Apheresis left me weak

Yesterday a blood donation bus came by the office for the quarterly donation drive. I'd donated whole blood twice before; but this time, the bus had an apheresis machine for doing Double Red Blood Cell process.

Human has an average of 12 units of blood (a unit is 450ml). It is composed primarily of plasma (55%) and red blood cells (45%). A whole blood donation removes one unit of this mixture. A Double Red Blood Cell procedure removes one unit of only RBC, which is about the same amount of RBC removed in 1/4.5= 2.2 whole blood donation.

I had one needle stuck into a vein on the inside of elbow. Blood was first drawn into the machine. It then separated out the whole blood to plasma and RBC. The plasma and some saline were returned to the vein through the same needle. This cycle was repeated four times. The procedure took 40 minutes vs. 30 minutes for whole blood.

When the plasma was being returned, I could feel that it was cold. My fingertips and lips were prickling because of the cold. I was at that point where I would almost start shivering.

I felt weak throughout the day, weaker than after doing whole blood donation. When I got home, I slept almost immediately. I felt good about donating, though.

Hard red clay soil

Over the weekend, I opened up a patch of the lawn for a vegetable garden. Removing the sod was easily accomplished using a square spade inserted just under the root. I then just jam the spade repeatedly along the sod-soil boundary. It peeled off readily.

After about half an hour of doing this, I realised that that meant my soil was hard as concrete. I immediately reached for the garden fork but tried hard I did, I couldn't make a dent deeper than 3 cm. A digging bar didn't fare much better either at 10 cm.

It was dried clay under the grass. How the grass could survive or how the clay got so dry under the grass was beyond my understanding. Helpful discussions in gardenweb.com pointed out that moist clay soil was easier to work on.

I was not going to waste water hosing down the dry soil. I mulched it instead and am waiting for a rain. Once it gets easier to work with, I'll insert garden fork as deep as I can and lever the soil up. This will allow some air and mulch to drop inside through the crack. The trapped mulch will entice worms to go deeper and till the soil for me.

Killing a mulberry tree

Killing a mulberry tree is hard. You can cut it down to a stump, but by next month there will be several new sprouts. It has a deep taproot so digging it out is difficult. It is made even more difficult by its propensity for growing near fences.

I have two of them (black mulberry) in my yard on a fence corner. One is quite tall, 5m, the other was about 2.5m. I cut down the shorter one to a stump a year ago because it was so near to the fence post. Earlier this year, I was surprised to see new growths from the stump. That was before I knew the tree was a mulberry tree.

I don't want to use salt to kill the tree because I feel that the salt will affect the area. After all, the salt has to go somewhere. Even if all of the salt is absorbed by the root, when the root decomposes, the salt will leach out.

So I put a thick (3mil) black plastic bag over the stump and weighted the edges. The bag will cause the sun to bake the stump and also deprive it access to sunlight. I'll open it up in October to see if it does the trick.

The taller one will stay for now because it bears fruit and provides shade. I need to ruminate on its fate.



PS.

I had been trying to identify all the trees on the property ever since I bought it. The basswood out front was quite easy to identify and so was the holly tree (it was so distinctive). I used various online tree identification sites to no avail. It was not until wife remarked on the berry-like fruit that I finally know where to start searching: berry trees.

BTW, I found a post in gardenweb site explaining why they grow alongside fence while searching for a way to kill it.