Don't Forget to shake Those Tomato Blossoms!

I've written about this before, but a little reminder won't hurt. Whether avid gardeners or not, most people grow a tomato plant or two, often in pots on the deck or patio. If so, they are finally seeing a few blossoms on their plants and are anxiously waiting for fruit to set. Now's the time for a little assisted pollination on the gardener's part. Why you may ask? First, because if you assist nature you will get those delicious vine ripened tomatoes several weeks earlier than you otherwise would. Second, shaking the blossoms increases the number of seeds in tomatoes and by so doing increases their flavor. Tomato blossoms have both sex organs in the same flower. In nature fertilization occurs when the wind or the wings of a bee shake the flower and distribute pollen from the male stamens to the female stigmas. This is a rather hit and miss situations as you might expect. Later in the season, then each plant has hundreds of blossoms it makes little difference whether you intervene or not; however, early in the spring when each plant only has a few blossoms, assisted pollination can make a big difference. Here's how to do it. Female stigmas are ready to be pollinated when the pedals of the blossom curve upward. Assisted pollination works best if performed in the middle of the day, around noon. There are many ways to accomplish this simple task. If your plants are staked or caged, simply shake the stake or cage. If not, gently strike the blossoms with the back of your hand. If you are inclined to go high-tech, touch each blossom, or group of blossoms, with the brush of a battery operated hand held tooth brush. Anything seems to work! Happy gardening.

How to prevent blossom-end rot in tomatoes.

As the name implies, blossom-end rot (BER) is a deformity that occurs at the blossom end of all fruiting vegetables. It is particularly common in tomatoes, squash, and pepper plants. BER begins as a watery-looking area adjacent to the blossom. In time, the lesions enlarge, become brown to black in color, and take on a leathery appearance, which covers the bottom half of the fruit. While edible, the unaffected upper half of the fruit is small and not worth keeping. BER is not caused by a pest or parasite; rather, it is the result of a calcium deficiency in the plant. All plants require significant quantities of calcium to develop correctly, and BER is a sure sign that the plant is not absorbing enough of the mineral for the proper development of fruit. There are two primary causes of calcium deficiency in plants. The first results from a calcium deficiency in the soil. The soil simply does not contain enough calcium to meet the needs of the plant. Alternately, soil conditions are such (usually too wet or too dry) that the plants cannot absorb enough calcium to meet their needs. As usually is the case, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so begin your program to prevent BER by making sure the soil in your garden is not deficient in calcium. One can add lime, gypsum, and eggshells to increase the calcium content of soils thought to be deficient in the mineral. Eggshells are an excellent safe source of calcium for plants, but it takes a fair amount of time before the calcium in eggshells becomes available to the plant. Lime and gypsum must be used with caution because both materials may make the soil too alkaline for ideal plant growth. I prefer to add ground-up oyster shells yearly to my garden soil at the rate four to six pounds per one hundred square foot to make sure the soil does not become calcium deficient. Now, the hard part. Even if your soil has sufficient calcium, the plants will not be able to absorb the mineral if soil conditions are not right. In this respect, plants may not be able to absorb sufficient calcium if the soil is either too dry or too wet. This is particularly true of the tomato plant, which should be managed on the dry side. Most gardeners tend to over-water their tomato plants. Tomatoes, as garden guru Bob Tanem advises, should be given infrequent deep watering only when they show signs (wilting) of water deficiency in the morning. Now what can you do if your mature plants are developing fruit with BER? At this point, it is too late to amend the soil, and changing your watering habits probably will not make much difference either once the fruit has set. So what, if anything, can you do to salvage what remains of the crop? Liquid calcium sprays provide the only known remedy for this gardening dilemma. Products like Bonide’s Rot-Stop can provide emergency treatment to plants that are, for any reason, deficient in calcium. There is some question as to whether the commonly sold calcium sprays are organic. Thus, it is best to make sure the soil has enough calcium from natural sources like ground-up oyster shells to prevent the condition from occurring in the first place. However, if your mature tomato plants are producing malformed fruit showing BER, a liquid calcium spray will provide a quick fix for the problem. You also can make your own calcium spray by filling a gallon jar with eggshells and water and letting the mixture steep for a month. Filter out the eggshells and use the resulting liquid as a foliar spray, one cup per quart of water. The problem with this way of treating BER results from the fact that it takes a month to produce the calcium spray; thus, unless you anticipate the problem well ahead of time and have the eggshell spray ready for use when you need it, you will be forced to buy a commercial product even though it might not be as organic as you would like. Finally, I should point out that researchers at the University of Nebraska have determined that calcium is not absorbed through the leaves of a tomato plant. They maintain that the only way to prevent BED in tomatoes is to make sure the soil, with respect to pH, water content, etc., is adequate to allow the plants to absorb calcium through the plants’ root system. This is an excerpt from my soon to be published book Gardening The Organic Way.

Who is Barack Hussein Obama?

This is a reality check for those who haven’t figured out who Barack Hussein Obama is! Surprisingly many, if not most, have not! This unfathomable truth is one of the mysteries of the ages for which there is no reasonable explanation. First, let’s consider the obvious. Obama’s mother was a communist as was his father. He spent his formative years under the tutelage of another famous communist Frank Marshal Davis. His early sponsors included the communist sympathizers Bill Ayers and his cop-killer wife Bernadine Dohrn. Obama sat in the pews of Reverend Wright's church for 20 years listening to his anti-American rhetoric. The good reverends famous “God Damn America” sermon tells you everything you need to know about this America hating bastard and his famous parishioner, Barack Hussein Obama, everything! Oh, I forgot to mention that more recently our first black president traded a low-level American Muslim deserter for five high level 9/11 terrorists. Well, he explains, we have to be sure that no American is left behind. In the meantime he does not lift a finger to free the American patriots who languish in the prisons of our enemies throughout the world. As my mother used to say "This guy is a real piece of work." Yes, there can be no doubt President Obama is an anti-American communist sympathizer who firmly believes that America is the root of all the world’s evils, and has been since our countries inception. As president he will do everything in his power to bring America to her knees! So far so bad, but it gets worse! Obama is not a Christian, not by a long shoot. No, he is a dyed in the wool radical Muslim always has been, always will be! This, of course, explains his hatred of Israel; his capitulation to the mullahs in Iran; and his failure to maintain sufficient troops in Iraq to prevent its takeover by ISIS after he ended that war. Obama’s religious bent may be the best kept secret in the civilized world. Yes, when all is said and done, Obama is an anti-American, Muslim communist, nothing more nothing less! American could never be conquered from a foreign entity but thanks to our one man one vote method of governance we have been annihilated from within. It took 239 years for this democracy to kill us, but at long last it has in the name of Barack Hussein Obama and the legions of mindless robots who will follow him to the gates of hell, but not back. If there is a hell, Obama and his minions will roast there until the cows come home, if not longer.

Why are there only male flowers on my squash and cucumber plants?

This is a very common question for which there no completely satisfactory answer. Most gardeners can distinguish male squash and cucumber flowers, which are simply a flower on a stem, from female flowers, which are attached to a small immature squash or cucumber. Gardener's also know the production of these plants can be increased by transferring the pollen from a male flower to a female flower with small artist's paint brush. But, what if there are no female flowers? First, not to panic! Normally the first 10 to 20 flowers on a plant in the gourd family are male flowers. Thereafter, these plants produce 10 to 20 male flowers for every female flower. The reason for this genetic discrepancy is unknown. The gardener simply has to be patent and let nature take its course, the female flowers will come in time and there in nothing one can do to hasten their arrival. For the sake of completeness I should add, that there are gynoecious varieties of cucumbers that produce only, or mostly, female flowers. These seedless types of cucumbers do not require pollination and thus are ideal plants to grow in a greenhouse. In fact, if they are pollinated the resulting fruit is deformed and bitter tasting. These F1 cucumber hybrids include Dove, Raven, Falcon, Luna, Neptune and Diva. This is an excerpt from my soon to be published book Gardening The Organic way.

Ronald Reagan's Biggest Political Blunder.

I believe Ronald Reagan was one of America's greatest presidents, maybe the greatest. However, all of the world's great leaders make mistakes, after all their feet are made of clay similar to yours and mine. Some, like Obama, make nothing but mistakes. In the case of Reagan, many would say that his biggest error in judgment was in agreeing to grant citizenship to millions of Mexican illegal's in exchange for liberals promise to secure our borders. We all know how that turned out, don't we? But Reagan's biggest mistake was not in agreeing to this foolish deal proposed by Tip O'Neill; rather it occurred years before when Reagan was governor of what was then the great state of California. We Californians are still paying for this error in judgment, some 50 years later. When I entered medical school 56 years ago, California had two large mental institutions, one in Newark and one in Napa. The Newark facility, where I served a rotation while in medical school at USC, had over 1,000 patients, the one in Napa was only slightly smaller. In those days the mentally ill were sent to these institutions for treatment and, more importantly, since treatment was most often unsuccessful, for long term care. Then along came the psychiatrists, the dumbest members of the medical profession by far. These mental lightweights convinced Governor Regan, who was all about reducing the cost of government, that the great majority of those institutionalized in mental facilities could be managed with psychiatric medications in an out-patient setting; thus, saving the tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars each year by eliminating the costs of institutionalizing them. There were three major flaws in this ill conserved plan. First, people with mental illnesses most often do not know they are ill; thus, they will not voluntarily return for treatment. Rather, to be treated, they must be confined. Second, not believing that they need treatment, mentally ill people will refuse to take the medications that keep them reasonably sane unless forced to by the medical personal where they are confined. Finally, even if they are willing to take their medications and do so, most, if left to their own devices will, sooner rather than later, come to the conclusion that they are cured and stop coming to the out-patient clinics set up to care for them. Any third year medical student, worth his salt, in the mid 1900s could have predicted the outcome of this flawed and silly governmental program and many of us did! However, reason did not prevail and the large mental institutions in California were closed, or greatly reduced in size, and the institutionalized were turned loose to wreak havoc on society. How so, you may ask? An estimated 70 percent, no one knows the number for sure, of those living under your local freeway overpass are mentally ill or outright insane. Similarly, the criminal insane, who should never have been allowed to roam the streets of America in the first place, make up a significant segment of our prison population. Finally, it has become so bad that the mentally ill are allowed to fly planes filled with innocent passengers into mountain sides. Yes, I know this latest abomination did not occur in California, but it just as well could have! In summary, Reagan's attempt to save money by closing California's mental institutions has been an unmitigated disaster! The resulting toll this flawed policy has had on society, and the mentally ill people it was designed to help, are inestimable! The primary lesson to be learned from this fiasco is that the mentally ill cannot care for themselves and must be cared for by society. Not to do so is self-destructive and inhuman in the extreme. In closing, let me point out that outpatient clinics which supply narcotics to drug addicts have been very successful in reducing drug related crimes and in caring for the drug addict. These programs are successful because the drug addict usually is not mentally ill. Rather, these unfortunates simple have an addiction and we as a society have correctly come to the conclusion that it is simpler, and more cost effective, to supply them with drugs rather than attempt to treat their addiction.

The Plastic Bag Scandal

It goes without saying that plastic waste is a significant global environmental problem! The world generates over 300 million tons of plastic waste each year, only 10 percent of which is recycled. More worrisome, 17 percent of this material ends up in the ocean. Just how effective, do you think, will California's war on plastic take-home bags be in reducing the environmental pollution caused by plastic waste? Most likely we will never know the answer to this all important question. After all, the politicians have made an effort to "fix" the problem and that’s all that really matters in the la-la land in which liberals live. Whether or not the "fix" works is of little or no importance. Common sense should tell us that the ban on plastic take-home bags will have little or no effect on the mountains of plastic waste we humans generate each year. This is so, because nearly everything you buy at a retail outlet these days is contained in a plastic sack or container, even corn flakes. Thus, what difference does it really make if our purchases are carried home in yet another plastic container? I will argue that it doesn't

make the slightest bit of difference, none at all! In fact, the liberal do-gooders who passed this meaningless legislation are making a giant mountain out of a infinitesimally small mole-hill. But, I have led the reader slightly astray because this absurd piece of poorly crafted legislation is about a lot more than simply banning plastic bags at the supermarket. Rather, it is about banning all take-home bags at retail outlets unless, of course, you pay an extra charge for paper. How in the Sam hill, you might be asking, did paper get into this fight? Good question! As we all know paper products including grocery bags, cardboard containers and the like, decompose relatively rapidly when disposed of and are not a significant problem, wherever they end up (by the way, my composting earthworms love paper products of all kinds). More importantly perhaps, paper comes from trees which are a renewable natural resource in ready supply. People make money growing trees and turning them into paper, so what’s not to like about the paper industry and their products they produce for us? No, something went badly wrong when the liberal politicians in Sacramento crafted this destructive piece of legislation. Why, include paper bags in legislation designed to decrease the amount of plastic which ends up in our landfills, streams and oceans? That’s the $64,000 question. Well, first because there is a lot of money to be made in bags if the retailers do not have to provide them for free! Second, politicians live on the campaign contributions provided to them by corporations like Safeway who will profit handsomely from the plastic bag ban. I have been unable to determine how much money Safeway contributes to the campaign coffers of politicians they consider to be "business friendly" however, you can be sure it is substantial. So, how do you convince customers to pay for something they are accustomed to receiving for free? The first step is to outlaw the plastic grocery bag and force customers to bring their own cloth bags or pay ten cents for ones made of paper. Remember that before the social engineers got their fingers in the grocery store’s "bag of tricks" you had a choice of plastic or paper, both of which were free. At this point, plastic bags are a thing of the distant past and the previously free paper ones now cost ten cents. As a result, merchants are way ahead of the game because they now only have to stock one type of bag; more importantly, they made a nice profit by selling the paper bags they previously provided for free. Nice work if you can get it! Sure, some of us who were accustomed to free grocery bags are pissed, just as we were when gasoline hit $4.50 a gallon. But, as with the gasoline rip-off, time has a way of deadening the effect of what you pay for things and we consumers undoubtedly will soon forget that bags were once free and be willingly pay an added charge for the convenience of transporting our food and beverages home in bags rather than piece-meal in the trunk or back seat of the car. However, the "rip-off artists" at Safeway, in cahoots with their political cronies in Sacramento, were just "warming up" when they decided to screw the public by banning plastic bags and requiring us to buy ones made from paper! As I made my way through the check-out line at our local Safeway yesterday morning I noticed something new, a large rack of fancy plastic take home bags. I kid you not, less than two weeks after banning free plastic bags, the bureaucrats in Sacramento authorized the sale of similar plastic bags- at 25 cents a pop! I was told that the new bags were more environmentally friendly and would last longer than the previous free ones. Really? Somehow, I am a bit skeptical of these claims and common sense tells me that, sooner rather than later, the new 25 cent bags will end up in our landfills and oceans, side by side with the previous free ones!

The Price We Pay For Gender Equality

Before beginning I want to make two points. First, I am all for equal pay for equal work and all other forms of gender equality. If Carla Fiorina runs for the Presidency, I will be one of her strongest supporters! I might even support her campaign financially, although that would be unlikely considering my reluctance to squander money on hopeless endeavors. No, this article is not about equal rights for women; rather, it is about the cost society is paying for a females right to forgo her traditional role as a wife and mother to compete with males in the world of politics, finance and, yes, even truck driver. Second, this article pertains primarily to the white, Caucasian, world, not the peoples who are descendants of the Negroid and Mongolian branches of the species know as homo-sapiens. One could make the argument, however, that all members of the human race have suffered, and will continue to suffer, from the deterioration of traditional family unit brought on by the feminist movement. I want to begin this discussion by pointing out that in the early twentieth century fifty percent of the smartest whites on the planet were house wives! Oh, where were a few exceptions to this rule even then, but those who gave up their traditional roles of wife and mother to enter the work force in the early 1900s were miniscule in number and their effect on society of little consequence. To keep the remainder of this discussion in perspective, recall that, on average, each female of a given ethnic group must give birth to 2.2 live children just to maintain its status quo. The birth rate in 1911 for white women in the United States was 3.4; by 1992 it had dropped to 1.89! By comparison, the birth rate of black women in 1992 year was 2.2 while the fertility rate of Mexican American women was 2.47. As Hilary Clinton would argue, “What difference, at this point, does it make? Well, a great deal of difference! Here's why. I have concentrated on Caucasian women in this blog because America was predominately a white nation when our society began to unravel in the mid-twentieth century. However, the genetic makeup of all ethnic groups in this country, and most of the western world for that matter, have been ill-effected by women's liberation. This is so because smart well educated women of all races have significantly fewer children than do their uneducated and duller counterparts. For example, the fertility rate of educated white women (with a masters or higher) was 1.4 in 1992 while the birthrate of similarly educated Blacks and Latinos was 1.3 and 1.7 respectively. Thus, the effects, good and bad, of the feminist movement cuts across all races; the smarter they are, the lower their fertility rate. As a result, America and her sister Western Nations are becoming dumber with each passing second! In fact, western civilization has lost approximately 1.5 IQ points with each passing generation since the Elizabethan era and I believe the race toward national stupidity is accelerating. This loss of inherent genetic IQ is made all the more significant because the replacement population is largely comprised of Mexican and South American illegal's who have a mean IQ of 86, a full fourteen IQ points below that of the average Caucasian women. Now, I can hear the yelling, screaming and gnashing of teeth from the liberals who may, by chance, have stumbled onto this blog. These people have been educated by the liberal intelligentsia who, based on studies performed on rats and pigeons, would have us believe that all humans, irrespective of race, are born with roughly equal intelligence. If this were so, obviously, it wouldn't make a lick of difference who are having the babies, just as long as someone is turning them out in large numbers. I addressed this issue in some length in my book America in Decline and will not argue the point further here, other than to point out that every single one of the 167 creditable studies on human intelligence (those performed on humans, not rats and pigeons) have shown that there is a significant racial difference in mean IQ. The only question argued amongst the researches who performed these studies related to the magnitude of the racial differences in IQ, not the fact that such differences in innate intelligence exist. Still not convinced? Well then, consider this fact. Thirteen point five percent of the world's 1,226 billionaires are Jewish even though they make up less than 0.2 percent of the world's population. This is an astounding statistic considering the fact that the Jewish population has been the most abused and discriminated against race on the planet earth throughout recorded history. Those who wish to study the racial differences in intelligence between the races should consult Herrnstein and Murray's magnificent expose on the subject in their book, The Bell Curve. In a world where education and intelligence are the keys to success in life, what, if anything, can be done to reverse our countries intellectual slide from greatness to mediocrity? As I point out in America In Decline, most of our social and economic problems could be solved relatively easily if there were simply the will to do so. To reverse our intellectual slide, however, will be a difficult and possibly even impossible, no matter how much of our national treasure is throw at the project. Certainly we should not discourage females from, being all they can be, as they make their way through the twisted paths of the professional, political and academic worlds we live in; however, we might provide economic incentives (tax incentives, monetary rewards and the like) to encourage, and make it easier, for successful bright women, of all races, to have children while they pursue their professional careers. Similarly, on the other side of the equation, we should consider paying low IQ women not to have children, especially if they are unmarried. A Norplant injection program, which would prevent conception for five years, is feasible and, of equal importance, cost effective. Finally, if we are to have any hope in reversing our national decline into intellectual mediocrity, we must stop the flow of low IQ illegal's from Mexico and South America into our country. I ask you, how hard would it be to accomplish that goal?