A Seed Saver's Garden

[ducks4you]

OUR US postal service is turning into garbage.
I have never had house service since I moved to this tiny town, 2000. I have always had to go To the Post Office building and use a key to a box that I have to reapply for every year.
You would Think we would get great service.
THIS YEAR post office all over the country have been told to send local letters/parcels into the main city's postal hub, which then get driven back to our town Post Office.
So, If I mall something to my next door neighbor it now travels 90 miles back and forth, and can take a good week to go from the postal slot to the P. O. Box, 5 ft away from the postal slot.
Town snail mails all water bills. All due by the 14th of the month, from 14th-20th 10% addl charge, but still on time.
After that, payment is late. We Can turn off service, April-October for late payment,
When the billing clerk gets the bills out by at least the 4th of the month, some residents may not get their bills until the 12th of the month.
IT.IS.INFURIATRING!!!
What is More infuriating is my board who don't want to discuss emailing our bills.

 

[heirloomgal]

OUR US postal service is turning into garbage.
I have never had house service since I moved to this tiny town, 2000. I have always had to go To the Post Office building and use a key to a box that I have to reapply for every year.
You would Think we would get great service.
THIS YEAR post office all over the country have been told to send local letters/parcels into the main city's postal hub, which then get driven back to our town Post Office.
So, If I mall something to my next door neighbor it now travels 90 miles back and forth, and can take a good week to go from the postal slot to the P. O. Box, 5 ft away from the postal slot.
Town snail mails all water bills. All due by the 14th of the month, from 14th-20th 10% addl charge, but still on time.
After that, payment is late. We Can turn off service, April-October for late payment,
When the billing clerk gets the bills out by at least the 4th of the month, some residents may not get their bills until the 12th of the month.
IT.IS.INFURIATRING!!!
What is More infuriating is my board who don't want to discuss emailing our bills.

We have the same situation here ducks, if I mail something to someone here in the city (and I have because of the seeds) it travels to Toronto and back first. That's over 800 km, about 500 miles. Imagine! And people think jacking up the cost of gas + carbon tax is to reduce fuel usage? And this is not just my town, it's everywhere. Government exists to serve itself, not us.

The last (and probably only) patriot prime minister we had wanted to do away with door to door mail carriers and convert to community boxes with key access. At the time I didn't really want to lose door to door service, heck knows we pay through our nose in taxes we should get something for it. But I can see now why getting rid of this make work project was a good idea, he saw this coming.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

We have the same situation here ducks, if I mail something to someone here in the city (and I have because of the seeds) it travels to Toronto and back first. That's over 800 km, about 500 miles. Imagine! And people think jacking up the cost of gas + carbon tax is to reduce fuel usage? And this is not just my town, it's everywhere. Government exists to serve itself, not us.

I can get worse. My mom said that, for a while when she worked in Manhattan, if they wanted to send something to the building NEXT DOOR, it had to go through Fedex and go to MEMPHIS before it got back to them.

The last (and probably only) patriot prime minister we had wanted to do away with door to door mail carriers and convert to community boxes with key access. At the time I didn't really want to lose door to door service, heck knows we pay through our nose in taxes we should get something for it. But I can see now why getting rid of this make work project was a good idea, he saw this coming.

We've had a similar idea proposed a few time.

The big problem I can see with that is packages. End door delivery, and you would need to go to the PO EVERY time you got a package. And given how understaffed they keep most of those, that would make packages more or less inaccessible to most people (especially when combined with the request to eliminate Saturday delivery and close the PO's on Saturday as well as Sunday.)

Plus, a lot of people think even the neighborhood boxes would not help much to make things more efficient. More than a few just want to make everyone HAVE to rent a PO box (i.e. may people pay for receiving mail as well as send it).

And, of course, I have head the idea of "capacity shipping", where the PO would get the right and ability to hold mail at a given branch until enough had accumulated at that branch to make sending a truck with it on to the next one economically cost effective, so rural areas might only get mail a few time a YEAR.

The issue is that the modern PO is in an odd position, and wants to put itself in a slightly different odd position. They want all the freedoms of a totally private industry (the right to set their own prices*, delivery areas, and delivery times.) while retaining their government office perks (like being unable to be sued, and having a legal monopoly). And, in the case of Mr. DeJoy, he also has some other ideas like turning the PO into some sort of all around service center (like having a PO bank again, and replacing stamps with collectable stickers that would have no franking value. And he also hasn't abandoned the "tax the internet, and give us the money for lost business" idea.

*And to give you some idea of what those prices would be, the Postmaster in the 80's said he thought a dollar would be a "more than fair price" for sending a first class letter. So you can guess what, given inflation, DeJoy would probably suggest.

 

[digitS']

Yes, letter delivery, even bill delivery, has plummeted in the internet age.

Haven't we always had business-to-business couriers and taxis delivering this and that for local businesses, especially in cities? Western Union might show up with a telegram at the door during ages past.

I can remember the first time I saw UPS and FedEx vans delivering on residential streets. Boom. The stories began – the US postal service is losing money every year.

Steve

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Yeah, but most of that SHOULD have disappeared anyway. Unless you NEED a physical copy of what is being sent, email is both quicker (since it's basically instantaneous), cheaper (since it doesn't cost you anything beyond what you are already paying for your internet service) and more environmentally friendly. Even if you feel that a handwritten letter is somehow better for certain circumstances, for most day to day communication, e-mail simply works better.

The real problem is the the Post office didn't pay ATTENTION to e-mail and the online world when it showed up. They thought it would be a minor fad, the same way AT&T originally thought the telephone would be, or the gramophone, or talking movies, or television.....

If the Post office WAS a totally private company, the issue would be easy, they'd either have to get competitive or go out of business. Plenty of European countries have totally privatized their mail systems, and it's working GREAT for them.

But, as it said, the Post Office exists in a sort of twilight state between private and public. It's private run and run for profit, but is still subject to government oversight and some government restrictions, It's the tradeoff for being given the monopoly on most letter type mail (until things like FedEx and UPS showed up, it was a monopoly on ALL mail and shipping,) and the monopoly on government mail (that's why they still have to MAIL you things like your tax forms and such, they're legally obligated to.) And the reason Congress still allows this is the Post Office's promise to deliver ANYWHERE people live in the US, including the large amounts of rural and remote areas where the other services don't operate becuase it would not be cost effective.

And that has left a lot of Postmasters to get arrogant/greedy, and try to find ways to milk the rules to make as much money as possible (which is, of course the goal of any business, but with most of them, no one is OBLIGATED to use them if they feel the price is unfair for the service rendered.)

The post office has to realize that, at this point, it's getting pretty close to covering the EXACT same services as the private courier companies, and if they can do the job better or cheaper, people will use them. The areas where they have legal monopolies are rapidly becoming largely irrelevant.

Particularly now that the number of major competitors they have has gone from two to four (besides UPS and Fedex, I'd now count DHL and Amazon's own fleet.)

 

[heirloomgal]

If the Post office WAS a totally private company, the issue would be easy, they'd either have to get competitive or go out of business. Plenty of European countries have totally privatized their mail systems, and it's working GREAT for them.

I'm glad you included this, I didn't know. I'm not surprised though. It makes sense.

Interestingly, today I had to run an errand which took a bit of time and my kids waited in the car. Just so happened the postal picket line was next to the parking lot I was in, quite the set up they had there including the almost cartoonish metal barrel with fire. The signs they held asked the fairly heavy traffic to honk in support. Not a single honk as I walked past, or walked back again. Kids told me there was a single honk from a gov fire truck that whole time. Clearly, they have ZERO public support and people are ticked.

A friend this week also walked past one of the picket lines, and politely asked if they could explain what the dispute involved (seeing as they were asking for her support as a pedestrian). They didn't know. Honest to goodness, you can't make this up.

 

[Decoy1]

What do you think is happening with the bagged flowers? Is it a micro climate of heat from bag material maybe? I have found pepper flowers very fussy on heat, I once had the whole greenhouse drop every flower and small fruit because of temperature. 10 varieties, that is a good amount, are they all sweet?

I think that I've seen more beans cross than peppers is a ratio issue; I've only grown maybe 200 or 300 individual plants in the last few years of peppers, whereas I've grown thousands of individual bean plants. If I grow a pepper variety I seldom grow more than a single plant, especially hot peppers. With beans it's a minimum of 3-4, sometimes 20 for bush beans. I don't know which flowers bees would more naturally gravitate too, I'm thinking peppers perhaps due to flower structure. Both species though are cleistogamous and I'd be tempted to think that they'd naturally not have much outcrossing as a result in most conditions. In fact, I focus and track down almost solely species that exhibit cleistogamy so I can have maximum diversity with the least amount of issues. Probably a touch of laziness in there too on my part since pollinating flowers with paintbrushes seems such a chore to me!

The national seed exchange hosted an interesting talk that touched on this, and how even the biggest seed growing companies with acreage have a % margin for acceptable amounts of crossing in retail packets, it seems impossible to eliminate totally even when you isolate by the kilometer. I think this is mainly due to, going to descend into geek world here big time, but the evolutionary capability of the thorasic muscles of bees. It's those muscles that gives us purity gardeners a really hard time!

A rather belated response to your interesting reply. I’ve assumed that it’s lack of movement that causes bagged pepper flowers to fall off in the absence of bees (there’s a bees’ nest quite close) but that probably doesn’t make much sense. It might get too humid causing rot. Over heating is an interesting possibility I hadn’t thought of. I wonder whether quite a lot of flowers don’t develop into fruit anyway but I just notice more if I’ve gone to the trouble of bagging them.

Most of the varieties I succeeded with are chillis. Mostly, like you, I grow only one of each variety except for varieties I particularly like, Padron and one or two sweet ones, for example. I grow far more chillis than we can actually use. I just find them fascinating and appealing plants!

I was interested in what you wrote about cleistogamous flowers. Some Capsicum species have smaller and more insignificant flowers than others and I’m wondering whether they’re less likely to cross. Something to look into and observe. Interesting that retail companies accept a small amount of crossing too. I’ve certainly experienced that.

 

[Decoy1]

We have 2 major cedar trunk clusters that need to be dug up this spring. The last ones were absolutely brutal, back breaking work with pick axes, shovels, sawsall, etc. Without our neighbour hooking up his truck for the final yanking we wouldn't have got them out by hand. Any tips for easier stump removal? I can at least say we left these stumps much taller than the last ones, 4 feet or so for better leverage

We hire a stump grinder from time to time after cutting the stump down to near ground level.

 

[Branching Out]

We hire a stump grinder from time to time after cutting the stump down to near ground level.

We rented a stump grinder once as well, with excellent results.

 

[Alasgun]

Grinders do a fine job but if your sporting follicles are speaking to you; the might say, “Dy-no-mite would be a lot more fun”!