Minnesota Grapes – Year Two (Summer 2019) – Bull trunks!

Sun 23 June 2019 9:00 AM / Leave a Comment /

Good news/bad news time on the backyard grapes. The good news is all five grapes are doing great. The three from last spring have reached the top trellis wire, and the two planted this spring are each growing lots of vegetation.

The Marquette vine. Good, healthy shoot is forming the trunk.

The bad news is two of the three trunks I trained this spring seem to be “bull canes.” Bull canes are overly vigorous shoots. They’re extra thick and have very long distances between the leaf nodes. Compare the picture of the Marquette pictured above with the Bluebell vine pictured below. Especially notice the length of the internodes, and the number and size of the leaves.

Bluebell bull trunk. Long internodes, huge leaves.

So what’s wrong with bull canes? According to my research, they tend to be less fruitful than normal canes, so they make a poor choice for fruiting canes. Even if you got the same number of fruiting shoots, the long internodes also mean fewer shoots-per-foot, so they take up more trellis space for the same yield. They’re bad as trunks, too. The long internode distance means it’s hard to position the new fruiting cane shoots, as they will tend to be further away from the trellis wires. Due to their extra thickness, they also take longer to harden off for winter, and so are less winter hardy than thinner shoots.

My sources weren’t extra clear on what causes bull canes. I think it’s one of those things that just happens. Some sources suggested that bull canes happen when the vine has more energy than it has places to put it. This matches my experience: I pruned these vines down to one single shoot to train as the trunk this year, and two of the three grew bull canes. The research suggested letting them grow a couple of shoots, and even letting some flowers begin to mature, to help the vine spread out its energy and so avoid growing bull canes.

The bull trunk on the Frontenac Gris. Again notice the very long internodes.

Anyway, it’s hardly the end of the world. I’m going to continue training these trunks as if they were normal canes. I’ve already headed the vines and am beginning to train the lateral shoots to become next year’s fruiting canes. However, I’m mentally prepared for the trunks to die over winter, and I’m definitely planning to train up new trunks next year to replace the bull trunks, even if the bull trunks survive the winter.

There’s not a lot of information on bull trunks out there. Here are some of the sources of information I found:

Posted in: Gardening

Project complete: Cherry dining table

Mon 29 April 2019 11:14 AM / Leave a Comment /

Next on the list of furniture to build for our house was a dining table. I already wrote about the start of this project, buying the lumber and rough cutting it. Since then I finished the project.

This was my first time working with cherry. I found it nice to work with, although it did seem to tear out more easily than other woods I’ve used.

I was most worried about gluing up the top. Obviously on a table, it’s important for the top to be flat and preferably smooth. The top does still have some tearout and plane tracks that I couldn’t eliminate, and a couple of dips here and there. I’m hopeful that day to day wear on the table will even out some of these spots. Doing the whole project with hand tools was a challenge, but overall I’m very happy with how easily it went. As I kept gluing more boards onto the top, it got very heavy and difficult to deal with by myself, but I managed. The bottom side of the top was left very rough, I only worked it where I needed to to get the frame to fit well. The frame was attached to the top with wood buttons cut from scrap.

This was also my first time doing breadboard ends. For the tenons, I used a straightedge to guide my saw to cut the initial kerf, then knocked off most of the waste with a 1″ chisel before cleaning up the tenon with a rabbet block plane. The shallow parts of the mortise was cut with a plough plane, with my mortising chisel clearing out the deeper parts. I wish the exposed ends of the breadboard tenon had been tighter and cleaner looking.

The base is typical table drawbored mortise and tenon construction. I tapered the legs with a saw and hand planes. After transporting the pieces home, I broke all the edges with a block plane, did a little final smoothing, and then applied four coats of amber shellac. I plan to put a coat of urethane on top of that to help protect against alcohol spills, but haven’t had time to do so yet.

One thing I’m most pleased with is how quickly this project came together. I purchased the wood on December 31st and had the project finished in our house on April 20th, so a little less than 4 months. That’s a pretty good turnaround for me, considering I only work evenings and weekends as time allows. I’m also eager to see how the cherry ages in my dining room, which gets quite a lot of light.

Posted in: Woodworking

Minnesota Home Garden Grapes – Year Two (Spring 2019)

Sat 27 April 2019 9:25 AM / Leave a Comment /

In Spring 2018, we started growing grapevines in our home garden in Saint Paul. I did a ton of research on this, especially on Minnesota-hardy grape varieties. I found that the University of Minnesota actually does a bunch of research on cold weather grapes, both creating new grape varieties that grow well in cold weather climates, and providing information to vineyards in the area.

I ordered three vines from Wallace Woodstock, a Wisconsin-based nursery that I’ve had very good results from in the past. I focused primarily on varieties that are good for fresh eating, and that UMN declares as cold-hardy. I’m not planning to do wine making with the grapes we grow, though if we get some crazy good harvests, that may end up happening simply as a way of preserving the grapes rather than letting them go to waste.

The grape trellis, built in Spring 2018.

While waiting for the grapes to arrive, I studied vineyard management and grape pruning. My primary resource was a book recommended by a friend, From Vines to Wines by Jeff Cox (Storey Books, 1999), though I supplemented that with lots of online reading. I chose to build a 3-wire trellis, planning to prune the vines into a 4- or possibly 6-arm Kniffen system. I believe most of our grape varieties are downward-growing, so the lower trellis wire may be used to support fruit in the 4-arm system, instead of two extra arms. My understanding is you want balance vegetation vs fruiting, so how they grow will impact my trellising and pruning strategies.

Meet the grapes. This is the rockstar, the Frontenac Gris.

I chose to mulch with stone, which is strongly recommended by the book if you can put up with laying stones. Since I’m only growing a single trellis in a single garden bed, this seemed worth the effort.

Here’s the bluebell. A couple buds are visible in the bottom-right.

The three grapes I ordered were planted in the Spring of 2018 and did very well through the year. I let each of them grow three shoots, and arranged them to grow upwards along a bamboo cane. All three reached the lowest trellis wire, and the Frontenac Gris shot all the way up to the top of the trellis and a couple feet along the length of it by the end of summer. As the year came to a close, I planned to let the shoots stay on the trellis over winter and prune the smaller two back down to the original plant to regrow up the trellis with the strength of the established roots in 2019. I decided not to prune the Frontenac’s shoot, since it was already well established all the way up the trellis.

This is the Marquette. You can see the three buds for 2019 easily in this photo.

Then the rabbits hit over winter. They took down all of the shoots on all three grapevines back down to the plant. Like I said, I was planning to do this anyway, so it was no great loss. But I would have liked to do it on my terms, and I would have liked to let the Frontenac fruit a bit this year. Oh well.

That brings us to now, Spring 2019. All three grapevines survived the rabbit attacks and the very cold winter and have started putting out a bunch of new leaf buds this week. I nipped them back to three buds per plant again. I plan to select a single shoot from each plant after they are established, and prune out the others. My hope is that all three vines will reach the top of the trellis this year, and be in really good shape for Spring 2020 to get our first real harvest. If they do very well, I may even let one or two grape bunches grow this year.

One of the new vines, Swenson Red. Tons of buds!

Since the vines did so well in 2018, I ordered two more to fill out some of the trellis width in 2019. Those arrived this week and are now planted. I’m real excited to see how they do! But first I need to go construct some rabbit fencing…

And finally the Edelweiss, planted in the middle of some daisies. Another very strong plant with lots of buds, nipped down to three.
Posted in: Gardening

My problem with Game of the Year lists

Sun 6 January 2019 11:10 AM / Leave a Comment /

The end of the year means Game Of The Year lists, which always brings to mind the difference between the games I enjoy, and those which most of the gaming community enjoys. I think this year I finally figured out why I disagree with these lists so much: I’m officially done with video games as a storytelling medium.

Of course I don’t mean I’ll never play a game with a line of dialog again. But rather I am coming to view storytelling as a negative feature of most games. When I sit down to play a game, I want to enjoy an interactive experience, that tests my skill or challenges my problem solving abilities. If I wanted to experience a story, I would use a medium that does that far better than video games.

Last night I sat down to finally play the critically acclaimed What Remains of Edith Finch on PC. It’s a walking simulator, where you walk around a carefully crafted environment and listen to a narrator tell a story. I thought it had a promising start, I liked the way the subtitles were displayed. Neat trick. Forty-five minutes of walking through an empty forest and then an empty house, however, left me feeling pretty bored. The point at which I quit was when I was ineffectually attempting to capture rabbits as an owl. After the fourth failed dive, I realized I wasn’t enjoying the gameplay, and that watching an owl fail to catch a rabbit for five minutes is godawful storytelling. So I quit.

Edith Finch would make a far better book or movie. I feel like the game developers had some “ideal route” in mind when they created the game. They probably had to design the house such that it would be experienced in a certain order, with choke points to ensure the player hits critical story beats. It would be easier, and ensure a more compelling narrative, if the the authors had simply controlled the camera through the experience. Rather than watch an owl fail to catch a rabbit a bunch of times, they could just show the owl catching the rabbit and move on with the damn story. Controlling an owl with crappy gameplay does not improve the storytelling experience, in my opinion.

Why did Giant Sparrow decide to develop a game instead of a 3D animated movie, then? I don’t know, but I have some guesses. I think games are a much more forgiving medium for storytelling, precisely because it’s so bad at it. If you took a recording of a typical first gameplay experience and showed it to a movie-going audience, everyone would walk out after the fourth missed owl dive. But because games are terrible at telling stories, Edith Finch‘s narrative is given huge critical accolades, despite being a slog to experience. Video games also have lower graphical standards. Animated movies don’t have the excuse of realtime graphics to justify poor visuals. While Edith Finch‘s graphics are good for a video game, they’re nothing special in terms of pre-rendered animations. Finally, I think the competition in the narrative game market is smaller than that of the movie market, and the narrative game audience is much larger than that of the indie film genre. While Edith Finch‘s story may be great (I don’t know, I got bored and quit less than an hour into it), I don’t know that it would stand out in the crowded movie field, nor find an audience large enough to justify its cost as an indie film.

But enough harping on this one poor game. The fact that I bothered to try it puts it above most Game of the Year narrative slogs. At least Edith Finch doesn’t try to justify its being a game with exhaustively boring “game mechanics” like combing your horse, or picking up every flower in a giant, empty landscape in order to craft something. Unlike most GOTY candidates, where you might as well put the controller down and pick up some popcorn while the game plays a movie at you, Edith Finch also tells its story during gameplay.

There is a really interesting intersection, though, where video games truly can be unique with regards to storytelling. This is when the story itself is a game mechanic. It’s rare and incredibly difficult to get right. Undertale manages, and is an amazingly written game with a very compelling story that intersects with the gameplay. “Choose your own adventure”-style is a combination of storytelling and gameplay. It’s super hard to do well, but a couple games manage. Oxenfree skirts the line, but the combination of creepy writing and visuals with choose-your-own storytelling ends up with a compelling gameplay experience that I don’t think you could separate from the medium. I think Deus Ex‘s branching narrative that intersected with decent gameplay managed this feat. It’s not that these games have incredibly deep stories. Rather, it’s the intersection of the gameplay with the story that makes the experience compelling. You couldn’t remove Undertale‘s story from the game and place it into a book. They’re intertwined, and that’s what makes it a good video game.

But more often the story is an unnecessary waste of time in otherwise excellent games. The Witness is one of my favorite games ever, with incredibly conveyed gameplay mechanics that really challenge the player. One of the only black marks on the game for me is that the author tried to jam a story into it via a clumsy, hidden “VR” narrative video. No one knows what this is intended to mean. You can find pages of theories discussing the video and how it may tie into other aspects of the island on Reddit. But there is no hint at all at what the author might have meant. It’s not critical analysis of a literary work, it’s reading entrails. It’s a total failure of storytelling, and in my opinion, the game is poorer for it. Luckily it’s mostly entirely ignorable.

On the other hand is game-of-the-year-candidate Celeste. A really excellent platformer, with charming graphics and great music. And pages and pages of dull-as-dirt text to slog through on your way through the otherwise excellent game. If you read reviews of Celeste you’ll find endless praise for its treatment of self-doubt and how the main character builds confidence by conquering the mountain. But I was skipping the dialog as fast as I could by the end of Chapter 3. I’m here to play a challenging platformer, not read a book.

So, yes, this is finally the breaking point for me. I’m done with storytelling in video games. I’m here to play games, not read a book or watch a movie. If you want me to watch a movie, make a movie. If you want me to read a billion lines of text, write a book. Those mediums are far better at telling stories than video games can ever be. The only reason story games are praised as highly as they are is because it is such a terrible medium for it that storytelling that would be shunned in any other medium is seen as a shining beacon of promise. Throw GTA5 in the trash and watch The Goodfellas. Throw Fallout 4 in the trash and read Ancillary Justice. Throw Read Dead Redemption 2 in the trash and read Lonesome Dove.

Give me good gameplay. Give me cool graphics. Give me awesome music. These are things games are good at, and things we should use to decide which games truly represent the pinnacle of the medium. This is I think the disconnect between me and the Game of the Year lists. Those lists seem to exclusively praise big budgets and games that would be lucky to be considered B-tier movies. I think that’s the opposite of what Game of the Year lists should be focusing on. Game of the Year lists should focus on what games can do well, and what artists are exploring the scope of medium.

To that end, here are some really good games I played that came out in 2018: Lumines Remastered, Return of the Obra Dinn, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and what I would consider my game of the year: Hollow Knight. These games don’t try to imitate other art forms, badly. Instead they are shining examples of what kinds of experiences only games can provide.

Posted in: Gaming