Invasive Species

 I got 'em.

In north Georgia, the Joro spider has become pretty well-established and is expanding its range.  I first noticed them at my old house in the exurbs in late summer / early fall, 2018.  That was the same time this article appeared.  They seemed to be sort of centered on Braselton, along I-85, and were spreading up and down the freeway.  This article notes they were in 23 Georgia counties as of early 2021.

 

In late 2018, I moved to my new house, which is farther north and east.  No Joros at first, but in late summer, 2020, I saw a couple.  This year there are more.  The above pictures were taken at my former house.  The little spider seen in the web is the male.  The first article notes that the Joros seem to be getting along okay with no adverse impact, but I have seen fewer barn spiders around--and writing spiders.  I do, however, see spiny orb weavers in close proximity to the Joro webs.

Then there's this thing:

 

 

It's a hammerhead worm.  I had never seen one before a few mornings ago.  I lifted it with a stick and put it in the grass; by the time I found this article, it had disappeared.  I'm not sure I want a toxic carnivorous earthworm-eater to get established in my back yard. Alas.

Muscadine Harvest, 2021

 I have a muscadine trellis with six plants.  They have been in the ground for several years but had been growing rather slowly, root-hog-or-die style.  Last year I harvested a few from my Ison muscadine vine, and one or two from a couple of the others.  Then last winter I did some aggressive pruning and set them up for a good crop (I hoped).

In early August, the crop was looking very good.  I started picking in mid-August, and have pulled about 10 pounds off so far, mostly from the Ison.  Ison is listed by Ison's, the nursery that developed it and where I bought my vines, as an early variety.  Two others are early-mid season, Darlene and Summit.  I have been picking Summit for a while now--its yield will be about what the Ison was last year, a couple of pounds--and Darlene is just coming into harvest now, in mid-September.  The other variety I will harvest some off of this year is Late Fry, which should be ready in October sometime.

So far I am not doing anything with them other than eating fresh and freezing for further fresh eating.  At some point I might try to do something else with them.  If they continue to grow well, I'll have ... a lot... to deal with in good years.

I'm seeing some fruit flies and yellow jackets around the Ison now that they're ripening, and I have also seen a stink bug or two.  Overall, however, pest pressure has been minimal.  Hopefully it stays like that.

More on Refurbishing Chicken Waterers

 Well, this was interesting.

I coated the three-gallon waterer and the replacement two-gallon one with epoxy.  I mixed up enough epoxy to do both, and started with the three-gallon tankard.  It went well.  Then I moved onto the second, and it also...started off well.  Soon I noticed the epoxy beginning to get thick; then it was like cottage cheese; then it ceased to be usable.  This all happened over the course of about three minutes.

I recognized what was happening, and sped up.  As you can see, the interior is a little chunky, but overall it's serviceable.  What I didn't get to was the outside pan for the second one or the tops for either one.  Fortunately, I was prioritizing my coverage--though I'm sad for the lost epoxy.  It's too bad I didn't do some research first.  Those two links suggest that under hot conditions (it was upper 80s when I did this) the working time might be as short as 20 minutes or so, and that's probably about what I got out of it.  So for the future, only one can be done at a time.

I still have one more to do (the one I got off eBay) and more epoxy, so I'll probably give it another go--and maybe try to put the finishing touches on the two from this second effort.  Next time I'll be working with a stopwatch, too.

Lower-Carb Blueberry Pie

 I've posted before about using almond flour for pie crust to lower the carb content of a pie.  I haven't done this for fruit pies previously, mostly because fruit pies typically have some sort of top crust.  I decided to give it a try with a topless blueberry pie.

I used my go-to recipe for the almond flour pie crust:

1 1/2 c almond flour

2 tbsp Whey Low D

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 c almond oil (or butter, or coconut oil)

I mixed this up and pressed it into the pie plate:

The filling ingredients I got from a recipe online somewhere, but don't have the link:

1 1/4 c Whey Low D (as a lower-carb replacement for sugar)

1/3 c clear jel (as a low-carb replacement for flour)

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

5 c blueberries

The powdered ingredients are substantial:

 

In the shell, ready to go in the oven:

 

 As usually seems to happen, the crust got a little over-done, at least in appearance (after about 40 minutes at 425).

I don't have any pictures of what happened when it was cut open, but I have not had much success in getting blueberry pie filling to  hold together.  It tends to fall apart when cut, and that held true this time, as well.  Still, it was no worse than normal.  This was my first attempt with clear jel, and I thought that might be the solution (as well as lowering the carb count).  However, it didn't work out as hoped.  The crust's flavor was fine, even though it was dark.

The blueberries themselves have a lot of carbs, of course (about 18 net grams per cup, accoring to Fat Secret).  Assuming the Whey Low D has about 20% of the carb hit of regular sugar (see discussion here), the carb load for the entire pie would be about 300 grams, or 38 grams per slice.  That isn't exactly great; it's a pretty solid hit for someone who has carb issues.  However, it compares very favorably to a pie made with wheat flour and sugar, which would be around 150 grams per slice (increasing to about 168 grams if a top crust is added).  Relatively speaking, it's not bad--though a nut-based pie would be much lower.

It's something potentially useful to keep as an option for lower-carb baking.

More on Galvanized Waterers

 So far the epoxy coating is holding up well, but it will be a few months before I'll know if it really helps.

Meanwhile, the 'relatively new' 3-gallon waterer referred to in the previous post is definitely showing early signs of failure after about a month of daily use:

It's scheduled for epoxy before any additional use, but it would probably start rusting within another month with no intervention.

Queen Anne's Lace / Wild Carrot

 Queen Anne's Lace (QAL) is a common summer weed.  Its range is pretty broad, as witnessed by the University of Minnesota page on it.  I had some the first year I moved into my former house, but after mowing in the bloom stage, it disappeared and I never saw it again.  In my new house, I haven't seen it before this year. 

 

This year I have a bunch of it growing along a fence line by the road.  Some seeds apparently blew in from somewhere.  The above picture might actually be of a related plant, wild carrot. Until i went looking, I wasn't aware there was a difference between wild carrot and QAL.

QAL typically has a red flower cluster in the middle of the bloom.  The above picture (and all of what I have growing) lacks that.  However, according to Green Deane, QAL (Daucus carota) and wild carrot (Daucus pusillus) are related but the latter lacks the red flowers (QAL may sometimes be without the red center, too). QAL is non-native, but wild carrot grows here naturally.  Both have a carrot smell to them.  I think I might have nibbled on a root at some point, but in general, there's nothing worthwhile about these plants unless one is lost in the wilderness and starving.  Domesticated carrots are the way to go if one wants edible roots.

Thistles have nice flowers, but then they go bad. It's a similar situation with QAL/wild carrot.  I want to avoid having that happen if possible.  I don't really want a field full of them next season. So I headed out to where the plants are growing and snipped off the seed heads.

Fortunately, the problem is relatively contained for now, and hopefully my intervention will keep it that way--as it is, some of the seed heads had probably already released their seeds before I intervened.  I also expect the plants to respond to the loss of their reproductive capacity by putting out new flowers.  They seem to both stay in bloom longer than thistles and take longer to mature their seeds after the flowers close.  That gives me a little time.  Thistles transition from good to bad very quickly.

 If I'm not successful, the only other control mechanism will be mowing next year when blooms first emerge, and keeping it up as they re-emerge.

Refurbishing the Waterer

 My favorite poultry waterer is a two-gallon vacuum model made by Miller Manufacturing.  It can't be used with apple cider vinegar (two tablespoons per gallon is often used for chicken health).  I have plastic waterers for that.

Unfortunately, my waterer soon began to rust.  This is how it looked after about nine months of more or less daily use.

Online, I found a few possible explanations:

1. Faulty manufacture

2. Hard or acidic water

3. Adding vinegar to the water

4. Cheap construction, aka, they don't make them like they used to

I could rule out 3, because I had avoided that.  I had well test data for 2, and it was a possibility.  My old well water had a pH of 6.2, and the new well's water is still acidic, although less so at 6.6.  Both wells produce what the reports called 'slightly hard water.' Miller Manufacturing very graciously replaced my waterer but suggested that my water was probably to blame.

On backyardchickens.com, some people indicated that they had older galvanized waterers that had no rust after extensive use, but that new ones had rusted rapidly. They believed in their own cases that 4 was the culprit for their new ones that had corroded.

I bought an old galvanized waterer off of eBay of uncertain vintage and found it soon showed signs of rusting, too.

So I decided to adapt an idea I saw on backyardchickens.com by user dcwatson84--I got some pond liner epoxy and rust treatment. It's pond safe, so shouldn't pose any toxicity problems.

First, the rust needed to be removed. I used Evapo-Rust, which worked well, although it was very slow.  Because I didn't want to buy a sufficient quantity to immerse the waterer, I soaked paper towels and placed them over rusty spots per the directions.  It took up to 24 hours for the rust to (mostly) disappear, but most areas had to be saturated a couple of times because some spots in treated areas didn't have good contact with the towels the first time around.  It took a week of daily (or semi-daily) towel soakings and changes.

Then when I got the epoxy, I was surprised to see that it called for using an 'etching primer' and pre-sanding with 60 grit.  I had some 150 grit and wasn't coating a comparatively rough-surfaced pond, so I decided to give the 150 a try, sans primer (I had looked for some immersible paint or primer and only found Rust-Oleum 8400 [>$100 per gallon] as a possibility).  Because of the former rust, I reasoned that it was already somewhat roughened, anyway. 

Unlike the original poster, I did not coat the whole thing.  The epoxy is expensive, and if limited to water-contact areas, one 1.5-quart ($50! 😢) set should be enough to do several waterers.  Plus, people have in the past suggested that I am exceptionally cheap-another said something about being so tight that twanging in the wind was a possibility.  So mostly just the interior was coated, though I also did the outside pan--even though it did not have any rust (yet).

I also did not remove the rubber stopper but tried to paint around it.  Some epoxy ran down and stuck to it, anyway, so I carefully cut around it with a utility knife after the epoxy cured.  The result functions about like it did pre-epoxy.

Although it looks wet, it is dry in the picture above.  It dries glossy.  You can see where it's not very thick in some areas; it remains to be seen if rust will occur there.  This does not seem to have hurt and may help.

 

I have three more metal waterers--two that are new (the replacement 2-gallon one) or relatively new (a 3-gallon waterer that has seen only limited use and so far has no rust).  For the new ones, I plan to prophylactically sand and epoxy those, as well.  The eBay one that is now rusting will need to be pre-treated to eliminate its rust.

If I get three done with the $50 worth of epoxy, that's an extra $17 (roughly) in each waterer, plus a significant time cost (or $12.50 with four waterers done; I doubt it could do many or any more than that).  That may or may not be worth it going forward, even before questions of durability of the epoxy coating are answered.

But there is one bright side: the chickens are showing no ill signs after drinking out of it for a while.  I assumed it'd be safe, but one never knows for sure in advance...