stubbed toes and mud pies

[flowerbug]

weeded in some rocky areas today. a half hour which was enough. as i'm going along i think of how nice it was that i didn't have to move very many rocks to get at most of the weeds (99% poplar sprouts) and they came out easily. very hot and humid. can finish that up in a few minutes next time i go out. not sure that will be tomorrow, depends upon morning rains happening or not and other factors even further outside of my control.

if i now spend a half hour each day working on random garden weeding and then go on to the task of the day i should now be able to keep up with all the gardens i already have weeded. yes, they do still have some weeds in them that i have to get after but they are not massively overgrown like before and some minor weeding should work. so this is pretty much my schedule for all weeding from now until the major harvests start coming in and the only change will be if the north garden gets done or not. as we get back towards cooler days a lot more becomes easier and doable.

 

[flowerbug]

lifted the garlic today. about a month late. recent rains did not help but that's my fault for letting it go so long after being ready.

i planted it in two gardens, in the pepper garden (heavier soil with more clay but has been gardened for many years growing green, red and hot peppers) inside the fenced gardens. about 1/3 of the garlic had black mold starting on it, but i think i may be ok in that i peeled off the outer layers and will dry it out and eat it first. the other 2/3rds of the garlic looked better but i don't know how well it will cure until it dries down more. in the north garden there was no black mold at all and the garlic looks better but it does help that the north garden has actual topsoil. i'm drying it all down in my room since the garage is very hot and humid.

i'm hoping compared to the two previous years that the garlic at least stores ok. i have plenty of bulbules from the tops also and those store very well once the stems are dried completely - i keep them in a quart yogurt container without the top on all the way so they can stay dry and not sprout much at all (if kept in a darker spot they won't do much at all) they'll last until next summer. i give them away at the seed swaps and they are usually gone. they are also as edible as a clove of garlic and some of them are bigger than the smallest cloves from the bulbs and since they are formed and held up high they don't usually have a lot of soil contact issues that the bulbs can have.

 

[flowerbug]

more interesting cellular life exists than we know and more is being discovered:

Scientists discover an organism that defies the definition of life

Scientists have discovered a unique marine microbe, sukunaarchaeum, that defies traditional definitions of life.

www.earth.com

"Sukunaarchaeum muddies the waters further. It is undeniably cellular, yet its playbook borrows many viral tricks. It retains the genes for building its own ribosomes and messenger RNA – parts no virus carries – but appears to outsource nearly every other task to a host cell.

A record-breaking small genome​

The new organism’s entire genome fits into 238,000 base pairs – roughly the length of a medium-sized magazine article.

For comparison, the minimalist archaeon Nanoarchaeum equitans holds the previous cellular record at about 490,000 base pairs, already microscopic by prokaryotic standards."

 

[digitS']

oh no!!

it was hard enuf catching a glimmering of understanding about the "life / non-life" of viruses and now ..

. this!

 

[flowerbug]

oh no!!

it was hard enuf catching a glimmering of understanding about the "life / non-life" of viruses and now ..

. this!

viruses are like computer programs printed on paper - dead until loaded and running...

what they are describing here are likely very ancient microbes that were at one time symbionts or parasites and then somehow avoided the predation and the immune system of whatever creatures they were hanging out around or in. if you look at cellular biology there are various organs in modern cells which were likely adapted, coopted, etc. (chloroplasts and mitochondria). up and down the chain of complexity there is both evolution and devolution, it's always going on even if we don't notice it happening.