NUTS AND BOLTS
August 4, 2011 – The winged nut made me think of something else besides a snitch. It brought to mind a wing nut. Do you know what a wing nut is?
Think nuts and bolts. Nuts and bolts are the basics of mechanical engineering. The figure of speech "nuts and bolts" means the basics of something.
Figuratively speaking, John Avlon defines the basic problem with politics in terms of wingnuts... "A wingnut is someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of the political spectrum - the professional partisans, the unhinged activists and the paranoid conspiracy theorists. They're the people who always try to divide rather than unite us."Literally speaking... that is in its actual meaning... a wing nut is a type of nut that screws onto a bolt, usually to help clamp something together. Someone came up with the idea of attaching wings to a bolt to make it easier to turn and tighten the nut with your bare fingers. It also makes it easier to unscrew a piece, so that you can get to what may be inside. Unscrewing the unscrutible.
Here's a good example for the practical use of a wing nut: I remembered my daughter’s flower press, which has been sitting untouched, somewhere down in the basement, for probably ten years. I went downstairs and actually was able to find it.
The pieces of the press were still clamped together with bolts, wing nuts, and washers. Wondering what was inside, I unscrewed the wing bolts. Behold the hidden secret, sandwiched between layers of newsprint and corregated cardboard, a beautifully preserved collection of autumn leaves.
There are at least three kinds of nuts – tree nuts, metal nuts, and crazy people, like me. How many definitions there are for bolts? Here are just a few I found in the dictionary:
1) an arrow or a dart;
2) to make a sudden flight or escape;
3) in horticulture, to produce seed before the natural time;
4) figure of speech meaning to examine as if by sifting, to find the truth of
On the last definition an example was given in the form of a quote: “Time and nature will bolt out the truth of things.” – L’Estrange (no, not Belatrix)
So now I’m thinking about Nuts and Bolts. Nuts from tress and bolts of seed from the lettuce in my garden.
When lettuce bolts, it sends up a flower stalk, which goes to seed, while the lettuce leaves below become bitter tasting and less tender. Hot weather promotes bolting. Planting lettuce where it is slightly shaded during hot weather will help preserve the lettuce for a longer time. Lettuce is a cool season plant, and hot weather makes it think it's done growing, that it’s time to mature and go to seeds, but this is NOT the case. Lettuce only takes seven weeks to grow, and late August or early September is a good time to plant lettuce seed.
Wings, nuts, and bolts. Where is this all taking us?
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS FOR THE NATURALLY CURIOUS
Do you know when to harvest lettuce seeds and how to store them? Lettuce or spinach seeds can be harvest when the seed pods are dried out. Seeds can be spread out to dry completely on a paper towel or newsprint. Then they should be rolled up in the paper or collected into an envelope. The contents should be marked with the name of the seed and the date, and sealed in a plastic bag or jar. Read more.
ACTIVITY EXERCISE
Search for dried weeds or flowers, gather the seeds, take them home, and scratch them into a small patch of dirt. See if anything interesting grows. Foxglove seeds turn into beautiful flowers.
