deluxestogie Grow Log 2017

[deluxestogie]

Your Corojo is green no ?...

It's difficult to capture the exact hue of the leaf color with the camera. It has transitioned from very deep green to a slightly yellower green, and the leaves have become thicker and somewhat brittle--signs of maturity.

This is the same photo as the previous one, with closer detail.

I could have waited another week or two to prime the leaves, but I was concerned that they would suffer some damage from wind.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

My Back Porch Today

When all my 2017 leaf has been housed in the curing shed, there will be zero space there for more. The only reason I have room for it all is because the remaining leaf from 2016 (maybe a dozen strings and another dozen tied hands) has immigrated to my enclosed back porch.

One downside of using my kiln for flue-curing is that it can not be used to kiln leaf during the 6 weeks or so that the flue-curing is under way (early July to mid-August). Some of the 2016 leaf has aged enough to be smokable without kilning, but the kiln makes it way better.

I have a storage closet to the side of the kiln. Although I installed wheels on the kiln, to enable me to get into that closet from time to time, the other clutter on the porch prevents me from moving the kiln more than about 1 foot. I wonder what's in there. (I do recall that, on the closet shelf, I have my 1961 vintage Parker Brothers board game of Risk, with its boxes of little, colored wooden cubes for army tokens. It's almost time to send that to my grandson.)

Bob

 

[Youn]

Wow, the game of Risk is so old? I always thought it was from the 80's… I was born in 1979, this explains that!

/ A lot of pretty brown things, there!

 

[deluxestogie]

As a young teenager (~14 y/o), my two best friends and I played Risk at one another's houses. Endless hours (sometimes as friendly allies, at other times as genuinely angry enemies) were spent moving those little pieces about the board. There was an art to arranging the tiny "army" cubes within one country in the most intimidating configuration. I took adolescent pride in having never betrayed an alliance. I learned world geography from Risk: Irkust, Yakutsk, Kamchatka....

It may just be the passionate nature of teen memories, but Risk is rated as the number one best game ever, in my estimation. I haven't found anyone else interested in playing it in many decades. With the advent of computer game consoles (Atari, Nintendo, etc.), board games seem to have lost status for older kids and young teens. I don't remember my son playing board games--just Nintendo games--back in the mid to late 1980s. (I once had to leave work, and rush to the store to purchase Zelda, from the very first shipment to arrive on the market.)

I suppose there is a French edition of Risk.

Bob

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

North America is the key.

 

[mwaller]

... it's all too thick to make oscuro wrappers, so I'll be thinking filler condiment for these beasts.


Bob

Is there a specific method for creating maduro or oscuro wrappers? Is it simply well-cured ligero, it is there more to it?

 

[deluxestogie]

North America is the key.

Occasionally.

Bob

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

As a teenager and young adult, my friends and I used to play Risk enthusiastically. The heck with Monopoly...boooring. I tried to introduce my nephews to it when they were that age, but it never took. Can't sit still that long. Board games as well as card games are a dying form of entertainment. Younger people seem to have forgotten the social aspect of games in favor of whiz-bang special effects. I guess we have gone from getting together in groups to play games for entertainment to setting solitarily in front of glittering slot machines. Technology has it good and its not so good aspects. But as the French say "such is life."

Wes H.

Cribbage is also a good game. But you actually have to be able to count.

 

[deluxestogie]

I'll take a guess, and say that many a board game will be played in Florida over the next week. And a lot of folks will be wondering where the directions sheet has gone.

Bob

A few of my favorite computer games are Genghis Khan, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Nobunaga's Ambition. All of them were essentially strategy board games (similar to Risk), that used computer graphics maps, in place of printed maps on a board. Plus they each had some element of managing an economy.

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

Yes, board games by candle or lantern light. That will be a new experience for many I'm sure. Isn't there an old Black & White movie about a group of people stuck in a hotel during a hurricane. "Key Largo" if I recall correctly. Personally, I don't do computer games. I have enough hobbies already. Tobacco takes up a lot of time. I went to the county fair yesterday. I went to a Gem and Mineral show today. There were lots of sparkly baubles begging me to bring them home with me. I resisted the siren's call. The club President was trying to talk me into coming and giving a presentation on mineralogy to their group. Come to think of it, I do have a pretty good collection of different Sulfate minerals...Oh...and I still have to work for a living....damn!

I think I'll sign off for today and go crack open a fresh Hermiston melon. Hermiston, Oregon is regionally famous for their watermelons and cantaloupes. And unfortunately for them, for their Mexican Gang-Banger criminal element.

Wes H.

 

[BigBonner]

It's difficult to capture the exact hue of the leaf color with the camera. It has transitioned from very deep green to a slightly yellower green, and the leaves have become thicker and somewhat brittle--signs of maturity.

This is the same photo as the previous one, with closer detail.

I could have waited another week or two to prime the leaves, but I was concerned that they would suffer some damage from wind.

Bob

I noticed your Corojo 99 has a slick sheen to your leaf and are a little more green than mine . . Mine has lost that shine and slick feeling I would say from my 99 being a little more ripe .

 

[Youn]

As a young teenager (~14 y/o), my two best friends and I played Risk at one another's houses. Endless hours (sometimes as friendly allies, at other times as genuinely angry enemies) were spent moving those little pieces about the board. There was an art to arranging the tiny "army" cubes within one country in the most intimidating configuration. I took adolescent pride in having never betrayed an alliance. I learned world geography from Risk: Irkust, Yakutsk, Kamchatka....

It may just be the passionate nature of teen memories, but Risk is rated as the number one best game ever, in my estimation. I haven't found anyone else interested in playing it in many decades. With the advent of computer game consoles (Atari, Nintendo, etc.), board games seem to have lost status for older kids and young teens. I don't remember my son playing board games--just Nintendo games--back in the mid to late 1980s. (I once had to leave work, and rush to the store to purchase Zelda, from the very first shipment to arrive on the market.)

I suppose there is a French edition of Risk.

Bob

Mine was a french edition, yes, but it makes little difference, only the names of the countries It makes me learn some geography too, I remember wondering about Kamchatka hahaha!
France is a technologically lagging country and the video games wasn't so omnipresent in the 80s. In the same time that I was playing Risk, I was also programming some lines of Basic language on my computer Amstrad CPC 464, and playing good old games as Boulder Dash and Bomb Jack ; drawing with Paint on my brother's profesional PC… the domination of the computer games consoles here only comes from the 90s.
Maybe my son will play Risk one day… it's still there, in a corner of the attic, waiting for a new Napoleon.

 

[deluxestogie]

...in the 80s. In the same time that I was playing Risk, I was also programming some lines of Basic language on my computer Amstrad CPC 464...

In early 1977, I learned BASIC with a book, a pen and a pad of paper. I would write out code, then read through it line-by-line to see if it was correct. By the end of that year, I purchased a Northstar Sol-20 computer (with its mighty 8080A microprocessor, and 48K of RAM memory, plus 3 floppy disk drives [hard drives did not exist until a year later]) for a tidy $7000, and was finally able to actually "run" programs. In 1978, I used it, along with a primitive word processing program called Electric Pencil, to write a book on cigars--I never published it.

Fun memories.

Bob

 

[Alpine]

Maybe the time has come to publish that book. You can even expand the "tobacco cultivation" section a little...


pier

 

[deluxestogie]

Maybe the time has come to publish that book.

That was back in the day when cigar brands meant something. Today, the same material would be meaningless. And the explosion of silly brand names and dozens of blends per brand make retail cigar purchasing a lottery.

I have outlined and partially written a manuscript on home tobacco growing. It threatens to be in the range of 400 pages, and seems to require far more color photos than would be economically feasible in a small print-run book. I have reams of material already gathered. I'm exploring various options.

Bob

 

[Thedbs999]

Bob, "the explosion of silly brand names and dozens of blends per brand make retail cigar purchasing a lottery."
This is why i decided to grow my grow tobacco this year.

Dan

 

[deluxestogie]

I guess what I'm saying about today's cigar brands is that they have taken on the character of marketing fiction--like trailers for crummy movies. What exactly does an image of a skull, or a name like "asylum" mean about the cigar it labels? To me, it says, "I am a knockoff, ho-hum, average factory cigar. I've got to come up with a hook, so impressionable and ill-informed consumers will buy me."

Bob

 

[Gavroche]

Yes and what on Roméo and julietta ? a tragic story of cigar ?... ah ah ah !

 

[deluxestogie]

Soon, you will have me ranting.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

I cannot tell a lie. I cut down that potted Havana 233 growing in a Folger's coffee tub. [Not an endorsement of Folgers coffee, or any of its permutations.] A forlorn tobacco stump remains in the pot. Even its wooden label is gone. Maybe I should bring it indoors for the winter, and keep it watered. Like a pet hamster.

I have one labeled wire awaiting the sluggish maturation of tippy top leaf from the Piloto Cubano PR (~48 leaves). AND THAT'S ALL THAT IS LEFT TO HARVEST! (Assuming I completely ignore all the unsolicited suckers. Their most charitable disposition would be a single string, labeled "random sucker leaf". A short string at that.)

Bob