Calm days: blackberries, rowing, science
May. 22nd, 2013 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterOn Sunday, I went blackberry-picking with my friend S at a farm just outside of Calvert, TX. Whenever I pick blackberries, I think of my younger sister, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sytharin, because blackberries have long been one of her favorite foods. In Seattle, they ripen in August, but around here such fruits tend to ripen in May (peaches, too).
I also thought of my father while I picked, because back when he worked for Boeing, in the summer he'd often bike past blueberry farms on his ride home from work and would stop to pick blueberries to add to our family's Strategic Fruit Stockpile (strategic inasmuch as it ensured we had year-round pancake and waffle toppings).
This farm was an interesting place. S knew the farmer because he used to sell heirloom meats at the Bryan Farmer's Market. My impression is that he probably concluded that the Bryan Farmer's Market is too far away and he had too few customers to justify the trip, so he now just goes to a couple of other, more profitable markets. Understandable, but sad for us Bryan/College Station types. While we picked, we listened to the honking of geese and the territorial escapades of a couple of guinea fowl kept as guard birds. The farmer also keeps pigs and chickens, and mentioned that he was about to get a bunch of heirloom turkeys going. A pretty cool small-scale operation.
While the animal husbandry sounds good, things are far from easy out there; he's been having problems with his well, which means his family has had no running water in their house for the past 20 months. They just can't afford to keep the well pump running 24/7. We didn't get any details on the cause of the well troubles, but in situations like that the diagnosis is often part of the problem. It's hard for me to observe operations that are so dependent on groundwater, but it was also clear that this gentleman is figuring out some ingenious ways to cope, and I was grateful to observe his modes of operation. He pointed out a couple of growing fields with a ripening variety of heirloom rye, which he's using to fix nitrogen back into the soil, and said he'd had good luck the previous year with plowing in the rye and growing melons without any supplemental water.
I came home with almost 15 pounds of blackberries, so that determined the next item on the weekend agenda.scrottie and I set out to make blackberry jam and pie. One of the two batches of jam set up nicely; the other is currently a lovely blackberry-apricot syrup which I might attempt to re-jam. We shall see. The pie is probably the most enormous pie I've ever seen in my life.
Things have been fairly calm, otherwise. I've managed to mostly stay on the wagon with respect to summer erg training, and love following the Concept2 marathon training plan because it means I don't have to think about setting the erg training agenda and am logging plenty of meters. Aside from that, not much else to report just now. I'm mostly just working away at revising manuscripts for resubmission and analyzing data. Crunchy, crunchy data. The calm before the storm of another round of experiments, and what will probably be a really intense round of job applications.
sytharin, because blackberries have long been one of her favorite foods. In Seattle, they ripen in August, but around here such fruits tend to ripen in May (peaches, too).I also thought of my father while I picked, because back when he worked for Boeing, in the summer he'd often bike past blueberry farms on his ride home from work and would stop to pick blueberries to add to our family's Strategic Fruit Stockpile (strategic inasmuch as it ensured we had year-round pancake and waffle toppings).
This farm was an interesting place. S knew the farmer because he used to sell heirloom meats at the Bryan Farmer's Market. My impression is that he probably concluded that the Bryan Farmer's Market is too far away and he had too few customers to justify the trip, so he now just goes to a couple of other, more profitable markets. Understandable, but sad for us Bryan/College Station types. While we picked, we listened to the honking of geese and the territorial escapades of a couple of guinea fowl kept as guard birds. The farmer also keeps pigs and chickens, and mentioned that he was about to get a bunch of heirloom turkeys going. A pretty cool small-scale operation.
While the animal husbandry sounds good, things are far from easy out there; he's been having problems with his well, which means his family has had no running water in their house for the past 20 months. They just can't afford to keep the well pump running 24/7. We didn't get any details on the cause of the well troubles, but in situations like that the diagnosis is often part of the problem. It's hard for me to observe operations that are so dependent on groundwater, but it was also clear that this gentleman is figuring out some ingenious ways to cope, and I was grateful to observe his modes of operation. He pointed out a couple of growing fields with a ripening variety of heirloom rye, which he's using to fix nitrogen back into the soil, and said he'd had good luck the previous year with plowing in the rye and growing melons without any supplemental water.
I came home with almost 15 pounds of blackberries, so that determined the next item on the weekend agenda.
scrottie and I set out to make blackberry jam and pie. One of the two batches of jam set up nicely; the other is currently a lovely blackberry-apricot syrup which I might attempt to re-jam. We shall see. The pie is probably the most enormous pie I've ever seen in my life.Things have been fairly calm, otherwise. I've managed to mostly stay on the wagon with respect to summer erg training, and love following the Concept2 marathon training plan because it means I don't have to think about setting the erg training agenda and am logging plenty of meters. Aside from that, not much else to report just now. I'm mostly just working away at revising manuscripts for resubmission and analyzing data. Crunchy, crunchy data. The calm before the storm of another round of experiments, and what will probably be a really intense round of job applications.
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no subject
Date: 2013-05-22 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-22 07:02 pm (UTC)http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aquifers_of_Texas
If you examine the national drought monitor maintained by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
My region of Texas is in-between "abnormally dry" and "moderate drought" this year. Last year, we squeaked out of drought for a while, but I believe the municipal water reservoirs are still pretty low. As far as I'm concerned, things still aren't as out of whack as AZ was, though. I *do* think in some ways it's good for things like this to happen if it gets more farmers in this part of the country to come up with creative/innovative ways to manage irrigation.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-22 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-22 10:40 pm (UTC)http://www.texascooppower.com/texas-stories/life-arts/water-is-life
Some of the water rights issues in the state are pretty interesting.
Having driven through western Texas, and having lived in the middle of the desert, I have to say I agree that it's probably better in the longer term if arid parts of the country depopulate.
Mexico has been stepping up organic food production in some of its arid regions for export to the US, and it tends to be just as awful and tasteless as the stuff from California.
Loose thoughts, but this is an important subject.