Gardening in my Roots may resume soon

Due to this:

Gardening has been on a hiatus.  (No, not the gas mileage, dummy, the temperature!!)

I did go out yesterday and discover that a good handful of purple hull peas had appeared under the bare stalks of okra. The okra pretty much quick setting fruit because it hadn't been cut. Oddly enough, the cucumber is still going strong. I'll definitely order that variety next time. The fruit gets a little bitter if not cut small, but it's been producing solidly since June.

The sunflower crop needs cutting badly. I'll put up a picture on the weekend.

Adventure on the continent

A Curious Beginning
by Deanna Raybourne

Tee hee hee. Very silly--and funny about it--story of an orphaned young lady who is finally freed by the death of her Aunt to head abroad and resume pursuit of her passion--butterfly hunting.  I was expecting more butterflies and less bloodshed (mostly hers!) but I wasn't disappointed.

the one thing the author did absolutely correctly was in portraying the sort of stuffy, overdignified idiots you see in Victorian literature and then having Miss Victoria Speedwell puncture their puffy pride. That part of the story--mostly the first one-quarter--was hilarious. The rest just an action romp, very Pirates of the Carribbean-esqe.  But good adventure.

Losing your heart to dogs. And your head. And your wallet.

A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life
by Stephen Kotler

I don't know what to say. The humans are endearingly, brokenly human. The dogs are adorably broken and almost always fixable...and of course they're dogs, which makes them practically perfect in every way.  And what's not to love about a lifestyle that typically involves stepping in poop every morning?

This book will break your heart in many ways...but only once, during his descriptions of puppy mills, did I have to skip forward.  He doesn't typically dwell on the dark side-this is a book about hope, love, and hospice care. For dogs.

Also the story of dachshund play hour is hilarious.

Read this...but don't stop there

Feed Your Pet Right

I admire Dr. Marion Nestle so much it borders on hero worship. Reading her blog once a week helps keep me sane in a world full of haters on science. I'm overwhelmed by the amount of research and skepticism she and Dr. Nesheim put into this book. Here are just a few of the club-on-head moments it presented me with:

- Dogs aren't wolves. They have been eating human leftovers for as long as they have been dogs. Grains, fruits and vegetables won't kill them--old recipes for feeding your dog include sea biscuit, Scotch oatmeal, and fine flour as a supplement to the butchers scraps.
- Cats diets haven't been documented in history very often, but it was always assumed they'd supplement whatever food man gave them with yummy raw mice. That's why we put up with them, after all. (my note)
- The pet food industry is huge, profitable, and just as complexly convoluted as the human food industry.
- Veterinarian training and day-to-day success is highly subsidized by the pet food industry. The potential for conflict of interest is huge.

This book is very valuable for those and many other reasons. And yet....

It's a little dated. For one example, she states that according to the current research of the time, dogs originated "12,000 years ago at about the same time that humans were beginning to establish agricultural settlements." We have since determined--and are still testing--that more likely it was 15,000 to 30,000 years ago or even earlier. The oldest fossils and DNA crunching indicates that dogs became domesticated while man were still mostly hunter-gatherer groups.

It lumps all grains together and doesn't take into account the huge change in grain crop genetics that started in the early 1950s and goes on to this day. Today's wheat is not our great-grandfather's wheat. Neither is corn, and there's an increasing body of anecdotal evidence that corn or the contaminants in corn may cause allergies in dogs. And when did soybean meal come into the picture? I doubt if our 12,000-year-old ancestors fed soybeans to their dogs.

And how about this final advice: [just like for human diets] As long as the diet includes sufficient amounts of a variety of minimally processed foods--meat, dairy, fruit, vegetables, grains (or their substitutes)--the needs for essential nutrients and energy will be met.

That says only what it says. If you're concerned about your pet getting enough nutrition, and if you can swallow the howler about "minimally processed", pretty much any pet food is okay. But since when was enough, the whole picture? Human beings can eat preserved meat and benefit nutritionally, but it's currently classified as a carcinogen.  We can use the sugar in soda for energy, but is it health-promoting?

And going back to the minimally processed question, how about this:

You mix ("precondition") ingredients to the right consistency, and force the mix through shaping dies....the processes involve heat and pressure, extrusion cooks the food, kills contaminating microorganisms, and gelatinizes the starch so it is easier to digest. After extrusion, the kibbles are dried. Now the fun begins. The maker sprays the kibbles with additional fat, protein digests, flavor additives, and antioxidants, and gives them another round of drying. At last, the dry foods are packaged, labeled, and shipped.

Here is the result from a human study (the NutriNet-Sante cohort study), describing a link between cancer rates and ultra-processed food.
Industrial processes notably include hydrogenation, hydrolysis, extruding, moulding, reshaping, and pre-processing by frying.

Another mystery series, but one with promise

Lawn Order
by Molly MacRae

I'm unable to lay a finger on exactly why I liked this book. Up until the end I was completely clueless about who the perpetrator was, and that's not necessarily a good thing. In the ideal mystery, the clues are all right in your face and when they finally come together--bang!  "Of course!" you say. "I should have known that."

Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough. I'm not sure and will have to check other reviews later to see if the problem was me or simply a lack of clue-age.  Still, the townspeople were fun, funny and very well-characterized for a simple cozy mystery. I'm going to try a second book in the series and let you know.

Dogs...my favorite subject

What the Dog Knows
by Cat Warren

 A splendid mixture of science and personal experience! As she trains her cadaver dog Solo, she researches and writes about dog and their amazing scent tracking skills. And that's a big topic to tackle--while we all know that bloodhound have the highest number of scent receptor cells, does that make them the best trackers?

"For example, the Dachshund has around 125 million smell receptor cells, while a Fox terrier has 147 million and the German Shepherd has about 225 million." The bloodhound has all those breeds beat, with 300 million receptors.

Nancy Hook thinks such distinctions are silly. If she wanted to, she said scornfully to me, she could train her daughter's Chihuahua, Pip, to find bodies.  [...and...] Pip could get into small spaces, unlike Solo, who is huge and clumsy.

National Institute of Justice researcher Lester Shubin wrote of his research on bomb sniffing, We learned that basically any dog could find explosives or drugs, even very small dogs like Chihuahuas whose size could be an advantage," Shubin wrote in the NIJ reports. "Who is going to look twice at someone in a fur coat carrying a dog? But that dog could smell a bomb as well as the German shepherd."

But human beings, unlike dogs, aren't perfect. In a later chapter she discusses the human tendency to exaggerate, over-promise, and hate to fail which leads into deception and deceit.

When handlers lie about or exaggerate their dogs' capabilities under oath, it poisons the well for handler testimony and the credibility of the dog's nose.
[from Roger Titus, vice president of the National Police Bloodhound Association] What undermines the work are the lies he hears in training and on the witness stand. The stories can become albatrosses around the necks of conscientious trainers and handlers. "On occasion, it has become outrageous," Roger said of handlers' claims. "Four months old? Impossible. People who put trails out in January to run in May are full of it."
The danger signals are clear, Roger said. "It's the handler who wants to be a legend in his own mind."

She goes on to tell the story of Keith Pikett, a former Texas sheriff's deputy, whose "claims about his bloodhounds' scenting abilities resulted in what the Texas Innocence Project told the New York Times amounts to fifteen to twenty people in prison "based on virtually nothing but Pikett's testimony."  Of the thousands of people he helped put in prison with his deliberately faked "scent lineups,"  case after case of people have eventually been dismissed based on DNA evidence or simple common sense.
Texas Monthly Article Weird Science.