Cubits and Shrooms and Rain, Oh My!

All the rain we've had recently in Central Kansas has the rich prairie soil sprouting mushrooms everywhere, and it has ProfessorRoush "diving down a rabbit hole" regarding the exact dimensions of a "cubit".  I've lost track of the total, but over 2 weeks, I emptied my gauges of over 12" of rain.  The official total for the year is around 38" depending on where "spotty rains" fell, where we normally have only 27" by October.  Whatever the exact total, I've never seen the roadside ditch this full! 

You all remember "cubits", right?  As in Genesis 6:15, "The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits"?  Well, it turns out that each Middle-Eastern culture, whether Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, or Hebrew, had a different "cubit" defined.  There were Common Cubits, Standard Cubits, Royal Cubits, Long Cubits, Assyrian Cubits, Biblical Cubits, Black Cubits, Cloth Cubits, Hashemite Cubits, Legal Cubits and the Cubit of the King, to name only a few.  All are supposedly (but not supposeably) based on the length of the forearm to the tip of the middle finger.  Don't even get me started on the divisions of the cubit into palms and fingers!  The Wikipedia page about cubits is beyond bewildering.

Anyway, what I've learned is that someone other than me should be the one to attempt an Ark.  Regardless of the temporary panic that brought on the thoughts about The Ark, the rains have since stopped, and fall has arrived with cool nights and sunny days.  And a bumper crop of mushrooms is growing.

Normally, our mushrooms are the grey-white-turning-to-brown monstrous foot-wide toadstools pictured above left, which begin growing as the nice neat puffballs seen here to the right.  But these rains have also stimulated these smaller, frilly brown fungi (pictured below), that can be found everywhere the grass gets mowed.  I don't know if they also grow between clumps of the taller unmowed prairie grasses because I'm not curious enough to wade into the wet, tall grasses to find out.

Needless to say, I don't trust my fungal identification skills enough to harvest or consume any of these wonderful gifts from the prairie.  And in the meantime, please take the painfully-won wise advice of ProfessorRoush and don't ever Google or otherwise exhibit the slightest curiosity about cubits!

I Was In The Wrong Place

I suddenly realized yesterday that I'd been looking for Monarch butterflies to show up for years in the wrong place. And it has unfortunately started an "earworm".   

♫ I been in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time. 

I'd have said the right thing, but I must have used the wrong line. ♫

Thank you, Dr. John (Malcolm John Rebennack, 1940-2019)!   

Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) 

You see, friends, Manhattan Kansas is near one of the major migration routes for Monarch butterflies, and I know that, but I could never figure out why I didn't come across more than an occasional one.  Every year, when I bushhog the pasture in late June, I take special care to go around and preserve a large area of native milkweed that first cropped up on disturbed prairie soil from when we built the "barn".  I always hoped that it would draw the monarchs down from the heavens during their Southern migration period, but, watching for them, I seldom saw any.

Western Ironweed (Vernonia baldwinii)

I was out again yesterday on the bushhog, cutting down some summer forb overgrowth, particularly a few patches of Western Ironweed (Vernonia baldwinii), and stopped immediately when I saw the cloud of butterflies feasting on the delicate purple blooms.  Whites, Sulphurs, Skippers, Fritillaries, Monarchs, Swallowtails; they were all out feeding in the early hot afternoon. 

Western Ironweed closeup 

Of course, being butterflies, they wouldn't sit still or let me near them, so I captured these images on 5X from a distance.  I was especially proud to catch the Monarch and Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) captured on the same plant (top right), and both nearly in focus!

Jim Mason's Pocket Guide to Common Kansas Butterflies is a great online resource for butterfly identification, and shows valuable "folded" wing pictures of most entries, but it couldn't help me with this one! 

I've never read that Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) feed on Western Ironweed before. Veronia sp. are included in a rather long list of  "adult food sources" on the Monarch butterfly Wikipedia page, but so are half the other plants in my area.   Otherwise known as Baldwin's Ironweed, it is a common invasive weed on the prairie, and cattle won't eat it (which means deer won't eat it either!).  Now that I know it is an important nectar plant, I'll have to let clumps grow in my landscape in the future.  

Gratefully, Fall

After a hard summer of rampant garden growth (accompanied by rampant weed growth), and all the incumbent lawn-mowing that accompanies abundant rain, ProfessorRoush is more than ready for Fall and the garden is finally signaling that it agrees with me!    

In late August, we finally got the heat spell we normally get in July and the rain spigot shut down and the daytime temperatures reached >100ºF for a solid week and more.  The garden and lawn responded by ceasing growth, and the gardener of my garden (i.e. ProfessorRoush) breathed easier and skipped a couple of mowings.  In the style of the Old Testament or a Cecil de Mill's epic, one could say "A sigh of relief went up throughout the land."   That was the overwhelming feeling that I had, despite the heat wave and mini-drought, and I felt that the prairie was nodding alongside me.

Two weeks later, and the garden has changed.  The green hues are mixing with ochre and umber, and the prairie bluestem grass is beginning to withdraw nutrients from leaves.  It is cooler again now, the nights appreciably so, and we are likely weeks from the first frost, but you can feel the change in the air and see it in the plants.  Rain returned with the cold front, and I'll soon have to mow again, but I'm now sure that soon the first frost and cold nights that follow will rescue me.

The Sedum telephinum pictured on this blog entry is blooming merrily pink now, another sure sign of Fall's impending onset.  As you can see, it is attracting and nourishing these bumblebees, a final gift from the garden flora to its fauna.  This variety is either 'Black Jack' or 'Purple Emperor', which were planted near each other on my garden map.  I'm inclined to think it is the latter due to its height ('Black Jack" reaches 18-24", while 'Purple Emperor' only reaches 12 inches tall) despite the fact that this plant has not yet turned as dark maroon as either should eventually get.   Further evidence is that there is a nearby, shorter dark sedum and if that one is 'Purple Emperor', then they are planted in the same sequence as my map.  We'll call it 'Black Jack' anyway.

I've just had my first Sunday afternoon nap in weeks, another gift from the garden, and yet another sign that Fall, and inevitably Winter, are just around the corner.  The prairie winters are rough, but they are a needed respite from the frantic days of summer, and I'm grateful for now as the seasons progress.  And yet still sure that in a mere few months, I'll be reborn alongside the garden, and just as surely ready to embrace Spring.  I don't know where the bumblebees go in Winter, but I bet they will be eager for Spring too, stoked on Fall's larder after a long Winter's nap. 

Loss & Acceptance

What is that time-honored saying again?  "If you can't beat them, join them?"  Okay, Lord, I'm beaten down to my marrow and I want to move past it. I'm ready to join up, to "go with the flow," to swim alongside rather than against the current.

If you were wondering what happened to ProfessorRoush and this blog over the past 6 weeks, there is a simple answer.  Mother Nature won.

She beat me.  The abundant, incessant rains that Kansas usually doesn't receive in July and August came despite all expectations, and the prairie grass remains green and rapidly growing, verdant and lush, vibrant even as the end of August nears.  During 27 years living here, on this plot of prairie, I've never before seen the Big Bluestem this tall, the "turkey feet" seedheads reaching above my head in places (photo left). Simply staying ahead of the lawn and keeping the yard mowed has consumed all my free time, and the garden and this blog (and ProfessorRoush) have suffered accordingly.  In a normal Kansas summer, in late July and August, the faucet closes and the flora slows down its growth and browns, reducing mowing chores to an every-other-week (or sometimes even longer) cycle.  At times, even at every-other-week frequency, I normally can barely see the difference between mowed and unmowed areas.

Not this summer.   This summer mowing the lawn was a weekly occurrence and continues to be, the grass so high each week that I am timing mowings between rains merely to be able to keep the house visible.  Okay, that's a little literary sprinkling of hyperbole, but I'm nearing my limits on seeing the bright side of the rains.  In fact, I have been tempted to start mowing twice each week, but I was unable to work in any extra mowing when the grass was almost continuously wet with rain or heavy morning dew.  I certainly have no trouble seeing the mowing lane edges this year and I should be bagging the cuttings lest they smother the lawn. And the mushrooms!  So many huge mushrooms sprouting from the rich prairie soil!

Consequently, my occasionally orderly landscape is a complete shambles, taken over by Morning Glory and Common Dayflowers, the former climbing up everything including the spent yucca seedheads (above right) and the latter (left) covering and smothering any small plants.  I've crawled over my beds twice this summer already, literally on my hands and knees, at eye level with the invaders, literally engaged in hand-to-weed conflict and they've simply outgrown me, outlasted me.  Now, in late August, I simply have surrendered the garden to the heat and my despair.

My grief over the condition of my garden, however, is nearing its end, denial long past, anger spent, bartering for more garden time ended, depression easing as the forecast clears.  I find myself, at last, ready to embrace and accept the chaos of my climate circumstances.  The soft blue Morning Glories have won me over, reflecting the Kansas sky back from the earth.  I am patient now, content to await the return of fall, hoping for better-than-usual red hues in that Big Bluestem. There is ultimately a quiet wisdom in acceptance, a simplicity that allows more sleep, a freedom from outer world concerns.  My new motto; "If you can't beat them, then accept them for all their beauty."