Radishrain
Things pertaining to life: plants and animals, gardening, cooking, food, botany, zoology, farming, ranching, wildlife, genetics, plant breeding, software, media, etc.
https://scitechdaily.com/vitamin-d-determines-severity-in-covid-19-researchers-urge-government-to-change-advice/amp/
If the whole world read this article, there might be a vitamin D supplement shortage.
vitamin_d
If the whole world read this article, there might be a vitamin D supplement shortage.
vitamin_d
I've found that blending up sunroots with tomato sauces and/or soups makes them pretty tasty! Additionally, it helps to thicken them and add nutrients.
You can make an excellent ketchup and cocktail sauce substitute by doing this:
• Blend up a jar of home-canned stewed tomatoes (skins, seeds, juice, and all, if you like; they all turn into sauce).
• Blend several whole sunroots into them. (If you bake the sunroots well before blending them, it adds an additional pitentially desirable flavor.)
• Add distilled white vinegar and salt (as you would with ketchup).
Then it's ready! Four ingredients. That's it. I find that I use more of it with my food than I use ketchup.
By itself, it's unique, although an excellent dipping sauce, similar to ketchup and cocktail sauce (you probably want more salt and vinegar to get a steonger cocktail-type flavor). If you add mustard to it, it tastes just like ketchup with mustard in it, except it has an earthy aftertaste (which I personally like).
Adding sunroots to tomato soup adds a substance to the flavor, similar probably to what broth does to tomato soup.
I imagine all kinds of recipes could utilize sunroots to make a large variety of awesome new sauces.
Sunroots (including both raw and baked sunroots) blend up very easily in a blender with stewed tomatoes.
I've tested this with spring-harvested sunroots, so far. These seem to be firmer when cooked, sweeter (a lot like carrots), and have less inulin than fall-harvested sunroots. They taste like a mix between potatoes and carrots. The fall ones seem to taste more like a mix between already salted and buttered baked potatoes, steamed cauliflower, and seafood; I haven't tried those in sauce, yet.
Anyway, I've tried the sauce with mustard with hamurgers (I dipped them instead of spreading it on). I tried it without mustard with meatloaf patties (which patties included tomatoes, but no ketchup), and it was excellent!
tomato_
salt_
vinegar_
sauce_
ketchup_
soup_
recipe_
tomato_soup
broth_
stewed_tomato
canned_tomato
You can make an excellent ketchup and cocktail sauce substitute by doing this:
• Blend up a jar of home-canned stewed tomatoes (skins, seeds, juice, and all, if you like; they all turn into sauce).
• Blend several whole sunroots into them. (If you bake the sunroots well before blending them, it adds an additional pitentially desirable flavor.)
• Add distilled white vinegar and salt (as you would with ketchup).
Then it's ready! Four ingredients. That's it. I find that I use more of it with my food than I use ketchup.
By itself, it's unique, although an excellent dipping sauce, similar to ketchup and cocktail sauce (you probably want more salt and vinegar to get a steonger cocktail-type flavor). If you add mustard to it, it tastes just like ketchup with mustard in it, except it has an earthy aftertaste (which I personally like).
Adding sunroots to tomato soup adds a substance to the flavor, similar probably to what broth does to tomato soup.
I imagine all kinds of recipes could utilize sunroots to make a large variety of awesome new sauces.
Sunroots (including both raw and baked sunroots) blend up very easily in a blender with stewed tomatoes.
I've tested this with spring-harvested sunroots, so far. These seem to be firmer when cooked, sweeter (a lot like carrots), and have less inulin than fall-harvested sunroots. They taste like a mix between potatoes and carrots. The fall ones seem to taste more like a mix between already salted and buttered baked potatoes, steamed cauliflower, and seafood; I haven't tried those in sauce, yet.
Anyway, I've tried the sauce with mustard with hamurgers (I dipped them instead of spreading it on). I tried it without mustard with meatloaf patties (which patties included tomatoes, but no ketchup), and it was excellent!
tomato_
salt_
vinegar_
sauce_
ketchup_
soup_
recipe_
tomato_soup
broth_
stewed_tomato
canned_tomato
https://bonnieplants.com/gardening/you-must-use-a-good-potting-mix/
They probably know what they're doing since they sell plants that can be pretty vigorous. So, I looked them up to see what's likely in the potting mix of the plants they sell.
Basically, they say about what I'd expect, with a few important extras added in. It looks like decent advice.
-----
I might note that avoiding garden soil in containers (including for seed-starting), as they said, is a popular exhortation, but it's not necessarily bad (and I've never seen a potting mix that includes soil). Whether a person might want to use garden soil really depends on what they're doing, what results they want, how they're doing it, why they're doing it, and where they're doing it. But yeah, keep regular garden soil outdoors, please! It can spread hard-to-erradicate pests and diseases indoors.
In my Strong Camel 6'x5'x3' unheated greenhouse, I like to use regular garden soil for starting muskmelons, watermelons, and squash in 8oz foam cups. They do need to be watered on time to ensure that the soil doesn't shrink, stifle the roots, and compact too much, however, and it's best to overseed if you use it, it seems (more plants mean more roots breaking up the soil, which means better aeration, and better germination should it be difficult). I'm sure BonniePlants' ideal mix would be at least as effective, if not a lot better, however, without requiring as many seeds (but regular garden soil is pretty much free, and it does work better than many unideal soil-free mixes in this context; plus, you generally don't need to add extra fertilizer or minerals to regular soil after the plant gets a little bigger).
If I were to use any regular garden soil in smaller containers, in my unheated greenhouse, I wouldn't bring those indoors, and I would only mix a small amount of it with my seed-starting mix (like 1 to 10% or less), and I would mostly only use it for the purpose of adding extra nutrients/bacteria (and to reduce fertilization needs); also, I'd use it to help acclimatize the plants for transplanting (into regular garden soil) faster. I haven't historically used regular garden soil in my seed starting mixes for cells, though. So, if I try it, I might have other things to say about it.
vegetable_
soil_
potting_mix
They probably know what they're doing since they sell plants that can be pretty vigorous. So, I looked them up to see what's likely in the potting mix of the plants they sell.
Basically, they say about what I'd expect, with a few important extras added in. It looks like decent advice.
-----
I might note that avoiding garden soil in containers (including for seed-starting), as they said, is a popular exhortation, but it's not necessarily bad (and I've never seen a potting mix that includes soil). Whether a person might want to use garden soil really depends on what they're doing, what results they want, how they're doing it, why they're doing it, and where they're doing it. But yeah, keep regular garden soil outdoors, please! It can spread hard-to-erradicate pests and diseases indoors.
In my Strong Camel 6'x5'x3' unheated greenhouse, I like to use regular garden soil for starting muskmelons, watermelons, and squash in 8oz foam cups. They do need to be watered on time to ensure that the soil doesn't shrink, stifle the roots, and compact too much, however, and it's best to overseed if you use it, it seems (more plants mean more roots breaking up the soil, which means better aeration, and better germination should it be difficult). I'm sure BonniePlants' ideal mix would be at least as effective, if not a lot better, however, without requiring as many seeds (but regular garden soil is pretty much free, and it does work better than many unideal soil-free mixes in this context; plus, you generally don't need to add extra fertilizer or minerals to regular soil after the plant gets a little bigger).
If I were to use any regular garden soil in smaller containers, in my unheated greenhouse, I wouldn't bring those indoors, and I would only mix a small amount of it with my seed-starting mix (like 1 to 10% or less), and I would mostly only use it for the purpose of adding extra nutrients/bacteria (and to reduce fertilization needs); also, I'd use it to help acclimatize the plants for transplanting (into regular garden soil) faster. I haven't historically used regular garden soil in my seed starting mixes for cells, though. So, if I try it, I might have other things to say about it.
vegetable_
soil_
potting_mix
• https://www.thehappychickencoop.com/guide-to-chicken-parasites/
• https://www.thehappychickencoop.com/guide-to-chicken-parasites-part-2/
The above links tell about all sorts of chicken parasites, both external and internal, respectively.
parasite_
• https://www.thehappychickencoop.com/guide-to-chicken-parasites-part-2/
The above links tell about all sorts of chicken parasites, both external and internal, respectively.
parasite_
https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/37RHucXpQICZQPmJdoIzTg.Jmsiuod6nQcp_qpQ6pRl_x
The above link has three videos (you may have to swipe to see the other two) of some large hornets or wasps I found on 27 Jun 2018. These wasps seemed interested in the tomato and watermelon plants, but especially the tomatoes, and especially the Stick tomatoes (I observed them several times besides this, and they gravitated toward the Stick tomatoes; I had two plants). Their preference for the Stick tomatoes isn't obvious from the footage (that's just an observation I made; I saw them quite a few times without making videos).
One of them (not in the video) was huge! It must have been about four inches long. I'd never seen anything like it. I only saw it once, but it was faster than these smaller ones in the videos (which are really fast, if you can't tell; they can change directions and fly faster than regular wasps, kind of like hoverflies fly). The big one could dart across my backyard in a second, probably. Due to its prowess, I didn't tarry too long. Fortunately, it didn't attack, even though I made a hasty retreat after I observed it, awestruck, for a while. I believe it also liked the Stick tomato. It wasn't arched much like a regular wasp; it was fairly straight, and somewhat longer proportionate to its width than the smaller ones.
The wasps would fly from plant to plant for the duration of their visits. They didn't do anything else in particular. They didn't fly around looking for places to build nests like our regular wasps.
The aforementioned 'smaller' ones are still about an inch and a half long or so (even though one appears to be the size of a regular large wasp in part of the watermelon video; it was bigger than it looked; well, they all looked bigger in person, but especially that one, although it was probably the smallest of the three).
They had bolder stripes than our other wasps, and looked thicker in general.
They're possibly Vespa mandarinia (apparently those are in Idaho now, although they weren't reported as early as my videos here), or maybe a hybrid. I'm not sure. I think their heads may have looked different.
I wonder if I'll see them again if I plant more Stick tomatoes.
In the video where you see one on a Stick tomato, listen for the sounds of its wings as it flies.
I haven't seen these since maybe July of 2018, I think. Maybe I saw one in 2019, early on, but I don't think so. I never saw them before 2018. (But we've long had plenty of small and large wasps of other sorts—not this large, though.)
I haven't noticed a decline in bees, particularly. So, hopefully these aren't killing them.
I don't know why the wasps were monitoring my plants regularly, nor what they liked about the Stick tomato. I found them very fascinating creatures. They never bothered me at all, either.
tomato_
The above link has three videos (you may have to swipe to see the other two) of some large hornets or wasps I found on 27 Jun 2018. These wasps seemed interested in the tomato and watermelon plants, but especially the tomatoes, and especially the Stick tomatoes (I observed them several times besides this, and they gravitated toward the Stick tomatoes; I had two plants). Their preference for the Stick tomatoes isn't obvious from the footage (that's just an observation I made; I saw them quite a few times without making videos).
One of them (not in the video) was huge! It must have been about four inches long. I'd never seen anything like it. I only saw it once, but it was faster than these smaller ones in the videos (which are really fast, if you can't tell; they can change directions and fly faster than regular wasps, kind of like hoverflies fly). The big one could dart across my backyard in a second, probably. Due to its prowess, I didn't tarry too long. Fortunately, it didn't attack, even though I made a hasty retreat after I observed it, awestruck, for a while. I believe it also liked the Stick tomato. It wasn't arched much like a regular wasp; it was fairly straight, and somewhat longer proportionate to its width than the smaller ones.
The wasps would fly from plant to plant for the duration of their visits. They didn't do anything else in particular. They didn't fly around looking for places to build nests like our regular wasps.
The aforementioned 'smaller' ones are still about an inch and a half long or so (even though one appears to be the size of a regular large wasp in part of the watermelon video; it was bigger than it looked; well, they all looked bigger in person, but especially that one, although it was probably the smallest of the three).
They had bolder stripes than our other wasps, and looked thicker in general.
They're possibly Vespa mandarinia (apparently those are in Idaho now, although they weren't reported as early as my videos here), or maybe a hybrid. I'm not sure. I think their heads may have looked different.
I wonder if I'll see them again if I plant more Stick tomatoes.
In the video where you see one on a Stick tomato, listen for the sounds of its wings as it flies.
I haven't seen these since maybe July of 2018, I think. Maybe I saw one in 2019, early on, but I don't think so. I never saw them before 2018. (But we've long had plenty of small and large wasps of other sorts—not this large, though.)
I haven't noticed a decline in bees, particularly. So, hopefully these aren't killing them.
I don't know why the wasps were monitoring my plants regularly, nor what they liked about the Stick tomato. I found them very fascinating creatures. They never bothered me at all, either.
tomato_
Wikipedia says the ketogenic diet can help reduce seizures in some children with epillepsy, but it says the benefits don't always go away after discontinuing the diet (I'm paraphrasing). I hadn't heard that before:
"Around half of children and young people with epilepsy who have tried some form of this diet saw the number of seizures drop by at least half, and the effect persists after discontinuing the diet."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet
epilepsy_
ketogenic_
diet_
"Around half of children and young people with epilepsy who have tried some form of this diet saw the number of seizures drop by at least half, and the effect persists after discontinuing the diet."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet
epilepsy_
ketogenic_
diet_
I was reading in an old public domain dictionary that 'donkey riding' had a special meaning. I forgot what it was, but I found another one that might be the same, which says it means cheating with weights and measures, or miscounting. That might fit with the song, since it does seem to be about people making off with goods or money (in good conscience or not).
I just wanted to point this out since I don't see anyone else on the Internet pointing out the old secret or slang meaning for 'donkey riding'.
The version of the song I'm familiar with is by St. John Children's Choir in Children S Sing-A-Long Favorites, disc 2 track 8. There are a lot of cool songs on that album that I hadn't heard in other large collections of nursery rhymes, childrens' songs, and such.
One alternative is that the donkey riding could represent peace (but nursery rhymes tend to be about satirical political things, if what people say is the truth):
https://www.gotquestions.org/king-ride-donkey.html (note this link is religious)
Or it could be literal!
song_
music_
children_
donkey_
meaning_
mp3_
I just wanted to point this out since I don't see anyone else on the Internet pointing out the old secret or slang meaning for 'donkey riding'.
The version of the song I'm familiar with is by St. John Children's Choir in Children S Sing-A-Long Favorites, disc 2 track 8. There are a lot of cool songs on that album that I hadn't heard in other large collections of nursery rhymes, childrens' songs, and such.
One alternative is that the donkey riding could represent peace (but nursery rhymes tend to be about satirical political things, if what people say is the truth):
https://www.gotquestions.org/king-ride-donkey.html (note this link is religious)
Or it could be literal!
song_
music_
children_
donkey_
meaning_
mp3_
https://www.argusobserver.com/users/login/?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.argusobserver.com%2Fvalley_life%2Fchukars-adapt-to-new-learning-environments%2Farticle_6ad12934-8cb6-11ea-b477-77cc837acee1.html%3Fsave_asset%3D6ad12934-8cb6-11ea-b477-77cc837acee1
Yeah, I thought this was about birds, but nope. It's about college students at one of my old colleges. :) The maskot is a chukar.
The article seems to be about changes due to COVID-19.
Yeah, I thought this was about birds, but nope. It's about college students at one of my old colleges. :) The maskot is a chukar.
The article seems to be about changes due to COVID-19.
This thread on Gardenweb began the discussion, 'What are you favorite black tomatoes?'
https://www.houzz.com/discussions/2192757/what-are-your-favorite-black-tomatoes
Rather than resurrect the thread there, I figured I'd start a new one, and I might as well do it here, instead.
So, what are your favorite black/brown tomatoes, and what do you like about them? For my purposes, I'm not evaluating blue and purple tomatoes, but you can include them if you want.
• Flavor: Paul Robeson
• Sweetness: Ron's Carbon Copy and sometimes Chocolate Pear
• Earliness: Chocolate Pear
• Production: Chocolate Pear (for small tomatoes), and Black Giant (for larger tomatoes)
• Largest fruit: Black from Tula
Other black tomatoes I've tried (in no particular order) include at least these:
• Black
• African Brown Beefsteak
• Beduin
• Amazon Chocolate (no fruit)
• Indian Zebra (AKA Indian Stripe)
• Cherokee Purple (didn't eat any fruit)
• Tim's Black Ruffles (didn't eat any fruit)
• Black Vernissage
• Black Plum
• Noire De Crimee
• Black Prince (no fruit)
• Cherokee Tiger Black Pear (no fruit)
Does Girl Girl's Weird thing count as black? Mine was maroon. I've grown that.
Some black/brown tomatoes that I think/hope I'll like a lot include these:
• Chocolate Sprinkles F1
• Sunchocola F1 (I'm growing the F2, this year)
• Japanese Black Trifele (growing this year)
• Brown Berry (growing this year)
• Chocolate Cherry
• Black Cherry
• Austin's Black Cherry (growing this year)
• Wild Tiger
https://www.houzz.com/discussions/2192757/what-are-your-favorite-black-tomatoes
Rather than resurrect the thread there, I figured I'd start a new one, and I might as well do it here, instead.
So, what are your favorite black/brown tomatoes, and what do you like about them? For my purposes, I'm not evaluating blue and purple tomatoes, but you can include them if you want.
• Flavor: Paul Robeson
• Sweetness: Ron's Carbon Copy and sometimes Chocolate Pear
• Earliness: Chocolate Pear
• Production: Chocolate Pear (for small tomatoes), and Black Giant (for larger tomatoes)
• Largest fruit: Black from Tula
Other black tomatoes I've tried (in no particular order) include at least these:
• Black
• African Brown Beefsteak
• Beduin
• Amazon Chocolate (no fruit)
• Indian Zebra (AKA Indian Stripe)
• Cherokee Purple (didn't eat any fruit)
• Tim's Black Ruffles (didn't eat any fruit)
• Black Vernissage
• Black Plum
• Noire De Crimee
• Black Prince (no fruit)
• Cherokee Tiger Black Pear (no fruit)
Does Girl Girl's Weird thing count as black? Mine was maroon. I've grown that.
Some black/brown tomatoes that I think/hope I'll like a lot include these:
• Chocolate Sprinkles F1
• Sunchocola F1 (I'm growing the F2, this year)
• Japanese Black Trifele (growing this year)
• Brown Berry (growing this year)
• Chocolate Cherry
• Black Cherry
• Austin's Black Cherry (growing this year)
• Wild Tiger
The variegated grape leaf hoppers came out really early, this year, but not on the grapes (which still had a while before they grew any leaves at the time: they're starting to grow leaves now, however). They're on most of the species of plants! They only ever seemed to feast on grape leaves in previous years, and they took until maybe June or July to show up. The mild winter we had this time might have something to do with it. They're everything from stuff in the mint family, to prickly lettuce, to alpine strawberries, to roses, to hollyhocks, etc., in high numbers.
Anyway, the speckles on the strawberry leaves here, which I guess aren't very visible in the pictures, are from the leafhoppers (but these plants look great anyway):
This is either Yellow Wonder or Alexandria (the plants I have of these breeds are a few years old, but they've been in this spot since spring 2019, I believe):
This is Reine des Vallees, transplanted from my bedroom last fall (there's more than one plant in this spot); it looks as big and healthy as older plants:
variegated_grape_leafhopper
Anyway, the speckles on the strawberry leaves here, which I guess aren't very visible in the pictures, are from the leafhoppers (but these plants look great anyway):
This is either Yellow Wonder or Alexandria (the plants I have of these breeds are a few years old, but they've been in this spot since spring 2019, I believe):
This is Reine des Vallees, transplanted from my bedroom last fall (there's more than one plant in this spot); it looks as big and healthy as older plants:
variegated_grape_leafhopper
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