Posted on 01/15/2007 9:26:04 AM PST by kellynla
Citrus crop destroyed by cold snap.
No need for illegal immigrant labor.
Midwest has mild winter. Housing boom continues unabated in several areas.
Lack of American construction workers draws immigrants to the hot construction sites.
This capitalist free market thing seems to respond faster to changes in the economy than the politicians in Washington. By the time the politicians finally vote in the right answer, it will be the right answer to the problems of some transient phenomenon that has become irrelevant by the time the law in ready to be implemented.
Your graph just went to 1990.
2000 is a shoelace on 2 clothespins.
2010 is just the 2 clothespins.
I bet demand for Texas Rio Grande Valley citrus will be up if they don't get frost damage this week. The damage in California sounds similar to the damage the Rio Grande Valley had from the Christmas 1983 freeze. Corpus Christi had lows down to 14°F for over a day, and half the palm trees in the city died.
If the anti polution people hadn't banned smudge pots it wouldn't be a problem!
"It's all Bush's fault . . ."
I really don't mind so much that they don't use them anymore, as they were pretty nasty when getting low on fuel. Once they're burning good they give off huge amounts of heat and burn pretty clean, but as they run low they can sit there and chug black smoke for hours on end. The morning after can look like Apocalypse Now. :) I do wish they'd make some allowances for special situations, such as extreme cold during a critical window of fruit growth.
But honestly, I don't think that the big growers have the manpower to use smudge-pots anymore. Old rancher friends of mine tell me stories about the old days when all of the teenage boys would get on work lists, and the phone calls would come in the late evening, meaning they'd be out there all night long trying to keep the smudge-pots running. I don't know if that would be practical in these times.
All of the big orange growers use giant wind machines now, that run on propane, gas or diesel. They do a pretty good job. But for a guy like me who has maybe two dozen trees, a wind machine is not only impossibly expensive, it's completely impractical because of the way my trees are dispersed. (They're not all together in a grove)
I have two smudge pots that I use for back yard parties, and, yes, on rare nights like this last weekend in an attempt to save some yearling avocado trees that mean a great deal to me.
My dear friend has a couple of hundred acres of oranges with no wind machine. It was his fires I was stoking for much of the night on Friday. I came home around midnight and got my own fires burning. Whenever I get my hands on an old washing machine I take the drum out and weld legs onto it. They make a great portable firepit. I had those going all night long, along with some propane space heaters that mount on top of 5 gallon propane bottles. Those propane ones are nice because you light them and they run all night without intervention, but they are really only good for one single tree per heater. I also have old fashioned strings of Christmas lights around the base of the avocado trees. The old fashioned lights put out some decent heat. I think they're "C-9" bulbs.
It was lots of work from 4:00am Friday morning when I got up until about 10:00pm Saturday night when I went to bed. By late Saturday night my eye was twitching nonstop and my sciatic nerve was twanging like a guitar string. :( I crashed and slept for ten hours.
"Improvise, Adapt, Overcome" the Marine Way!
A billion dollars from the transportation bond (Prop 1B) will go to CARB to help pay for developing the framework for the Global Warming regulation and developing the carbon trading program. As always, the devil was in the details (fineprint).
Going through the backdoor of the PUC to approve $3 billion in rate hikes for Solar Roofs will also bring them dollars for their Global Warming folly.
And all without raising taxes! It's a miracle! /s
The global warming advocates will blame the cold spell on global warming. Thats the beauty of global warming. If its too hot you blame it on global warming and if its too cold you blame it on global warming. No matter what the weather they win.
Its all because nancy pelosi doesn't want to raise the minimum wage of American Samoa! Its all soo clear!
Just nature's way of limiting the spread of E. Coli-ridden California produce.
When Coca Cola bought Minute Maid, they also bought 12% of the land area of Belize and installed citrus farms there.
Good luck with your avocado trees. When I was a little boy, we got an avocado pit to sprout in our apartment and put the seedling into a flower pot. By the time I left home, it was up to the ceiling. No avocados--I think it needed some cross pollination. But it was a beautiful tree.
and Minute Maid still makes lousy overpriced OJ from concentrate no less...
Zoom!
1. global warming
2. Global Warming
But docha just love the commentators that say the cold is caused by global warming.
Just TWO clothes pins?
Could be VERY interesting.
Yes, Avocados do have special polination needs, and without bees and other insects in your house it wouldn't do well. Haas is the most popular avocado because of its ease of peeling and the nice taste and texture. But a grove of Haas avocados does not self-polinate well.
I'm not an expert at this by any means, but what my rancher friends tell me is that you intersperse "breeder" avacado trees throughout your avocado population. I have a "Zutano" avocado tree with three Haas and one Lamb Haas around it in the shape of a "W", with each tree 20' from its neighbors. The Zutano is the breeder for the four Haas. The single Lamb Haas is to lengthen the harvest season because it ripens later than the Haas.
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