Month: December 2011

The magic of oranges

One of the compensations for the bleakness of winter is that the oranges start pouring out of Florida and California. As far as I can tell, in this part of the country, the winter trucking of oranges north from Florida works pretty much the same as it did when I was a child in the 1950s. U.S. 601, which runs through the Yadkin Valley, was a major truck route that came up from South Carolina and continued northward, connecting with routes that went from Ohio toward Chicago. To this day, there is a tradition of roadside produce stands along U.S. 601 that sell trucked-in produce from Florida, South Carolina and Georgia. Here in Stokes County, which is crossed by no major highways (U.S. 52 touches the southern corner of the county), there is no tradition of these roadside produce stands. I’m guessing that oranges have been shipped around the world for centuries. If historical novels can be trusted, then from Winston Graham’s novels we could learn, for example, that oranges from Spain have been shipped to the British Isles during the winter for hundreds of years.

While visiting family yesterday in the Yadkin Valley, I bought a box of oranges from a produce stand on U.S. 601. These oranges are better, fresher, and cheaper than the oranges that can be had in the grocery store. Not only that, most of the time, the grocery stores carry California oranges. I love California oranges — if I’m in California. But here in the Southeast, Florida oranges are the way to go. I’m guessing that Florida had a good crop this year. The box of oranges cost $18.50.

Since my hippy days in the 1970s, I’ve known about the magic of oranges. This mainly came from reading Jethro Kloss, who believed that oranges are a powerful medicine.

I can testify to the power of oranges. When I was in my 20s, I had to have wisdom teeth surgically removed. My dentist referred me to an oral surgeon who did the work. Two of the teeth were impacted and had never emerged from the gum. They had to be removed by making an incision in the gum, breaking the teeth apart, and bringing them out piece by piece. About two weeks after a brutal round of oral surgery, I had a regular appointment with my dentist. While poking around in my mouth, he asked me what the oral surgeon had decided to do about the wisdom teeth. I told him that we’d taken the first two out two weeks ago and that Dr. Westrick had removed the stitches last week. My dentist didn’t believe me at first. He said he couldn’t see any sign of oral surgery. In fact, he checked with my oral surgeon to see if I was telling the truth. The dentist later told me that he had never seen anyone heal so fast and that he didn’t think it was possible. “What did you do?” he asked. I said, “I juiced a dozen oranges every day.”

So I don’t just eat an orange or two. I juice them in generous quantities. I don’t know what it is that gives fresh oranges their virtue. As far as I’m concerned, orange juice in bottles and cartons is just another dead, sweet drink. All of its virtue is gone. I don’t drink it. Fresh orange juice is alive. If you can handle the calorie load and the fructose, try sometime drinking the juice of 10 or 12 fresh oranges every day for a week. Your skin will glow.

The hens aren't retired after all

My hens abruptly stopped laying back in the summer after two years of laying strong. I had no eggs at all during August, September, October, November, and much of December. I still have a great deal to learn about chickens. The only theory that I could come up with was that they had already reached henopause, so now I would have to support them and pasture them, as promised, for their remaining Golden Years.

But then all of a sudden, in the last week, they started laying huge, beautiful eggs. I am mystified. The only theory I can come up with is that they cannot tolerate hot weather. I have definitely found that my chickens, types that are said to be cold-weather hardy, are much more uncomfortable in the summer than they are in the cold of winter.

By the way, I am down to two chickens — Patience and Ruth. Chastity died during the summer. I have no idea why. She was fine in the morning when I let them out, but I found her lying dead in the grass during the afternoon. It was not a hot day. There were no signs that any kind of predator was involved. Chickens, I understand, sometimes choke to death. So that’s the only theory I was able to come up with.

During my eggless months I bought a dozen eggs only once — good eggs, supposedly, from Whole Foods. I almost threw them out because they were so pale and pathetic. Clearly, if you want good eggs with deeply colored yolks and great flavor, they’ve got to come from pastured hens.

It's good I like turnips

I’m sure I’ll never get over the thrill of knowing that supper came home in a wheelbarrow rather than a grocery bag. I harvested the remaining turnips today, because they’d stopped growing, and the risk of a hard freeze is increasing. It seems strange that the garden is still producing turnips, mustard, and kale during the second week of December. I really don’t have a reference for whether this is abnormally late for these crops in this area. Fall gardens are frost-hardy. And if it is unusually late for the garden, then that’s the upside of climate change — a longer growing season.

The soil was nice and wet when I pulled the turnips. Most of the turnips came up with a clump of soil, and in almost every clump of soil was a nice, fat earthworm or two. The organic soil amendments I’ve dumped on the garden are really paying off. I spread the dirty turnips in the grass and hosed them down to wash them, then spread them out to dry in the wind and sun. Now they’re in the basement. There was about three-quarters of a bushel of turnips left from a turnip patch of about 175 square feet. I’ve been eating, and giving away, turnips since October. I’ve prepared them every way I can think of — steamed and sliced, with butter; curried; roasted; creamed in yogurt. One turnip dish that is good enough for company is turnips au gratin.

I don’t know why turnips are almost universally scorned. For the garden, they’re an easy fall staple, and they’ll keep well into the winter. No doubt many a peasant has been kept alive by turnips in hard times. I’ve actually been served turnips once in a fancy restaurant — Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley. As I said to the waiter, it takes confidence to serve turnips.


Spread out to dry


In a bushel basket


The turnip tops made a wheelbarrow load for the compost.


Mustard


This cabbage is still going, but I doubt that it will have time to make a head before a freeze gets it.

Royalty, rusting


[Click here for High-Res]

Fortunately I’ve never been badly afflicted with a craving for fancy cars. However, I’ve had a thing for Jaguars ever since I was a teen-ager — the sedans, not so much the sporty types. I came across this old guy today on a country backroad north of me, parked outside a garage. I believe it’s a 1957.

I was able to manage my thing for Jaguars by renting one occasionally for a road trip. One of the best road trips I ever had was in a Jaguar S-type, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, down Highway 1 along the coast. Driving down, when I was in the lane on the ocean side, I took it easy. But heading north on the return to San Francisco, with an empty lane between the car and a long descent into the Pacific, I must admit that I let that Jaguar show me what it could do, and it was thrilling …

LED lighting


There are five LEDs in these spotlights, in finned aluminum heat sinks.

LED light bulbs are still pricey, but the cost has been coming down, and the variety of bulbs available is increasing.

I wanted interesting lighting for my living room, which has a 21-foot ceiling and lots of planes and angles. My concept was to use spotlights for indirect light — not too bright — bounced off the walls and ceiling. I wanted fixtures that use bulbs with a standard base rather than odd bases that would lock me into high-priced and inefficient bulbs. When the house was complete and time came for the final inspection, I put ordinary 60-watt incandescent bulbs in these fixtures just to get through the electrical inspection — a total of 15 bulbs. So for more than two years, that’s what I’ve had, and of course they didn’t create the right effect at all. The power consumption also was outrageous — 900 watts when all the lights were on. So I very rarely used them. I was never able to find spotlight bulbs (as opposed to floodlights) in compact fluorescent. But LED spotlight bulbs have started to come onto the market at prices that are bearable.

Philips makes a line of LED bulbs that can be found at Home Depot. Amazon, and specialty retailers online, also carry a pretty good range of LED bulbs these days.

The color of light that you get from LED bulbs is not ideal, though some are better than others. My corner lights (each bulb is 3 watts) are too blue, but I decided that I can live with since they’re not terribly bright and since the light is bounced off of warm-colored walls. The three lights up at 16 feet (6 watts each) are a much warmer color. The warmer color lights tend to cost a bit more, and, per watt, they’re not quite as bright.

Now when all these lights are on, I’m drawing 54 rather than 900 watts. Of course I’ll use the lights more, now that they’re not sucking so much electricity.

It might be possible to justify the cost of LED bulbs now because of their long life and low power consumption. There’s a good chance that they’ll last me 15 years or more.


I have lights like this in each corner, nine feet up.


This fixture is 16 feet up.

How your privacy is bought and sold

Thanks to a WikiLeaks document dump, we now know more than ever about how private corporations are spying on all of us (unless you’re off the grid) and selling the data to whoever will pay for it, including, of course, governments.

If you use a cell phone or a computer, you are being monitored. One of the leaked documents reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) began building last January a secret $1.5 billion installation in Utah to store “terabytes of domestic and foreign intelligence data forever and process it for years to come.”

This is being reported on security web sites and places where geeks hang on. Here’s a link to the ITWorld story, which has some of the details.

It will be interesting to see what the mainstream media say about this. I’m expecting them to ignore it.