Since WordPress is now allowing 3GB of storage I thought I would place my Ph.D. thesis on my Blog site and see how it lists in search engines.

Wilcox, Douglas Howard, Ph.D., The University of Manitoba, February 1995, Models of Interference in Monocultures and Mixtures of Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and Quackgrass (Elytrigia repens (L.) Nevski.). 265 pgs.

Abstract (downloads follow): Quackgrass is the most serious perennial grassy weed of wheat in Manitoba. Field experiments and surveys investigating the nature and extent of interference in monocultures and mixtures of quackgrass and wheat were conducted over the years 1987 to 1989 at Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, Canada.

Intraspecific and interspecific interference between spring wheat and quackgrass was investigated in the field using an additive series design consisting of five replacement series proportions at total stand densities of 75, 150, and 300 plants sqM. A revised synthetic no-interaction analysis determined that wheat was superior to quackgrass in both intraspecific and interpecific interference and that niche dedifferentiation was large. Quackgrass reproductive variable were less sensitive to interspecific interference than were vegetative variables.

Surveys of commercial fields of spring wheat infested with quackgrass were conducted using a dynamic stratified random sampling design in which systematic samples were taken at approximately 30, 60 and 93 days after planting. Wheat yield loss, as a percentage of weed-free yield, (Yw%) was related to spring quackgrass shoot counts/m^-2 (Qs) by a rectangular hyperbolic model of the form

Yw% = 98.7(1-0.433(Qs)/100(1+(0.433(Qs)/193.7))).

Wheat kernel weight was the wheat yield component most influenced by quackgrass infestation. In quackgrass populations the majority of new rhizome production occurred during wheat senescence and biomass partitioning to heads increased as quackgrass infestation increased. Allometric models of the relationship between quackgrass parts were site specific and generally became more accurate the later the sampling date.

A set of models relating spring quackgrass infestation to yield losses in hard red spring wheat, flax, and polish canola were combined with allometric models in a multi-year spreadsheet (Lotus 1-2-3, v 3.1) model. Simulations run using the multi-year model demonstrated the potential of a spreadsheet model of assisting in weed control decisions.

Downloads:

PDF – quackgrass_phd_1 - Cover Sheets, Acknowledgments, Table of Contents, List of Tables, List of Figures

PDF – quackgrass_phd_2 – Abstract, Forward, Introduction

PDF – quackgrass_phd_3 - Literature Review

PDF – quackgrass_phd_4 - Chapter 1 - Interference Modelling of Wheat (Triticum aestivum) and Quackgrass (Elytrigia repens) Grown in an Additive Series.

PDF – quackgrass_phd_5 - Chapter 2 - Models of Quackgrass (Elytrigia repens) Interference in Spring Wheat (Triticum aestivum).

PDF – quackgrass_phd_6 - Chapter 3 - Allometry in Quackgrass (Elytrigia repens) Infesting Spring Wheat (Triticum aestivum).

PDF – quackgrass_phd_7 - Chapter 4 - A Deterministic Empirical Model of Quackgrass (Elytrigia repens) Interference in Spring Annual Crops.

PDF – quackgrass_phd_8 - General Discussion, Summary and Conclusions, Suggestions for Further Work

PDF – quackgrass_phd_9 - Literature Cited

PDF – quackgrass_phd_10 - Appendix 1 - Modelling Light Transmittance and Light Use Efficiency in Wheat and Quackgrass Grown In Additive Series.

PDF – quackgrass_phd_11 - Appendix 2 - Climatic Data for the University of Manitoba, Portage La Prairie, Research Station During the Growing Seasons of 1987, 1988 and 1989.

PDF – quackgrass_phd_12 - Appendix 3 - Water Use and Water Use Efficiency (WUE) in the Additive Series Experiments.

PDF – quackgrass_phd_13 - Appendix 4 - Soil Nutrient Change in the Soil Beneath Treatments of the Additive Series Experiment.

PDF – quackgrass_phd_14 - Appendix 5 - Quackgrass Spreadsheet Model Cell Format Codes.

Since WordPress is now allowing 3GB of storage I thought I would place my thesis on my Blog site and see how it lists in search engines. The first is my M.Sc. Thesis:

Wilcox, Douglas Howard, M.Sc., The University of Manitoba, May 1986, Biology and Control of Bromus pectinatus Thunb., 177pgs.

Abstract (downloads follow) - Investigations into the biology and control of the annual grassy weed Bromus pectinatus Thunb. were conducted at the National Plant Breeding Station, Njoro, Kenya, from 1982 to 1984.

B. pectinatus is described and, in the tradition of other Bromus sp. of similar morphology, the common name Kenya Chess is proposed for B. pectinatus.

Pot growth of B. pectinatus was influenced by soil type and microclimate, but not by seed origin. B. pectinatus was germinated and grown in amended and untreated soils ranging in pH from 3.05 to 8.13. Soils with a pH near 3 could not support growth or germination of B. pectiqatus. B. pectinatus grew best on a soil of pH 6.55 and when soil pH influenced germination the optimum soil pH was 6.0. Out-of-doors grown B. pectinatus matured earlier and had fewer culms than plants grown in the shadehouse or glasshouse.

Exposure to light during germination, inhibited the germination of B. pectinatus seeds. Germination of B. pectinatus seed was most rapid at a 17 C temperature. Prechilling or preheating seeds did not promote germination of dormant B. pectinatus seeds. Germination of dormant B. pectinatus seeds was enhanced by seed hull removal or pricking the lemma or removing the rachilla segment.

Germination of B. pectinatus seed in the soil was unaffected by depth of burial, whereas, emergence was reduced to 35, 19, 11, 4 and 0% from depths of 0, 1, 2, 4 and 8 cm, respectively.

There was a relationship between field emergence of B. pectinatus and the precipitation pattern. After-harvest germination of B. pectinatus seed indicated that there was an innate dormancy in hulled seed which persisted for 8 months. The innate dormancy was mainly induced by the seed hull, but was also induced within the caryopsis itself.

Field measurements were used to develop an equation which related yield loss in wheat with B, pectinatus infestation. Delayed sowing of wheat and barley into a B. pectinatus infested site resulted in yield reductions that were correlated with length of delay.

Replacement series studies were conducted using varying proportions of wheat : B. pectinatus and rapeseed : B. pectinatus. Varying the proportions resulted in growth changes in the plants. B. pectinatus maturation was delayed when grown in a mixture. Rapeseed / canola was unaffected by B. pectinatus interference.

A spatial interference study determined that B. pectinatus interfers with wheat mainly above ground.

The herbicides isoproturon, pendimethalin and oxadiazon were found to be ineffective against B. pectinatus, The herbicides triallate, chlorsulfuron, metribuzin, trifluralin and EPTC achieved limited control of B, pectinatus. Superior control of B. pectinatus was achieved using fluazifop-butyl at 0.25 kg/ha and fenthiaprop-ethyl at 0.12 kg/ha, in rapeseed / canola.

Downloads:

PDF - bromus_msc_1 - Cover Sheets, Acknowledgments, Table of Contents, List of Tables, List of Figures

PDF - bromus_msc_2 - Abstract, Forward, Introduction

PDF - bromus_msc_3 - Literature Review

PDF - bromus_msc_4 - Chapter 1 - Bromus pectinatus Thunb. Morphology

PDF - bromus_msc_5 - Chapter 2 - The influence of Soil pH on the Morphology of Bromus pectinatus Thunb.

PDF - bromus_msc_6 - Chapter 3 - Factors Influencing the Germination and Emergence of Bromus pectinatus Thunb.

PDF - bromus_msc_7 - Chapter 4 - Field Emergence and dormancy of Bromus pectinatus Thunb.

PDF - bromus_msc_8 - Chapter 5 - Bromus pectinatus Thunb. Interference in Crops

PDF - bromus_msc_9 - Chapter 6 - Chemical Control of Bromus pectinatus Thunb.

PDF - bromus_msc_10 - General Discussion, Summary and Conclusions, Suggestions for Further Work

PDF - bromus_msc_11 - List of References

PDF - bromus_msc_12 - Appendix

The last time I was in Moncton, New Brunswick,  it was as a layover on my way back from PEI Agri-Insurance Research Conference. I spent the night in a “smoking room” because that was all that was left and as I registered I thought how bad could it be? Turns out it was awful and I will never do that again – the smoke permeated everything and seemed to get worse and worse as the night progressed.

I returned last week to Moncton  to attend another Agri-Insurance Research Conference. This time my stay was much better – for starters I was in a non-smoking hotel.  I stayed at the Delta Beausejour in the “tourist section” of Moncton. The hotel was fine, although the hallway and street noise could get a little loud occasionally. The hotel was within easy walking distance to a scenic and long walkway along the Petitcodiac river. The Petitcodiac connects to the Bay of Fundy about 30 km away. Because of this connection I got to see a “tidal bore” several times over the week. During a tidal bore the leading edge of the incoming tide forms waves of water that travel up the river against the direction of the current. The Petitcodiac has the nickname of “the chocolate river” because of its colour. A picture I took of the Petitcodiac during the tidal bore phase follows:

As part of the conference we got to spend part of one day touring some of the agriculture and aquaculture of New Brunswick. We went Verger Belliveau Orchards and saw the apples in bloom and toured their apple packing facility and fruit beverage cellar.

We then toured Captain Dan’s Lobster Plant while they were processing lobsters. Most of the processing is still done manually so there were a lot of workers on the factory floor. HACCP standards were applied so everyone was dressed in lab coats and hair nets and no cameras or jewelry were allowed. We then went to the Village Bay seafood oyster farm and packaging facility and were lectured on how the New Brunswick innovative cage system is used for oyster cultivation and harvesting. We also toured the oyster cages by barge.

We then drove through the Bell Mills Cranberry Farm and saw examples of the new cranberry bogs that New Brunswick would like to further enhance as an industry in their province. It would have been nice to get out and see the bogs but the producer was unavailable and we were running behind time.

Finally we ended the day on a Shediac Bay Lobster Tales Boat tour. The crew were entertaining and there were live musicians. We socialized and learned about the lobster’s life cycle and how to eat them “the acadian way”. Lobster can be quite tasty even without garlic butter.

As you can tell it was a very full day and very educational. The following is a picture of the Dieppe region near the Moncton airport showing the Petitcodiac river from my airplane window as I left Moncton.

When Wanda was involved in the Crafters Hand store this past winter she was often criticized for charging too much for her saskatoon jams.  She was charging $5 per jar that her “competitors” in the same store were charging $3 for.  Wanda’s jams had a higher concentration of fruit, but other than that there was little difference to defend the pricing. There is a good article in a recent issue of the Farmers Market Association of Manitoba Co-op Inc. Newsletter <FMAM Newsletter Volume 2 Issue 1 - Released on January 29, 2008 > by Tamela Friesen that gives Wanda a good justification for her saskatoon jam pricing.

The article focuses on the fact that farmers’ market product costs matter - but that they are often not tracked enough, nor considered adequately in pricing. The article illustrates this using an example of homemade preserves and proves “that if you do not cost it, you likely spend more than you earn”.

According to the article homemade preserves involve the following costs: 

-         “The least expensive jars were $0.66 each, including taxes.

-         Pectin cost about $0.25 per jar.

-         Sugar averaged about $0.22 per jar.

-         Ingredients, if we picked them, were the cost of labour and any u-pick fees. In the case of saskatoon jam, a u-pick four-litre pail was $11.00, sans labour. That works out to nearly $1.00 per jar.

-          Our best picker picked a pail in half an hour. If we pay ourselves $10/hour, that’s $5 per bucket … $0.50/jar for picking.

 Have you been keeping track? So far, the cost of producing our jar of jam registers at $2.63/jar. What’s still missing from the cost?

-         Labour for cleaning and sorting berries and for cooking and processing the jam,

-         electricity for the stove, labels, transportation to the market,

-          labour at the market, & marketing materials.

-         Need to use your air conditioning because your canning heated up the house too much? That counts too! 

The article indicates that to have a chance to breakeven on a jar of saskatoon jam, you would have to charge $7.89 per jar (or perhaps only $4.89 per jar if you have your own berries). Kind of makes Wanda’s $5 per jar seem very reasonable.

We had a mild frost on May 27^th and fortunately we had no sensitive plants out in our “Meadow”. I hope the frost is over because I would like to get the flowers, tomatoes, peppers and pumpkins transplanted without worrying about covering them up. I’ve already planted 27 bare root Sea Buckthorn trees in our yard as a bit of a shelterbelt where our pincherry orchard died. It is feeling like spring – I’ve mowed the grass twice already, the saskatoon bushes and plum trees are in full-bloom, hummingbirds and orioles are slurping up their feeder syrup, and the barn swallows are back and diving near us.

The last three weeks I have been involved in the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Manitoba “Workplace Physical Activity Challenge”. My total steps (including conversions) over the 15 work days were  126,000. When we get the group total I’ll be able to see if my total was above or below average.

The weather has been good enough lately that I’m often able to cycle to work. The one way trip to the office is roughly 9 km and takes roughly ½ hour – partly because half the route is on gravel road (thats 18 km/day kiddies).  Gravel is a pain to cycle on but the worse part is all the gravel dust and flying rocks when people pass you in their automobiles.

One of my favorite web sites to visit is the Palm Addicts web site http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/ . It is a useful site for notifying me of the latest Palm related software and hardware as well as providing interesting insights and thoughts from other Palm-addicts and gadget-junkies. The site also regularly runs contests for laptops, PDAs, Cellphones, and related software and accessories in which contest entry is contingent on you writing a submission. Of the eleven submissions I have sent in only one did not get published – likely because it partly commented on how the palmaddict site can be slow to load – particularly on dialup – and they don’t like “negative” commentary. One of my early submissions won some Palm software – HanDBase - but I have not won anything since. The following is a listing of my Palm Addict published submissions to date.

● Old Palm, Bridge and GPS - http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2005/12/a_palm_user.html

● Using an APC Mobile Power Pack - http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2007/03/apc_mobile_powe.html

● SD Cards are tough - http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2007/03/why_snow_blowin.html

● pFuel Software - http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2007/07/what-i-like-a-1.html

● OLPC Thought - http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2007/10/olpc-pda-wannab.html

● Pentax and Palm Photography - http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2007/10/palm-perfect-fo.html

● NHF-800 MiniDisc Advantages- http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2007/11/why-i-love-my-s.html

● Palm for Drivers Ed help - http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2008/04/my-palm-as-driv.html

● Palm for Password help - http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2008/04/bogged-down-wit.html

● Making Radio podcasts with minidisc - http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2008/05/portable-radio.html

My latest photographic purchase is an “Asahi Pentax right-angle viewfinder attachment” with leather case. It can be fitted onto the viewfinder and allows you to view the scene from the top of the camera instead of the side. This will be particularly useful for plant and insect photography where the camera is placed close to the ground. Unfortunately it was designed for an older Pentax with a slightly narrower viewfinder than my Pentax *ist DL. However I used some tin snips to cut the shell and allow flexibility in the side-arms for the viewfinder to be stretched apart the extra 2mm required and it now works fine on my DL. Anyone purchasing an older  Asahi Pentax right-angle viewfinder attachment, such as I did off of eBay (or elsewhere), needs to be aware that this kind of modification may be required.

A picture of the Asahi Pentax right-angle viewfinder attachment follows:

For almost three years I have tracked my WebStats for The Dragonfly Meadow web site   http://www.dragonflymeadow.ca/  on the Cirrus Host server http://www.cirrushosting.com/toronto-web-hosting-canada.html using Webalizer. This software was adequate with only the occasional hickup until this spring when it seemed to not work properly at all. It seemed to be reporting web traffic mounts about one-tenth of what they previously were. The Cirrus Host technical support did not say why it wasn’t working (If they even knew - plesk version change, log file size issue, something else?) but did indicate that I switch to their new preferred product - AWStats. I have switched to AWStats and it appears to be working well. We have been averaging about 70 hits a day – a little less than we used to (110 hits/day) but not too bad. I also added Google Analytics to track some key pages: http://www.google.com/analytics  and it also seems to be working well.

Thought I would not do my Blog for a while and see if anyone noticed – no one did – at least not enough to mention it too me. Not really a surprise only confirms what I thought anyways. The blog is more for me than anyone else – a bit of journal interspersed with the occasional rant or tip.

We woke to a big snowfall on April 24 which isn’t unusual except that it was such a shock because at midnight there wasn’t any snow on the ground and the whether wasn’t too bad. So much for Spring! The kids got a snow day out of it. The following picture of our front yard illustrates what we woke up to.

We were told that the Southport I-NetLink Wireless   http://www.inetlink.ca/  tower was finally live and that they were coming out to test our line of site to see if we can qualify for their high speed internet. Turns out the Southport tower isn’t actually in Southport but is south of us near the old ESPO Seed Potato farm – it would be better called the Gainsborough Tower. In any case it turns out we have too many tall trees in the way and we can’t get I-NetLink Wireless  high speed service after all. We would have to double the height of our current tower to 50 or 60 feet to even have a chance at a good line of sight. I suspect a lot of our neighbors are also going to be disappointed as well. Even before they came out I was disappointed with the potential setup and subscription cost of the I-NetLink Wireless  plan in the RM of Portage. I was hoping that since the RM of Portage contributed financing to this tower that I-NetLink Wireless  would have had some sort of discount for residents – but they didn’t.  The way it turned out it really doesn’t matter to me anyways. I guess we’ll have to investigate the less cost effective option of satellite high speed internet   http://www.xplornet.com/packages.php?type=res.  - when and if our budget ever allows it again. We’ve determined that Patrick’s school trip to China  http://chinatrip2009.googlepages.com/home is a year earlier then we originally thought (Grade 11, next spring – instead of Grade 12) and Stewart needs a new piano so our budget  has to be a lot tighter for the next while.

Spring must be on its way. The Canada Geese have started returning - they have been here around a week already. Shortly after spotting the first geese we saw a flock of about 20 wild turkeys running down the gravel road in front of our house. I also purchased a new Honda push mower – the mower Patrick “fixed” last year still isn’t running. We also have to scrape the SUV windows as Jack Frost has returned, leaving us morning samples of his artwork. One of his pieces left on the front hood of our SUV is in the following photo.