Tree Holes and Ground Tunnels

ProfessorRoush has been absent from the blog lately, but I've not been idle!  Various work and other duties have stolen my time away from the garden and the blog, including the loving, care, and feeding of Mrs. ProfessorRoush.   We're nesting a bit, buying some furniture upgrades and aiming for some functional and cosmetic house improvements.  One thing to watch for is a report on the Great Deck Replacement Project of 2026!

Meanwhile, last year's Amaryllis is beginning to bloom again (photo top right).  I keep these "disposable" bulbs in large pots outside during the summer after they've bloomed, and then I winter them in the garage from late October through January once their foliage starts to dry.   I brought this pot indoors about mid-January and began to water it and the 3 bulbs of the pot have thrown up 3 strong flower stems (4 if you include the one that Mrs. ProfessorRoush snapped off this week by closing the adjacent window on it).  In the background of the photo above, you can still see the fog that stuck around until about 11am today (photo at left).  Hey, at least we don't have snow anymore!

One thing I wanted to include today was a plea to not be quite so tidy in your gardens that you destroy habitat.  This seedless cottonwood near the barn died last year, its weak wood topped by wind and snow, and I almost removed it this summer; or, more accurately, offered to "let" a friend remove it for the lousy firewood it would hold.  I changed my mind when I realized a flock of cedar waxwings were using it this spring as a collecting perch for their flock and I decided to keep it around another year.

And now a year later, it holds a secret and I can't bear to think about cutting it down.  A couple of months ago, as I was staring at these wretched skeletal remains and thinking about brittle, falling, cottonwood limbs, I noticed that it now holds a residence for a large "something."  Look closely at the previous photo and you'll see this 3"X4" nest hole about 2/3rds of the way to the top of the trunk.  Squirrel?  Owl?  Hawk?  I haven't seen the new resident coming or going yet, so its identity is a mystery right now, but I'm willing to wait and watch.  Personally, I'm hoping for "owl"; a nice screech owl family would be welcome tenants.

So, the new cottonwood hole is a great example of letting nature have its choice in our gardens, to increase our tolerance for that  planned garden neglectfulness that Mirabel Osler described in A Gentle Plea for Chaos.  I'm advocating for that, and yet at the same time, I'm wondering what creature is behind a second mystery that is occurring in my garden and I'm planning an attack on the latter.  Can you see the raised, superficial tunnels in the photo at right?   My back landscape beds are filled with them and they extend slightly into the yard around.  If I were back home in Indiana, where I encountered this frequently in the soft, sandy soil of my boyhood home, I'd say these were moles, but I've never had moles here before in my garden, nor found them at large in the prairie surrounding me.  The ground is just likely too heavy and rocky to entice them to even try to tunnel here.  These current tunnels are only in the cultivated bed and area of the grass and I fear they're another form of incursion into my space by pack rats and I won't tolerate that.   My embrace of natural ecology only extends so far!

Brave New World

2026 has just begun and I'm already salivating with the anticipation of another spring and summer ahead.  I certainly felt that 2025 ended on a high note, prompted, perhaps, by this amaryllis, a Christmas gift from a friend, that began blooming the day after I received it and bloomed across both Christmas and New Year's Day.  It is just now beginning to fade into the background and I need to remove the "waxy rubber" coat from the bulb, pot it up, and see if I can coax it to bloom again next year.  It certainly bloomed itself onto center stage for the holidays, a bright spot indoors when the seasonal grays imposed.  Look upon it, all ye, and despair not!

Outside, in the garden, all is quiet and dormant.  I keep the bird feeders filled with sunflower and thistle in the hope of keeping SOME movement and life in the garden, all while I also keep the rat bait stations filled to diminish the pack rat population and quell the seeming overpopulation of the filthy creatures.  I have recently noticed some "tunneling" in my back bed, and I'm wondering if moles are making a first-ever incursion into my garden or if the pack rats are merely switching tactics.

Garden statues, and other garden "bones", stand out in winter.  Mine are even more gray this year because I recently observed that my beloved "reading angel", a long-ago birthday gift from my wife and daughter, was disintegrating.  She had toppled over in fall, and her wings were in pieces on the ground and her concrete weathered and worn out on exposed dorsal surfaces.   Another statue, a long-eared rabbit, had lost an ear and broken off a paw over time.  I repaired both as best I could with some concrete patch repair and then I spray-painted most of my plain concrete statues to protect them, with the resulting flat gray appearance you see here.   Once it warms up, if the paint seems to protect them from weather and freeze-thaw cracks, I'll spray other concrete statues and then keep them painted in rotation.  One must care for our bones!

At this time of year, any color other than brown and umber stands out in the garden, so I was delighted to find this Yucca filamentosa 'Color Guard' in fine leaf and full variegation despite the frigid temperatures we occasionally see.   I have transplanted this clump twice over the years, and it has cloned itself locally, but this cultivar doesn't seem to have near the self-seeding tendencies of my more common variegated Yucca varieties.  And therein lies my primary observation of this blog entry;  whenever you actually want a near-ideal plant to spread like a weed, they don't, but turn your back on any  common perennial and they'll soon be choking out your most prized plants!

Have a happy and productive 2026 gardening year, my friends!

Bluebirds Down!

The unseasonably warm weather of the past few days lured ProfessorRoush out of the house and into the garden.  Christmas Day and Friday it was 60ºF or over, and the fog was heavy in the mornings; heavy enough to wet the grass and bring out the umbers and reds of the Bluestem grasses.  Mrs. ProfessorRoush loves the foggy mornings when the house feels isolated in a sea of gray and the garden edges are the limits of our world.  

Friday, high 65ºF, I straightened the garage, wandered the garden, target shot for awhile, and just generally enjoyed the free space of the garden, while yesterday it was outside "chore day" in the still 60ºF temperatures of the late morning and afternoon.  I started the day replacing the rat bait in the secure bait stations to diminish the pack rat population of my neighborhood.  All the bait stations were empty; am I poisoning the rats, or merely feeding them?  Afterwards, although I never claim to be any sort of a mechanic, I took a flat tire off of the lawn mower and attempted to repair it with placement of a rubber innertube.  That seemingly simple act involves getting the jack out of my jeep, assembling it, jacking up the lawn mower, removing the tire, and cutting off the existing valve stem in preparation, which all took about a half-hour.   Two hours after that, completely frustrated and defeated, I called a still-open tire shop (Burnett's Automotive of Manhattan Kansas) and took it there where they placed the tube and aired it up in 10 minutes free of charge.  Following that fiasco, putting the wheel back on the tractor was a cinch, the jack and tools were put back into their proper places and the job was complete.

At that point, I should have quit, but the weather forecast for today (Sunday) foretold stiff winds and a massive drop in temperatures, and in the back of my mind was the nagging thought that my twenty-four or so bluebird trail boxes had not been cleaned of old nests and paper wasp nets yet this season.  So I set out and rode the lawnmower where I could, and walked where I couldn't, to service the boxes in the spring-like temperatures.  It's a stiff up and down walk for an old man to the far reaches of the pasture where our house and garden is a distant dot.

Bluebird box nest

I am dismayed to report in hindsight that I found only eight or nine boxes with Bluebird nests and one very twiggy chickadee nest.  Many boxes were empty and I'm at a loss to explain the overall nest decrease from my previous high of 20 nests.  I had not noticed it during the summer, likely because most of the boxes that had Bluebird nests were boxes around the house and garden, so the Bluebirds within my daily vision had not diminished appreciably.  Distant boxes on fence posts of the pasture were routinely empty.  More predators? There did not seem to be more paper wasp nests in the boxes, and my impression is the latter were also decreased this year.    Poor environmental conditions?  More rain?   Less rain at critical periods?   A colder winter last year?  Are Bluebirds domesticating themselves, becoming dependent on populated structures and artificial nest boxes?  

Roush Bluebird Box design

I did get the impression that the newer boxes of my own design were more likely to have nests, and many of my older boxes are nearing 20 or 25 years old, so I have resolved to make more new boxes in the near future and to site them on isolated T-posts instead of on the fence lines so snakes and other predators have a harder time getting to them.  A proper Bluebird home is the least that I can provide as my contribution towards rectifying the environmental excesses of my own footprints on the prairie.

Christmas Galore!

I had long planned to post on Christmas, but this is not at all what I had in mind as late as 6:00 p.m. yesterday.   I apologize that I've been away from the blog for over a month, but it's a long story that I won't bore you with, at least on this most important day of the year, Christmas Day, 2025 A. D.; 2025 years since the birth of Christ, the Son of God.  I had planned a post with pictures of the house and snowless garden engulfed in the thick fog of the past two mornings, but, as often occurs, fate intervened to change my plans. 

Leaving work in the dark on these recent shortest days of winter and traveling towards the grocery, I had recently noticed some Christmas lighting popping up in the K-State University Gardens.  So last night, Christmas Eve, I asked Mrs. ProfessorRoush if she would go with me to see them. I didn't expect such a display, complete with Christmas music over loudspeakers, that would draw us out of the car, and have us walking around the garden in the chill air, but that's what we got.  Evidently, for the 150th anniversary of Kansas State University Gardens, the Friends of the K-State Gardens went all out!  And now, I'll shut up and let the pictures speak for themselves, because the Director, Scott McElwain, and the K-State Gardens outdid themselves this year!

The view from the parking lot approaching the daylily and rose display gardens

The old K-State Dairy Barn, now the Gardens Welcome and Office Center

The "setback" between the Garden's Center and the south wing of the barn

This tree near the walk was spectacularly lighted in bright white

The "setback between the Insect Zoo and the Garden Center

Look closely at the rose garden greenhouse to see the reflection of the Christmas lights in it.

If you'd like to see the display, it's open through December 31st and the music hours are listed on the website linked above.   And if you want to donate to support the display, this QR code works:

Lot's of people were taking selfies next to the backlit statue here!

Merry Christmas to all and all the best wishes for you to have a fantastic 2026 year (gardening and everything else)!