Over dose of cooking, but guests pleased, sated

Yesterday was the day the Phactors cooked a margarita and tapas dinner having auctioned off this event to raise money for church remodeling.  In general TPP regards cooking as fun, but when you are cooking for 12 and preparing several newish recipes, it's also a lot of work.  The menu consisted of the following dishes: 1st - banderillas with olives, cheese, chorizo, pickles, salami, marinated mushrooms, etc. in various combinations of 3, sauted portabello mushroom and goat cheese quesadillas, and grilled, marinated shrimp.  2nd - roasted sweet pepper salad, asparagus wrapped in Spanish ham, and sherried eggplant.  3d - "Russian" potato salad, salmon in mojo sauce, and lastly, almond tacos (think thin cookies shaped like taco shells) filled with seasonal berries and topped with whipped cream.  Of course you want it all to look nice and be prettily presented, and not use a lot of last minute preparation; after all you have guests.  The first course was served with margaritas; the rest with a white sangria.  The weather all day was on-and-off rain, and it was off for the evening, so the party took place in our garden pavilion, but it was a bit cool, not really the best setting for summery food and cold drinks.  Nonetheless, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and the dinner fare, or were at least polite enough to say so.  The four most liked dishes were the roasted pepper salad, the asparagus wrapped in ham, the grilled shrimp, and the berry taco.  This dinner took considerable planning and preparation, and it kept us busy for a full day having started the evening before.  TPP has great admiration for people who do this, and do it well, on a restaurant sized scale. So enough cooking for a day or so, and enough left-overs to allow that. 

Rodents break probation - herbivore enforcement returns

For purposes of last week's garden tours, our most obtrusive plant cages were removed and hidden away.  The less obtrusive cages remained in place.  All the activity, the patio construction and the hundreds of visitors annoyed the resident woodchuck enough that they moved to green pastures.  The bun-buns and tree rats just stayed out of sight.  But presently the Phactors are feeling rather gullible because just because the tree rats and bun-buns didn't chew anything up for a few days, you right away fall into a complacency that is remarkably stupid.  Of course at times it matters not.  The dill remained fenced to protect all the seedlings, but they are gone, victims of a very small hungry bun-bun, one small enough to fit through the fence openings.  Next year we are upgrading our defensive perimeter with a critter border fence (did you get that NSA?) that has much smaller openings.  Among the bed of bellflowers the woodchuck neatly cropped, a new species (name somewhere in the records) re-appeared much to our surprise having narrowly survived a not only herbivory but a reduction in the bed size.  So now the exclusion cages are being repositioned.  It still raises a question about why a tropical bonsai bougainvillea was so attractive?  Perhaps a tree-rat keeps a life list of bark chewed off limbs.  Still our list of bun-bun favorites is showing its accuracy.  So the probationary period is over.  The rodents broke probation as we cynically knew they would, so it's back to caged plants as usual.  Things were going so well there for a few days.  Sigh.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Compass Plant

As mentioned yesterday, the prairie is in bloom, and given the reasonably abundant rain, the vegetation is lush and tall.  The compass plant (Silphium laciniatum) is one of the prairie emergents whose inflorescence emerges above the other prairie vegetation at least at this time of year.  The inflorescences are around 6-6.5 feet tall and it is just beginning to flower, and as this image shows it is quite stunning.  Each "flower" is actually an inflorescence typical of the sunflower/aster family.  The image of a flower, and without question the image floral visitors react to is the whole "bloom", is presented by the ray flowers around the periphery each with a strap-like corolla lobe and the central disk flowers each with a smaller 5-lobed corolla.  Each "bloom" is around 3 inches across.  This is a common enough strategy; when you have small flowers, cluster them together for a bigger display. 

Hot, humid summer field work

Humidty on our prairie study site was about 300% (based on how it felt) this morning especially down in the vegetation where we had little seedling plots to photograph.  The emergent vegetation, e.g., compass plant, is already about 6 feet tall and getting ready to flower.  The grasses will wait until later to shoot upward for flowering.  Quite different from the stunted growth of last year's heat and drought.  This area has had rain for the past few days so the plants can transpire a lot, and that makes the humity down in the vegetation as high as it can get.  And as the morning wore on, the heat rose, and you just became soaked in sweat.  Now the only complaint here is that when you're trying to see things, bending over, you keep getting sweat on the lens of your glasses, and that's really annoying.  The other problem is the prairie vegetation has lots of rough edges, and wearing short sleeves for comfort, your arms get quite scratched from pawing through the leaves searching for your well marked plots that nonetheless are hard to find.  It's not just sedges that have edges.  In compensation it's a nice meadow of flowers this time of year, fleabane asters, yarrow, wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium, shown with beetle floral

visitor), cone flowers purple and pale, pinks, black-eyed susans, sunflowers, lead plant.  Tomorrow morning will be a repeat.

The unified theory of gumbo

The Botanical Society of America is meeting in New Orleans Louisiana about a month from now.  The fact that it will be hot and humid hardly matters because botanists are basically cheap-skates and they like the off-season rates.  Besides, convention centers are always AC-ed to near meat-locker temperatures anyways, and you rarely get to see daylight at meetings so condensed are the programs.  Since lots of us are field workers anyways, you do get used to dealing with difficult conditions, but some of the lab people can be kind of wimpy.  TPP hasn't been in NO in a long time, actually since the last time the botanical meetings were there, decades ago, and it's always nice when the area offers food and music as a sort of bonus.  Now here's a freebie for you (don't think this is behind a fire-wall), The unified theory of gumbo (a pdf) (complete with Mrs. Elie's gumbo recipe!).  Don't miss out on this one.  None of this "new-voh" cajun food, oh, no.  This one is authentic!  TPP does anticipate eating well; to those ends reservations have been make at NOLA. The results will be blog fodder for certain.   

KILLER ALGA EATS PEOPLE!

In the category of outrageous "news" stories about plants, can TPP play?  Just a couple of days after seeing the blooming of a spiny pineapple touted as a "sheep-eating" plant, another image comes to the fore that shows something even more stunning.  After all, there were no pictures of dead sheep hung up on these spiny pineapples, but this image is quite clear.  This alga can and will consume humans!  This poor kid is just about toast as he is dragged under by a bloom of green algae (probably Cladophora).  What happens next is just too gruesome to relate.  Algal blooms happen almost every summer and you would think people would learn to be more careful.  This can happen at your swiming hole too, so let's watch that nitrogen pollution people.  Don't feed those killer algae, or they will feed on you! 

RE coastal property as an investment

If you actually thought about taking TPP's suggestion about buying coastal property before it becomes coastal property as an investment, you might need to shorten your timetable a bit according to some estimates that say sea levels are rising 60% faster than expected.  Some cities will need to be renamed soon; maybe Miami, Florida will become Atlantis. 

Plan ahead - invest in coastal property

Here's an idea for you long-term investors.  Get a contour map and figure out where coastlines are going to be once the ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic have melted.  Buy cheapo property now, far inland, and then sell it off for beach front condos and resorts once the water gets there.  What could be simpler?  Heck, even global warming denial dummies like the Trumped-up may decide to invest like this.  He does believe in making money. The map shown portrays the estimated coast line of North America should the ice sheets totally melt.  A long time ago in the Carboniferous a great bay occupied a similar location in what is the Mississippi River drainage.  Coal swamp forests of clubmosses, horsetails, and ferns grew around its margins.  This is really exciting! Lincolnland will have some welcome access to fresh seafood!  If you own land in Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Florida, sell now. 

Helping the NSA keep us safe

So the NSA is spying on us to keep us safe and sound from terrorism while trampling on our constitutional rights, even though that is what the terrorists so despise, our freedoms.  Did it ever occur to anyone who knew the secret, which was so secret they could not even tell you it was secret, that they’re aiding and abetting a terrorists’ goal?  Now the primary problem with spooks is that they get so wound up in their spookiness that they quickly lose touch with reality.  To even be in this business requires a level of paranoia well beyond everyone but the loony fringe, and now they’re so far gone, their paranoia and conspiratorial thinking fueled by the NSA’s spookiness, that they’ll never believe Elvis is actually dead and not just feeling a little under the weather.  The general lack of outrage among the USA public sort of shows you how you begin the slide into a totalitarian government by cowing the general public (the “proles”) with surveillance. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about” is such a stupid platitude, oh, but it came from Senator Lindsey Graham, because it implies that if TPP opposes this intrusion he has something to hide, and most assuredly he has much less to hide than most senators.   And the “our spying is keeping you safe, and it’s already stopped 50, 500, 5000, or so terrible things from happening, and nothing, nothing makes TPP madder than how scaredy-cat people have to be to fall for this, and you almost, almost think they deserve it.  So it serves the spooks to keep the people’s alarm rising, to keep people worried, to keep them in the dark, so the secrecy is quite necessary.   Now here is the problem;  the Spooks never know when to stop, so it won’t be long before someone decides “we got the data, so we may as well use it”, until everyone gets GPS ear tags like the cattle they’ve become.  Will this blog now land me in some NSA file labeled “questionable”?  Probably.  TPP’s blood is already in the CDC (brought home a tropical disease) and both Naval Intelligence and the FBI have a file on me somewhere labeled “long-haired lefty” (it was long back then).  Maybe TPP should just make it easy for the NSA and get a cell phone and a gps unit.   The Pres says “trust us”, but how can you when they have been keeping secrets from us while they whittle away at constitutional rights using secret courts.  So don’t be surprised when some crooks or drug dealers get arrested using this NSA data and they say, “see what we can do!”  But now the secret is out, but like an onion there are layers upon layers of deception, and you wonder what anyone really knows.   Clearly all of this costs more than a little bit of money, and would it not be nice if we knew what we were getting in return in addition to reassurances  from some of the less bright senators.  What if we all just started inserting red button words in every email and every cell phone call?  Would it be like everyone flushing their toilet at the same time?   Would this over whelm their inbox? 

Sheep-eating plant?

Sure. TPP calls BS on a sheep-eating plant.  Puya chiliensis, a member of the pineapple family, is a tough, spiny native of the Andes.  Sheep ain't, so right there the story falters.  How does a plant become adapted to snaring fluffy sheeps with its "razor-sharp" spines so it can receive nutrition from their rotting remains interact so intimately with a recently, in evolutionary terms, introduced species?  Oh, maybe it's really an alpaca predator!  Note also that the spiny part consists of the bracts of the inflorescence, so here's a plant that only flowers every now and then, that uses its reproductive parts to snare sheep (or alpaca?).  Actually when bromeliads flower the apical meristem of that shoot gets used to produce the inflorescence, and after flowering and fruiting, that stem dies, but branches below continue its growth.  It would work better if the plant figured out how to fertilize itself prior to reaching reproductive size/age.  If you haven't looked up some images, this plant is like a yucca with a spiny pineapple atop a flowering stalk.  So this story doesn't work on several levels showing that some people will believe anything.  Maybe once someone found a dead sheep with its fleece entangled in the emerging inflorescence, but sorry, TPP doesn't believe this story for even a second.  And there it is reported (secondarily) with nary a smidgen of disbelief (but it is the HuffPo, so...).  Good grief, what kind of science reporting is that?  It is a cool plant, and if mine flowered after 15 years, TPP wouldn't be sheepish about seeking some publicity, but made up stories wouldn't be part of it.