Botanical art - Van Gogh's Olive trees

TPP loves botanical art, and this is just freaking amazing! An artist plants a 1.2 acre plot to recreate a Van Gogh painting. This is simply wonderful!  Mrs. Phactor adds a "Wow! Van Gogh would be proud." Too bad it has to be seen from the air.

Fall fell, so autumn

Today really felt like the first real autumn day, cool, crisp, dry (too dry!), and cool enough over night to require a light blanket with the optional two black kitty-girl warmer, but only for Mrs. Phactor. TPP is not complaining. He picked a handful of grape tomatoes and enough small eggplant for a pasta dinner. This also means it will soon be time to harvest prairie biomass for another master's degree project, but that will probably be done next week. Time to go looking for some prairie gentians; although vividly blue they hide deep within the grassy canopy and so are seldom seen by most people. A bottle gentian grew in our gardens for a few years, but it did not sustain itself. It's a strange plant whose flowers never actually open requiring fairly substantial bees to force their way in. Now TPP is on the prowl for a couple of big, winter squashes, they type with hard, dark orange flesh.  They are around but right now shops want "Halloween" prices for them, not squash prices, so perhaps some will wait for a post October sale. Of course there may also be enough squash remaining in the freezer from last year. Inventory control is so hard, and it's a form of spelunking to find out what frozen items lurk in the depths of the freezer. Mrs. Phactor already pointed out that at least 5 packages of Andouille sausage await the urge to make some gumbo.  And cool fall weather is perfect for a pot of gumbo!  See how things just sort of work out especially as the transition continues from margarita season to NY cocktail season. 

Fearful things!

Fear is a powerful motivator and so its use in political rhetoric is so common, but unfortunately people can come to fear the wrong or even imaginary things.  Tom Tomorrow explains what fears keep right-wingers up at night. It explains a lot.

What's the correct vintage for an apocalypse?

White wine with fish is a no brainer, but the assembled dinner party was largely drinking red wine in honor, no doubt, of the evenings' entertainment, the appearance of a "blood moon".  The party took place in a sufficiently rural area with minimal light pollution for optimal naked eye viewing, and perhaps you don't realize how much even a small city produces until you see it glowing from a distance. The cloud cover most conveniently removed itself just as the eclipse started. And yes, it was a quite spectacular moon as the many images posted around the internet showed, further demonstrating that there are certain subjects for which phone cameras are just not adequate, and most amusingly so. The dinner was most excellent, and the post-dinner discussion and drinking topic that was most entertaining was what wine do you drink while waiting for the apocalypse, the harbinger of which was this reddish, eclipsed full moon? The conclusion was that this was a simple matter; drink the best stuff you have because it won't have a chance to get any better what with the apocalypse and all. No use hoarding a special bottle for an occasion that will now never happen, so pass that super Tuscan. While an amusing enough discussion, it remains deeply depressing that NASA, the Church of the Latter Day Saints, and others felt the need to issue statements trying to convince certain people that no apocalypse was actually going to happen. How can people be so gullible, and ignorant, in this day and age?  But if remain unconvinced, then give us your wine, but only the good stuff please. Clinking empty wine bottles together will scare away the blood dragon and restore our moon's color.

Kitchen garden - late summer, early fall

In late September there isn't much to do with your kitchen garden except clean up and recap. On the whole it was an OK year, considering all the garden neglect, but why the zucchini stopped producing while still healthy is a mystery. Tomatoes are just about shot although those magnificently indeterminate grape tomatoes will keep making a few fruit. Looks like a few late eggplant and peppers will be produced as well because they recovered somewhat from the blighty conditions. Late pole beans are just about ready to pick and maybe a few snap peas will make it too. The big surprise were the cucumbers which are still making some fruit. Usually the bacterial wilt nails them in August. No idea how these escaped, maybe it was a bad year for the beetle vectors. The wet spring and early summer may have aided the milky spore fungus that attacks beetle larvae because the Japanese beetles were not all that bad and June bugs were uncommon. 
Some fall lettuce will be ready soon, but the bloody squirrels dug up all the spinach, a downside of container gardening. This time of year the squirrels dig up everything. And now, as announced excitedly by the kitty-girls, they have partners in crime, a pair of chipmunks, which are rather unusual around here especially in town. So far no problems have arisen from their residency, and they are plenty cute.  Guess the gardens are wildlife friendly so long as the kitty-girls remain inside or on a leash, a binary choice.
Unfortunately a lot of lawn remains to be mowed and it has to be done before going to a dinner party later. Yesterday was spent digging holes, planting trees & shrubs, and watering those and other newish plantings before a dinner club wine and goodies party. The weather is quite beautiful in terms of temperature, but it's dry, dry enough to create a lot of early leaf fall, and so mowing will kick up a lot of dust and spores so TPP's sinuses and eyes will suffer. Apparently margaritas are an remedy.

Friday Fabulous Flower - White butterfly ginger

It's been quite awhile since the last FFF. This plant may have been featured before, but so what?  TPP knew the second he entered the greenhouse that this plant was in flower because of its fragrance, a very perfumed, somewhat heavy fragrance, but quite lovely and one of the best smelling flowers in our collection.  The butterfly ginger (Hedychium coronarium) stands about 1.5 m tall so you don't have to stoop over to look at or smell the flowers. Wish we could introduce the scratch your monitor screen and smell technology. Students in economic botany extract the fragrance by harvesting the new flowers each morning, slicing them lengthwise, and placing them cut side down on a layer of highly purified vegetable fat (i.e., Crisco) in a shallow covered dish (i.e. Petri). After several days the fat becomes impregnated with the fragrance because like many fragrance molecules they are lipid soluble so they dissolve into the fat to be released upon mild heating like rubbing between you fingers or on your skin behind your ear. You can do this with any fragrant flower as a nice kid/garden activity. The process is called enfleurage, a really old perfume technique.

Perils of lawn mowing

Our lawns need mowing in spite of the dry conditions interspersed with a couple of deluges. It's been nearly 3 weeks since they were last mowed, but the last thing a lawn needs in lolly-coddling. Crab grass is growing exceptionally well this year, and mowing will help prevent the production of a major crop of seeds. Mowing our lawn requires a lot of dodging and weaving in and around all the trees, bushes, and garden beds, and it's really icky out there right now because the garden spiders, many of whom are nearing the size of Shelob, have webs spanning up to 8 feet across walk ways. The problem is that your attention when mowing is directed downward so you walk into the webs head high. Now TPP doesn't have a major problem with spider, but the webs are icky nonetheless. The dry conditions have caused a lot of leaves to fall prematurely, and it is harvest season here abouts, and the lawn mower just kicks up clouds of dust and spores, something that sets off TPP's mucus production and irritates the sinuses. So adding to the tedium of lawn mowing is the misery of allergies and the ickiness of spider webs such that the enjoyment of the activity is largely lost. At least the lawn season is coming to an end.

Happy posts!

September is a nice time of year when you are not a student or faculty member for whom the month is quite hectic. Enjoying September is a great side benefit of retirement. And it includes TPP's birthday and his annual birthday celebration of cooking for his friends a once a year special dish. This tradition began with the idea of not doing birthdays any more, but just doing "fish soup", but now the number of fish soups has begun to add up too, so to continue the enjoyment of September TPP has been staying away from depressing blog topics which abound!
Middle Eastern Conflicts/Refugee Crisis - Didn't any of these world leaders play Risk while growing up? Depressing.
T-Rump, Fe-fi-forina, Sanctimonous, Chucklebee, and all the rest remaining. The GOP's view for America is deeply, profoundly depressing.  Cymbalta please with a side dish of Citalopram.
Discrimination called religious freedom. While you are free to believe as you wish, you may not impose those beliefs on others especially if you have a government job or run hospitals like St. Whatever's. Sad and depressing.
Garden fatalities - It was a tough year for a lot of plants especially because they got either too much water or not enough. A long-time garden resident, a bristle cone pine looks to be in a fatal decline, as do a couple of small Japanese maples.  The golden chain tree suddenly died early this summer, and after looking great last year a small cluster of Oregon grape bushes (Mahonia) crashed. Some replacements have been purchased and now must be planted. Nothing like yanking out dead trees and digging big holes to brighten your day. Did get a nice bottle of wine from the local nursery and a keep up the good work card.
Apples. Local source of Northern Spys had a crop failure for that variety, but the Jonathons are superb this year. Eh, that's farming.
However on the bright side and to keep from ruining the good September mood, the Chi-town Cubs are still winning more than losing and usually by mid- September they would have been in the sub-basement of the league for at least a month. TPP doesn't really follow them, but so many friends do that the Cub's success is brightening the moods of many friends and colleagues.
Bernie Sanders' candidacy. Don't know it he would be a good president or not, but he makes TPP smile. Just going to Liberty University was a political tour de force. He's like a T-Rump antibody.

Innovative bicycle wheel with built in springs

Oh, this is just too cool!  Loop wheels with built in springs would look just great on TPP's bicycle and at my age, and another year was just chalked up, anything that makes the ride smoother is looked upon with great favor!  Wonder if they have one that glows in the dark?  Can't tell you how many rims TPP has dinged up on nasty bumps over the years.  Here's a link to the article at Treehugger, but the link in their article to the wheel page did not work. Come on guys, we wants the link! 

Brand spanking new botanical research articles

TPP is catching up, or trying to, on lots of things. Here's a link to some research summaries for the latest issue of the American Journal of Botany. The very first article is pretty interesting because fruits almost universally turn from green to a "fruity" color to signify ripeness advertising to seed disperses that a reward is available (often, but not always). But this particular tropical plant has reddish immature fruits and green mature fruits, a situation rather like the leaves of some tropical plants that flush red and then turn green, however a protective function for the red pigmentation could not be supported! So there you go! You can be pretty sure that one of the authors knew about fruit color changes and dispersal, and then noticed that this plant was not playing according to the "rules" so curiosity made them ask why and they devised a research project to test the various ideas involved. Thousands of such questions and studies exist if you just learn how to observe.  
Other studies involved microlichens, fern gametophytes (haploid ferns), genetics of cellulose systhesis, and the origin of C4 photosynthesis. Pretty diverse stuff, but that is the nature of botany and this journal in particular.