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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 25, 2013 19:00:51 GMT -5
Also remember to take it out of the sack BEFORE you give the sack to the cyclops (if you have decided to not use the Name)(oh wait, correction don't give the actual SACK, either just the lunch and the bottle), Turn off your lantern when you can, do not rely on the torch as your sole light source until AFTER the thief is disposed of (that killed me SO many times), don't walk into the gas room with a lit match (or the torch)etc.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 25, 2013 18:06:19 GMT -5
It's too early for ***'s. Why not wash down that *wieback with some *irben*, finish off with some *eppole or a nice piece of *amorano, *one out, and play a nice nostalgic game of *ork.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 23, 2013 14:43:22 GMT -5
Thanks both, taste good too :)I came across Rancho Gordo web site when I did a search for black and white Anasazi beans - Vaquero they look gorgeous. There's also a brown and white version out there, called New Mexico cave (as far as I am concerned, except for the seed color, the two seem more or less the same bean, right down to the same bullsh**t origin story). Actually now that I think of it, more of less the reversed of this happened with my vulgaris beans. despite both the Bantus and the Fort portal mixed I sowed being a rather wide spectrum of seed colors (from tans, through purples and olives; and down to maroons, and near blacks for the Portals)EVERY seed I got back from both of them was purple (well except for some FP's I picked too early; those dried white with a slight purple blush) And my one and only survivng speckled grey went in as black mottled over tan and came back as purple over white (though 1. I'm not 100% sure that was the speckled grey, there were 4 different beans in that pot of which one made a pod, it could have been one of the others and 2. that plant conked out before the pod was 100% done, so the seed could be immature (which can effect color a LOT).
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 21, 2013 21:19:52 GMT -5
No, but if I ever finish the story I may give him a gender ambigous name, like Hilary (I literally did not know that that could be a male given name until I was well into my twenties. I always assumed it was female, since my aunt is named Hilary.)
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 21, 2013 9:59:15 GMT -5
Remind me of some of the old "Pardon my Bloopers" radio reels, like the annoucer who said "And now let us take time to paen Breyer's ice cream (paen (meaning praise), is pronouced "pee on") or the poor Italian man who was asked "where would you find the Great Lakes" and ansered "Upper U.S.)(read with Italian accent). Or this little gem from a story I wrote about a hunter of magical beings lost in the modern world.
"It telling you, he's fay, he's a fairy" "Really, Mr. O'Bannon, we belive in embracing all genders now. And by the way, they prefer to be called "gay" or "homosexual" "No, no, you don't understand, he's a sidhe* "The correct term is "transgender" now, and again there is nothing wrong about that)
*Sidhe is pronouced "shee". It's short for Daonie Sidhe (Diana's Children) and is a Celtic term for the whole of farie kind.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 18, 2013 13:57:57 GMT -5
Small update
I manged to collect a little more feral wheat in an odd way yesterday. I'm not sure if i mentioned it when I talked about the other, but there was actually a third patch I had seen, in, of all places, the middle of town (well the middle of a bit of town that ran along a highway. By the side of the road, there was a house with a gone to seed terraced garden that I could see had quite a bit of wheat mixed into the other assorted weeds. Problem was, I couldn't think of any way to get there (or more accurately, a way to park there that could be explained away should a police car be passing by). Fast forward to yesterday, when I went over to that area to drop off my main computer at the repair shop (it's been giving me trouble for months). As I pulled into the spot I suddenly said "This area looks familiar" and I suddenly realized I had parked EXACTLY in front of the house! (silver lining, I guess) The drawback is that, looking it over nearly all the wheat is too young to harvest (as it looked ripe earlier in the year, I assume that somehow, that wheat matured shattered (or was mown down) those seeds re-germinated, and that I what I saw. So I was only able to grab three ears (and two of those are really green, so how good the seed is will need to be seen once they are dry enough to thresh). One of the weirder things I noticed is that the wheat on one side of the stairs is different from on the other side. On one side (where it is thicker) the wheat is a blocky, beardless type (typical of what usually shows up along our roads). On the other side where it is much sparser, the wheat is a heavily bearded type that seems to be a modern bread type with the irregular rows typical of that (though a much shorter one than the highway sample, both in plant height and head length. Even odder, one of the heads is actually a compund head, with small side bunches to the ear. I've seen that before in pictures of really OLD wheat strains (it's very common for turgidumtype (aka cone or rivet wheat)) but odd in modern ones. I'm assuming it's just a random mutation (since I doubt that any random farm out here is growing rivet wheat still, it has't been a part of major agriculture since about 1600.)But assuming any of the seed is good (it's one of the still green ears) it will be interesting to see if it is passed on to the next generation.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 12, 2013 15:18:11 GMT -5
I'm not saying that is impossible, but it seems to me if that was the case there'd be a heck of a lot more blues in the population (in those populations that have them, they probably only make up about 0.001%) Rice beans are closest related to Azuki's so they probably follow adzuki rules of inheritance. Also blue actually as far as I can tell requires more than one gene to be created. there are basically two levels of color to rice beans; base coat and mottling. base can be cream, tan, red, maroon or somewhere in between. Mottling is purplish can be off to total (there's also a pinto but since I have yet to see than and mottling together or over anything but cream I tend to think it's genetically exclusive and probably base coat at that). To get blue the base has to be cream and the mottle purple (at it's extreme upper edge cream can get sort of greenish which is probably what makes the purple look blue). If the plants had given back cream or cream mottle, I would have just assumed the mottle had turned off. If red mottle or black (what happens when you get total over red or any other shade except cream) that the red gene had turned back on. But to get red both genes would have had to reverse their positions at the same time and on ALL of the plants at the same time. That doesn't sound all that likely to me.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 12, 2013 11:05:51 GMT -5
I'd personally guess the other parent (assuming it is a cross) is more likely a regular kidney bean than the one Galina suggested. If you bought it at a Whole Foods; it was presumably grown on a production farm designed for HUGE amounts of product. They probably would grow several sorts of beans but all of those would be of a fairly small pool of well known, easily sellable varieties, nothing too obscure. the standard red kidney seems to me the one of that group that would be the closest in appearance. The kidney usually is another long seeded bean, but I have seen some strains of commercial kidney where the beans can get that short, flat shape from time to time. I actually had something similar happen this year happen with my rice beans. When I finally started harvesting a few weeks back, I noticed that most of the beans I was getting back were plain red, the commonest color. I hadn't planted any red on purpose (I'm trying to build up my supply of the other colors) but I had spilled a massive amount of red ones on the spot by accident so having a lot of red plants show up wasn't all that surprising. Plus the spill had occurred on the side where I hadn't really planted as much "on purpose seed" so most of the plants there being volunteers made sense. That is until I started pulling plants up (the beans this year are a hopeless tangle, so as soon as a plant had had all it's pods harvested, I remover it to make access to the others easier) and noticed a lot of those plants have the remnants of peat plugs on the base. That means that they would be the 20 or so seeds I planted indoors as a last ditch effort to get a crop after the critters ate nearly everything earlier in the year. And those were BLUE seeds (that was all I had left at that point). So one of two things happened either red seeds fell into the area of the pots and filled in the spaces as the planted ones died off, or every one of them somehow reverted to red despite rice beans supposedly being fully self pollinating. While it sounds absurd, I actually hope the first is the case. with the amount of seed that was dropped it is possible that could happen, and all of the intentionally planted ones either died or did not produce (with the snarl over there, telling which plants made which pods is all but impossible). The second would be a problem. Something similar to this happened the last time I got a good crop of rice beans about two years ago (I planted all whites creams tans and got about 90% reds back) but I thought that was due to leftovers reds in the soil (rice beans can stay inert down there for almost a decade, and that was before I started soaking them before planting to eliminate "sleepers" and the fact that the line between a tan and a red that isn't all that red is rather slim. But if it is all reversion, that would mean that habit of tossing out all of the red seed I sort through as not being what I am looking for is probably eliminating a lot of what I AM looking for. It would also mean that working out which type of beans will ACTALLY flower up here (which I FINALLY thought I had figured out) would need to be rethought, as by that the blues shouldn't have produced ANYTHING; they're the other type.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 10, 2013 11:00:46 GMT -5
the tip thing causes another problem, being so far up, you can get quite a lot of cases of it reaching the aluerone pericarp, making a dent of sorts. To me, it's more corroboration that there is some genetic connection between Glass Gem and Earth Tones (which has the same super wide palette of colors) Not having seen the cobs you took the photo of broken up, I can't be sure, but I imagine the pastel one I told you to rogue out is what I call "cap corn"; had starch sides with a big soft tip, covered by a very thin shell of hard. Good for grinding, not for popcorn. Yes, add a bite test, though unless your pool is FULL of dark purple dark red etc. you usually should be able to SEE really bad kernels; if light doesn't pass through, it's probably not good popping corn
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 10, 2013 9:57:43 GMT -5
Maybe at some point down the road. At the moment, it looks so nice I am sparing it from shelling at least until the fall is over, so I can use it in out decorations (interior decorations only, I'm not putting one like this on the door to get all wet and moldy!)
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 9, 2013 20:52:13 GMT -5
Something I though you might want to see, Joseph. i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg52/Strasheela/rainmini_zps3fefd442.jpgI found this miniature cob at the supermarket today. I caght my eye because of the fact that, for a popcorn cob, it seems to have an unusually high diversity of colors. This includes several that one does not normally find in popcorn; like bright green, turquoise, and orange II (the shade of orange you can get when magenta aleurone is over a yellow base); colors almost unheard of for a popcorn, but pretty common in Glass gem. the colors don't match perfectly, but they may be partially obscured (as you can see the husk and cob are magenta, which means it is possible the pericarp is pale magenta as well which could alter the perceived color of the kernels.) but it is eerily close. What I am trying to get at is, I think this cob may ALREADY be a glass gem colored popcorn.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 9, 2013 15:21:35 GMT -5
found the survivors in my drawer yesterday; turns out there are six of them (two singles and two pairs), each about the size of a small cocktail onion. So they probably ARE from the one the divided into 3 from last year (the two singles probably were attached originally and I split them when I re-planted them. That size seems a little small for getting through the iffy winters here; alliums that sized often exhaust their stored food before spring (we don't tend to get long steady freezes or nice insulating layers of winter snow around here, so plants that are programmed to grow as soon as it is warm enough often get into trouble; it warms up, the bulbs use a little of their stored food to start growing, it gets cold again, the cold kills off whatever grew, it gets warm again and so on until the bulb drains out.) So with so few I'll probably simply put a medium pot on one of the radiators plant them in that over the winter and see if a little inside light can give them the equivalent of a second spring and summer so by the real spring, they have LOTS of energy to really put on weight (or, dare I hope, to send out scapes?)
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 7, 2013 14:03:17 GMT -5
The focus that so many people have on maintaining heirlooms is very interesting to me. I'd rather have a variety that I bred myself than an heirloom and I'd much rather have a crop that produces a variety of types that are new and surprising every year. But, I am not a farmer, so I don't particularly require predictability. And that is the big difference. Wide diversity gives you increased stability, but the tradeoff is a bit of the optimal yield. It's the flipside of the diversity benefit; just as upping the gene base lessens the chances of every plant failing or underperforming resulting in little or no crop, it also lessens the chances of every plant succeeding or overperfoming, resulting in the maximum possible crop. If you are in it mostly for the fun, or your crop base is secure enough that having a crop that isn't the absolute total maximum possible bumper is OK, there's no problem. But if you are a marginal hardscrabble farmer whose land is so poor that anything less than a bumper crop doesn't give you enough yield to live on, the temptation to skew your population to whichever plants do the absolute best for you is probably pretty strong. Or why I hate it when people say, "maximum diversity is always the best diversity; you have to make sure every gene combination stays in the pool no matter what. In any diverse population there are going to be some losers that just don't work no matter what, fighting to keep them there is probably going to be a lot of work and unless you live in an area like mine (where the year to year weather is so erratic that anything that worked last year is pretty much guaranteed to NOT work the next year) probably not worth it.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 5, 2013 17:23:06 GMT -5
The literature describing shoepeg is excellent. Corn produces a reproductive organ on the cob called a cupule. Cupules always form in pairs aligned along the length of the cob. One of the cupules aborts on normal corn with the result that the other cupule makes a kernel. Since the same cupule of each pair forms a kernel, the germ always faces the same direction. This pattern of one aborted cupule always results in kernels in rows on the cob since the cupules are aligned along the length on a fused tassel-like structure. So what happens if both cupules make a kernel? Then you have shoepeg corn. The germs are formed facing each other. There is not enough room on the cob for all the kernels to fit in rows so they push each other out to the sides to fit. So shoepeg corn is defined by looking at the germ to see if a pair of kernels are facing each other? or if the germ all faces the same direction down the cob. . Somewhere in my oddities gallery I actually have at least one example of this in the form of a "Siamese twin kernel" where the two kernels got pushed so close they actually got stuck together (and they have totally different colors so it is two kernels growing together not one that split). The germs aren't facing each other now (when one is facing forward the other is sort of 90 degrees) but they might have been when they were pollinated.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 5, 2013 17:06:57 GMT -5
Agreeing with Joseph. When a cob doesn't get well pollinated and the kernels don't have other kernels pushing up against them, they tend to get a little bigger and rounder (and flatter). In extreme examples you get what I refer to as "buttons" (like what you have on the bluish cob in the last pic) In the case of dents it is also not unusual for such kernels to develop weaker dimples, if any, as a lot of the dimple formation comes from the pressure on the kernel from it's neighbors. Thiery usually great for planting. Such kernels being larger, often have a bit of extra stored up food, which can result in a larger healthier plant. (I remember in college a lecture in plant science where the teacher explained that, in the modern growing of corn, it is often normal to remove all the butt kernels (the larger more irregular ones near the base of the cob) and discard them at harvest since they can clog the systems used to process the corn. When I asked why they simply didn't re use the butts as the next years seed the reply he gave is that that would make sense for a small timer, but modern farmers NEVER saved their own seed.) The only issue is that evry know and again such kernels can get malformed germs. The extreme spread of the uninhibited kernel can, in theory cause the germ to get folded in ways that make it harder for it to sprout correctly. The germ will also often end up parallel to the cob so the germ can get crushed if the husk is too tight.
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