Deluxestogie Grow Log 2020

[skychaser]

I've gotten only two puny, heavily blemished tomatoes so far, from 4 plants, and zero eggplants from 12 plants. I might have harvested 10 pea pods, before the vines died. No pears or apples or black walnuts, and few blackberries or grapes. It has been a season that I wouldn't want to see repeated. (Iowa lost 40% of its corn harvest in a single storm.) We take our food supply for granted.

Bob

I picked about 100 lbs of tomatoes last week. Less than half of what I normally would get and nearly 3 weeks later. We had nearly 3 weeks of cold miserable rain starting the 1st of June that sent the plants into shock. The leaves twisted and curled up and looked like they had been sprayed with an herbicide. I've seen it before but never like this. The early setting fruit got a lot of stem rot and it took the plants all of July to start to come out of it.

It was a disaster for all my squash, cucumbers and melons. The seed just rotted in the ground. And it was a disaster for the wild turkey chicks that just hatched. Normally right now I would have 3-4 moms with 50 chicks hanging around in a big flock. This year I have a dozen hens all together with 0 chicks.

The craigslist adds for produce has never been this low, so I guess I'm not alone. I've only seen two adds for tomatoes and they want $3 per lb. I sell mine for $1 in bulk and everything I will get this year is already sold. On the bright side, the tobacco looks good and the corn, potatoes and onions have never been better. The beans that came up are doing good but are 3 week late too.

 

[deluxestogie]

Why do you tell that within 10 years or so all the big trees will be gone ?

They are quite old for Silver Maple. All of them have begun to drop larger and larger branches. I've lived here for 22 years, and seen their rate of fallen branches accelerate. Entropy always wins.

Please put the Ainaro me Liquiça in pots and take them in if you haven't gotten seeds by frost.

If they are too large to fit indoors, then I'll have to top them fairly low, pot them, then put them into the ground again next spring.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

The problem with "unseasonable" weather is that it not only affects the germination and growth patterns of the plants, but may also force them to blossom out of sync with their usual pollinating insects.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

Life expectancy of trees:

Tree Lifespans

Bob

 

[plantdude]

Life expectancy of trees:

Tree Lifespans

Bob

That a good link Bob. I'm surprised to see Tupelo's can make it 600 years, I would have never guessed.

 

[deluxestogie]

Well, it's missing quite a few. But a look at "similar" species shows the lifespan differences between, say Silver Maple and Sugar Maple. All of my Silver Maples have a trunk diameter of over 36 inches.

"Approximate the tree's age by multiplying the diameter by 3 for silver maple, 4.5 for red and Norway maple, 5 for black maple, and 5.5 for sugar maple."

How to Tell the Age of Maple Trees

With numerous types of maple trees, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact age of a living...

homeguides.sfgate.com

What that algorithm suggests is that silver maples, of all the maples, grow trunks with the lowest density (get fatter faster), which also comports with their shorter survival. Sugar maple is much harder and more durable wood than silver maple.

Bob

 

[Brown Thumb]

I think it’s been a bad year for everything and everybody to some extent. We got zero potatoes and zero beans from the garden this year. Should have seen my wife’s face when she pulled up the potatoe plants! First time in eight years not a single spud.

First time yr. I grew spuds. I planted 100 about 50 survived.
One plant was down and out so I went burrowing.

The tomatoes,beans,buttnut squash, onions, are going very well.
Watermelon,cantaloupe,cucumbers,pumpkins,corn, zucchini was a waste of time.

 

[Brown Thumb]

The craigslist adds for produce has never been this low, so I guess I'm not alone. I've only seen two adds for tomatoes and they want $3 per lb. I sell mine for $1 in bulk and everything I will get this year is already sold. On the bright side, the tobacco looks good and the corn, potatoes and onions have never been better. The beans that came up are doing good but are 3 week late too.

Jacob my boy, girlfriends parents own a farm and sell at market and the get a buck per cucumber.
That’s crazy.

 

[deluxestogie]

Bob

 

[Sigge]

Bob

After a difficult early season, your plants look really good. I'm happy it turned not to be a complete disaster for you.

L

 

[deluxestogie]

Thank you. Tobacco plants in themselves are just nice to look at.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

I posted a single photo with no commentary. It's a truly joyous aspect of this forum that within seven hours, there have been responses in some form or another from members in Alabama, France, Arkansas, Texas, Romania, Arizona, Croatia, West Virginia, Alberta, Ontario, Finland, and Indiana.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

Mud Lug Science: a series of 1, plus 1 control

[I was intending to post this in the pics of your sticks thread, but decided that this is really a grower issue.]

Question: Are mud lugs worth the trouble of saving, handling, curing and storing?
(Spoiler: not unless you're desperate)

My Lipstick on a Pig used ~7 day old Glessnor mud lugs, fresh from the mud. They are the control "group". Today's task was to match that control with a test "group", upon which more care had been lavished.

To be meaningful, the properly managed mud lugs for the test subject would need to be from the same tobacco variety. I selected primed, strung, shed-cured, aged and kilned Glessnor mud lugs from my 2013 crop. Again, the wrapper is Ecuador Cameroon. Neither cigar used a binder.

The mud lug filler is in a somewhat brittle low case (not too crumbly), since the only other case this stuff achieves is pudding. With stemming and knocking and shaking, most of the dried mud that still clung to the 7 year old leaf had come off before I brought it to the rolling board.

Even so, more dried mud dusted the rolling area. (But it is kilned and aged mud!)

As with Piglet, this cigar lit easily, and burned well. Nicotine was pretty much absent. As far as how it tastes, I'm not sure that it is all that different from any all volado cigar--not very flavorful. In comparing it to the unaged filler, if I were to rate that one as 3 stars out of a possible 10, the properly cared for filler gets an easy 3½ stars. Meh.

So, with this inadequate study, the answer to the primary question is:

1. Not unless you are desperate for cigar-ish leaf.
2. Yes, if you need some very bland filler for a cigarette blend.

Impact on Bob's harvest practices: None. For the past five or so years, I've just left true mud lugs (the bottom couple of leaves) to rot in the mud. I now label the next priming up as "mud lugs". They're noticeably nicer.

Bob

 

[Radagast]

I had fun with them this first grow and I know it's harmless but I find the dirt from leaves like that a tad gross so I doubt I will bother with them much again either.

 

[plantdude]

Mud Lug Science: a series of 1, plus 1 control

[I was intending to post this in the pics of your sticks thread, but decided that this is really a grower issue.]

Question: Are mud lugs worth the trouble of saving, handling, curing and storing?
(Spoiler: not unless you're desperate)

My Lipstick on a Pig used ~7 day old Glessnor mud lugs, fresh from the mud. They are the control "group". Today's task was to match that control with a test "group", upon which more care had been lavished.

To be meaningful, the properly managed mud lugs for the test subject would need to be from the same tobacco variety. I selected primed, strung, shed-cured, aged and kilned Glessnor mud lugs from my 2013 crop. Again, the wrapper is Ecuador Cameroon. Neither cigar used a binder.

The mud lug filler is in a somewhat brittle low case (not too crumbly), since the only other case this stuff achieves is pudding. With stemming and knocking and shaking, most of the dried mud that still clung to the 7 year old leaf had come off before I brought it to the rolling board.

Even so, more dried mud dusted the rolling area. (But it is kilned and aged mud!)

As with Piglet, this cigar lit easily, and burned well. Nicotine was pretty much absent. As far as how it tastes, I'm not sure that it is all that different from any all volado cigar--not very flavorful. In comparing it to the unaged filler, if I were to rate that one as 3 stars out of a possible 10, the properly cared for filler gets an easy 3½ stars. Meh.

So, with this inadequate study, the answer to the primary question is:

1. Not unless you are desperate for cigar-ish leaf.
2. Yes, if you need some very bland filler for a cigarette blend.

Impact on Bob's harvest practices: None. For the past five or so years, I've just left true mud lugs (the bottom couple of leaves) to rot in the mud. I now label the next priming up as "mud lugs". They're noticeably nicer.

Bob

Good to know, thanks for sharing the info.

 

[deluxestogie]

Reflections on Marvin K. Mooney.

The time is too early.
The time is a couple of weeks from now.
Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go anyway.

My Glessnor was looking maturish. The bottom half of the plants look okay for stalk cutting, but the tops could sure use a bit more time. Unfortunately, I've got about five more days with high temps in the 80s, and balmy nights. After that, highs float in the low 70s, and the nights in the 50s, with constantly high humidity. Since more suitable curing conditions are not likely to return this fall, I decided to stalk-cut the Glessnor today (all 7 plants), and trust the curing shed to accomplish some serious curing with my scant remaining hot days.

No step by step photos. But here it is in the shed. The photo makes the leaf look even less mature than it is, since I allowed the cut stalks to wilt briefly in the sun, prior to hanging.

Today or tomorrow I'll stalk-cut the maturish Prilep, and hang them in the sun. That will leave a pathetic band of stragglers. Some of those might make it; some might not.

The change in the weather could be worse. I'm not complaining. Here is the weather for Denver CO:



Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

My Prilep 66-9/7 has yet to blossom. Choosing to get some leaf from them, rather than none, I went ahead and stalk-cut them today. The lower half of each stalk is likely to come out fine. We'll have to see about the upper halves. There were 8 of them, out of the 16 that I had planned (and 20 that I started in the 1020 tray). I was able to easily cut the stalks with a small pair of pruning shears. (The Glessnor required my full-size loppers, and was a challenge even with all that leverage.)

This strange season, with no BT spraying, I found only about 20 tiny hornworms total, and a few eggs. The confused Manduca sexta moths seemed to prefer the tasty and tender Prilep as a birthing place--nearly half of them, even though there was about 6 or 8 times the foliage among the Glessnor.

Driving a nail into each Oriental stalk is silly. Instead, I use the pointed end of a single blade from a sharp pair of scissors to puncture a through-hole in the base of each stalk, and use a hanger made from a strategically unfolded, large paper clasp.

I make sure my Tyvek name tag (one on each stalk, to follow its leaves through their entire existence) is on the "hook" side of the clasp. Once the stalk is in place, I close that final angle a bit, so that wind motion cannot slip the stalk off the clasp. The clothespins are positioned only to maintain adequate separation between the stalks, for best sun exposure.

Sun-curing most Orientals on the stalk usually requires about 3 weeks, depending on the cloud cover and temperatures

Bob

 

[GreenDragon]

Driving a nail into each Oriental stalk is silly. Instead, I use the pointed end of a single blade from a sharp pair of scissors to puncture a through-hole in the base of each stalk, and use a hanger made from a strategically unfolded, large paper clasp.

After sticking my finger a few times I now use a cordless drill with a 3/8" bit to make the pilot hole. So much easier and no blood!
Although I should add that I usually do this to much bigger plants and the bottom stems are quite woody.

 

[POGreen]

Bob , have you ever heard of a cigarvariety called ''Hiltonia'' ?
I've got some extra seeds if you're interested
POGreen

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

After sticking my finger a few times I now use a cordless drill with a 3/8" bit to make the pilot hole. So much easier and no blood!
Although I should add that I usually do this to much bigger plants and the bottom stems are quite woody.

I use a drill for stalk curing too.