Next week brings the soldering in.

Kinda blurry, but here’s my class piece so far:

The sun’s pushing up a steady supply of lettuce greens in the cold frame, a meal’s worth of kale once a week, our first full serving ever of asparagus, broccoli starts that are a foot tall, artichoke plants that are leafing out, peas that are 4-10 inches tall, and a solidly started crop of alliums (including the coming year’s supply of leek, talon/storage onion, walla walla/sweet onion, storage shallot and three varieties of garlic). The fruit trees are now dropping their petals and showing signs of set fruit (apple, pear, cherry, plum). The hops vines are almost 6 feet tall already. I’m hoping in the next month or so that we might get kiwi blossoms for the first time since planting the vines three years ago. Tomatoes and peppers are 4-12 inches tall in the garage under my miniature grow light setup. Sometime soon I’ll want to start other hot weather seeds inside. I’m fighting harder against slugs than in past springs, but they continue to ravage my carrot sprouts.

That doesn’t mean I’m not pushing hard against myself.

I’m swimming, cycling, and running multiple times each per week. In January when I decided to start this journey I was not running outside of soccer, I didn’t own a road bike, and had only just started taking myself swimming once a week. And I was only managing that flailing^Wswimming with a snorkel, regular arm/leg cramps and exhaustion after relatively short distances. Dropped the snorkel but still have the cramps and exhaustion. (Interestingly, apparently muscle cramps are primarily about muscle fatigue, not hydration or electrolytes. It’d be nice if I might push past more of that level of fatigue at some point in the training, but it’s still happening.)

Saturday’s at 6:30am my cohorts and I are up and heading to swim class. To me becoming a competent, efficient swimmer means learning a life changing exercise that hopefully I can practice all my life. Hopefully most of that won’t be so damned early in the morning though.

Through all of this I’d hoped to maybe loose a bit of weight after grad school helping nudge me up to 230lbs. I got back to 200lbs over the past two years, but haven’t been able to really get below that. I’m not losing weight tri training though, because all this exercising needs calories behind it. Which means I’m eating like a teenager. Still I’ve dropped at least three or four inches of waist circumference, my pants legs are baggy, and my shirts are increasingly too tight. I have to hold my arms at my sides differently because they don’t quite fit in their normal places. This may actually allow me to compete to some degree if I want to since there is a “Clydesdale” category in many races for the heftier gents. I suspect if I keep this up I will end up dropping ten or more pounds here eventually. In the meantime…

The next eight weeks are going to be a challenge. I need to push each of my swim/bike/run distances further, do an extra instance of each exercise per week, and regularly link at least the bike/run portions into a combined “brick”. As the weather begins to warm, I’ll need to get myself out of the pool, into a wetsuit, and Into swimming frigid northwest bodies of water.

1.5km swim, 45km bike, 10km run.

I’m starting to believe I can do this.

Back in January, based on reading about “bench grafting”, I did some tongue and whip grafting mixing my three plum varieties into single trees. I’m not sure if any of those grafts took, though I decided yesterday one didn’t and I pruned it off. I am pretty sure I did these initial grafts poorly based on the shoulder surfing I did yesterday at the scion exchange where experienced people were doing proper bench grafting of scions onto root stock. It’s a lot harder to do on the tree in the yard than on a work bench. But now that I read the info sheets I got at the scion exchange I wonder if I need to give these grafts more time. The sap’s just really pushing now and it logically could need some time to push through and heal over the graft site. The other things I did sub-optimally were to use plain old wide rubber bands, wind them over the graft site tighter than I saw people doing yesterday, not use disinfectant on my tools and the wood as I joined it, split the branch while cutting the tongue with a kitchen knife and leave the entire whip of the scion instead of pruning it back to just three buds and sealing the end, and putting graft sealant over the entire rubber band instead of just the ends. About the only things I did right was the general shape of the graft, sizing the two pieces pretty close to one another and using graft sealant.

I got to the scion exchange about two hours into the event with the hope of getting a few cherry varieties, a peach and an apricot. No such luck. I got one of the cherry varieties I wanted. So I consoled myself by wandering around taking in the hundreds of varieties of scions available and arbitrarily picking a few cherry varieties (Sam, Chelan, Lapin) and some lighter yellow/red plums (“peach”, Mirabelle de Metz, Victoria) as well as one apple (McIntosh) and asian pear (Hosui) scion. I also bought a jig for bench grafting which came with a sharp knife, a chisel, grafting bands and a few other things. After trying to use it on my trees, I can definitely say the bench grafting jig is truly for bench grafting, but I thought I’d try. I didn’t go a great job on these grafts either and barely managed to not end up at the ER getting stitches in my fingers thanks to the sharp tools.

I put the plum scion wood on the santa rosa tree my parents brought me and onto which I’d already attempted adding Green Gage and Italian scions. The Italian is the one I (prematurely?) decided probably hadn’t taken, so I grafted a new piece of that on today also. If these scions take, this little tree will have six varieties of plum. It’s my experiment tree. I’ve been playing with pruning on it the past couple years. I originally topped it to get some whips spread at a good starting height and have been braiding those whips as they grow upward. Those braids are just starting to grow together. Maybe it will look cool in a decade? While doing that first bit of braiding I left two loops out opposite sides of the braid a few feet above the ground as I’m figuring I’ll move this tree somewhere else once I’m doing playing with it and want it to just grow and produce. Those loops will be handles to move the tree and maybe later foot holds for the grand kids to climb up into the tree. How’s that for a long term project?

My mom sent me a copy of the Ball book on preserving in the hopes we wouldn’t kill ourselves. I bumped into a used/free copy of a 40′s book on cooking with a pressure cooker. I even noticed the pressure cooker we bought came with a book of recipes and suggestions. And we slowly started using the pressure cooker more.

We can, or “jar” really, a lot of things.

In a good summer, we’ll put away all the stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce we’ll use over the coming year.

When I make stews or soups for a meal I put away a portion of it for an easy meal later.

Before I started loosing my grad-school pounds two years ago, I was starting to get flagged as pre-hypertensive so we started removing sodium from some glaring places in our diet. One Thanksgiving we made broth from the turkey carcass. Now we make all our own no-salt-added broth. We can our own no-salt-added beans from dry beans. Those two no-salt-added canned goods are pretty pricey to by at the market and almost free to do from scratch. Dry beans and things like roasts cook up so much faster in a pressure cooker.

On the money and nerdy sides, the other hot thing about the pressure cooker is that it uses physics to cook your food both faster and with less energy input. Everybody seems to be on the save energy / save money bandwagon these days outside the house in their cars. Why not inside? Producing/shipping/storing/reheating frozen foods is energy intensive. Pressure cooking and canning can save energy and money.

And apparently now it’s the latest trend according to Slate.

People continue to be interested in fast, but not having to sacrifice quality for speed is a great perk. That Slate article taught me I shouldn’t just be boiling my chicken/turkey carcasses in my stock pot but rather pressure cooking them. Duh! Later this month our most recent batch of broth will probably be gone and it’ll be time to have chicken roast for dinner and then put away some broth. I’m excited to test the difference!

His basic premise is that much of the world’s food production depends heavily on an extremely short supply chain that is subject to disruptions tied to its dependence on oil and that this can have catastrophic societal impact. A massive amount of our economy and oil/energy go into food production. It is massively inefficient from an energy standpoint. Most efficiency improvements in recent time have focused on time to market and supply chain improvements, leading to a local maximum in efficiency. Schreier imagines the use of science and technology to get to a whole further plateau of efficient food production and food supply robustness. But it’s not just imagination. He’s more than a scientist. He’s an engineer and has developed and implemented a series of systematic improvements to the concept of greenhouse agriculture, culminating in a working design for an aquaponic solar greenhouse.

He’s made a number of interesting observations and connections. Photosynthesis is inefficient. Plants actually want some shade and grow it themselves. Plants use the blue and red wavelength light and have reflective green canopy. Based on that, he’s build on a Chinese lean-to greenhouse based design which incorporates a “lamella system” of blinds. The blinds have photovoltaic cells on the outer surface which turn out to be quite efficient compared to the plants. These make electricity which is a useful supplemental energy source within the greenhouse. But much of the cleverness is in how the PV cells are coupled with a carrier of his design and under an EFTE film that forms the south facing shell of the greenhouse. EFTE turns out to be a super material for greenhouses. It is more structural, transmissive to light and robust when exposed to the elements compared to traditional greenhouse enclosures. Placing the PV cells on the lamella system below the EFTE shell means they don’t need the expensive and heavy glass manufacturing that is common. The hollow blade carrier for the PV cells allows air cooling of the cells which doubles as heating for the aquaponics thermal mass during the daytime or with reversed airflow uses the aquaponics thermal mass as a heat source for overhead heating of the plants during the night. The blades can rotate automatically to track the sun keeping ideal the lighting/shading of the plants underneath. Shreier gets some additional efficiency from hanging within the greenhouse plastic sheeting with flourescing pigment embedded plastics which convert green light into red. And finally he’s come across a failed US designed sulfur argon plasma light bulb design, refined it into a workable (selling in-production even) broad spectrum, high-efficiency light bulb and with the local PV electricity can give quality supplemental light to the plants and remain carbon negative on the greenhouse’s energy equation.

This combines into something utterly game changing.

Portland Purple Water is looking to implement a spin on the idea with the “Oregon Greenhouse”, incorporating Schreier’s concepts with a few additional concepts that are close to home (eg: rainwater catchment and filtration for the aquaponics system).

The impressive thing to me isn’t so much that this is all production level engineering or the extent to which Schreier’s systematically created an awesome prototype. As a techie I’m almost immune to the cool prototype. The cool thing here is that Herr Schreier is one TED talk away from getting international exposure and his production ready ideas getting matched to manufacturing at scale. Produced with economies of scale his concept is an inexpensive incremental improvement that can save food producers a massive amount of money and at the same time encourage a more robust, local, oil-independent food supply chains. At least some of his point technology improvements are certainly bound for the market and will make a positive impact. And it seems highly likely there will be more people deploying his ideas together and that will revolutionize local food production.