Fertilizing

It looks like they’re getting ready to inject manure in the fields around here today. For those who don’t know how it works, this might be interesting. They unroll about a mile of this big hose that Guy is inspecting in the picture below, stretching from the dairy down the road to the far side of the field. Then they start pumping liquid manure (enough water is added to make it a slurry) through the hose, which is attached to a plow with injectors that’s pulled by a tractor. The plow slices the soil open, injects the manure in, and then lets the soil fall back.

It works pretty well. We’ll smell it around here for a couple days, but it’s nothing like the smell you’d get if they spread it on top like they used to. They don’t have to use as much chemical fertilizer, if any at all. It also reduces the amount that runs off if it rains. It’ll put an end to picking up downed ears of corn, though.

The hose is probably 8 or 10 inches across. Basically a fire hose. It gets pulled back and forth across the field as they work their way from the far side this way. It seems like it would be too heavy, full of slurry, to drag that much hose that far, but it works.


I picked twelve pounds of green and red bell peppers on that first day of frost. I was going to dry them all, but that would give me way more than I need, so I decided to pickle some. This is a recipe from the Stocking Up book, which uses half peppers and half onions. I went about 5 parts peppers and 3 parts onions, since I was trying to use up peppers. Add vinegar and sugar, cook down, and process in pints. I’m thinking of using them as Christmas presents, if I can think of anyone who would like such a thing. I’m hoping it serves as a sort of relish for sausage, that kind of thing.


Part #3 of my assembly language video series has over 1000 views, which is way more than any others I’ve done. So I’m going to put in some more time on that in the coming weeks. It’d be cool if I could turn it into a real project that pays for itself, maybe with a Patreon kind of thing. There are some people doing that, like the guy making Handmade Hero, a game written in C, who does all the work on stream and puts the videos up to watch.

I think I’ll do a couple more entries in the series and see how it goes. Maybe I can get some feedback on the idea. I’d need to decide what kind of project to do first. One possibility would be an operating system. Not that the Commodore 64 or 128 needs another operating system, but that would cover all the ways the 6502 interfaces with other hardware, which could be useful for people programming it on other platforms.


I bought a Sansa Clip MP3 player many years ago. Still have it, actually, though the headphone jack got bad, so now I just use it to take dictation. It came with two songs pre-installed on it. I don’t remember the other, but this one was good enough that I tracked down a lot of other songs by the same guy, Andrew Paul Woodworth. Seems like he’s mostly a regional performer in the Seattle region. Too bad, I’d go to see him if he came around here.