Well, what you have there is a link to a Powerpoint presentation by Doug O'Brien at Cabrillo College. Sadly, all it proves is that Doug O'Brien of Cabrillo College doesn't know what he is talking about if he thinks you get a downward pH adjustment of 0.1 every time you put a ton of lime on an acre of soil. Neither calcium nor sulfate has a direct effect on soil pH and that's all that gypsum is...calcium and sulfate. The only time you will have a downward shift in the pH due to gypsum application is when it is applied to a sodic soil (i.e. SAR greater than 15) which has an elevated pH due to that sodium imbalance. (On a side note, very often the text book rise in pH does not accompany sodic soil conditions) Only when sodicity causes an elevation of the pH does gypsum help decrease that pH. And even in those cases the effect is indirect and has to do with improved soil structure allowing for the leaching of sodium rather than any reactions that calcium goes into. If you need to lower your soil pH, elemental sulfur is your better bet. As far as why it is important...it is primarily a nutrient availability issue. If the pH is too high or too low, fewer nutrients will be available for a number of reasons. Also, if it gets really low you can start having toxicity issues. I guess if you want to get into it more we can start a new thread.

We have a house finch nest in our wreath one brood already hatched and fledged, then they were right back at it again. I see a lot of people who don’t notice a disturbance in the nest when the babies go missing. One thing it might be is crows, we had 4 babies and an unhatched egg and a crow came and took all but 2. It tried to come back, but I think we scared it off. We have video of it going to the nest on our doorbell cam. Crows are smart and like to observe, they will watch mama and papa going to the nest and also people checking on it as well. If you are checking on a nest be very aware of your surroundings

I have to say those chicks need better nesting material under them. Clean straw or shredded newspaper would work if you can't buy nesting material at the pet store. You need to keep an eye on the youngest chick since the two older ones are going to get most of the food from the parents due to their size. Hopefully you have on hand some feeding syringes, or even a small spoon, so that you can handfeed the youngest chick as needed. If his crop always looks empty, give him some handfeeding formula or he may end up starving. If you're not comfortable handfeeding, you can move the oldest chick to a warm area for about an hour so that the youngest chicks get a little more food from the parents. So far their coloring and skin look really good, but I worry with the size difference. I stress using nesting material of some sort since you can see in the pics that the chicks aren't able to keep their feet under their bodies and they also look cold. Nesting material helps hold heat and will prevent leg splay.

Vee, until I went to live in England, I had never heard of, much less eaten, most of the fish you listed, with the exception of cod. Iowa is about as far from any sea as one could get in North America, so when Iowans had fresh fish when I was a kid it was freshwater kinds caught in local lakes and rivers. Otherwise, we had to depend on either canned fish/seafood or frozen kinds, such as cod. My Norwegian great-grandmother carried on the tradition of preparing lutefisk from dried cod (or some other whitefish). It was soaked for days in several changes of water to remove the salt, and then soaked in a lye solution for a couple of days, and finally soaked again in water to remove the lye. Only then was it cooked, either steamed or fried. Most of her descendants were less enamored with lutefisk than she was (it stank to high heaven and had a gelatinous texture that most disliked). Still, we ate it, mostly not to hurt her feelings and secondly just to carry on the tradition. I've had lutefisk prepared by other cooks, including Norwegians on a seismic vessel in the Chukchi Sea, that tasted better than great-grandmother's, so perhaps she wasn't very good at making lutefisk, which is not surprising because she wasn't known for good cooking of any sort. Fridays were 'fish days' in our school cafeteria, too; I guess in respect of Catholic students. You will probably laugh at what we were served: frozen breaded fish sticks, served with ketchup or tartar sauce and, for some reason, macaroni and cheese; tuna-noodle casserole with crushed potato chips (crisps) as topping; tuna salad sandwiches or pimiento cheese as alternative for those who couldn't stomach the tuna; and 'fishburgers', breaded fillets on hamburger buns, dressed with lettuce, mayonnaise and sweet gherkin relish. Garrison Keillor in his Prairie Home Companion radio show poked fun at the ubiquity of tuna-noodle casserole in the American Midwest. A 'fish dinner' that my family particularly liked was our mother's fried salmon patties or croquettes, always served with 'English peas' and potato chunks creamed together in one of those white sauces you referred to. I recall mama's white roux being very tasty but I know what you mean about the insipid ones and all those overcooked vegetables (not mama's). Another thing about the canned salmon that mama used to make her patties: My brothers and I thought it was disgusting because it was canned with the skin and bones included. Mama had us pick out those things. One day my brother decided to taste a bone and talked me into trying one, too. From that day we were dedicated salmon pickers and bone eaters, because the canning process had rendered the bones soft enough to chew with a very pleasant crunchiness. I'm sure other people have known this for a long time, but it was a revelation to us. Since adulthood I have loved fish and seafood of all sorts.