Breathe easier on smoky days



The same mask that stops colds and flu in the winter can help you breathe easier when forest fires are filling our air with smoke.  Your breath moistens the inside of the mask; smoke particles get caught up in the moist cloth, greatly reducing the amount you take into your lungs.  A bandanna cold mask has more cloth to catch the smoke than a dust mask or medical mask, and more room inside it to breathe easily.
          You can breathe easier in your yard by using misters to clear the smoke by taking it to the ground, where it becomes good fertilizer.  The snakelike standing plastic misters with twin emitters that you can usually buy at the Grange Coop or Diamond Building Supply work very well for this, as they produce a very fine mist.  They also can be moved around, as they are made to be used on a hose.  (The hose should be heavy duty 5/8” or cheap ½” to take the pressure.)  Individual mist emitters that you can build into a drip line system, available at Grover Plumbing, put out too much water with too big of drops, and they can’t be easily moved around.
          I keep misters running in my front and back yard throughout the heat of the summer to cool the air, help my air conditioner and keep my blueberries happy and bearing big fruit.  Misters are critical for growing big blueberries in our hot, dry climate. 
Most plants benefit from a little more humidity and less heat in our area.  Misters keep the temperature in my yard about 10 degrees cooler, and allowed my tomatoes to set fruit last summer when it was too hot for pollination elsewhere in Grants Pass.  Pollen dies over 95° F. 
          People breathe easier with a little more humidity and less heat when the temperatures are near 100 degrees, and I can tell the difference when I get home.  When fires were burning nearby, it was easy to tell that there was less smoke around my house than elsewhere.
          One might think that misters getting plants wet all day and night might cause fungal infections, but I have seen no such problems.  Mold can appear on roses in spring and fall when we get too much rain, but in the heat of summer when misters are running, it doesn’t happen.  Powdery mildew is a hot weather fungus, but it appears in response to heat and water stress, not humidity.
          Misters don’t use a lot of water, but combined with sprinkler watering, they can make rain if enough people are using them to keep their yards green, by revving up the water cycle.  We used to make midsummer thundershowers in the ‘80s, when the whole town was watered and farms were in full production.  We need to reform our water pricing to encourage watering of landscapes and bring back wet thundershowers instead of dry lightning and forest fires.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I've stopped being a Twitter pig

I've been tweeting for a couple of months now, and I've figured out a few things.  I've stopped being a Twitter pig. A pig eats nearly anything, and that is what I was doing.  I was following anybody who followed me, and anybody who was suggested to me by Twitter, with very few exceptions.  My Twitter notifications become too many, and my Twitter feed was filling up with some really nasty junk.  I was also getting too many Direct Messages wasting my time with spam, mostly selling Twitter followers or music. I now don't automatically follow anybody who follows me.  I don't even necessarily respond.  I go to the site first and decide if I can stand what they are tweeting.  Really bad English and cussing turns me off.  So does sex and nudity.  So does selling Twitter followers.  Hip Hop musicians were a major source of bad English, cussing, sex and nudity.  Sellers of followers are everywhere. If I decide that a new follower qual...
Read more

Open Letter to petitioners re #Measure48 Mississippi

Mississippi Measure 48 is a proposed constitutional amendment, posted at http://www.mississippiforcannabis.org/  .  I have a question about its "locality tax," licenses, and fees.   Answers and further discussion will be edited into this post. " ...Regulations will require an annual Mississippi Cannabis Sales license issued by any Mississippi County Circuit Clerk for a fee of no more than $1000.00 to all adult residents who apply, and a $25.00 annual city or county governing locality fee to farm 10 - 500 plants. Locality fees for cannabis farms with more than 500 plants will not exceed $1000.00...." At first this "locality fee" sounded like a flat yearly fee, but the last sentence above makes it clear that is wrong.  Is it $25 per plant?  If so, it should say "per plant" after "$25." But it couldn't be $25 per plant, because 500 plants times $25 is $12,500.  501 plants, however, would only be $1000.  A fee of $25 plus $5 per p...
Read more

Open letter to honey processors: Change your caps

Image
A flat-topped 5-pound honey bottle; the fat one mentioned was thrown away.  The other day, I went looking for a honey dispenser with a pointy cap, because the 1 lb flat-topped squirt bottle I had been using was always sticky.  Honey would collect on the flat top and drip down the side when it was used.  It was a fat-top bottle, made to be able to set it upside down for easy dispensing, but that only made it easy for the honey to leak out and make a pool in the cabinet. I was looking through the honey selection at Fred Meyer and all the containers had the same type of flat top, some with a fatter top for setting the bottle upside down, others with a smaller top of the same design.  I noticed that the Agave Nectar bottles used by Madhava (Madhavasweeteners.com) had a pointed cap that opened to a short cone-shaped dispenser with a sloping cap that looked unlikely for honey to pool on.  I bought it, used it up, and now it is my honey dispenser. I call on ...
Read more