Five Things Friday: 2/12/16

I’m sick. I’ve been sick and more-or-less in bed for three days. Shout out to my husband for keeping everything running around here while I’ve been down for the count.

So this week’s 5 Things Friday is really 3 Things Friday. I’m cutting it off short so I can go crawl back into bed with my tea.

This week: how bees can help African farmers protect their crops from elephants, my upcoming seminars at The Northwest Flower and Garden Show, and why I’m old school when it comes to free speech and open debate. 

1. Upcoming Events: The Northwest Flower & Garden Show

The horticultural big deal Northwest Flower and Garden Show is coming up next weekend. As in years past, you’ll find me in the seminar rooms, demonstrating gardening and productive home techniques.

I’d love to see you there!

My 2016 seminars are:

In a Pickle: Food Preservation in the Depths of Winter

We think of food preservation as a summer activity – but many of our best cool season NW vegetable crops are ideal for preservation through lacto-fermentation. Learn about this health-boosting traditional method of converting hardy vegetables into long-lasting and delicious pickles.

I’ll demo Spiced Ginger Carrots, Sauerkraut with Apples and Caraway, and Korean-spiced daikon radish and salt-cured Meyer Lemons.

Book signing to follow.

When: Friday, Feb 19 at 11:45 am
Where: DIY Stage / Washington State Convention Center

Sowing Confidence: Start Your Own Vegetable Seeds

If you want to save money, grow unusual vegetable varieties, or have the earliest possible harvest, starting your own seeds indoors is a must.

I’ll discuss the most important and often confusing aspects of starting your own seeds indoors so you can grow your own vegetable starts with confidence. Specific planting, up-potting and thinning techniques and timing secrets will be demonstrated.

Book signing to follow.

When: Saturday, Feb 20 at 1:30 pm
Where: DIY Stage / Washington State Convention Center

Hands-On Home Signing

In addition to the post-seminar signings, I’ll be at the University Book Store Booth to sign copies of my book and answer questions.

When: Friday, Feb 19 from 5:00 – 5:30 pm
Where: University Book Store Booth / Booth 211 / South Hall / Washington State Convention Center

2. What I’ve Been Reading

The coolest thing I’ve read in the past few days isn’t a book, it’s an article from Mother Nature Network about how fences of beehives are helping African farmers keep elephants out of their vegetable fields.

Elephants, despite their thick skin and imposing heft, are terrified of bees. And for good reason: When elephants disturb a beehive, they trigger its defensive swarming response, which often leads to bees stinging the sensitive tissue inside their trunks. Being such intelligent animals, elephants have learned to associate bees with excruciating nose pain. They even have a specific “bees!” alarm call, and they’re known to flee the sound of buzzing alone.

Couldn’t farmers just repel elephants with audio recordings of bees? Maybe briefly, but elephants are too clever to buy a ruse like that for long. Like other noise-based scare tactics, it stops working once elephants realize the sound is an empty threat.

As scientists have shown in recent years, however, a fence made of actual bees can be an effective, even profitable way to keep elephants at bay. It’s a brilliantly simple strategy, hanging beehives from wooden posts at 10-meter intervals with a long metal wire linking them all together. When an elephant hits the wire, it shakes the hives and sends angry honeybees swarming into a defensive frenzy.

Read the full article here – this is a seriously cool, low-tech example of how the problem can be the (profitable) solution with a little creativity. These bee-fences helps farmers protect their crops against elephants without harming the elephant and provide an extra yield in the form of “elephant-friendly honey.”

Very cool stuff. If you like this kind of thing, check out Elephants and Bees for more info on how you can help keep the project going.

3. What Quote I’ve Been Pondering

There are moments when I feel like I’m still a young adult. And then I meet a legitimate young adult and I realize I’m as old and tired as re-used dirt.

You know what the difference between 20 and nearly-37 is? Other than the wrinkles and weight gain, I mean? At 20 I thought I knew everything. At 37 I’ve learned enough that I know how little I really know. (Not a damned thing, if you round down.)

It turns out there’s a legitimate term for this. It’s called the Dunning–Kruger effect.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately.

Their research also suggests corollaries: highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

TL;DR: incompetent people don’t know they are incompetent.

Explains a whole lot about politics, doesn’t it?

It seems to me that one of the best ways to figure out what you really understand is through rigorous and unfettered discussion about the merits of various ideas. Eventually, if you stand up and defend your ideas long enough you’ll run into someone who has forgotten more on the topic than you’ll ever know. It’s then that you recognize how little you know, and that is where the fun really starts.

Which brings me to this Emerson quote: “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”

It’s easy to fall into a defensive posture when confronted with an opposing perspective. It’s easy to think your own viewpoint is inherently legitimate because you feel it to be legitimate. It’s easy to see a challenge to an idea as a personal attack.

Sometimes I fall into this trap, too. “But I was just expressing my opinion!” I’ve thought when hurt by a friend or reader who’s disagreed with one of my rants.

Well, that’s all well and good, but in the public sphere my opinion is only as good as my defense of it. My feelings about my opinion are, frankly, irrelevant.

So I try not to conflate these two very different things:

• the discussion
• my feelings about the discussion

As Emerson advised, I try not to mistake contradiction for persecution.

I think it’s very important societally that we not just tolerate but encourage discussion and dissent, no matter how challenging the topic. This is how we separate the good ideas from the bad. This is how we see what notions still float when the waters get choppy.

What have you guys been thinking about, reading, eating or doing lately? Help me round this week out with your own great points-to-ponder in the comments. 

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