End of May

May thirty-oneth - the end of May, the beginning of summer, and very appropriately today was a hot, dry summer day. All of the gardens, all of the new plants, need water.  The last two "rain events" have defied the weather reports, beat the odds (rain 80-90% likely) and not a drop fell even though heavy clouds surrounded the area and thunder was quite close. TPP hates to start watering so early in the season, but what you gonna do?  When you plant, you water, or you buy again, and plant again. Yesterday evening  Mrs. Phactor sprinted out of the back door and out to her perennial garden to chase a woodchuck out and save her bell flowers. Apparently Campanula is like candy, and although the bunnies have been awful, her bellflowers were not converted into bun-bun salad and a decent flowering was anticipated. A newly arrived resident, a woodchuck, would change all of that.  It took three tries, and most of an apple as bait, but the woodchuck relocation was successful within 12 hrs of its initiation; the bellflower will flower. Mrs. Phactor spent the day relocating hosta and removing weeds. Right now a Calycanthus-Sinocalycanthus hybrid, an American snowbell, wild columbine, pentstemons, yellow indigos, and Mrs. Phactor's iris areekeeping the gardens colorful. And indeed, the view was enjoyed most fully with a couple of margaritas. Isn't that what gardens are for?

Hot dog nostalgia

Upstate New York is where TPP grew up, basically in sight of Lake Ontario, and very few people outside of the "natives" know that Rochester is renown for its hot dogs and its lake side stands.  On a recent visit to the Phactors' alma mater, Oswego State, our first stop was the lakeside stand just west of the campus, Big Rudy's. One of the star attractions at these stands is a fat, white hot [dog], a pork, veal, beef variety in natural casing made by Zweigle's, a sort of local take on a Vienna sausage-bratwurst hybrid (from an amateur's perspective). Now that's fine by itself, but, and this is paramount, it must be grilled (never boiled) and topped by a finely ground beef hot sauce, mustard, and onions. The hot dog should, if properly cooked, pop open and burst from its casing a bit.  Grilled peppers are a nice option, but not required. The best known hot dog stand in the Rochester area is Schaller's (a drive-in - think Happy Days) and how nice to see they are getting their due. Somebody did some diligent research! 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Oyama magnolia

Wow!  Just wow! A new magnolia in flower is just so exciting!

  Our Magnolia sieboldii, the Oyama magnolia, is several years old, a somewhat skinny shrub about six and a half to seven feet tall. It's winter hardiness has always been a worry, so TPP did not know what to expect after the severe cold this past winter. Surprisingly, there was no winter damage and it has produced a handful of flower buds; it's first flowering. As the buds enlarge, they shed the bud's outer layer leaving a flower bud that looks a bit like a pointed boiled egg.  When open the flowers are 3-4 inches in diameter and composed of 9 white tepals in three whorls of three. The many stamens are pink-red in color, and the outer most are larger and more petal-like.  The flowers are borne on the ends of branches and pendant, so you must walk under the plant and sort of look up to see how pretty the flowers are. Enjoy!

Cats need more food in the winter?

Here's a report on research that found that cats eat more in the winter, so it recommends we feed them more.  Who wrote this?  A cat? TPP's basic skepticism suspects that our kitty-girls, the ones that think they own our house, have been lying to cat researchers. This is not ridiculous since they lie to us all the time. Have you been fed? The answer is never yes.  Do you want some more kibble? The answer is always yes.  Of course for indoor cats, the temperature is never below the 60s (F) in the winter, and often quite a bit warmer in the summer with people who avoid AC whenever possible. Warmer temps prompt more cat inactivity, but let's face it the basic housecat sleeps away most of the day anyways. So these researchers better watch the sources of their data very closely to avoid false conclusions.  Oh, duh! There must be some sort of cat think-tank out there, like the Heartland institute, that has taken cat money to conduct this study with predetermined outcomes! Follow the money; it will lead to cats!  

Watch out! This material may cause you to think!

For some time now, since the news of this first appeared, TPP has been going to write about students requesting "trigger warnings" on books, articles, and indeed, course syllabi. Fortunately this hasn't happened at our university as yet.  There are so many things wrong with this TPP hardly knows where to begin. In biology it's often religiously conservative students who wish to avoid evolution.  Hey, memorize the bones of a vertebrate skeleton.  OK!  Homology, not OK!  But how the bloody hell is TPP supposed to know what topics, -isms, or subjects will offend the delicate sensibilities of students?  And where is it written anyways that when you decide to study at the university level you need to be warned about something that might make you uncomfortable, uneasy, uncertain?  Now before you try to climb TPP's tree about this, be aware that while teaching economic botany, he was accused of being a sexist, a racist, and a religious proselytizer, all in the same semester.  Our undergraduate dean says its still some sort of record obviously set by an equal opportunity offensive instructor, and his response, "Keep up the good work."  Would it have mattered if the syllabus contained trigger warnings?  "Be aware that gatherer-hunter societies have a sexual division of labor presented as an observation about who knew plant resources and not some sort of advocacy for women's roles in a perfect society."  "Geographic origins of plants and plant products are based upon actual facts and not presented to denigrate any particular cultures or peoples, so no, African-Americans (G. W. Carver, in particular) did not invent peanut butter (Marcellus Gilmore Edson, a Canadian, patented the product in 1884 before Carver was even in college.)."  "Biblical botanical scholarship about every mention, in Hebrew, of a plant tells you about what plants were used and important in the Middle East, and this should not be construed as criticism or confirmation of the Bible's veracity (it actually goes both ways - it wasn't an apple; John the Baptist did eat locusts in the wilderness, but he wasn't eating grasshopper like insects, but carob pods.)." At any rate, such complaints come from unimaginative, uninformed, and perhaps, uneducable students, and probably the best response is to suggest that perhaps university study is beyond their intellectual or emotional maturity at the present time.  Kathleen Parker is not one of my favorite opinionators, but in this case she clearly nails it, particularly for the blame any administrator deserves for falling for this.  Requiring trigger warnings ..."is the busy work of smallish minds --yet another numbing example of political correctness run amok and the infantilizing of education in the service of overreaching sensitivity."  Gee, wish TPP could write like that.  Wow, just noticed that our local rag's title for this column was "Warning: Literature happening."  The real title was: "Fair warning, provoking a thought is literature’s job." Now possibly, they just wanted a much shorter, albeit less punchy title, or they thought the full title might hurt someone's feelings! Ha! 

Garden rebuilding - one plant at a time

Nothing like a long weekend to give you enough time to get the garden in shape for the rest of the summer, mostly.  A number of things need almost complete rebuilding. Some new plants, of three different varieties, will start rebuilding a red raspberry bed devastated by bunnies and a hard winter. The asparagus bed will take longer to rebuild because it's hard to get bigger, older plants, so it takes a couple of years to get them large enough to bear a decent crop. Feed them, feed them, and feed them. The privet hedge was cut back and is starting to regrow already. Several almost dead trees are showing signs of life making for some tough decisions; mostly just pragmatic pruning. A Henry Lauder walking stick (a contorted European filbert) is barely showing life, a few live shoots, here and there, on a shrub about 6-7 feet in diameter. Waiting is best as the best decision will probably become obvious whether it just needs some pruning or whether it's too far gone. One new purchase, a Japanese snowbell is just barely showing signs of breaking out of dormancy and growing, and this makes for a bad situation vis-à-vis the nursery's guarantee which they will not wish to honor since the tree is alive, but how much of a tree is a tree?  It remains to be seen. Personally TPP feels he bought a whole one. Fortunately most of the other new plants are doing much better although they all require watering as lack of rain is making things a bit on the dry side. 

Deforestation and clear cutting

TPP is basically opposed to deforestation and clear cutting.  It's basically a rape nature with a bulldozer mentality. However at times drastic action is needed, and in this case it was lawn that needed mowing, and it involved clear cutting and deforestation. The massive sugar maple had a good crop last year and this year the number of maple seedlings sprouting virtually everywhere is astounding. So simply mowing the lawn amounted to clear cutting of a very young forest. Wish the forest trying to take over our gardens could be removed as easily. To continue the theme, TPP had to patrol the western front of our estate to destroy an illegal immigrant: garlic mustard, which is kindly grown by a neighbor especially for export purposes. Fortunately garlic mustard does pull fairly easily. A visit to these distant regions did reveal that a fringe tree somewhat surrounded by ever embiggering conifers was in glorious full bloom, a delight to both eye and nose.

Urban gardening ignorance & defeatism

Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn is a NYC person, and this usually means two things: they are opinionated and they don't know crap about gardening.  Now Liz is entitled to her opinions, but to label urban gardening a bunch of lies, well, that's not something TPP will up put with. Liz has a bad combination: ignorance and defeatism. First is to realize what you can and cannot grow for yourself. You are not going to supply yourself with tomatoes or enough salad greens to matter, not unless you've got an abandoned lot to convert into a garden of some size.  One of my former students does this in Seattle, and some of these community gardens are quite wonderful and very productive. Liz lives in Manhattan, so perhaps she is without such educational resources, and basically she's left with pot gardening on a patio or terrace, or around a street tree.  One of the best things to do with such a limited space is to grow fresh herbs, a big pot of mint for your mojitos and juleps, and a mixture of basic cooking herbs: rosemary, parsley (another decent size pot), basil and Thai basil and purple basil, and some chives. Now you could grow a cherry tomato, but Liz has never seen a full-grown one before and probably thinks they're little plants with little fruit. TPP has had to prune cherry tomato vines in a 7 foot cage with hedge trimmers, but it produced 2 quarts of tomatoes a day at its summer peak.  You need a damned big pot to grow a vine like that, and if you have your soil (Liz, please, dirt is something under your finger nails and in certain types of books and movies.) delivered by FedEx, well, there is a basic problem isn't there?  As someone in the comments pointed out, re-purposed soda bottles (or wine bottles - Liz is an urban sophisticate after all.) can provide almost continuous watering for pots. Some nice pots of flowers or just put your hanging basket plants outside for the summer can make your terrace a much nicer place. So basically Ms. Dunn simply has no idea what she's talking about based on limited experience with something she doesn't understand. Is this how she pays her bills? Amazing. 

Friday Fabulous Flower -' Lemon Sunset' Evening Primrose

Yesterday was pretty busy, so missed this post

by a day.  A new evening primrose has been added to our gardens making a total of three species, Oenothera macrocarpa (previously missouriensis), O. fremontii, and now O. longiflora.  All of them have fairly large flowers in comparison to the size of the plant. The flowers don't last long and their flowering pattern is often different - the new species opens in the evening and then wilting late the next morning.  All three species seem to like the hot, well-drained margin or tiers of a south facing garden. The two previous species sort of sprawl, but the new species has a dandelion like rosette with a couple of tall inflorescences rising a foot or so above. The corolla is about 3 inches in diameter and you just can't miss it.  The others are quite hardy, but time will tell about this new species. 

Scientific field work - equipment attrition

Field work is hard on both the researchers and the equipment. TPP's back is not getting any younger. One of the adventures each spring is to discover all of the "equipment" you and your students lost the previous year. Now please understand that the reason this becomes apparent each spring when your field site is a prairie is that hidden things appear after the prairie has been burned.  Now herein lies the real problem: lost items are now easy to find, but following a prairie burn, they may not be in primo condition any more. Last year was a tough year. Several wooden meter sticks were lost, a couple of pairs of sunglasses, countless pencils, ballpoint pens, although one still worked quite well (Yeah Bic), and permanent markers just went missing, as well as a couple of compasses that lost their way. Well, here's the compasses, a bit on the toasty

side, but still quite functional as paper weights or as specimens for demonstrating to students the consequences of carelessness while doing field work. Ah, well, plastic components have their limitations.