Monday, monday

Monday started early when a cat woke TPP to tell him that a thunderstorm was approaching, a fact he would find out himself in another 10 to 15 minutes. She's got good hearing and is a little afraid of thunder. The morning news confirmed that here in Lincolnland politics particularly the state's gerrymandered election districts were not going change because a political hired gun of a legal persuasion managed to convince a judge that the half a million signatures, more than twice the total needed, were invalid so the voter initiative would not be on the ballot. Democracy in action. Yeah, sure. BTW you only need 5000 signatures to become a candidate for governor. And then SCOTUS amazes us with the contorted legal logic they use to empower corporations at the expense of individuals. This after the most buffered branch of the government decides that women entering clinics don't need any spatial protection from the friendly counselors attempting to harass and intimidate them. SCOTUS needs a good dose of their own medicine.  Actually some of the justices just need to get out every year or so and see how people actually live and behave. On the good news front, more rain fell and Costa Rica won at the world cup. Ole mis amigos. Maybe the cat has the right idea; find a quiet place safe from thunder boomers and go back to sleep. 

Garden gnome drone

TPP thinks he's on to something. First, let's assume you have a ceramic garden gnome because you cannot find anything more interesting to put in your garden like a chair. Second, never under estimate how lazy people can be. So the innovative thought here is to make a ceramic garden gnome drone.  The gnome functions as camouflage for the drone. There you are on the patio with a nice cold cocktail, and you want to know how much it rained last night. Fly your drone gnome to the rain gauge to check without ever getting up from your chair. Does the neighbor's clematis look better than yours this year?  Send the drone to check. Oh, even better, equip your gnome drone with a laser, or maybe just a pellet gun, and go hunting bunnies!  OK, there's real sales potential here. Actually maybe the gnome itself can be the weapon. Imagine sending a ceramic planet-busting gnome crashing down upon a bunny, thus taking care of two issues at once, a bunny and a ceramic gnome in a collision of mutual annihilation, like matter and antimatter, presuming the gnome is made of antimatter!  There probably is some kind of ordinance prohibiting antimatter gnome drones. If only there was an ordinance prohibiting ceramic garden gnomes.

Where did June go?

Next week is the 4th of July?  What?  Where did June go?  Dang, guess we've been busy because June just evaporated. Several signs suggest everything but us are on schedule. Had some black raspberries for breakfast; they aren't cultivated, just "tended" in the wildish black raspberry preserve at the rear of our property. Had 2/3s of a garden tomato, the 1st, and it was wonderful, but some tomato-loving critter ate a big chunk out of it. Typical. Having a wildlife friendly yard isn't all its cracked up to be at times. Zucchini, beans, peppers, eggplant are on the way. Usually by mid-June our gardens are in good shape and then the lilies, all sorts, break into flower for the mid-summer. This year there's still a lot of our yearly cleanup to do, and then all the gardens that we usually don't have to do anything to.  Where did all the weeds come from? The Phactors are still planting new things mostly to repair the winter's damage. So work is longer term. Some American hollies had been demonstrating for several years that hollies don't like growing in the upper Midwest; this winter truly convinced them.  TPP bit the bullet and removed them, well, what was left of them today. You know you've done the right thing when the space left looks better than it did with the hollies in place. Four of them were females, and birds loved the berries, especially cedar waxwings, but the male tree totally died so even if the others were growing well, their best feature, the red berries, were going to be absent.  A relocation of a mock orange and a new oak leafed hydrangea should help fix things up.  A ever larger Magnolia salicifolia is encroaching on this garden from the other side of a fence, so not so much space to fill. All this cutting and pulling is real work and TPP has had enough of it for today. Time to cool down, clean up, and blog.  Off to a cocktail party at 5. Later to Hyde Park.

Let's see what unfolds!

Usually we await the opening of flower buds to see how the flower looks, but sometimes, the flower bud itself is pretty attractive. This flower bud is from a plant growing, on its own, just outside an access door to our greenhouse in a gravel bed used to fill in space between some building

electrical equipment and the foundation of the greenhouse, not the most hospitable of places, so yes, the plant is a tad weedy, but no so much so that it isn't used as an ornamental. This particular aestivation (term for how floral parts are arranged in the bud) is called convolute, sort of a pin wheel type overlapping. The bud opens in the early evening and then the flower wilts the next morning.  The flower is white, with some pinkish highlights, trumpet shaped and at least 20 cm long, quite lovely and quite fragrant. This is probably Datura inoxia (nightshade family) (downy leaves, spiny fruit), which is a way more handsome plant than the better known jimson weed. 

A damned big Jack-in-the-pulpit

If you've never seen, or smelled, an Amorphophallus in flower, it's something to see (see if you can figure out the name).  Like all aroids, this isn't a flower, but an inflorescence and a modified leaf, a bract, in the terminology of the family, a spadix and a spathe.  Hundreds of unisexual flowers are hidden from view at the base of the spadix.  This is the titan, the largest such inflorescence in the world at 2+ meters tall.  TPP once had a smaller species bloom in his house, not exactly a planned event, but the basketball sized corm was being overwintered when it flowered.  This smaller species had an inflorescence just a bit over a meter tall and it was raised on a half-meter stalk.  The fragrance produced lures in pollinators, beetles and flies, and it smells like rotting flesh, carrion.  The pollinators use carrion for a brood substrate, which is not provided, so they are cruelly deceived by the plant. Beetles are particularly fun because as the beetles fly in they more or less fly directly into the pylon that is the spadix, and as the fall, the funnel like spathe dumps them down to the bottom where the female flowers are located, ready to be pollinated provided that the beetles have chanced upon another such aroid a bit earlier.  At any rate these are a lot of fun to see, in someone else's greenhouse. Many of these inflorescences also heat up, a mechanism for dispersing more of their attractant odor. Jolly good fun for the whole family.  Aroids aren't the only flowers that use such pollinators (see here, here, and here), aroids are just the most famous.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

The Phactors pride themselves on having a wild-life friendly yard; it provides lots of cover, water, and food.  This is why so many critters are seen and live on our urban property.  Mrs. Phactor was quite excited to add the great blue heron to her yard life list, but not so happy to see that most of the gold fish living in the lily pond were the price to be paid for the lengthening of her bird list. Yes, with one exception, they were just gold fish, but you do grow attached to them just the same.  Of course TPP grows attached to the plants the bunnies eat too.  So a fish every now and again, no problem, but that was one big, hungry bird.  And thanks to the effective heron discouragement practices of our neighbors (way to go guys!), our big fish were easy pickings. The problem has more or less solved itself as no one, especially a hungry heron, will fish in an empty pond.  But remember this bird, we know where you live!   

What is biodynamic wine?

What is biodynamic wine?  A reasonable question, but TPP had never heard of such a thing.  Biodynamic is one of those words that doesn’t mean too much and so is subject to appropriation for jargon. Apparently biodynamic wines have done well in blind taste tests. Some poking around the subject suggests that “biodynamic” agriculture is multi-faceted organic agriculture with a big old dose of mystical, magical woo thrown in for good measure.

"The Biodynamic farmer is attuned to the daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms of nature, for example, the affects of the new and full moons on planting seeds and plant growth…[because], a fully biodynamic farm also plants by the astronomical calendar."

Yes, seasons are important for farming but not so the ascension of Aquarius "to balance the vital life forces" of your garden.  Multi-faceted organic agriculture is a good thing, and grapes as a perennial crop seem well suited to be grown with soil-improvement techniques, integrated pest management, and the like.  All well and good, but checking the phase of the moon and the astrological sign to determine when to plant, prune, or harvest?  Go for it, but it won’t make one whit of difference.  Although based on ancient beliefs, celestial events affecting vital energies is pure pseudoscience. So why does the wine taste better?  Soils, and weather, and water and all make lots of differences which is why different vintage wines even from the same grapes in the same vineyard differ in taste year to year, so picking a fair basis for comparison is next to impossible.  The organic techniques may make better tasting wine.  Great!   But here’s my bet, a taste comparison between “biodynamic” wine and “organic” wine treated the same way but minus the woo wouldn’t find a consistent difference. But it requires some careful planning and controls or it doesn't prove a thing.

 

Osmundastrum? Oh, no, phylogenetic taxonomy has done it to me again!

TPP could not believe it, but there it was, Osmundastrum cinnamomeum, cinnamon fern with a new name!  Dang, it's happened again!  TPP active botanical life has exceeded another taxonomic name. Imagine what Linnaeus would think. As explained in here previously, cinnamon fern is the oldest confirmed species on Earth.  It's fossils demonstrate that cinnamon fern was alive and well growing in Jurassic Park. Pretty amazing. Some of you many know the other two species, royal fern (O. regalis or O. spectabilis - depending if old world or from the Americas) and interrupted fern, O. claytoniana.  The reason for the change is that cinnamon fern is sister group to all of the other members of this fern family, Osmundaceae.  In other words the family is a single lineage and basal branch is cinnamon fern so it has an ancient common ancestry with all of the other ferns in this family, some of which are placed in other genera (e.g., Todea).  Now you have two choices: one, every species in the family becomes a member of the genus Osmunda so there would be only one genus, or two, cinnamon fern gets renamed and you can see what choice was made.  When the specific epithet cinnamomea got switched from Osmunda to Osmundastrum a change in Latin gender required a new ending - thus cinnamomeum, -a to -um. This will be annoying for some time to come.  This may be the taxonomic outcome of such great longevity; everyone is your ancestor.  Maybe it should have been named Methusosmunda. 

Giving weeds no [lamb's] quarter

This has been a great year for certain weeds, weeds that are generally no so much of a problem. Thousands of sugar maple and red bud seedlings are quite usual because when you have huge sugar maple trees and many redbuds, well, that's just what you get.  In the lawns the seedlings just  get mowed, but so much of our yard are gardens woody weeds just have to be pulled or your garden starts becoming a forest, an unwanted succession.  A 3 foot tall redbud "sapling" was found in the raspberry bed, and the weed wrench (greatest tool not being sold any more as a political protest against government intrusion?) managed to pull it from the rain-softened ground 5 foot long root and all!  Hackberry seedlings are also a problem for the same reasons. This year lamb's quarter is everywhere in remarkable numbers as if someone had sprinkled it's seeds everywhere.  No idea how or why such a population boom occurred; it wasn't because we were neglectful last year. Wild lettuce and black nightshade is also pretty common this year too.  Some disturbances upwind may be the source of so many new weeds in such numbers. Pokeweed is pretty common in some areas, and in this case it's because some neighbors think poke a nice plant whose berries are good food for birds. Poke seedlings are clustered under bird perch locations, so they are quite right, and our yard provides lots of lodging while the neighbor's yard provides lots of food whose seed then gets transferred. A lot of work has gotten us to the point of almost being on top of the situation, although you realize you'll just have to do it again next year.

Remembering my high school English teacher

A visit back to upstate New York triggered some nostalgia, and quite by chance TPP stumbled upon one old memory, our high school English teacher.  Wow, was that a long time ago!  This happened because the Phactors had stopped by a bar and grill, a so-called clam shack, that we used to visit every now and again.  The décor hadn't changed much if at all in a long time, and there was a picture of a woman that was an advertisement for Genessee Beer. You probably wouldn't know this unless you were from Rochester, New York, a city bisected by the Genessee River, which further south where it meets the Niagara escarpment forms the "grand canyon" of the east.  At any rate, my high school English teacher was the dark-haired, long-legged model upon which the bar maid "Jenny", the local nickname for the beer, was based. She was quite proud of that as it turned out, and she had already proved to be an excellent teacher by the time her students figured out she had been a model before becoming a teacher.