soft grip" handle. A few more chops should free it I thought, it didn't. So I had to lift it up, spilling a few bits of onion that were no longer contained in the "easy to clean" container on the cutting board. A minute with a knife to free the stuck veggie from the blades and I was back in business, except the spilled pieces prevented me from getting it down where it belonged on the cutting board, but with the same skill it takes to get Rosie O'Donnell fitted at the Men's Warehouse, I tucked the loose pieces inside and chopped again.




Stuck again. And yet a third attempt: stuck again. What a piece of crap. Normally, when I buy something for $8 at Walmart, I know it might not be the Rolls Royce of kitchen gadgets. But this one makes me mad because it's so bad that it has to be on purpose. This thing is so awfully designed, in so many ways, that there is no way anybody at Farberware (oh yeah, I'm naming names) believed it was anything other than complete junk.

My list of complaints:

• The convoluted blade design has a narrow little uncleanable area at each bend. I can't even get the tiny nipple brush from my son's bottles in there.
  
• The blade falls off the shaft, both for cleaning and to frustrate the user.
• There's a worthless, plastic thing with a cut out the exact shape as the blade that the blade has to be inserted through. Not a problem if the blade was a circle or square, or some shape other than a zigzag.
• There are more parts than it needs, a lot more parts than it needs and when you "open for cleaning" it comes apart like a swiss watch.
• Oh, and there's the little detail with it not chopping anything.

Farberware (Farberware, Farberware, Farberware) must have gotten a cheap batch of laid off Chernobyl engineers to design this one.

Email me if you'd like to buy a slightly used food chopper...only $10.

UPDATE: Just be fair, we tried chopping some carrot. Still a piece of crap!

The War Goes On

I thought it was done, at least for a few months. It's been quiet. No insects and the diseases are dormant for the winter. except for the skunk and possum that I have to chase away from the cat's food dish every night, I thought my battle with nature was taking a break until Spring.

The whitest Skunk I've ever seen.

This morning I found two of my newest fruit trees rubbed by deer. They like to rub their antlers on small trees. I've heard that they do it to rub the velvet like fuzz off the antlers, I've heard they do it to mark their territory. I don't care why they do it but I want it to stop.

Fatally wounded Nectarine

They've gotten all the way around my only Nectarine and gotten half way around my Granny Smith apple tree. I 'm pretty sure the Nectarine's a goner. The apple might make it if the damage stops.

I had a couple of old signs in my workshop from a painting contractor we hired several years ago. One of those made a couple of field expedient tree guards this morning. With a thick band of duct tape to secure them, I hope at least one of these trees survives.



We've already had a couple of hard frosts.



Cold weather hit us early this year. I got out my mower this morning and cut down the few still standing corn stalks and cut down the Asparagus.

a tangle of asparagus before mowing

I'm home from work for a few days so I hope to get some winter work done in the Garden. The strawberries got a layer of straw mulch a few weeks ago from the majority of a bale left over from a scarecrow 4H project.

strawberries under straw

I've got grape vines that need to have all their vines removed down to just 4 short main branches. Once they're pruned, the vines are nothing more than 4 sticks with little barbs left along each one.



And the fruit trees will need a hard pruning. All of the branches growing up will be removed to help the tree grow spreading and as flat to the ground as possible. This keeps the fruit from overwhelming the roots and allows good sunlight and air penetration. 80% of the wood will be removed to grow back next year. I'll post before and after pictures when it's all done.

a peach tree that needs a hard pruning.

Hiding in my own house

Yesterday was my 9 year old daughter's birthday. Or maybe yesterday it was my 8 year old daughter's birthday. Either way, she's 9 now and was 8 a couple of day's ago.

Today, Saturday, we had her birthday party. Mostly family and 4 girls from her class. Very nice girls, friendly, smart, and all confident and very polite. This is the first time I've met these girls and I'm glad to know that my daughter has such nice friends. But the news is not all good.

They're sleeping over tonight. A slumber party of 4th graders, in my living room. And I'm trapped hiding in my office. I want to go to bed, but I know they won't so I can't. The ruler of the roost, master of all I see, hiding from 9 year olds. Nice 9 year olds, but scary at the same time.

Every time I walk through the room, one of them tries to show me some amazing talent. It's late and they've already passed the sillies. I was hoping the next phase was sleep but it's not. The next phase is showing off. I've seen how good one of the girls is at making spring sounds with her mouth. I've seen how good another can touch her elbows together behind her back. Not to be outdone, her twin sister can do the same. Another can really spread her toes wide, another can point her big toe in an opposite direction of the others. If could do any of these things, I'd keep it to myself. I try to be encouraging and kind with phrases like "Way to go...touching your elbows together....that'll get you far." and "Nice freaky toes...way to hustle". But they see through it. They see my deer in the headlights stare as I look around for a way out. I think they're just messing with me.

So, here I am hiding in my office, posting because I've already read the whole internet to pass the time and I've run out of things to do.

David and Goliath

The Methodist Church in Elmer held the pumpkin chucking competition today. Our church entered for the first time. We had no idea what to expect from the other churches, we had tried to do some recon but got nowhere. So with no idea what anyone else was building, we designed ours to fit in a pick up truck and really worked hard to get the most power we could out of our design. We were pretty proud of our little catapult and pretty excited to show it off today.

Then we saw the competition for the first time. They were not built to fit in a pickup truck. Most came in on flat bed trailers. If you look real close at the middle catapult, the tiny little one in the middle of the picture, that's ours. Click the picture for a larger image and with a magnifying glass, you might see it.




Two were so big, the teams brought a front end loader to hang the counter weights.

Them(left) us(right)

We hung our counter weight by hand.

It was a little intimidating. Being the new guys, having all the other churches commenting about the little catapult. But we had done our homework. We knew the weight of the pumpkins would be between 5 and 7 lbs. We had calculated moment of inertia of our throwing arm, we knew how much energy we were transferring to the pumpkin. We even watched video of our catapult frame by frame and calculated throwing angles, kinetic energy, and some other things. We had a well designed catapult.

As these things were towering over us, I kept thinking how much energy it would require to get a throwing arm that size rotating and how much faster our little throwing arm would accelerate. But still, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the size of these monstrous machines.

The other teams started doing a few practice throws and their catapults sure looked slow compared to ours. But slow on a 25' arm might still beat our little 12' throwing arm. My team wanted to do a couple of practice shots too. I suggested that we just wait and see what the others could do. We already know what ours can do and I was starting to believe that if we didn't win, at least we'd make a good showing and I wanted to surprise people. There were a few comments in the crowd about the church with the little catapult not throwing any pumpkins.

team Shiloh

We nervously walked around for two hours waiting for the competition to start. There was a lot to do. There was a live band, hot dogs and hamburgers, baked goods, several kids games to play, a pumpkin seed spitting contest (the winner was over 29'...wow), and a skillet throwing contest. There were two hay rides running continuously. You could even enter a scare crow making contest where participants scrambled to stuff scattered clothes with straw. The church that put this on did a really great job.

It was finally 4:00, pumpkin chucking time. Each team got three throws. To make things go faster, every other catapult would fire together. That meant catapults 1,3, and 5 would be launching at the same time. We were catapult #3. After a 10 count, we pulled the release cord. The giant machines to our right and left slowly slung around while ours whipped the pumpkin down range. Our pumpkin sailed past the other two. The second and third rounds went just about the same.

I was tending the catapult but lots of people I knew in the crowd told me later that everybody was talking about the little catapult and how it was beating all the big catapults. We hadn't seen the numbers, they had three men in the field who would run to the landing spots of the pumpkins. Someone with a rangefinder would then measure the distance to the men and write it all down on a chart. We hadn't seen the numbers but we thought we were out in front. It seemed like the guys marking the landing spots kept running toward us when everybody else would fire and away from us whenever we fired.

for a very big (9M) full size video click here

The second part of the competition was the accuracy contest. They stood a scarecrow 50' from the catapults and each team had 3 chances to hit the scarecrow. It might sound easy to hit a target 50' away but keep in mind, these catapults were designed to throw hundreds of feet with trajectories going over 100' high. Hitting a 6' tall scarecrow at ground height right in front of you was completely different. We really weren't prepared.

Not knowing what to do, we dropped most of the weight off our arm, and moved our sling release pin forward about 15 degrees. We figured this would be a shorter throw and would throw pretty flat to the ground. Our first throw was a record setter...7 feet...the wrong direction.

We added some weight and tried again. It was a hard throw and a straight, flat throw just above the ground. We were the first team in the competition's 4 year history to actually hit the scarecrow. We barely nicked it's glove. It counted. We were told that we could skip our 3rd throw if we wanted to since we had our successful hit. No, we wanted a real hit. No glove nicks for us.

Our third throw took off at 50 or 60 mph and hit the scarecrow square in the middle of the chest. The pumpkin exploded, the scarecrow's 2x4 spine snapped in two. The crowd went wild. We tried to act like we felt bad about the scarecrow. We didn't, we felt great.

In the end, the little catapult from Shiloh came in first place for distance at 96 yards, came in first place for accuracy, being the only team to hit the thing (and we did it twice), and won "best all around" for winning the other two. We walked away with two trophies, and the big "best all around" trophy is on it's way to us soon.

When the competition was done, the other teams started disassembling their catapults for the ride home. The front end loaders were moving weights, winches and come-alongs were lowering timbers. Flat bed trailers and dump trucks were pulling onto the field to load the catapults for transport. Four guys picked ours up, put it in the back of a pickup and we drove away.

I think I have a plan for next year that will have twice the punch in an even smaller package.

team Shiloh with one broken scarecrow.

Moving On

It's been almost a month since I've posted. That's because the garden's done for the year and this is a gardening blog. I still plan to sit down and make up a success and failure list of everything I grew this year but not today.

Today, I'm posting about a catapult.

I got a call from my friend's sister, and cousin's wife, Val. She wanted to know if I'd be interested in helping the teenagers at the church build a catapult to compete in a pumpkin throwing contest. What a ridiculous question. This was over the summer. I said sure as long as we have two things: 1) Enough time to build it, and 2) materials or a budget for materials.

I got a second call at the beginning of October, maybe it was the very end of September asking if I was still interested because the contest was in 4 weeks. So much for enough time to build it.

I went down to the church that evening and we all talked about catapults. We drew diagrams and by the end of the evening half a dozen high school and college kids and I had a pretty good working design on paper.

I put our sketches in Cad to let the computer do all the math and dimensions so I wouldn't have to.


We all spent the week trying to find materials. Everybody on the building team had a few scraps to bring, a couple of church members offered to let us look through their lumber piles, and Val's dad dropped off a load of everything we were missing from our materials list.

The following Sunday we started building. We got a lot done, had to make a lot of design changes as we went, and it really started looking like something. We did the same thing the next Sunday.





For the second build weekend, I had the flu. I showed up to help but really wasn't much help. I am really impressed with the group of guys who worked on this. They had good ideas, and really took charge. I offered advice and helped a little but these are country kids, they knew what they were doing.

It stands about 7' tall, has a 12' throwing arm with a 9' sling attached to the end of the arm. I borrowed 540 lbs of Olympic weights from work as a counterweight.

The third weekend was last Sunday and we got together to test it and make adjustments to the weights, release angle, sling, and anything else that needed adjusting to get maximum distance for the contest. A crowd from the church showed up and brought things to throw, mostly pumpkins. I still had the flu so I showed up late and mostly just watched. The best throw was 242 feet. That's not bad. I don't think it's enough to win but for our first year entering the contest, I'm satisfied.

If you want to see the full sized video and don't mind a 7M download,
it's temporarily available here.

The competition is this afternoon. We have no idea what to expect from the other churches that are competing and we have no idea what types of catapults they'll have. Later I'll post how we did.