Snoopin’ with the Snoop

I weeded a lot of grass. And have blisters on my right ring and pinky fingers. Photos:

This may be called a sunflower, but this one doesn't follow the sun.

One of the varieties of sunflowers that I planted this spring (early summer – I put in my garden really late), was Autumn Beauty from Baker Creek. And I thought this was one of them until I went to attach the link and read that the Autumn Beauties are supposed to be 7 feet tall. This one is about three, if that. It may be one of the transplants out of the peat bag: a poor mouse who ate its way into the peat bag with a tummy full of sunflower seeds and then couldn’t get out, died, and then after partial decomposition, the sunflowers sprouted and grew. Imagine my surprise when I opened a brand new peat bag (which had been sitting in the garage for years) and found two plants growing in it. Or maybe, this sunflower is from some of my old seed packets that I planted to see if they would germinate 3 years after I bought them. Ahhh, wait. I think it’s the Torch variety. That would make sense, now that I’ve Googled it. The Torch Mexican Sunflower is Tithonia rotundifolia, which would explain why it doesn’t follow the sun. But no, wrong again. See photo on Baker Creek website. Enough waffling. It’s a flower in my garden. Another sunflower I have, which is currently at least six feet tall has not yet bloomed. The flower dimensions are there, but are green and haven’t opened. These not-bloomed heads have been following the sun for about the last two weeks. I stumped about Shorty.

As for the other side of gardening, the bugs:

Don't know what this is, but it sure is brilliant.

That red and orange striped beetle-like bug stuck around long enough for me to run inside and grab my camera. I don’t know what s/he is, so I don’t know if it’s a beneficial or a pest. Speaking of pests:

A margined blister beetle – bane of my amaranth – Epicauta pestifera

Munch. Munch. Munch munch munch munch. Chomp. Swallow. Munch. Not to mention they poop all over the leaves they eat. Yeah, I’m not touching my Tiger-Eye Amaranth. The Hopi Red Dye Amaranth that was a volunteer plant this year (I originally planted them in 2007 but did not harvest them, because I was in NC) is untouched — for now. I like to eat the Hopi Red Dye. Before the Blister Beetles came around I wasn’t too much of a fan of the Tiger-Eye, so I won’t be planting it again. I’m wavering between exterminating them, picking them off and throwing them in the beanfield where the chemicals that are already there will kill them, or trying that lime-flour attack I read about this morning (a mixture of lime and flour doused on them and the plants at the hottest part of the day). They weren’t dining when I was in my garden this morning; I first saw them around 1 or 2 p.m. today.

It appears I also have a Golden Digger Wasp building a nest between my tomatoes and carrots/beets/fennel. (Video forthcoming when I can get it to export out of Kino, which depends on my downloading mjpegtools, apparently. We’ll see.)

Beware, this is a huge video file:
Read the rest of this entry »

I really haven’t much to say, except my “rain gear” isn’t strong enough for the Remnants of Ike. Got up before sunrise this morning — just woke up, no alarms or anything — and took a walk outside. Realized that when I cleaned the gutters in the early summer I didn’t clean out the garage gutters, and the rain was pouring over the sides. So I dragged out the ladder, climbed up, and by pulling out handfuls of maple seeds, released a deluge in both downspouts.

I printed the screen of my web browser because I think it’s really cool the way that Ike is still defined over Illinois: Read the rest of this entry »

Long ago (around 1984) and quite near to where I’m sitting…

a big project was under construction. From cedar wood to cedar planks, scalloped for aesthetics; nail by nail, my grandfather, dad and grandmother put together the wood that we christened “the playhouse.” A pint-sized rectangular cube on stilts for two girls ages seven and four, the playhouse provided adult-sized endless entertainment. With my sister’s love of playing “back then” (may I mention she is now a professional pilgrim out at Plimoth Plantation’s Living History Museum on Cape Cod), our backyard transformed from the modern grass and cornfields to the wilds of the plains in the 1800s, with the cherry tree on the edge of a ravine and the threat of the romanticized notion of Indians. Aprons ’round our waists and a metal bucket and dipper for hydration during the humid summer afternoons provided visual stimulation for our mental playground while our gravel driveway became a shallow river we had to run up and down to lose their trail.

The porch provided a platform for biological expeditions in the form of butterfly hunting with friends, or as a diving board of sorts for water games with cousins.

One summer, a wind storm broke a branch off of one the poplars in the front yard. Stuck into the flower garden, our imaginary landscape had a grand old tree to shade our log cabin from the east. Surprisingly, it rooted…

When we hit junior high and high school, playhouse evenings, weekends, summers and imaginations were pushed to the wayside for activities centering around friends and school activities. Slowly we moved out. Without my sister’s love of back-then, and without her presence, my use of the playhouse waned. Occasionally, we’ have a water fight with buckets and hoses, and the structure would serve as shield and shelter. Or perhaps we’d once again pull out our stilts and use the porch as a mounting platform as we had so many times in the years of full use.

When the black paint had faded to almost the wood, my dad, or maybe George, put on a fresh coat of white.

Fast forward to the summer of 2006, when I set up a reading nook on the table George had installed when he used the playhouse as a workshop for his forge. I took a trip to St. Louis, and forgot about the blankets, and was sick the week I got back. So, two or three weeks from when I had first moved in to when I went out to collect the blankets, a mouse had decided to make the house her home. So I left the blankets alone until the baby mice were exploring the playhouse and I decided the mother needed to find a new residence. I made the playhouse a scary place to grow up, for a mouse, and was able to watch her pick up her youngins by the scruff of their necks and haul them off to a new place.

Now, once again, the playhouse will be filled with minds and imaginations. Or something of the sort. My dad agreed to let my neighbors take the playhouse. Two days ago when I was working in the wildflower garden, the girls next door were out running around their yard. As they crept closer to the property line and hid behind some bushes, I heard the words “house” and “playhouse” squeak out quite often. I dutifully ignored them so they wouldn’t run away and hide.

Yesterday, the playhouse moved. Sawed off from the cement foundation and loaded onto some big machine with wheels, it has traveled to a new home. I was reminded of “The Wizard of Oz,” when the house floats up in the twister. For a while, no more foreheads will knock themselves on the top of the door frame with exclamations of “ouch” and other assorted word choices. Instead, I’m sure I’ll hear peals of laughter from next door. Follow more link for the video: Read the rest of this entry »

This tour was awesome, as per usual. The forecasters warned of the strong and moist Pacific storm system, so I packed for freezing, snowy weather. We got wind. I’m not talking a 5-10 mph breeze, but 25-30 sustained, with higher gusts.

10. If our supe says one mile, it’ll take an hour walking at about 3 miles an hour. If he says 2 miles, it will be a wild goose chase that takes 4 hours.

9. Wild horses in the desert are no longer a myth made up by the BLM to protect land. We actually saw some, and Burke and Megan walked with them, kinda. I’ll add pictures when I upload them.

8. If I don’t bring my prosumer zoom camera, I’ll want it. If I do bring it, I won’t use it. Solution: keep it in the truck (per Bryan).

7. Even if you’re getting back to the field station from a long, hard 8-day tour, Chad will put you to work, with a mischievous smile, at any chance, and you can’t complain because he spread 26 tons of gravel on our parking lot by himself…

6. A “few rolls of barbed wire and a couple of T-posts” one mile out in the wilderness equals 11 rolls of barbed wire and about the same number of grouped-by-four T-posts. For a 9-person conservation crew, that adds up to bruises all along the hip and shoulder area, a few moments (or a half hour) of frustration, and extrememly sore shoulders. And for me, an extremely sore right bicep. One T-post weighs approximately 8-10 pounds. Lugging 40 pounds a mile through the wilderness is easy when the weight is on your lower back hips, like as with a pack. Having to carry 40+ pounds a mile through the wilderness in your arms (twice)…builds muscle. Yay!

5. If it’s cold and windy when it’s time to make dinner, dinner will be a scavenge-for-yourself affair.

4. If you (like me) are of a slight build and are on a 9-person conservation work crew of 6 guys, then at some point or another, you will probably be bench pressed. Dave’s video forthcoming when I get a copy. I never got a copy from Dave; here’s Jon’s:
I got a copy of the video from Jon.

3. If you (like me) have been bench pressed by your co-workers, they will begin volunteering you and your body type for other adventures, such as you climbing into 8 rolls of barbed wire in order to roll them a mile out of the BLM wilderness and back to the truck. Axels are not allowed in the wilderness, but the reasoning was that since the rolls would not be rotating around me, and I would be moving at the same speed and direction as them, I would not be an axel and the process would not be illegal.

2. My Eureka AlpineLite 2XT 4-season tent stood up to the wind and cold. I did have it guy-lined to the wilderness border fence, but it didn’t move and it didn’t look like the fence stopped it from moving (since it had survived strong winds before I guy-lined it). Other tents were upside-down, moved 6-feet or so, or damaged by a pole through a fly.

1. Don’t EVER squat downwind of a folding table on a windy day. See, I was securing the empty water coolers and the wind kicked up some dust in my face. I turned away from the wind and the next thing, I heard a big thud on my head, and I was lying in the dirt no longer holding the water coolers I had tied to the table that hit me in the head and blew almost into the wash when the wind picked it up. Where was Dave and his movie camera?