Another Win For Linux

[yogi]

I happen to have a section of that Mennonite tomato in the fridge, and there are a few seeds in it. The only glitch is that I would need some soil in which to grow it. LOL I have thought about doing something I experimented with in the past, i.e., growing the plants inside a bag of potting soil. I never grew such a fantastic crop of tomatoes as I did back then. I suppose I could start some seedlings now and expect a harvest around Halloween. Your comments about pruning and forcing super-growth on a single stem got me thinking gardening again. It sure would be interesting if I could show you a picture of my 5 pound tomato next fall.

[Kellemora]

Gibberellic Acid is used to cause plants and/or their fruits to grow larger than they should, but don't ask me how to use it, because I never have.

If you scoop out a small section of your tomato with seeds, put them in a glass of water on your window ledge until they ferment, then you can wash them off and set them aside to dry on a piece of toilet tissue. If they stick, no biggie, plant them with the TP stuck to them, won't hurt anything.
I did this quit a lot, kept the seeds about 3/8 to 1/2 inch apart on the tissue, then used them by pinching the seed and tissue to tear it apart. When you are ready to plant, you can wet the tissue so it pulls apart easily too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibberellic_acid

[yogi]

I don't know if it was gibberellic acid, but way back in the old days when I was heavily into organic gardening I used a rooting compound that promoted growth. One instance I can recall is using it on a rubber tree plant to propagate cuttings. I recall using it on tubers too, such as potatoes, to get them started.

Thanks for the tip for tomato seeds. I don't recall ever fermenting them in the past, but I have saved seeds to let them dry out and start a new crop.

[Kellemora]

Rooting Compound is HORMODIN Comes H-1, H-2, and H-3 concentrations.
Can't live without this stuff!

There are many video's on how to ferment tomato seeds.
Here's one done by a Brit, but shows how easy it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbVcHLpHxKg

If you want to save seeds to plant next year, it is best to ferment them, let they dry, and store them in an envelope.
We kept all seeds in wooden boxes because they stay dryer that way, also if you have a silica gel pack from some electronic device package, toss that in too.

[yogi]

One of the comments on that video mirrors my experiences. Cherry tomatoes that fell off the vine and were reincorporated into the dirt over winter had a pretty high germination rate. LOL I guess fermentation is more of a sure thing, but Mother Nature has her own ways too.

[Kellemora]

Yes, almost all seeds that fall from fruit to the ground, if somehow covered and protected from the elements, if necessary, will reproduce. In some cases, maybe only one in ten-thousand, in others, one in ten or less, like dandelions, hi hi.

We had a small garden area of tomatoes up between two cherry trees. It was abandoned, and even so, a pile of tomato plants grew and fell over on top of each other. I picked several tomatoes from the pile of stems and leaves each year for about three or four years. I think by mowing over it I finally wiped out the tomatoes.
We do have a few cherry tries that came up as volunteers, and a couple of nice holly bushes, I decided not to mow down.
But all the other trees that sprout up out there, like Mimosa's I mow down as fast as they come up.

The main purpose of fermenting seeds is so you can store them dry until next year, or the year after. Kept in a wooden box, seeds can remain viable in some cases for several years. Unfortunately they cannot remain dormant forever and will eventually die. The germination rate drops in half every year, sometimes more than half, depends on the seed variety.

I used to collect packets of flower seeds as a hobby. Some of those date back as far as 1976.
In a few cases, I had more than one pack of the same seeds with the same package design.
Around 2005 I tried germinating them rather than just throw them away, more out of curiosity than anything else.
I no longer remember what they were, but some of the packets had at least a 10% germination rate, and others did not germinate at all.

Debi's father carried a Buckeye seed in his pocket, I assume for good luck.
I have no idea how old it was. But when I started dating Debi, he gave me one.
No telling how old it was. After he passed away, I decided to plant both of them to see what would happen.
I didn't mark the pot as to which one was which, because I really didn't know since both ended up in a sock drawer.
To my surprise, one of them did germinate. I let it grow to about a foot high inside, them moved it to outside for about three months before I planted it in the ground.
Debi read somewhere that the buckeye tree is poisonous and made me move it out of the back yard.
I did, moved to the corner of the front yard, it grew about another foot taller then just up and died.

[yogi]

Your mention of "poison" plants brought back memories of something that grew prolifically in the back yard forest I had up north. It was a tree that had needle sharp spikes on it's branches. You could do some serious damage to yourself if you fell into them inadvertently. The tree would have fruit that looked like miniature cherries that were about the size of a pea. A couple seeds were inside the fruit and not much else. However, every one of those fruits that fell to the ground germinated and grew into a new tree, or so it seemed. The wood from this tree was indeed cherry colored and very hard. I'd have to sharpen my chain saw after I tried trimming or removing one. I never did get a positive ID as to what they were, but aside from propagating like wildfire, nothing grew under the tree within the root line. The saplings from the tree were the only thing that grew near the parent tree. I read that some plant roots actually give off a poison to stop other plants from growing near it. I'm certain that was the story with these trees.

[Kellemora]

I don't know which tree it is either Yogi, but you are correct about some trees preventing anything else from growing near it.
Also, besides that, some trees co-mingle with other trees of a like kind, and if one gets injured or gets a disease, the others help it if they can, or isolate it to protect themselves.
Some scientists believe they do communicate with each other through their root systems, and tried to prove it by showing a terminally sick tree, and the other tree roots from healthy trees quickly died back away from the sick trees roots, thus leaving it alone to suffer and die.

In the flower business, some things we would try in an attempt to create a new hybrid, could in some cases cause the entire bed of flowers to shut down, including those which were not part of the hybridization process.
I've seen some mighty weird things happen with flowers and plants over the years, some of which we can't explain.
In other cases we learned the hard way, you can't do it that way, and went on to try other things.

Since they were in business to make money, they rarely tried things they already knew were impossible.
But in the space I had reserved for my own crazy ideas, I would try things considered impossible, and sometimes had a success. Maybe not exactly what I wanted to achieve, but a surprise plant which was duplicatable.
I was striving to create a white marigold for a contest which had been going on for over 20 years.
I didn't wind up with a white marigold, but did wind up with marigolds with Dusty Miller type leaves.
After I propagated enough of these, we were able to start selling them from the plant department, and folks fell in love with them, for a short time anyhow.
We did have several types of annuals offered by no one else, and a few tropical plants too.
Most growers won't mess with trying to cultivate plants that cannot be propagated from themselves, via cuttings or seeds.
We had one line of tropical plants we sold, and/or rented out for special occasions. Those who bought them probably did so to see if they could propagate them, although many were sold to interior landscapers who did malls and the like.

It took several steps to get the final desired plant. And the parent plants all had to be isolated from each other to keep the strain pure. Each of the four parent plants were kept in separate greenhouses from each other. Then we could bring two A and B to propagation house 1, and bring C and D to propagation house 2.
A and B produced plant E, and C and D produced plant F.
Then in propagation house 3 we would pair plants E and F so they would cross pollinate and produce plant G.
Plant G is the unique cultivar we sold, which could not be propagated from its own cuttings and was sterile so no seeds.
Plants E and F could be propagated from their own cuttings, but the plants grown from the cuttings could not be cross pollinated to produce plant G.
In other words for each crop of G, we had to repeat the entire process all over again, which is why no other greenhouses messed with it. To get 500 plant G, it took about 750 each of E and F, because not all take. And to get E and F took several thousand A, B, C, and D, all raised separate and away from each other, which takes several greenhouses isolated from each other to pull off. Needless to say, this plant was very expensive, which is why we normally just rented them out for graduations, weddings, large parties, etc.
Crazy business, I'm glad I'm out of, hi hi.

[yogi]

The "G" plants must have been extra special in order to justify all the cost and effort that goes into producing them. I know people will pay a premium for that unique plant that nobody else seems to have, but how many customers like that could be out there?

I've read about the way trees communicate via their root system and it's fascinating. I lived on a full acre of land in Illinois and about 3/4ths of it was overgrown with trees, shrubs, and brush. There were a lot of prairie plants growing wild back there too in what seemed like a limited space. When we first moved in there had to be close to a dozen elm trees of various size in our woods. It took about ten years before Dutch Elm disease started to do it's thing. All the elms died over the course of ten years or so.

My neighbor had a single elm tree about 50 yards from my forest and the next closest elm tree. His tree was special because it was planted when his son was born, or something like that. So, when he saw my elms dying off he called in an arborist who told the story about how trees communicate via their root system. He said there was only one thing he could do which was dig a trench around the neighbor's elm and sever the root system. They had some heavy equipment out there to do the job. By the time the arborist finished his work all my elms were dead and cut down, but I left the stumps in the ground assuming they would die off eventually.

The memorial elm didn't look like it was doing so well, but it lasted for at least five years after the treatment. I moved and don't know if it's still there.

[Kellemora]

They were special enough we rented them out to area schools for their graduations, some proms, a few shindigs at major places like the Biltmore Club, and a few businesses and churches also rented them from us.
We usually supplied all the rental Ferns and Palms too. Often the entire front of the stage were ferns side by side, and down each side of the stage were palms, sometimes across the back as well.
If you can picture that, then in the front corners we often had two to four of our type G plants. Twice as tall as a fern, about half as tall as a palm, and the leaves looked like small lacy feathers on willowy branches.
We always had people guessing as to what it might be, but they always named different types of trees, like Mimosa or Cypress, etc. Some thought it might be a tall type of fern like a maidenhair fern.

The plants that looks most like what we propagated are called Tree Ferns. In fact, the Cyathea cooperi now in propagation looks similar to ours, except that tree only has one trunk like palm with leaves dangling down from the top. While ours had several vertical trunks some with small branches going up the trunk, which makes it not look like a fern at all.
Wish I had a picture of these guys, they were beautiful.

By the way, Monsanto purchased hundreds of these over the years to adorn their offices as well as give as gifts to major clients. And as I said previously, indoor mall landscapers also purchased several per year. So, since we had the means to do so, it was worth raising them.

On the Elms, I had one in my backyard near a pool. I wished that darn thing would die for years, hi hi. For some reason, it never seemed to get infected by the disease.

[yogi]

A few of the elms I cut down were magnificent. I wished I had a saw mill to make planks out of them. Most were in the 25 year old range but some were younger. Dutch Elm was a big problem up where I lived and I was surprised to see so many trees in my back acre. I guess it's typical for them to die off around 25 years old.

It's a shame you don't have pictures of your G-plant creations, but I got a pretty good idea of what they looked like from your description.

[Kellemora]

I used to have thousands of photo's, and over 90% of them were lost in the two floods. Very sad about that.

We had a framed picture of two photographs hanging on our cut flower shop wall. One from the 1940's and one from the 1970's. I had asked for this picture when the shop closed, but dad said it was promised to uncle Clarence.
Before giving it to uncle Clarence, my mom took it to a studio to have it copied and an identical one made for me.
I hate to say this, but I was most disappointed when I opened the gift of it from her.
Not only was it not identical, they studio cropped off the main feature I liked about both photos.
I still have it, sitting against the wall in the back of my closet.
I have better pictures I took myself while up on a couple of helicopter rides.
I didn't want to let my mom know how disappointed I was after she spent all that money.
So after a couple of years I stopped by my uncles to see if I could borrow it long enough to have a copy made.
I about cried when he said he never wanted it in the first place and tossed it in the trash.

It wasn't the greenhouses that were the main feature to me, I have plenty of photo's of our greenhouses old and new showing the same things. The feature of these two photo's was the drive which became Bansbach Road.
It was originally just a gravel drive that ran down the original boundary of our property, all the way back to the barns at the north end of our original property line.
The thing about this was, in the 1940 photograph, before cars had power steering and were still all stick shifts, the gravel road which started around 1890, by 1940 was still perfectly straight. Simply because of the way farmers drove back then. They lined up the radiator cap with a post on the far side of the field and drove to it. That's how we kept the rows straight when we plowed.
One other thing most folks don't realize about driving on gravel roads. You always drive on the center and right hump. This is to help keep the road flat from those who don't, and hold the weeds at bay, hi hi.
The newer photo from 1970, after power steering, and automatic transmission, wound around like a snake. The road was no longer straight, even though nothing about the road itself changed. New gravel was added bringing it back to perfectly straight, but within a year or two, it was back looking like a snake again.
New drivers have no idea how to keep their car going in a straight line, or to ride on the high side of the humps.

To me, that picture with two photo's showed the difference between old technology and new technology. Serious drivers from lackadaisical drivers, etc.

[yogi]

I can feel your pain with the irony of that dual picture you never were allowed to have. It would make me cry as well.

I don't take many pictures and almost always miss the good shots. In my many decades of owning a camera I can recall only two photographs I shot which I thought were exceptional. One was of the October full moon rising above the eastern horizon across the street from my house. It was dark and the street lights were on and there were some very thin clouds in the sky that would obscure the moon from moment to moment. I got a shot when the moon was in the clear above the roof line of the neighbor's house. It was a two second exposure and I didn't have a tripod so that I had to brace the camera against something solid and hope I could hold it steady long enough to get the picture. It worked way better than I hoped given that it was ever so slightly out of focus and the streetlights were glowing amber under a jet black sky.

The second masterpiece was taken two Septembers ago when wife and I were celebrating our 50th anniversary at a posh resort in South Carolina. There were three buildings with luxury suits build along the banks of a calm riverbed - with alligators in it nonetheless. Some exceptionally tall pines were in the background and the buildings reflected magnificently in the mirror calm waters of the river. I walked to the opposite shore where there was an wooden bridge and captured the whole scene with perfect composition. I was really proud of myself and received a lot of good comments about it. Wife decided she like the picture so much that she would take it to a shop, have it enlarged and framed so that she could put it over the bed. When we got it back the picture was cropped to eliminate the fence and part of the waterway. To my mind that destroyed the beauty of it all. It now looked like a postage stamp instead of a post card. LOL

Anyway, I have the digital originals of both so not all is lost. The Pixel 3 clever phone I have takes some pretty awesome pictures too, but they are obviously enhanced. I must say it does an excellent job with night photography and we have a lot of open sky here for me to experiment. While I have a couple really good Pixel photos, they are nothing compared to my two works of art with the Nikon.

[Kellemora]

Being at the right place, at the right time, and at the right angles, with the right lighting, is about like winning the lottery.
So if you got some excellent shots over the years, BRAVO, BRAVO, BRAVO. You are a lucky man!

The camera I used during my freelance photography days was a Yashica TL Electro X 35mm.
I had special lenses for taking certain shots, and used an appropriate film for the shot.
Some films were great for green or landscape shots, while others were great for reds or facial shots.
I never did find the perfect film for all photography needs.

Speaking of cell phone cameras. Did you know that the camera facing you in most cell phones that have one facing you, is totally different than the one out the back for taking distant pictures.
The camera facing you has a much wider perception of light waves.

Here, you can prove it to yourself this way.
Hold your infrared TV remote facing the front of your phone with the camera turned on.
You WILL be able to see the infrared lights flash. (Good way to see if your remote is working).
Now try it with the back of your camera, or the normal picture taking lens. You probably won't see the infrared.
Looking back at 35mm film. The back camera is more like the blue film, while the front of the camera is more like the red film, designed for selfies, or face shots.
I don't have a Schmartz-Fone myself, but have tried it with other peoples phones and it seems all that do have a camera facing you can see the infrared, while the back camera cannot, except in a couple of cases on super expensive phones.

[yogi]

Now that you mention it ... I happen to have one of them there super expensive phones. LOL The Pixel 3 XL actually has three cameras and I've seen somebody talking about releasing a phone with five cameras. Oddly enough I don't recall which side of the phone has the two cameras, but I'm guessing the selfie side facing me. There are two modes for selfies, one being a wider frame than normal. The point is to include more than just two people when making a self portrait. The resolution of the front camera is way different than the resolution of the rear camera. There is a 2:1 telescopic lens out front which isn't much when you think about it, but they do some digital hanky-panky to get those really long distant shots. That's why they need better resolution up front.

Now that I own a smartphone I can say with some authority that it is worth having. I recommend you getting one just for the fact that it is more like a Linux computer than a phone. I do not recommend you doing something crazy like I did and get the top of the line. Pixel is a great phone, but the apps and computer aspects of it are just as much fun on phones selling for 1/3rd the price. It's the apps that make my Pixel fun. Some can be done with a desktop or laptop, but many are only suited for mobile computing. I have a sound meter app, for example, that has no desktop equivalent. It does take time to learn so that maybe it would not fit into your schedule. But, if it's at all possible for you to acquire one, you will not regret it. We can message each other then, and send selfies.

I do indeed recall the color balance on Kodak film. There was daylight film and indoor film, but I also got my hands on some infrared film one time. I eventually got my own darkroom and was able to play with colors, but most of my darkroom experience was in black and white; a lot easier to deal with and no color balance problems.

[Kellemora]

I don't want a Schmartz-Fone, hi hi. I have enough things eating away at my time as it is.
My frau has one, and it is always notifying her of someone who posted on Farcebook, or if someone texted her, etc.

I used to develop my own 620 B&W film, sorta enjoyed it. Even bought an enlarger, a super cheap one of course.
I did do a few rolls of 35mm film, but it ended up costing me more to do my own than taking it down to Shiller's who were professionals. I never used those photo-mat places or drug stores though, since I was a freelance photographer, only Shillers would do.

[yogi]

You are absolutely correct about the costs involved in doing your own photo developing. I always had about as much waste as I did good results which doubled the already inflated cost. But, of course, that's not why I took part in the hobby.

My wife must be similar to your wife when it comes to notifications on the phone. The damned phone of hers is continually beeping because somebody farted and had to tell the world about it. Now that I have one of my own, I realize you don't have to get all those notices if you don't want them. There is a panel called "settings" where all that crap can be turned off.

[Kellemora]

I get spied on enough through my computer. I don't need to be carrying around a mobile spyware device, hi hi.
When the frau changed services, the new flip fone I got had things like GPS and other tracking stuff not needed for the cell phone to work. I found I could turn off most of the things in the phone from settings, including the MAP and GPS for the Map, but not the GPS for the cell tower location data.
I know when it is closed, it is not getting data other than the ability to ring.
I can say this because if my phone was closed, as it usually is, and I watch the display as I open it, the clock has the wrong time and has to update real quick before the call kicks in. It probably stays on for about 15 minutes after I close the phone.

[yogi]

The cellular base station has to know where you are at all times. It pings you constantly whether your phone is turned on or not. You are correct in saying THAT tracking cannot be turned off. Well, maybe if you removed the battery, but who does that?

[Kellemora]

They had something about this on a TV show a couple of months ago.
The Cellular Phone service does not require or use GPS to locate where its subscribers are.

First, think of Ham Radio Repeaters. If you are within range of the repeater, you can bring it up.
But it doesn't know where you are. Some repeaters are interconnected, called the Evergreen System.
So what you put on one repeater is transmitted out through several repeaters across the country.
But that's as far as I go here.

Back to the Cellular Phone system. It does not know who you are until you activate your phone. Once activated it will connect to the nearest Cell Tower and make a permanent link to the Cell System.
A massive database records your number and what cell tower you are on.
If you move away from your cell tower and into another cell towers area, the database instantly updates what cell tower you are now on. But it still does not know your location, only what cell tower your phone is linked to.
Cell Towers are not necessarily connected to each other, but they are connected to one of several mirrored databases. So no matter where you go, the database knows where you are at, so they can ring your phone if someone calls your number.

Over the years, the cell phone system has added many new features and ways to use your cell phone, including making use of the Internet they have always used to connect from a source tower to a destination tower. And of course, they also use satellites now too.
Other services can use the GPS system in your phone to track exactly where you are. Even so, the cellular service company, from what I understand, could care less where you are. Not their job, hi hi.

Not to be funny here, but the cell phone service has grown in such a way, it won't be long before they will not need all their towers. And/or their towers will become a part of the national WiFi subscription system which they may or may not be an integral part of.
The companies who own the towers may lease WiFi antenna space to the upcoming national WiFi providers, who knows how it will pan out and come into fruition.