Black rain drops keep falling on my head

[cat3man]

Call me Batty if you like, I have been and often called worse, much worse.
But I have a fondness for many animals especially those most maligned by human beings. No animal on Earth deserves the treatment that they have gotten from humans, especially those which humans can justify their unrelenting and totally undeserved malignment. Take snakes for example. Snakes, I’m sure, we’re responsible for a lot of sheep deaths. Naturally, when writing a Bible and desperately looking for some poor animal to represent evil it’s not a very big stretch of the imagination the bunch of sheep herders that wrote the Bible would pick the snake. I can’t help but wonder how much better off snakes would have been if the Bible had been written by gardeners or even pot growers for that matter? Hell we might have all been a lot better off if it had been written by pot growers? I can tell you one thing, Moses would not have had to fumble around with those three tablets of rules on his way down the mountain if some stoned pot growers had been chiseling on those stones. He would have only had one stone to worry about at most let alone the other two. The other one he got down with and the one he dropped so hard that even Humpty Dumpty couldn’t put it back together again.
I’m a leading authority on almost everything with the Bible being one possible exception. Despite having skimmed

through it a time or two, trying to convince the nuns I was actually reading it, I saw nothing in there about bats. Therefore, I’m not really sure why everybody is so freaked out about them. Unless it’s because of Bella Lugosi? It might be because they fly around at night yet can’t see the nose in front of their face that’s got a lot of people kind of nervous. And whoever started the rumor about them crashing into your hair with smoking more than pot out in his garden. Our destruction of their habitat and the subsequent viral outbreaks as a result of other human-based abuses have really decimated the bat population in North America. Really, for no other reason than that I have and still do construct bat houses when I have time to give them shelter in the cold winter and a place to breed in the warm summers. After the first year of watching my first bat house I noticed the sizable pile of guano at the bottom of the pole. It was at that point I converted an old feed container into a guano collection station. It’s perfect for it. It covers a large surface area underneath the structure and with the top cut open makes collection no work at all. In fact, unless the bats get constipated, it’s not much work for them either. As an added bonus this old chemical container comes with a spout on the side to make draining tea out of quite easy.
For a couple of years now it’s been piling up inside that container to where it was about ankle deep. I read that a good tea could be made with a 4:1 ratio of water to guano. Yesterday I added that amount of water to the container and I also added some pine shavings. I get tons of pine dust whenever I cut up one of these big pine trees around here for lumber or slabs. My grandfather used to collect pine straw in mass to use as mulch in his garden for two reasons. The mulch of course is beneficial for keeping down the weeds and protecting the plants in the winter but more importantly, being the wettest state in North America the soil here is leached of its natural fertilizers quite quickly and is known for being extremely low in acidity.
You might be delighted to know after all this reading that I have finally gotten to the question that I have today.
To top off my tea, yesterday I added the equivalent of about a 30 lb bag of dog food worth of pine shavings to the mix. It’s been sitting for nearly a year so it’s quite dry or was before I added it now I have a nice black and brown soup mix in there a little thinner then watery oatmeal.
The pine shavings soaked up a lot of water by last night. I’ve yet to check it today but plan on adding water to bring it up to about a four to one ratio. This leaves a nice amount of tea seeping and all that rich goodness. From what I read unlike other fertilizers that have to be allowed to cool, once made into tea it can be used immediately. I can check the pH easy enough and have pH reducers left over from my hydroponic days. So balancing the pH should be no problem at all. What potential problem I see is in the mix of fertilizer. I have no way of measuring what amounts of each of the three different categories that fertilizer comes in. As long as the pH is balanced can I throw caution to the wind here and just use the T or should I try to figure out some way of analyzing the fertilizer content of my tea before using it. I suppose I could use it on some of these house plants around here that I don’t like. Since my wife has passed away my love for them has waned greatly. I never have enjoyed growing anything I can’t eat drink or smoke. I’ve never found a house plant that could do any of those things for me.
If anyone thinks I should analyze the fertilizer content please let me know how to do that. I have yet to contact my local farm agent about it. I know that I get a fertilizer analysis for my garden through him from the university. I have any clue as to how or where I should take my tea to have it analyzed. I don’t have time or the inclination to spend much of what little time I have left with a fishing pole in my hand. That might not be the case if I hadn’t already killed hundreds of millions of pounds of fish during my working life as a commercial fisherman. However, my neighbor is an avid fisherman still and has lots of waste from his misadventures on the water. As a retired professional I get no end of entertainment from some of the stories I hear about how this or that great new idea has panned out. People don’t realize most great new ideas aren’t new at all but we’re tried already by the amateur on his way to becoming a professional. The difference between the two only being the amount of time it takes to make all the mistakes necessary to get there.
Any feedback that you can give me about my fertilizer issue would be greatly appreciated. Any feedback that you could give me about my issues would be greatly appreciated but totally unnecessary as I’m quite sure that after 35 years of marriage that I’ve heard it all before.
Apparently, it never made much difference then so I thought for the sake of your time but I’d let you know now.

[ChittyChittyBangin]

You sir have my attention. That is BADASS. Now i want a bat quano collection station. You could process that and sell it no joke. Id much rather buy fresh anyway. As far as your tea goes… id buy a PPM meter and do a slurry test on your tea to check ppms.

[Jaysittinback]

@cat3man

freaked out about them

face to face close up with a bat, damn they got an awful disgusting vicious-looking face. The snake had the privilege of legs, then it got cursed to crawl around on it’s belly forever

[Nip]

Bats are Where it’s At ! Snakes I watch out for especially Gurellia Growing here, 4 poisonous lurk here Rattlesnakes. water moccasins, and the elusive Coral Snake and the Hard to See Copperhead

[Jaysittinback]

Yeah that’s why I don’t go far. How do you go anywhere haha does everybody carry and have mace or wth sorry half off-topic

[Nip]

I just watch where I step, and I if I hear a Rattle JUMP LIKE HELL I mess around the garden at night they like to feed on field mice

[Jaysittinback]

Im guessing theyre like most animals want nothing to do with ya and know youre there, so theyre goin the other way. Most of the time

[Nip]

Exactly they just want to be left alone, problem is there hard to see , You have to remain calm after being struck and head to the ER to be injected with Anti venom

[Jaysittinback]

Scary. The only toxins here are wasps and shrooms far as I know

[Nip]

Shrooms grow here in the Cow Crapp, I can’t hardly mess with them, but a friend fills a trashbag up every summer! Wasp’s here to and Poison Ivy

[borialis]

I’d look at what a bag of bat guano in a box store says as far as NPK. Given that it’s probably from a millennia old colony that someone killed in a day with dinamite.

[ChittyChittyBangin]

@borialis

what a bag of bat guano in a box store says as far as NPK.

[cat3man]

That’s no reason to malign snakes. Dolphins and porpoises had legs once too, You’re breathing mammals evolved on land, but they didn’t have to be cursed to be smart enough to know the best way to get the hell away from man was to go back into the sea.
That works for a pretty long time until we poison the sea.
The poor critters can’t escape us anywhere they go now.
I’m excited about going to Mars though. I can’t wait to see what we can drive into Extinction there.

[cat3man]

I know I can be a bit… Verbose, so you probably didn’t get to the part where I added in the equivalent of about a 30 or 40 lb bag of dog food worth of yellow pine sawdust to drive the acidity up.
I have some kind of meter out there in the shop that was supposed to test pH levels? My limited number of brain cells remaining forced me to erase a lot of that old data. I’m reading too about electrocurrent metering? I really haven’t had time to put to proper dd here.
I’ll try to get caught up on these tools tonight.

[cat3man]

Ah nip… You must be a close neighbor of mine. I live in the great hate state of Mississippi the world’s largest fourth world country. We have all four varieties of North America’s poisonous snakes here as well. All of GODdess’s creatures on my land are protected with deadly force. I wouldn’t consider harming any animal on my property with the possible exception of the cottonmouth water moccasin and that would only be if my attempts to trap and transport him elsewhere are unsuccessful. You can smell them long before you see them though. The problem I have with them is not only are they hyper territorial but they are even more aggressive about it. If you ever encounter one especially in the water you really have to be on your guard just because when they appear to be running from you they are only trying to find a better position from which to strike at you from usually behind you. You have a good chance with them on solid ground if you’re in short grass or in the open where they can be seen but in tall grass or water deep enough for them to be submerged in you’d best get the hell out of there because your life is truly in peril.
I haven’t met our new game warden. Our old game warden was a great guy and changed a lot of my attitudes about wildlife. Unfortunately he died recently and so access to traps for relocation are now questionable for me. Like everywhere else the city folk are crowding out everybody and everything that enjoys the wonders of nature. Why half of them want to move out here and take the city with them I have no idea but I wish they would stop.
I counted three box turtles this spring so far which was encouraging. They used to be ubiquitous but are now getting to be rather rare.
“Have fun while you can, fate is an awful thing.” The Youngbloods circa 1967

[ChittyChittyBangin]

Im your neighbor to the east. I do alot of work in MS.

[ChittyChittyBangin]

@cat3man

counted three box turtles this spring so far which was encouraging. They used to be ubiquitous but are now getting to be rather rare

Green snakes are also. Back when we were kids id see hundreds of em, nowadays i might see a handful.

[cat3man]

You can thank corporations like Monsanto that unleash chemicals into the air and across the Earth’s surfaces so powerful that they can now easily penetrate cell walls and take generations upon generations to deteriorate, if in fact they ever do. All of their so-called advancements come without any meaningful government oversight whatsoever and when they’re horrific sins against Earth and humanity are discovered they simply change their names and become some other company ensuring the perpetual cycle of madness that they are unleashing upon us all.
The petrochemical industry has been taking a lot of heat. Heat it deserves. I’m afraid though, that it distracts from the many other companies that use their extractions to wreak havoc on our ecosystems.
If that doesn’t strike close enough to home for our fellow growers here consider that the idea of actually selling a seed that was an improvement on a variety that was already beneficial to man would have been a concept so alien to our forefathers as to be made up of the stuff of nightmares.
Copyrighted genetics now make it possible for these corporation to plant and cultivate their genetic seed crops upwind of your family heirlooms and without the need for search warrants can enter your land and take samples of your crop and if, as surely the case will be, that the pollen from their crops have gotten into the life cycle of your crops they have every legal right to come on to your property and seize your entire crop and you have absolutely no legal recourse whatsoever.
How many of you realize that maze or as we call it corn is one of the top four or five leading food sources for all of humanity and that the world’s entire source of corn grown commercially now comes from only two varieties of corn copyrighted by the multinational conglomerate that monsano has now become a part of…on
And on.
It should come as no surprise, if you know that, to know that their corn can be treated with chemicals produced by Monsanto that will kill everything where it is grown except that variety of corn. Logically it all makes perfectly good sense…commercially. But man’s logic and nature’s logic are no longer subject to the rules of nature.
I’m no purist mind you, despite having been an environmentalist from the days that I circulated petitions to start Earth Day in my junior year of high school in 1969. I have gas burners for both road and farm and I’m guilty of using a myriad of chemicals both indoors and out to increase yields and harvest. Until such time that we are producing alternatives that are viable while continuing produce man-made chemicals The benefits of avoiding the man-made chemicals can be difficult to justify at times.
I’m all for change and just as quickly as possible but with the caveat of filling as few body bags as possible. So I, like so many others, do whatever I can in any small way to facilitate that change. It may not be amounting too much now but maybe we’ll be finding some basic solutions to problems that are all too easy to point out and then walk away from or worse yet ignore.
Collecting bat guano was a no-brainer for me. It is something that is incredibly easy to do and I can’t think of one single more beneficial thing that a person can do for the environment as a whole when applying it to growing our particular type of crops. You end up getting fertilizer for free basically, benefiting your plants beyond measure but more importantly you were doing a world of good for yet another species that we have driven to the brink of extinction. A vitally beneficial species that I hope doesn’t become another notch in the belt of those human beings to insensitive to understand the damage they are doing in their relentless march toward the extinction of all wildlife on this planet.
The industrial revolution started in the 1850s when man switched his mass production efforts away from wood and toward coal burning. Both sources of fuel, at the time were considered infinitely limitless, however coal produced the energy needed at a much more efficient rate per pound, which in turn started the snowball of the industrial revolution rolling unstoppably down the hill setting us on a course into the sixth great extinction that we could have easily avoided had we only listened to the warnings the scientists have been giving us for generations now.
I think many of the mass killings and open violence anywhere large populations of people are packed together is a form of mass hysteria that’s beginning to grip humanity because the average human, I don’t believe, is capable of even comprehending the overwhelming onslaught of environmental disaster that confronts it.
Crisis is far too mild a word to describe it.
Denying reality has subconscious consequences that I’m not sure any of us fully understand and certainly can’t control.
When you consider that in the short 250 or so years since the start of the industrial revolution we have driven into extinction almost gleefully nearly 2/3 of all of the known wild species of animals on this planet.
Trying to wrap my head around just that one fact nearly overwhelms my comprehension. My awareness of all these problems has been acute for nearly 50 years now and I have seen far too little being done far too late about any of it.
The snakes and bats and all the other creatures that we share this earth with are every bit as important as the two-legged variety.
The sun’s love is a great healer and that is the principle reason that I have chosen to only grow under its healing light ever again. Our crops will prove to be more and more beneficial to mankind in general as the environmental degradation continues to rage out of control.
I for one hope that you indoor growers don’t start hating on me for that.
I am anything but opposed to hydroponics.
In fact, I believe that it is the only moral, ethical and hopefully one day we’ll be the only legal way that we produce our food.
I have hunted and fished my whole life. As an omnivore having been raised by omnivores it is all I’ve ever known for most of my life. I’ve always been attracted to the vegan concept of living because the idea of my survival depending on the death of another life form is anything but moral for me personally. However not until recently did I ever fully understand but it was about it that didn’t quite wash with me. The fact of the matter is more life forms are slaughtered needlessly with the traditional farming methods for our vegetable crops than all of the other meat production methods combined. You add to the chemicals necessary for corporate farming and that nightmare grows even worse.
That is why I believe that hydroponics will ultimately be the only way that we produce our food in one form or another. We certainly can’t go into space without it not that I am in a hurry to see the virus known as homeo sapiens spreading its vicious path of carnage and death across the vastness of space victimizing yet other planets and the defenseless life forms that call them home.
I’m going to look into doing a lot more research on what was originally an afterthought in my attempt to give refuge to the struggling bat population here in southern Mississippi.
Research that I will be happy to share freely and openly here. A concept that all farmers for several millennia were raised with and taught that their work was a noble one and that what they were producing was more than just an opportunity for profit but by sharing their knowledge was important also, as it was gained, was a way to stop the cycle of starvation that had been the reason for so many near extinction events in man’s history.
It may all be about the Benjamins now baby, but it wasn’t always that way. And if you think we are better off now because of that change then maybe you had better take a little closer look around town.
When children are dying by the hundreds in school yards and playgrounds it is far too easy to blame a lifeless gun as the cause of all our problems.
If we as humans don’t come to grips with our humanity as it slips away from us pretty damn soon my greatest fear especially for my grandchildren is that it may just slip away forever.

[cat3man]

One of the most effective methods of personal protection that is perfectly legal, is as easily available as It is abundant and be found nearly anywhere on the planet is something no less sophisticated than a $5 can of hornet and wasp spray. If you can find bear spray it is even better though with wasps and hornets so much more abundant I believe I would trust the $5 can of wasp spray the most. Unfortunately, for me I live near one of the largest swamps in North America and have seen wild boar the size of Volkswagens nosing around in search of roots in the woods right behind my house. Those badass boys along with the severe mauling I took from a pit bull last November I never leave home without my trusty equalizer of all men firmly strapped underneath my left arm.

[cat3man]

@Jaysittinback

then

Nip… You can’t just count on that rattle either. I’m pretty sure my wife’s dog Sandy was killed by a rattlesnake. I’ve seen one around the barn and garden but have no kids to worry about so I was never too concerned considering they see us long before we see them as a rule.
I haven’t seen it since a few days before she came home sick with symptoms and died so I suspect she died doing her job, small reprieve from the grief.
The variety we have here I had never even heard of before encountering one in my garden a couple of years ago. Locally they are called ground rattlers but are known more officially as pygmy rattlers? Shocking to me as it was so seldom to find that I did not in fact know it all.
All three of the most common venomous snakes the cottonmouth, the rattler and the copperhead all have some extremely distinctive features that make them easy to spot. What fooled me was this rattlesnake looks just like a small rattlesnake and it raises its tail like many other non-rattlers and shakes it to give the illusion of it being rattlesnake but there is no rattle? I walked right up to this one thinking it was one of the big rat snakes that we have around here which are much more common but look like rattlers. All venomous snakes have cat eyes and distinctly triangular heads due to their venom sacks in their jaws. Now if you’re close enough to see those slit eyes he’s usually already dead or you’re smart enough to have left him alone. The triangular head on the other hand is much easier to spot at a distance. The closer I got the more I started to question my judgment as he moved his head around I could see it was much more triangular than it looked at a distance. The one dead giveaway that you can count on with all three is the easiest to spot. If you look at photos on the web you’ll see that all snakes are long and slender and taper down to a point on their tail. The difference with the venomous snakes is their bodies take a long taper and then somewhere near the tail it suddenly drops off and becomes very skinny. It’s easy to spot and a dead giveaway, especially if they’re on the move and are stretched out a little. All of those features are a little hard to tell when coiled, A defensive position indicating they are scared so if you back off a little they’ll mosey on.
I’m not a snake handler and in fact the only time in my life that my knees literally buckled out from under me was when I encountered a rather large rattler in Arizona foolishly thinking following game trails was as safe in Arizona as it was in Oregon. And as to counting on your ears after that encounter I wouldn’t count on that method very much. With Rock in hand I heard a rattling on the trail ahead of me and it seemed like when I first heard it that it would have been out there somewhere in front of me but the more I looked the more my head went down until it eventually focused in on the monster coil beneath me less than a fathom away maybe less than half a fathom away but not more. A big rock had always been my main line of defense when hiking in the Sierras and had been successful on many occasions in defending myself with but this badass saw that rock whize by his head and didn’t even so much as flinch when it went by and instead kept raising up with his tail going crazy. I’ve been in some pretty scary places and it’s some pretty tight jams in my life and I’ve always thought of myself as being somewhat fearless compared to the average pikinic thieving bear but all of that went out the window when both of my knees started quaking completely on their own, over which I had no power to control whatsoever. I don’t know what shocked me more quite frankly the snake being where he was where I should have expected he would have been or having my knees do something they’d never done in my entire life before or since for that matter.
I couldn’t have backed up fast enough and would have been out of his way forever had not it been for a small but equally as sharp as his fangs cactus that was immediately behind me. That’s not to say it slowed my retreat down much just made it a good deal more painful being more so when back on the trail I had to remove them from a part of my body that was much more accustomed to soft cushions than sharp teeth of either snake or cactus.
I held for him no ill will though. I was encroaching on his world. One which I personally believe he had every right to feel entitled to be defending.
Killing for food or for personal defense is one thing but to get some perverted ego rush out of running over some defenses animal with your car or giving them lead poisoning for the thrill of the kill makes that person about as pathetic an excuse for a human being as you can get.
I have heard and read about a lot of different Gods that man worships but I’ve never heard of one of them who stands firmly behind outright cold-blooded murder of the innocent especially when they’re at their most helpless.
It’s so hot in the south here in the States all summer long that I spend most of my time working in the garden at night as well.
Years ago when delivering fuel all over the vast openness of North Dakota at all times of the day and night I discovered a headlamp made in Portland Oregon by a great group of people who run Coast lights. Not to take anything away from their consumer brand that you can find at any big box store that sells building materials but I bought one of their more expensive commercial headlamps that comes with a rechargeable battery. It’s LED has three different levels with a third level that will light up your garden like it’s daylight. The lithium batteries aren’t all that eco-friendly unless you compare them to any other way to get that much juice out of a headlamp. I’ve used the three of my batteries in that one light for over a decade now and they still recharge just fine. One of the original ones died and one of the other ones I have noticed will only burn for about 4 hours now as opposed to the six or eight hours I used to get. But if you wear a headlight and make a little bit of noise you don’t have to worry too much about snakes especially at night they’re awake and generally out looking for their daily grind before finding some cool place to sleep all day. Those are the places I worry about. It doesn’t take long for them to wake up when you step on them.
I sing Neil Young tunes also. And if you’ve ever heard me sing you’ll know why I worry so little about snakes in my garden at night…
You know I lose
You know I win
You know I call for
the shape I’m in.