Friday Fabulous Flower - Stoopid hydrangeas

Sorry about the brief hiatus in posting; travel and computer problems combined.  New equipment and installations and all that "it's so easy and 11 year old can do it", but you don't have an 11 year old problems.  However TPP seems to have emerged triumphant having done battle with the wireless network, printer, and CD drive.  Now just have to get backed up files back.
But first back to business as usual.  It's mid-October, the nights are getting cool, and it's about the time we can expect our first frost. The last and latest plant to flower, wolfbane (monk's hood), is just beginning to flower. Some bok choi and bibb lettuce remains in the garden. And look at this!  After a sparse early summer flowering, these stoopid hydrangeas sat there and looked green until mid-September and then they decide to burst (slowly) into flower.  It's quite a display, on 3 shrubs nearly 5 feet tall. The picture was taken yesterday, and if frosts hold off, this display could last several more weeks. It might be worth covering the shrubs is only a light frost is predicted. Not sure why the flowering stimulus was off kilter this year, but a stoopid yellow azalea is flowering also, so it will be a no-show next spring. Wonder if it will ever get back on schedule?

When it rains, it sometimes pours

This is both literally and metaphorically true.  A nice band of storms passed through the region dumping a nice quantity of rain.  Following a most excellent seminar by a former student who has become a very 1st class biologist, the department retired to this student's favorite watering hole.  Upon emerging a heavy dark band of clouds covered the entire western horizon, and TPP was a good 20-25 min walk from home. Weather moves fast out here in the Midwest and experience indicated this would be close and it was, but TPP made it with 3-4 min to spare.  Us field workers can walk pretty fast when needs be.  At any rate, our gardens got a tad over 2.25" of rain, and some much needed relief.  Also just in time for planting the new tree mentioned a few blogs back.  It poured.  So it did metaphorically too.  NSF shut down while in the middle of a complicated and somewhat confusing collaborative grant proposal submission, and a lot to things need to be done still, but maybe the shut down will provide a bit of time relief.  Then my copy editor emails that the book ms is ready to be returned, and does TPP want the punctuation edits just accepted so that he could concentrate on the more substantive edits?  Sure, why not?  Now a nearly 700 page ms is no small matter, and who knows how many edits that might contain.  These things all get done when TPP is not teaching or in other ways interacting with students, or eating and sleeping.  Oh, and Lincolnland has mandated that TPP take his ethics training and his crime reporting training in October too.  TPP thinks he'll plant a tree and go buy some apples.

Mini-summer in October

A week of 80 degree highs in October is a rare event, and the Phactor wonders if this is the beginning of a new pattern with such weather becoming common? The weather in mid-October is often warm, and dry, not as parched dry as this year, but dry, and the 2nd or 3d week in October is reliably some of the best weather of the year and when the Missouri Botanical Garden looks its best. When deciding when to host a weekend systematics symposium, the ever pragmatic and empirical former director, Peter Raven, had his staff do a century of weather research and match that with peak display times at the garden, and mid-October was the solution. The estate is looking fairly colorful, but the display will be both less vivid, and short-lived because of the dryness. Lots of leaves are parched at their margins, and even our great big sugar maple will be not so orange as usual. This weekend we attempted to apple up, no not in honor the late Steve Jobs, but to stock up on apples for the winter, especially to seek some Northern Spies, our favorite. Our local source didn't have any, so another great old variety, the Red Pippin, was purchased instead. Then a lovely friend arrived back from a quickie trip to Michigan for football something or other, and delivered us a bag of spies. Oh, that is the measure of a friend. Unfortunately this is a bit early for spies in Michigan and indeed they are a bit underripe and their full complex flavor has not yet developed. In the usual domino effect, the pond renovation has drawn attention to a long neglected hedgerow and Mrs. Phactor declared death sentences upon the old, over-grown shrubs and left yours truly to carry out the sentences. Basal pruning is the usual method of execution, although some ancient forsythias and an old flowering crab were given reprieves on the condition that they grow back attractively. The new Japanese maples were planted and now the area can be sized up for additional landscaping. Then, as if on command, a large box of bulbs arrived via UPS indicating that this was not going to be a watch football weekend, and the joggers pranced by while real exercise was accomplishing something. Stop by if you want and drag some shrub corpses to the street. It's great exercise!

October Baseball - CCL!

Growing up in the 50s and 60s meant that there was really only one professional sport, baseball. Oh, every now and again you would go see a hockey game, but as a kid we were hardly ever separated from our glove and bat. And now my thoughts on baseball are simple: couldn't care less! Major league baseball is dragging itself into another October and does it seem to anyone else that they're all just bloody tired of playing the game? Watching Fall baseball is like watching a tired sit-com whose writers ran out of ideas about 2 seasons ago! In thinking back the Phactor remembers the precise moment when my interest in baseball began to wane: when the Phillies acquired Pete Rose as a free agent from the Cincinnati Reds. All Reds fans hated the Phillies, and we loved Pete Rose. The conflict in loyalty was too much to deal with. The result is quite simple, this former fan no longer knows or cares what happens in baseball. October is now for gardening.