Find the wiki

Just to let you know there'll be a new string to the bow from now on. Somewhere to post files without extensive editing so that they fit on the page. Products, activities, all that stuff.

http://BlackWalnutsdotCa.wikispaces.com

Not planning a full migration just yet, but we'll see. This is not yet a private wiki, so you should be able to access it, but just in case I convert it to a private site send me an email for your invitation to join. Tell me who you are, and why you're interested in black walnuts.

Applied Research Day

Yesterday (10 April 2008) was Applied Research Day at Algonquin College, where student teams showed off the technology they worked on during their final year at the college. Front and centre was Black Walnut Team 3, exhibiting the current iterations of the harvester and cracker/separator (shown in the picture), and taking up the largest footprint in the exhibition hall by far. I say Team 3, because this is the third annual iteration of students to work on machinery development. It has been a pleasure to work with each team, each bringing its own assortment of personalities and skills, working towards our goal of cost-effective farm-scale technology for black walnut nut production (I think we’ve been a reasonable partner, because I frequently hear the words ‘patient’ and ‘supportive’ applied in our direction; from our perspective these are just elements of our commitment to the emergence of a regional nut production industry).

This event marks a milestone: the completion at the College of work on the cracker/separator, and the production of an experimental harvester which we can begin to analyze practically, i.e. under field conditions, before embarking on a ‘second generation’ model. Both units will come to the farm over the summer and be exhaustively tested. Only the harvester will feed back into Team 4’s program; the cracker/separator will be taken up by the members of Team 2 who demonstrated the first proof of concept to the NNGA last year. They will work with us at the farm to define efficiency, where cost savings in manufacture can be made, and to complete (by the end of the year) the construction of the first five units which we hope to offer to the market. Bookmark this post!

The Triumph of the Tree

John Stewart Collis, in his lyrical prose in the book of the same name, begins: We were nursed into life by trees. It is to trees that we owe the development of a physiology which made Man possible – that is to say, made conceptual thought possible. JSC was a remarkable writer, more a natural philosopher, a conscript to WW II who requested to spend it on the land, and who served in an agricultural brigade as a result (he’d actually served in the conventional sense in WW I, so one cannot question his motive). Out of this came The Worm Forgives The Plough (1973) among others, the first book of his I read. His writing had far more in common with the blogging style of today than with the writing of the time http://transitionculture.org/book-reviews/the-worm-forgives-the-plough-john-stewart-collis/). Again, in The Triumph of the Tree (1950), in fact it is not unlikely that in the course of the next few decades after we have had some really rude shocks – we will gradually return (this time on the plane of consciousness) into the Order of Nature, as one factor of the whole. If this happens, the turning point will undoubtedly have been this century. It seems that he was probably just a decade out, a remarkable insight into the perils facing us at a time when global warming was unknown. He is able to conjure questions enough to make a tree laugh, but in spite of its lyricism this is very somber reading, because, sixty years on, one can really see how much further out we now actually exist on the edge, and all, if we accept JSC’s arguments, because we lost our wonder (perhaps fear) of trees, and fled the Era of Mythology. I would like to think that the Era of Science could restore some of this wonder (perhaps respect).

(There have been various publishers of The Triumph of the Tree, starting with William Sloane Associates, and House of Stratus. Most are now extinct, but I see that the used book is still available through the Internet).

Here we go

Please bear with me while I convert most of the website into a blog. It seems to me that this will improve functionality and purpose, which is the way I want to go.