making my own plates

Almost like being on TV

2011-10-16T22:35:00.002-05:00

Last week I was grateful to have the chance to explain what I do with my free time at work. http://globalphysicsdept.posterous.com/#!/nathan-moore-cognitive-acceleration

Kimchee

2011-10-16T22:29:00.003-05:00

We went up to the garden for probably the last time this year as a family. Our friend John, who owns the land, offered us lots of Daikon Radishes, which I'm turning into Kimchee.

The green layers are something like mustard greens, although the proper name is Japanese. The last time I tried this the chickens wouldn't even try the results. Maybe better luck this time?

Tomorrow night is probably for chili peppers. We have about a diaper-box full of Jalapenos that need to be turned into Escabeche.

Old Exams

2011-01-02T23:10:00.002-06:00

I decided to put all my old algebra and Calculus based intro exams on the web. They're here: old exams .

I've also been reading about slide rules. I still don't understand how they actually work, (ie, I don't know that I could build one out of bamboo). All of the examples we do in class though only require 2-3 digits of precision, so I've been thinking about using it as my only calculation aid in class this spring. We'll see how/if that goes.

Henry Thomas

2010-06-24T18:08:00.003-05:00

Well, the fertility and hatch viability of chicken eggs turned out to be very hard to predict. Oh well.

The new addition as of last week, Henry Thomas, picture below. He and his mother are healthy. No sibling rivalry yet (so far as we can tell...).

Making Name Tags in LaTeX

2010-05-12T21:35:00.006-05:00

With a colleague, I've been organizing a meeting. Meetings need nametags, and I didn't think to buy the avery inserts (5392), for the plastic avery nametag holders (74520) that we have on hand.

Enter LaTeX. There wasn't anything on google that immediately solved my problem, so I messed around with the tabular environment (you can insert figures in tables - I didn't know that...) until I produced the nametag below.

The latex code for this nametag follows:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper,twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage[left=.5cm,right=.5cm,top=1cm,bottom=1cm,noheadfoot]{geometry}
\pagestyle{empty}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{multirow}

\begin{document}

\begin{table}[ht]
\begin{tabular}{|ccc|}
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\tiny Using Inquiry Approaches to Improve Student Leaning in Science and Math} \\
&&\\
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{{\Huge Nathan Moore} } \\
\multirow{3}{*}{\includegraphics[height=1.5in]{minnesotastatelogo_CMYK.pdf}}
&&
\multirow{3}{*}{\includegraphics[height=1.5in]{wsu_logo.pdf}}\\
&Winona &\\
&&\\
&Physics&\\
&&\\&&\\&&\\&&\\
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\tiny Winona State University, 17-18 May, 2010}\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

...

\end{document}

Greenhouse Temperature since the Winter Solstice

2010-03-27T11:07:00.002-05:00

I finally got the data from the greenhouse. Temperature readings were taken at 5min intervals from about 23 November until early/mid March. A plot of the data follows. If you like, the data is also available online at Google Docs:

No time for analysis yet. Files online at: http://toulouse.physics.winona.edu/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=talks:clasp_f09

Another incuabtion

2010-03-17T12:47:00.004-05:00

The picture below is from some Dark Cornish Eggs that finished on Monday. The red X's mark eggs which did not hatch (most of them still had substantial yolk, indicating early mortality). It looks like there's a consistent problem with one of the middle rows. I'm not sure now if it is related to the evaporation tray below or the fan/heater above.

As before, the data from this hatch is on Google Docs.

Initial Egg Incubationxxxxcccccccccccc

2010-02-28T09:32:00.003-06:00

The hatch data from the initial egg incubation is available online at Google Docs. I was busy with the local science fair this week and only today had time to look at the data. Comments later. For now, see the picture below which marks the non-hatching eggs with a red X.

Egg incubation, 18 February

2010-02-18T09:35:00.002-06:00

I massed the eggs again this morning before going to work, the data is available online, via Google Docs. The egg mass continues to drop, the eggs are now (on average) at about 86% of their original mass, though from the data at right it seems clear that this "drying out" does not occur at a universal rate.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to take masses again before they start to hatch. The chickens position themselves in a rather specific way to pip out of the shell and taking them all out and putting them on the scale during that process might really screw up my hatch rate.

I did take the eggs off the automatic turner today, and I also made the above image with Gnuplot (here are the instructions).

chickens in the greenhouse

2010-02-17T08:02:00.000-06:00

It works.

Note the thermometer reading from yesterday. It was about 20F outside when I took this picture at 9am.

To keep the eggs clean and to give the birds a roost off the ground, I built a second nest box for the hens that are in the greenhouse. Since the birds in the greenhouse are just fed corn and vegetable waste from Rochester Wholesale, I split my flock into about 5 birds each and have been cycling them between the two coops (one in the garage, a second in the greenhouse).

Its not really warm enough yet to

plant things in the greenhouse.

In 2-3 more weeks I'll put all the birds back in the garage and start beets, spinach, radishes etc in the greenhouse. I suppose there's some risk that the chicken manure will burn the soil sufficiently for nothing to grow in the green house, but here's hoping that doesn't happen.

I'm also about to send in my seed order to Sand Hill, and have resolved to save more see this year. I'm not sure if my grocery bill is really reduced by $70 by garden produce, but a seed order of that much seems like like an expense I should try to reduce.

The really hard seeds to save are cucumbers and squash, the flowers of which need to be hand pollinated and taped shut, and come from the seed co. in a packet of 25 for $2.75 I suppose its hard work for them too...

Bantam incubation, day 13

2010-02-13T21:13:00.000-06:00

I had some free time this morning and massed all the eggs again. The data is online here: Google spreadsheet

The eggs are now at roughly 88% of

original mass, but the data doesn't seem as clear as before - see the graph at right. The yellow/orange data is the egg mass at 7 February, the blue data is from today, 13 February. The eggs still have another week - so I assume that the mass will drop to about 80-85% of the original value, but some of the eggs have already dropped by as much as 18% of their original weight.

So what's the takeaway? So far, I have

no idea which of the eggs won't

hatch, which was one of the things I was originally wondering about. I will guess however that the eggs that have lost the most mass (by percentage) thus far will also be the eggs to hatch the earliest.

I think the "exponential decrease" bit I was talking about in my last post is also not supported by the fit lines I generated in the first image.

Bantam incubation, day 7

2010-02-07T22:31:00.001-06:00

After returning from a superbowl party, I got around to massing the eggs tonight. Incubation (day 0) started on 31 January, so Feb 7 is day 7 (convenient!). As can be seen from the data below, it looks like most of the eggs lost about 2grams of mass over the 7 days, with an average decrease in mass of about 5-7%. Oddly enough, it looks like all of the eggs are "drying out" at the same rate, and accordingly, I think all of the embroyo's are developing. I didn't expect this at all! I was imagining that I'd see sharp differences between the eggs that don't develop and those that hatch by this time.

After massing all of the eggs (masses are +/- 0.1 gram, data available online here: Here's the google doc), I filled up one side of the incubator and put the eggs back on the automatic turner.

This first figure is a histogram (a frequency plot) of the amount of mass each egg lost over 7 days. From the graph, you can see that the avgerage loss per egg was a little under 2 grams, and that the most common loss was around 1.7 grams. I've read in the standard "howto" books that eggs that are not developing don't loose much mass. Based on that idea, all of the eggs seem to be doing ok.

Initially, I wondered if there would be clear evidence that some of the eggs are not developing. I made this plot of fractional change in mass vs the starting mass to see if the smaller eggs (for example) were losing virtually no mass (and accordingly should be tossed onto the compost). As the data shows, if decrease in mass is proportional to the health of an egg, you can't simply filter out the small eggs to have a better hatch rate.

The final image plots egg mass after 7 days as a function of the initial mass. As the graph clearly shows, all eggs are losing mass at a rate proportional to their original mass. This was a fun graph to look at. The upper line in the graph is the simple y=x, and describes what no change in egg mass will look like. As time goes on, I exxpect all egg masses to drop (down) in this image. It will be interesting to see if that pans out.

Kraut and eggs

2010-01-31T21:06:00.000-06:00

Not together of course - yuk.

I checked the kraut tonight that I started in the 4 gallon pail back in early November. Still really salty, covered in "bloom" as Katz describes it, and after you get through the first inch of brown stuff, it tastes like "real" sauerkraut from the can. Given the live cultures on my kitchen culture, it might be healthier than the stuff in the can.

Also, I have another batch of banty eggs that I started incubating tonight. For a change of pace, I decided to mass all 36 eggs with a triple-beam balance. I've read that as eggs develop they lose something like 10% of their mass through the developing chick's respiration. My plan is to mass this set of eggs every 3 days or so (over a 21 day incubation period) to see if this is actually true (I'm guessing it is).

Further, I think the loss of moisture should be somewhat exponential, because as the chick grows, it requires more food, and food is proportional to respiration.

Here's the data so far. Looks like an average egg mass of about 1oz (30grams), so 2 banty eggs to 1 "Large" egg holds up..

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tr-jG2Z9GrnYZ4cYraRJnwg&single=true&gid=0&output=html

The eggs came from two weeks of laying from a small flock of 6 or so bantam hens. I've been looking at the histogram of egg masses and have wondered if there's a way to figure out how many of those 6 hens were actually laying.

Snow

2009-12-08T22:11:00.000-06:00

Lots of snow tonight. I shoveled off the back sidewalk about an hour ago and already I can't see the ground - falling at a rate of about 1" per hour right now.

I bought a snowblower via craigslist earlier this fall and am excited to use it. I was really into non-gasoline lawn implements earlier in my life (a reel mowers, snow shovel, garden hoe, etc) but of late I've come to appreciate modern convenience. The tiller was a near necessity this summer given the large garden at our friend's place, and the thought of lifting more early-march wet snow makes my back start twitching. I miss the reel mower for the lawn a little, but the chickens love the bagger that's attached to the mower we now use regularly in the summer.

winter feeding

2009-12-06T23:52:00.000-06:00

I drove up to the hives this saturday to feed the bees more syrup. The recipe is 20 lbs of beet sugar (from Walmart), a 4 gallon pail from the grocery store, and enough warm tap water to make the sugar dissolve almost completely. Its somewhere between medium and heavy syrup recipes I've seen on the web.

One of the hives (pink) had completely drained their feeder, and the other hive looked less interested in the syrup (lots of dead bugs in their tray). After filling the pails I squatted down and listened to each hive. Although I saw no flying bees, each hive was humming - I assume shivering to stay warm on that 20F day.

I walked around in the garden and was somewhat surprised (and happy) to see that the Mizuna mustard was still growing strong.

greenhouse

2009-11-15T20:19:00.000-06:00

Last weekend, while making breakfast, I decided that I should build a greenhouse in the backyard. The Kale, chard, beets, and cabbage all have done quite well, and as the fall has been quite warm, they hadn't yet frosted out.

I settled on this design from North Carolina State (Extension Service), mainly because a few photos on the web made the structure look functional and easy.

My total cost was a little over $100, the single biggest expense being the cheap 4mil plastic that I'll have to replace each year. These films degrade under ultra-violet radiation (sunlight) and I think there'd be little benefit from the enclosure in July anyway.

My real goal is to actually succeed in starting strong eggplant and peppers this spring, and the structure needed to be finished by the first hard freeze so...

I puttered around on monday and tuesday, and we had wednesday off. I ended up finishing the sheathing on Thursday morning at about 12:30am. Thankfully, none of my neighbors complained about the floodlight I used to finish the job (I can't have a sheet of plastic flapping in the wind all day while I'm at work.)

Coleman suggests that every layer of plastic gives you about 1.5 USDA climatic zones, which means part of my backyard is the equivalent of southern Missouri.

Well, I guess it's time to write someting

2009-09-30T21:31:00.000-05:00

I spent the last few weeks writing a grant for submission to the National Science Foundation. Two other faculty and I have a pretty good idea about how to improve first-year experiences, and we asked the taxpayers to fund it. We'll see what happens (in 6 months - NSF review panels are notoriously slow).

Since I last put something here our family has started keeping bees. They're wonderful - I love every last one of the eighty thousand or so that we have. Bees are kind of like apple trees though - you start out buy buying a few pounds of workers and two queens in April, and the colonies don't really become sufficiently established to produce a honey crop in the first year. Earlier in September we extracted a few frames of honey that tastes, well, like honey. Watching the bees though is quite hypnotizing - with practice you can notice the blobs of pollen on the bee's legs as the come in for a landing on the bottom board.

I'd really love to keep hives in my backyard...

2008-12-18T00:17:00.000-06:00

When we first moved into out present house the garage had working electricity. The circuit powered a garage door motor, a few outlets, and one dim lightbulb. At that time, I didn't really have the time or inclination to work out there, and about a year later I realized that the electricity no loner worked. In the intervening time, we had dug up most of the back yard for a vegetable patch, and the present theory is that the feed wires were shorted out while I spaded over the potato bed.

This really wasn't a big deal for a while. We mostly park the cars outside, and used the garage for storage. Lately though, with the addition of a chicken coop and a few woodworking tools, the need for electricity became a little more pronounced, and presently, the garage is "plugged in" to an outlet on our back porch. Aside from tripping over the extension cord every few weeks, this was an acceptable arrangement. The table saw doesn't draw more than 4-5amps, and the chicken lights in the garage are all compact flourescent, so the current draw is minimal.

S. has asked me to build a bookshelf for her as a Christmas present. This means that I need to start planing some of the stock I bought at an auction last fall, which resulted in me walking down to the basement to re-set the breaker every few passes on the thickness planer I scrounged at another sale this fall.

I can't imagine that the neighbors appreciate the noise, and so I ended up spending much of the night planing oak stock with a beautiful old jack plane that I found at another auction over the summer. My main text for woodworking thus far has been Watson's "Furniture Making, Plain and Simple", which mostly eschews any tool that plugs into the wall. I'm now off to read the section on surface planing (page 28).

Tire sandals

2008-12-10T11:26:00.001-06:00

Cool!

Given that I have new snow tires coming in a few days....

http://www.hollowtop.com/sandals.htm

My Nader/Gonzalez shirt came in the mail last week...

2008-12-01T07:20:00.000-06:00

Thanksgiving holidays are often trouble. Although it is great to see family, the chickens won't water themselves over the long weekend, and imposing on friends to check the feed is not pleasant. Accordingly, I spent evenings of the last few weeks building a chicken coop in the garage for the birds. I sectioned off a corner, firred-out and insulated the exterior walls, and covered them with poly film. The chicken-touching surface outside the plastic vapor barrier is my local Menard's entire selection of damaged plywood (at $5/sheet !)

Thus far, the birds seem happy. I've kept them shut up in the coop over the weekend, and will eventually open up a dog door for them to get outside. My only long-term concern is that the manure load may accelerate the inevitable rotting away of the sill plate that always seems to happen in old garages. I covered the structrual parts of the coop with poly and green-treated, and eventually I may cast a concrete barrier to keep the manure from leaching through to the outside walls of the garage. For now though, I'm going to see where the manure builds up.

Jacob Omund

2008-10-01T19:05:00.000-05:00

Born 30 September, 2008. He's roughly 1 gallon in volume, 3.8kg in mass, healthy, and very hungry. Praise God for that. For the etymology of his middle name, click here.

Processing Recipe for Tomatillos

2008-09-09T11:13:00.000-05:00

From the nice people at the University of Minnesota Extension Service:

Use clean fresh green tomatillos with papery husks.

Husk and rinse tomatillos and boil whole for 5-10 minutes. Process whole, do not peel, seed, or chop etc.

Remove from water, drain briefly, and pack in jars.

Add 1 Tablespoon lemon juice to pints, 2 T to Quart jars.

Fill remaining space in jars with boiling water, leaving 1/2 inch headspace.

If you're using a boiling water canner, process pints for 45 minutes, quarts for 50 minutes. For a pressure canner, process at 15 pounds for 10 minutes.

If you've got a ph meter lying around, the safe pH for processing is 4.2 (or lower). To measure the pH, the food scientist at the U suggested crushing a ready to process (ie, boiled) tomatillo and mixing 1:1 with recently boiled distilled water.

The Peas are done, time for beans

2008-07-04T10:51:00.000-05:00

Although the USDA's climate map differs, experience suggests that I live in zone 5 rather than zone 4 (as the map would suggest).

I spent yesterday afternoon grading an exam, pulling out the peas, which are mostly done, and planting wax beans. My backyard garden is quite small, and I seem to get reasonable results from sowing several things successively. So far as I can tell, beans, beets, and chard don't really care when in the summer you plant them, so they make a great 2nd crop to follow things like radishes, peas, or lettuce.

Below, some "Royal Burgandy" bush beans that follows a patch of (absolutely nasty) Collard Greens. I like Mustard Greens - especially sauted with eggs, and turnip greens are also ok, but I'll never plant collards for human consumption again.

The one trick I've found useful for planting beans in mid summer is soaking them in a glass of water for a few hours before planting. This really speeds germination in otherwise dry soil.

Midsummer, Garlic

2008-06-30T17:37:00.000-05:00

The garlic I planted last September started to brown today, so I pulled the whole row, save one plant, out to dry. Garlic is really easy to grow, although the stuff from my backyard really doesn't taste any different than the stuff that comes from HyVee. Of course, my garlic doesn't sprout in the cupboard like theirs, so I guess there is some benefit from home-grown.

I'll have to manure a new bed in august for next year's crop. With luck, the local coffee shop will have enough grounds built up for me to not need to have to buy the composted stuff from Menards.

The chickens are still working on the lawn - I'm guessing I'll need to move their coop by the end of the week.

Rejoice, We Conquer (sort-of)

2008-06-29T09:39:00.000-05:00

No word yet on how long it takes three pullets to denude a 4x8 section of lawn.

I finally finished the "portable" coop last night and the 3 chicks we have left are now out of the garage. This is a big relief, as this is one of several house projects that have been dragging on for too long. The coop is over-engineered, and is probably strong enough to take a 4" tree branch or a Northern Michigan snow load. This makes it to heavy to pick up and move, although it is easy to drag around.

a chicken tractor

2008-06-18T22:46:00.000-05:00

I've been teaching an intro-level physics class this June and have been keeping busy in the evenings with some amateur contracting projects. In May there was a little plumbing associated with the water softener, and for most of June I've been waiting for some permanent steel columns to arrive to shore up some beams in the basement. We also hatched out another 22 or so Wyandotte mutts about 2 weeks ago, and now all but 3 are sold.

2 of the remaining chickens reside with a student (in his apartment!) and the lone rooster lives alone in our garage.

This loneliness on his part has motivated me to work on a "chicken tractor", a movable coop (with no bottom) that you drag around your backyard. Pictures follow:

Also, I was on MPR this June. The audio engineers there are genius. In no way did I sound as cogent as they presented me.

Sunday Paper

2008-05-28T10:16:00.000-05:00

We still get the Minneapolis Star Tribune, but lately its been of fairly mediocre quality. Over the weekend I started reading the NY Times online. Its fantrastic how much information the paper contains, and I also love that if you double-click a word in the article, a pop-up window containing the definition of the word appears. What a cool idea!

One of the articles that inspired this note was an article on mementos that the different presidential campaigns should adopt. My favorite logo is below:

more eggs and a commissioning

2008-05-11T22:53:00.000-05:00

The Banty chicks hatched this past week and after a few mediocre responses to my craigslist ad, I ended up giving the 18 chicks to one of my students from the spring semester. Of the 30 or so eggs that I incubated, 21 hatched and 2 were subsequently trampled by the embden geese who were sharing the brooder. The geese are now up at my dad's place and once again, we're poultry-less.

Not to worry however - we've just returned home with two dozen eggs from our local Wyandotte mutts. The hens these eggs came from were originally bred from some beautiful blue-laced red wyandottes, which were crossed over subsequent generations with various roosters including Black Javas, Red Stars, and more Wyandottes. The resulting birds have a rose comb for the winter weather, lay well, and dress out like a standard-sized bird. I'm hoping to sell the hens from the next hatch in Winona and caponize the roosters for the freezer.

While up at my dad's place, we went to my brother's commissioning ceremony. Michael has been in ROTC for a few years, and now after graduation he'll be heading into the chemical corps and it sounds like eventually, to Iraq or Afghanistan. The commissioning was an impressive and moving ceremony, and the language used was rare in the context of my recent teaching experience. I certainly like my job and my students, but in the context of a physics classroom, at a public institution, ideas like duty, honor, and service come up infrequently. I'm very proud of my brother.

Also, it seems like a shame that stories like the ones I heard about the 12 students who were commissioned come up only rarely in the media I read. At the risk of sounding jingoistic, the Star Tribune could have made a wonderful feature article about people who chose to serve their country (by profiling ROTC students like these).

Geese and Kale

2008-04-18T22:56:00.000-05:00

The goslings seem to be doing ok. The four birds take about 3 days to drain a quart mason jar waterer, and every once in a while I see them pecking at the chick crumble in the tray. I read somewhere that you're supposed to put goslings out on pasture as soon as possible, but given the rain and the neighbor's cats I've decided that feeding them Kale from the coldframe is a good substitute. Thus far, the handfuls of greens I've been tossing them completely disappear within a few hours of feeding them. I'll have to try some of the left-over winter squash tomorrow.

Almost Finished

2008-04-16T20:33:00.001-05:00

Predictably, and with little help from me, the geese have learned to walk and drink water. It is nice that don't have to teach them to do this.

Some students came over tonight and we got the flashing for the oven finished. The end of the day today was filling the shell with vermiculite and then lighting up a bunch of charcoal briquettes in the main oven chamber. After a few more bags of vermiculite and some futzing with an oven door, we'll be done.

Also, we have geese

2008-04-15T16:05:00.001-05:00

I do not anticipate the officials' visit with pleasure.

Them: "Sir, you're not allowed to keep geese in this city."
Me: "What about all the college students across the street who talk loudly after drinking beer on the weekends. Geese do not drink beer, and only talk loudly when the sun is up."
Them: "That's different... "

Ollie loved the geese this afternoon right up to the point when one of them pooped on her blue dress (which reduced her to tears for a solid 5 minutes).

Mostly-done oven

2008-04-15T09:26:00.000-05:00

A student came over last night and we finished sheathing most of the oven. With luck, more of the class will come over today and we'll finish flashing the oven and fill the shell with vermiculite.

watermelon meringue pie

2008-04-10T23:08:00.001-05:00

One of the classes I'm teaching this spring semester is "Thermodynamics", a junior level course covering all aspects of heat, engines, and the thermal probabilities that underlie much of biology and chemistry. A very similar course in our local Chemistry department is called "Physical Chemistry", the engineers sometimes call it "Heat and Mass Transfer", and most people would just call it cooking.

When I first came to my institution, I only knew what I'd experienced while a student, and so my first approaches were a lot of lecture with some homework thrown in. That was after all what I'd been through, and I escaped graduate school with a PhD, so it couldn't be all bad. Of course, "doing" is much more powerful than listening, so whenever its possible, it is nice to give students to basically "mess around with stuff until I either understand it, or it breaks", as one student described a lab I taught last fall.

While in graduate school, I found that, much like my father, I tend to dive very deep into hobbies for relatively short periods of time. Like his 6 month foray into jello-meringue pies (all jello is basically citric acid + flavor, so echto-cooler meringue is totally possible...), there was the failed clutch on a $300 SAAB that I spent $800 in parts and the better part of a summer replacing. Another year was spent brewing beer, another spring of omelette's, a winter of Indian vegetarian food, and those are just the things that I remember. I've spent much of the last year replumbing my basement, and now that the task is nearly done I'll probably need to start making wooden furniture or get really into Phish tape trading to stay sane.

Being fickle has its downsides though - some of these hobbies have been quite brief, for example I can't cogently play the banjo that I own and know how to tune. Similarly, there's a half yard of yellow gingham around the house that I bought last year, thinking that I would sew Ollie a nice spring dress...

A continual interest has been cooking, and a year or two ago I ran across the fantastic volume, "The Bread Builders" by Scott and Wing. In part, the book talks about how to build a retained heat masonry oven, which really caught my curiosity. Some related web searches led me to a few pages of ovens, and eventually I found the perfect teaching tool, the 1-hour bread oven, which is perfect for teaching because it isn't mortared together, so ideally students could study the oven, make predictions and then re-stack the oven and test their ideas.

Thus the pictures at right. The oven chamber is made out of firebrick, and the oven's roof is a slightly arched, 24"x24" slab of Rutland 601 (available at Ace Hardware). I fired the oven up about a week ago and found that although the heat retention was fantastic (the outside of the oven was at about 150F 24 hours after firing), the masonry shell convected too much heat for the inside of the oven to get up to Pizza temperature (900F).

Accordingly, I'm now working on building a wood frame and aluminum shell, that will be filled with vermiculite, a fantastic insulator. Had the heavens not opened up and dropped sleet/rain/ice on me today, the oven would be ready to fire.

Gardening

2008-03-28T22:29:00.001-05:00

Almost all the snow is gone from the backyard. I got carried away this week and pulled out all the old garden fencing and also hoed up half of the backyard garden. As Ollie's mood permits tomorrow, I'd like to plant a bunch of spinach, peas, radishes and the like in the thawed soil. Although its probably too cold for this sort of ambition, sunny ground is definitely thawed.

Ha!

2008-03-23T15:43:00.000-05:00

The Daily news liked my letter!

That's said, I'm not sure I feel honored to be in the "Others Views" section. Wouldn't "Other Opinions" be a little more grammatically safe? (I can't figure out if "Other's Views", or "Others' views is appropriate...)

Seed Starting

2008-03-02T08:29:00.000-06:00

March 1 is an absurd time to start seeds, but we're optimists about the arrival of spring. The easiest indicator of future events is to say that past events will continue. Accordingly, I think that since it didn't snow on the first day of March, the rest of March will also be snow-free, and I'll be putting Tomatoes in the ground in mid-April (unlikely I know, but I can hope).

S. and I are tire of paying for peat plugs, and I'm too cheap to buy a real soil-block maker from Johnny's, so the family went to Fleet Farm and then put together a "good-enough" solution.

Action shots below.

The varieties we planted included several tomatoes, 3 eggplant, and a number of peppers. The main challenge now seems to be keeping the cat out of the soil plugs.

Tomatoes

Costoluto Genovese (Bachmann's, back when we liven in Minneapolis)
Yellow Pear (Burpee)
Brandywine (SeedSavers)
Principe Borghese (Bachman's again)

Eggplant

Long Purple (Plantation, Menards)
Diamond and Udmalbet ( Sand Hill Preservation Center, IA)

Peppers

Hot Lemon Pepper (Burpee)
Serrano (Plantation, Menards)
Jalapeno (Plantation, Menards)
Cubanelle (Plantation, Menards)
Ancho ( Sand Hill Preservation Center, IA)

cold

2008-01-24T22:36:00.000-06:00

This morning a friend gave me his definition of cold weather. He said, "If you breathe in through your nose, and your nose sticks shut, then you can call the weather cold". This certainly seems like a fair definition to me, but I'll give another. After finishing with the dishes tonight I carried the trash out to the garage. The weather is cold enough tonight that my wet fingers stuck (froze) to the inside of the screen door handle on my way out.

Of course, the thermometer says its "only" 0F right now (apparently it was more like -20F this morning before the sun rose). For reasons I don't quite understand, my Swedish car won't start in this cold, and so I've been walking to work this week. The exercise is actually quite nice, and now I suppose I'll have something to tell the asinine "Wellness Counselor" that the Health Insurance company somehow thought would be a benefit to my health.

For dinner tonight, Oli and I made Borscht. The beets the soup requires came out of the backyard produce hole (still not frozen), and the lamb stock we made with roasted neck and shoulder bones was really excellent. Amazingly, the Ojakangas Zuchinni bread I baked on Monday is still soft (and good tasting), and the Mayflower beans I added to the soup (from out backyard no less) were really a pleasant touch. Aside from some Blue Lake beams from a few years ago, these are the first "real" dry beans I've kept with the specific intention of growing and drying. Even now, months after picking, the beans have a wonderful, vegetable-like taste. I am really amazed something so wonderful grew in my backyard. I only grew a packet worth of beans though, so this is likely my only meal with this legume (the rest are saved for spring seed).

Tonight at dinner Oli and I added a new phrase to the dinner prayer, "Jesus, please keep the people without houses warm."

2008-01-22T00:10:00.000-06:00

Its too late to still be awake, but I'm stuck on a letter of reference that I can't quite finish. About 30 minutes ago there was a train whistle, which is really weird for this part of town (maybe someone was on the tracks?). The vibrations from another train just died away as well.

Growing up, I regularly heard the train whistle come from the 169 area of Brooklyn Park. In Minneapolis of course I never heard trains (I heard plenty of car traffic though, but the light rail came right about when we left). Now in Winona, although you rarely hear them, I regularly "feel" the trains when they pass through town. The city is on a huge sand bar with a high water table, so the pressure wave created by a train really propagates well (we feel the wave from about 4 blocks away).

Iranian

2008-01-13T21:44:00.000-06:00

I pulled two "Iranian" pumpkins out of the cellar tonight and roasted them in slices for a pie. Before cooking, The flesh was a beautiful and almost iridescent orange, although both squash had rotten spots (which I cut out). When I halved each of the pumpkins, the strands and seeds were somewhat slimy, but I scraped that off, and cut out the soft spots, as the main part of the pumpkin was still quite firm and healthy-looking.

While cooking (325F for an hour), an absurd amount of water came out of the fruit (similar to other "cinderella"-style squash). The cooked pumpkin had an odd smell (almost as if bitter) and I tossed it, thinking that an uneaten squash in the garden is better than a family with food poisoning.

Then I read this article in Mother Earth - apparently the squash were just fine. Oh well.

2008-01-13T20:10:00.000-06:00

January 13 is roughly 23 days after the solstice, which is about 12% of the way to the Summer Solstice. Although I certainly can't tell the difference in length of daylight, I'm optimistic that I may have edible-sized spinach by late February.

Christmas Break

2008-01-07T10:11:00.000-06:00

The break was nice. Among other things, Oli and I got to see the geese.

We also spent some time assembling a "Motorcycle".

Cold Winter Gardening

2008-01-06T16:54:00.000-06:00

The weather has been warm lately (way up to 44F today), and the melting snow has revealed a few of the vegetables I forgot about last November. I particularly noticed today the resilience of Kale and Brussel Sprouts, the latter of which I should have planted just a little earlier.

As the picture shows, the Brussel Sprouts along the stalk unfazed by the snow and cold of the last month, and, roughly the size of small green olives, are almost big enough to cook.

The kale was actually a bigger disaster than the sprouts. It finished wonderfully this fall, but I never really figured out how to cook it. With a little ambition and a good recipie, it looks like I could still try.

Corn Salsa

2008-01-06T14:45:00.000-06:00

Oli still cries a little bit when she gets too many jalapeños, but she loves the corn, black beans, and "matos" in this salsa. The salsa is fairly easy to make. In a bowl, combine:
- a can each of corn and black beans (both rinsed)
- the juice of a lime (or lemon)
- 1-3 tomatoes or tomatillos, diced (expensive this time of year, canned might work, but I've never tried)
- 1-5 jalapeño or Serrano peppers, diced
- a bunch of cilantro, washed and diced
- a pinch of salt.

This salsa seems to keep for a day or two in the fridge, but really is best eaten the same day. We like eating it with tortilla chips, Olivia likes it straight from the bowl.

Bottoming out

2007-12-22T08:28:00.000-06:00

I don't know if I can tell the difference between this image and the last - but that may be the cold medicine talking.

Watching the Sun Rise

2007-12-01T07:51:00.000-06:00

One of the neat things I've noticed about www.wunderground.com is that their satellite photo browser seems to display "real" photographs of the local weather. Note the line of sunrise in the image above. This morning I realized that this photograph must be real (or is at least fabricated by someone clever) because the angle of the sunrise changes with the season.

Remembering that the earth is a sphere, rotating on an axis that sometimes points towards the sun, and sometimes points away from the sun (by an angle of 23 degrees if I recall) you can understand how there are seasons.

What feels like Summer is simply when your respective hemisphere points toward the sun and is heated. Winter is the opposite.

Right now it is November, and where I live, we get less and less sunlight (ie Solar radiation/solar heating) with each passing day (up through December 21, the winter solstice). Winter is defined to start on the solstice, which has always seemed a little silly to me. Starting on the summer solstice in June, the amount of daylight decreases a little bit with each passing day. Aside from some details about the angle of the sun in the sky, time of daily sunlight is proportional to the amount of solar heating each hemisphere receives each day.

In some sense then, my hemisphere starts cooling in June on the summer solstice and stops cooling in December on the Winter solstice. The scientific irony in all of this is that summer, as we know it, is a time of summer disappearing, and winter, as we know it, is a time of summer appearing.

The reason why daily temperature doesn't exactly rise and fall with with amount of daylight then relates to the thermal heat capacity of the earth. Our atmosphere, the ocean, and other stuff on the surface absorb the energy coming off the sun, and in the early fall, this stored energy prolongs the warm temperatures. In the same sense, the snow and ice associated with the solstice absorb the sun's heat in the spring and result in the relatively cooler temperatures. (this is why September is generally warmer than March, even though they both contain an equinox).

I've never done the problem, but it might be fun to identify the month (or week) of the year based on the angle of the sunrise - It would seem entirely deterministic and mathematically accessible.

Squash Enchiladas

2007-11-28T11:35:00.000-06:00

Over the summer we grew a nice variety of vegetables in our backyard and also in a friend's garden. One of the most productive vegetables was winter squash, which now fills our basement root cellar. The only problem with growing so much squash is that the only good cooking methods I know involve pie or baking with butter and brown sugar.

Yesterday, I found a new recipe (in Bon Appetit of all places) for squash and corn filled enchiladas. Surprisingly, the dish was very good, and now I have 3 ways to cook squash.

One of the highlights of cooking was using a new variety, Golden Hubbard, the seeds for which we picked up at Seedsavers at a previous Fall Celebration. The squash baked normally, but unlike even other hubbards, had an incredibly hard rind (and would probably keep until may). The picture below shows the white rind.

I couldn't cut the squash in pieces before baking, and instead actually had to drop it on the backyard sidewalk to get it to break into baking-sized wedges. The recipe called for Butternut, of which we have a few left, and I cooked one of each. The Hubbard actually had a nicer color.

Winter is still one month away

2007-11-22T22:37:00.000-06:00

Winter is still technically a month away, but the weather is unaware of that. We got whisps of snow yesterday evening, and today on our way up to the cities, aside from the bare, brown ground, it seemed like a regular January day. As the picture shows, I finally got around to covering the broken coldframe lights with plastic, which although transparent to IR radiation, should at least trap a little warm air. My initial hope was to have edible spinach in January, but given the proximity to the winter solstice, I can't say I believe that it will pan out.

The two thanksgiving dinners we've had so far have been good, and the one tomorrow promises to be good as well. One of the things on the schedule for Saturday is taking the sheep to the butcher (or "freezer" as I tell Ollie). I never got around to using the two sheepskins from last year properly, so I'm not sure that I'll try the whole hide-tanning thing again.

Another sign of winter is the first seed catalog, which along with some winter warmer can be seen in the figure below:

long time no blog

2007-09-11T22:17:00.000-05:00

Well, 15 ducks moved from my dad's pasture to my freezer and I still havn't cooked one.
I keep planning to smoke one over the weekend but then saturday comes and goes and the ducks remain frozen in my freezer. I really need to get around to this task.

Classes have again started, and the local weathermen are in a panic about the possibility of a frost tonight. Of course, we live in almost Iowa, not almost Canada, so I'm not worried about our tomatoes. I spent the evening grading labs and making green bean pickles (and playing with the daughter while she was awake for a brief interval).

I've decided that I prefer dilled green beans to pickles any day of the week and made 10 jars of them tonight (I still have the rest of the yellow wax beans to pick, so there will likely be more jars in a few nights.) Thus far at least, dilled beans have the same basic taste as pickles, but they're crisp (which I can never produce from cucumbers), and they're also very easy to pack. With this batch, I ran out of backyard dill and had to use about 1T of dill seed for each quart jar. Im hoping that this will be roughly the correct taste.

One of the joys of canning is hearing the "plink" of jar lids sucking in when they've properly sealed. The quarts of green beans I put up today seem to take a while longer to cool than the pints I normally can. I'm guessing its a surface area to volume thing.

washing the car

2007-07-12T17:18:00.000-05:00

One of Ollie's favorite phrases is "Ollie helpful daughter". She says this whenever she sees something interesting that she wants to participate in. Yesterday afternoon, it was waxing the car that she wanted to help with.

After 5 minutes of polishing, she decided that the Blazer also needed to be waxed. There's no photo of the blazer because the engine blew up on the way back from Menards (sheetrock still in the back). The tow truck driver gave me $50 for the car and now I'm on the hunt for a nice 940 wagon.

bread

2007-07-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

The summer class I'm teaching is almost finished, and tonight, because Ollie got carried away while digging potatoes, we made a Swedish Rye from my great-grandmother's recipe. I forgot to mash the potatoes before adding them to the dough, and so you see Ollie doing her best to fix my mistake with a pastry blender.

I'm toying with the thought of bringing the finished loaves to class tomorrow so that the students have some good in their lives before starting the final exam. I don't think the exam is hard, but then again, I never do. After grades are finished, we'll have the rest of the summer to use like a normal summer, ie more bread baking, smoking a fair amount of rooster and duckling, and French-style beet, carrot, potato, and egg salads for lunch with mustard dressing.

I can't even remember what my life was about before I had a wife and a daughter.

2 years

2007-07-03T18:25:00.000-05:00

The little monkey turned 2 last week and had a simian-themed birthday party. A good time was had by most - eyeryone liked the fresh peas we picked from the fence.

chickens in your backyard

2007-06-10T22:30:00.000-05:00

There's a great book of the same name as this post that I read back when I was in grad school. At the time, my dad was just getting started with the backyard flock and I was inspired to talk up the idea with most of our Minneapolis neighbors. A half-dozen Wyandottes never appeared at 1910 East 36th for various reasons, but now I can say I've lived the dream.

What do I have to show for it? Well, chickens mostly hide under the broccoli and potatoes all day long, they ate half my dill, I stepped on (and killed) a little rooster while trying to round them all up a few evenings ago, and they scratch the ground to no end. All in all it is fun to have them around the yard, but they're quite hard on the vegetable garden.

In other news, you shouldn't prop open your cold frames if the lights are old glass storm windows (its very hard to get glass splinters out of spinach - I had to toss 3 bays worth). In addition to this, I've also learned that peas are the perfect crop for little girls. Easy to pick, easy to eat, and always in her hand.

@ 1 week

2007-05-22T12:16:00.000-05:00

At one week, the chicks seem to be doing well. Of the 20 that hatched, 11 are Red Star (yellow/orange) and 9 are the Wyandotte/Orpington/Black Java mix (grey/black). The Red Star chicks are sex-linked, the reddish chicks are female, blong chicks are male, so it looks like I have 4 Redd Star hens (at most).

They've grown quite a bit this week. In the attached pictures they're eating spent barley from a batch of english bitter that's now fermenting in the basement.

The brooder I'm using originally held the new high-vacuum system that the department recently bought. at 4x4x2, its a great size for the birds. As you can sort-of see in the lower picture, the birds are starting to get wingfeathers.

a long sigh of relief

2007-05-10T00:19:00.000-05:00

The semester ended a week or so ago, and grades were due today at noon. I'd spent the weekend at a biophysics conference in Minneapolis, and accordingly spent most of my free time since on the philosophical topic of partial credit. Grading, when a solution is not entirely right or wrong is a very difficult thing. Now though I'm done, and have spent a luxurious afternoon answering email about grades, talking about small research projects, digging up the other half of my backyard and attending a fish-fry. There are upsides to the 50-60 hour per week schoolyear...

gotta make a post

2007-04-15T23:07:00.000-05:00

Around easter weekend it got really cold here in Winona and I, trusting far too much in the thermal heat capacity of the soil, lost a few plants in the cold. My cold frame now looks a little more desolate.

That said, the seeds I planted in other parts of the frame are now starting to sprout, and the garlic continues to grow.

I put the fence posts for our garden spot in the ground last fall and never got around to building a gate for the garden (to keep the plants in and the local dog out). Naturally, I left the task of building a gate to the hottest part of this afternoon. It does wobble, and the latch looks terrible when you're up close, but the dog now doesn't go hear my garlic.

To celebrate, we had wild rice brats and I planted a full row (in 2 ft^2 parcels) of cold-season crops (beets, horseradish, radishes, chard, lettuce, spinach...). Olivia had fun planting peas yesterday too.

Spring, III

2007-03-24T23:35:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking and talking about cold frames ever since S. first brought Nick Coleman's "Four Season Harvest" home from the local public library. Having stayed up 'til 2am on Friday working and then spending much of Saturday morning continuing to write a document for work, I decided that this was the afternoon to make good on my ambition.

The basic recipe for a cold frame is to make a crooked box out of dimensional lumber and cover the top of the box with old window sashes (now called "lights" as they let the light in). The box is crooked in that of the two long edges, the southernmost is is 8" high and the northernmost is 12" high. The sides of the box are tapered from 12" to 8". Confused? A picture will probably help.

I hinged the windows and made some sticks to prop the lights open when it gets warmer. After dinner, we went back to menards to get some red barn paint (for the outside of the coldframes) and more lumber for a second frame of 3 lights.

With luck, I'll have spinach, chard, mache, beets, radishes and maybe some mizuna in the the ground tomorrow.

Spring part 2

2007-03-22T18:09:00.000-05:00

I mentioned that spring is here right? Today is the day of the week that I don't have to teach and that I use to catch up on work. I couldn't resist the beautiful weather this morning, and found out that my backyard garden is now thawed and ready to be spaded over. I'm thinking about cold frames and April planting already. Were I truly on the ball this spring, I'd have chard, spinach, and mache rebounding under a coldframe in the waxing daylight. As it is, I still need to fix an 80's volvo before being ready for the regular runs to Menard's for supplies.

While I at the office this afternoon I got a call from S., letting me know that we now are the proud owners of 7 Pilgrim goose eggs (from California). The eggs are of an unbelievable size - they only just barely fit in the incubator I've borrowed. While our city codes won't at present allow us to have geese free-ranging in the backyard, Ollie will at least have the pleasure of seeing a few geese hatch and run around the brooder box before being shipped off to Grandpa's place. (That said, with the racket made by dogs and students in our neighborhood, I can't see the additional trouble geese would bring.)

spring

2007-03-18T00:24:00.000-05:00

On St. Patrick's day one could do a bunch of things. Unfortunately, corned beef was not to be found in the local grocery stores, and "corning" beef myself (but where do you buy saltpeter?) sounds like a week-long process.

Adults with children do not go looking for green beer - so that's out too. After half a saturday at the office, I finally managed to finish grading some tests, so the evening really was free.

We planted seeds tonight. Before O. came along, S. and I lived in a small house in Minneapolis. The lot we lived on was carved out of where someone's garage should have gone, probably surveyed out before the grid went down. Our backyard was small - even by Winona standards, but four years of college and apartment living - being crammed into a tiny box we didn't own - having a place to live that belonged to us was fantastic.

We moved into that house in May, too late in the year to start tomatoes (though I'd tried in the basement apartment - the plant-light was suspended from a ski), and I spent most of the summer failing to grow palatable lettuce. The next year was better, I built some raised beds, and filled them with a half ton of composted manure that my decrepit Saab 9000 ferried over from Home Depot. I believe that second year was when I found my favorite variety of tomato, Costoluto Genovese. An Italian variety that I found in some seed catalog, (maybe Nichols or Shepherd's?) it tastes like a normal home-grown tomato and has and absolutely beautiful shape. Uniquely ribbed, perfect for slicing, a costoluto genovese is the sort of prize you offer over the back fence or leave on the kitchen table to ripen.

Eventually, our ambition exceeded the small minneapolis lot we lived in and we decided to leave the city for a "small town" with hopes for a larger backyard (we might try that story on O. when she's older - maybe it will seem reasonable).

At any rate, goose eggs are in the mail, an incubator sits on the back porch and seeds are germinating in a sunny window upstairs. I've got 2 ziplocks full of broom corn seed for the boulevard and we're hoping for pleasant weather next month.

Minneapolis

2007-03-10T17:44:00.000-06:00

We just got back from two days in Minneapolis, the town where S and I grew up and got married, where S. went to college, and where I did my doctoral work. Spending time with old, good, friends was a true pleasure.

A side bonus (and the impetus for the trip) was that I reduced my dad's flock of Wyandottes by 9 roosters (they don't lay eggs and eat lots of feed). We now have rooster for curry!

I found this picture on our camera and like it,

Also, here's a neat trick, (from http://servalx02.blogspot.com/)

Mandatory post about snow

2007-02-25T11:12:00.000-06:00

The snowstorm, predicted weeks ago by the National Weather Service, arrived off-course, and clobbered us with about 2 feet of snow. The precipitation was a mix of pellets, flakes, rain, pellets, and more flakes, and this morning the temperature is 33F. I'm betting on a warm week and have shoveled only half of my driveway (a small moral victory in my head: Doing the job well doesn't mean I have to shovel all the snow in sight.)

The college students who park on our block spent all of yesterday afternoon (and most of the morning) unearthing their cars so they could drive them to the other side of the street. Of the 4 groups of students I loaned shovels out to, all four said thank you, none of them offered to help me shovel my walk, and the shovels returned were obviously worse for the wear. If the students ask again today I'm thinking about loaning them out with a $30 deposit. Shame on all of those students' fathers for not insisting they have a big scoop shovel in their trunk for emergencies.

My favorite part of the day was hearing the guys in the big white truck exclaim, "Let's go help our peeps get outta the snow," once they'd freed their car from the drifts. I saw this group of guys all around the neighborhood for rest of the day, dragging cars out of the snow and (hopefully?) scoring dates in the process.

Dinner was refried black beans, Tomatillo salsa, blue corn chips, and a steak from the broiler (the gas grill wouldn't light with the wind gusts we had last night).

You can burn cornbread

2007-02-22T20:14:00.000-06:00

I forgot about this wheel of cornbread while talking to a friend. Its much crunchier than normal cornbread, but aside from that, tastes normal.

There is Russian Expression,

2007-02-17T09:56:00.000-06:00

Halfway through graduate school, and halfway through a meeting with my advisor, I balked at the suggested idea of writing a nonlinear fit routine. "Sacha", I said, "These routines are really complicated, and what help is it to us to create something like this from scratch when it already exists in Mathematica?" "Naaathan", my advisor said , "There is Russian expression, 'The people who make plates are not gods.'"

In the end, I wrote most of the fitting routine, and it was little help to our work. The expression stuck with me though.

I teach natural philosophy at a small institution on large river, near the 44th parallel (which incidentally, runs through France). I live in an old house in constant need of repair, with my wife, S., my daughter, O., and my dog, Hershey. I've been trying to talk S. and my local city government into allowing me to have chickens, ducks, and/or geese in our backyard, but as of yet, there is no peeping in my basement incubator.