Survival and Emergency Preparedness

Wife and I started eating some of the fruit off the Chinese plum yesterday. Little tart but some were tasty.

Purple kale is coming in nicely and we'll start adding them to our smoothies soon

Update 2 months later on the tomatoes.
1. ok. It was an experiment to plant a variety of tomatoes. I learned that there are different varieties and you should stick to what you know. I had some tomato plants that were not even producing edible size tomatoes.
2. Apparently, nearly all the annual seeds come from Red China now. It was difficult to obtain seeds during the lock down. I also learned that purported vendors in the midwest were not raising the seed that they sold on line.
3. I had thought that the size of the container was important. It has turned out that the root structure will expand and fill any size container. Some of the smallest containers were more productive than the largest containers.
4. The soil preparation and fertilizing were largely unimportant. So long as the containers had drainage, things were ok.
5. I tried raising carrots along with the tomatoes. Not productive.

The tangerine and orange crops normally come to harvest in mid March. Not this year. Tangerines were one month late. Oranges are two months late this year. I grow them so large that two people will eat one orange. Washington Navels.

The avocado trees. If there is a minimal fruit drop, I will have a couple hundred fruit this year.

Had so many cherry tomatoes come in this week that I was taking them to my sister. Planted some more French radishes. Looks like I will have Santa Rosa plums this year. Nothing from the Santa Rosa tree for the last 4 years.

The politicians are fretting about the water. Only 4% of the water is consumed by the urban dwellers. Quite a bit belongs to the farmers. However, The politicians will not get behind recycling water, building desalinization plants or buying up farmland. I expect that we will have another round of exposes of movie actors violating stupid water restrictions and water their lawns.

When people convert deserts to a want to be paradise, it takes water, lots and lots of water. I saw some of the pictures about the lakes being a record lows since the early 1900's.

Farmers just trying to farm to feed a nation. I get that too. lets hope that people start realizing that you can only jam so many people in to a certian sized area.

I never understood living in a desert. To hot for me. Then again I also promised myself that I would never live in a place that I would measure snow by the foot, yet here I am square in Alaska...