I'm Ticked Off

Hey, now this isn't fair.  This entire summer, the tick-averse Mrs. ProfessorRoush has been forcing me to disrobe in the laundry room immediately upon entering the back door and to submit to a humiliating tick check which involves minute inspection of every inch of my tender pink skin.  While that might sound like the start of a fun afternoon to some of you, you can trust me when I say that the only intimate contact it initiates is her scratching at every suspicious skin blemish to assure that some creepy little legs don't appear at the edges.  On most occasions, satisfied that I'm not harboring a pregnant momma tick which could birth-start a tick Armageddon in the house, she banishes me immediately to the shower, merely bleeding from a few overzealous scratch marks, while she lifts my clothes with a stick and washes them in scalding water.

On two previous occasions Mrs. ProfessorRoush did find and remove ticks, justifying her careful diligence.  There were also two other instances when I found and removed small ticks on my own due to her understandable but unconscionable unwillingness to diligently examine certain skin expanses.  The past few weeks, however, I had returned tickless and we had dropped our guard, sure that tick season was over.  Heck, I had even scabbed over the previous tick-created welts that I received from each bite.  I seem to have developed a type II sensitivity to tick bites this year and I form a nice hive at each bite, even when the tick hasn't been attached long.


Today, when I was driven in from a good day of gardening by the July heat, I noticed that my shoulder was itching and, in the mirror on the way to the shower, saw a small speck in the center of a red circle that appeared different from my normal freckles.  Primarily, it looked different because it was RAISED.

There were a few lost moments of reaction while Mrs. ProfessorRoush located her reading glasses.  I've found that older wives are constantly wearing the wrong glasses for the activity at hand and I would estimate that they spend approximately 25% of their lives looking for the alternate pair.   Once she could see the speck closer, she still wasn't sure that it was a tick.  She and I were both willing, however, to play it safe and have her grab this possible part of me with the tweezers and rip it off.  I braced myself for the fear that my farsighted wife would pluck a piece of ProfessorRoush rather than an invasive arachnid, but the "speck" was removed without any trauma other than a raised heart rate and some minor palpitations.  Under a magnifying glass that I've had since I was a child (a side benefit of living a long life interested in the sciences) we discovered that it was, in fact, a tick, the same minuscule invader pictured above one a paper towel next to a 22 gauge hypodermic needle.

There are, it seems, Darwinistic advantages to having a little tick hypersensitivity, even though this episode will likely initiate another series of strip tease inspections by the missus.  If I hadn't started itching, this little guy could have feasted for a few days on my fair skin.  Instead, thankfully, he was encased in this paper towel and flushed down where the sun doesn't shine.  Tough luck, buddy.

Opinionated Gardening

'Stella de Oro'

Are all gardeners so opinionated, or is it just ProfessorRoush?  Because he has definite opinions about almost everything in his garden.  Sometimes even he tires of his opinions, his interminable rants about disease or weeds or flower color or poor performance that keep him from enjoying the garden.  Is it really necessary to constantly pontificate about whether this rose is better than that one, or how one grass is a thug, sprawling over everything in its vicinity, while another grass adds a really nice structure to the garden?

Take, for instance, his opinion about 'Stella de Oro'.  If you've read his blog for more than a few days, you know he detests the orange-yellow color of 'SDO'.  You've seen him rant about how tired he is of seeing it everywhere, often displayed in combination with a purple barberry or a group of banal junipers. One of the reasons that ProfessorRoush believes in a single deity is that creating 'SDO' as the most reliable, easy to propagate and longest-blooming daylily on Earth is surely a little cosmic joke made while God was in a good mood and resting on the Seventh Day.

'Happy Returns'

There are certainly better alternatives.  'Happy Returns' blooms a little less frequently, but the two fewer shades of orange in 'Happy Returns' makes it a much prettier addition to the landscape.  It is just as healthy and, these days, just as easy to find.  But, I guess it just doesn't contrast with purple barberries as well so it doesn't satisfy the peasant sensibilities of modern landscape designers.  And there are similarly named Stella's, such as 'Purple de Oro', which should be better, but they're less healthy and don't bloom nearly as often, at least for me.  The latter also isn't that purple, but that's another rant entirely.

Don't get me wrong, I grow 'Stella de Oro' in spades.  ProfessorRoush wouldn't, with his unlimited mental budget for plants, but I do.  In fact, a few weeks ago, it was the primary blooming plant in the landscaping in front of my garage, as you can see below.  'SDO's are almost all of the yellow that you see here, with the exception of a single 'Happy Returns' at center left.  In my defense, I'd like to tell you that I was a beginning gardener at the time and didn't know any better, but, truthfully, I grew 'SDO' in a garden before this one and I also hated it there.  Unfortunately, if you want to buy a lot of daylilies on the cheap at big box stores, you get 'Stella de Oro', sometimes even when it is labeled as something else.  And I was working on my budget, not that of ProfessorRoush's.  Thankfully, as I'll blog about in a few days, the 'SDO' are resting now and other, more attractive, daylilies and lilies are center stage.



Some would suggest that ProfessorRoush should strive to develop a more open mind and keep his opinions to himself.  But then what would he write about?  Endless essays about the beauty of every living creature would either cause his arteries to explode from the suppressed inner tensions or, alternatively, he would quickly run out of complimentary English language adjectives and his writing would be as boring as a landscape composed entirely of purple barberries and 'Stella de Oro's.  Writing, and gardening, is so much more satisfying if you can make use of all the options available.

Frog Fear Freakout

Today's blog was guest submitted by Dr. Ranida Phobia in lieu of ProfessorRoush who is currently under treatment er, uh, "indisposed":

When I first saw him this morning, ProfessorRoush seemed unusually jittery, eyes darting feverishly left and right, up and down, his limbs as restless as a puppet under the direction of a seizuring master.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Ssshhh, they'll hear you!" ProfessorRoush frantically whispered.  He was haggard, unshaved, and his face was flushed.

"Who'll hear me?"

"The frogs, the darned tree frogs," he replied, "They're everywhere."

"So what?"

"They're freaking me out, man.  They're always there, watching me, perching on everything and watching me work.  Sitting on the porch railing, sitting on the windowsills...."

"Easy, buddy, they're just frogs."

"No, no, no!  I'm telling you, these are different.  They're more focused-like.  I think these frogs are intelligent, smarter than before, see, and they're observing us, taking notes and probably reporting back to their frog overlords."

"Ah, c'mon, There are just a few more out there now because we've had a wet spring," I said, as I began to ease out of reach of the trowel ProfessorRoush was clenching.

"That's it, exactly!  They must have reached a population density that allowed their collective consciousness to bind and amped up their intelligence.  They're planning now, something's gonna happen, I just know it.  The other day, one was just waiting for me, perched on a faucet handle I was reaching for.  Probably would have grabbed my arm and chewed it off, man.  I jumped a mile high when I saw it."


"Calm down, calm down.  I'm sure it's all just a coincidence and you'll feel better once the weeding slows down and you get some rest."  I felt the best approach was to keep my voice low and level and back away from ProfessorRoush as he began to flex his biceps and his eyes began bulging out.

"I think it's global warming," he whispered.  "I think all the Birkenstock-wearing WEE (author's note: he means Wild-Eyed Environmentalists) are right about us changing the climate and the world.  And the frogs are the first sign, but where they were going extinct before, now they've realized that global warming is good for them in Kansas, brings them more rain, and they're expanding their reach, getting ready to take over from us.  It's the dinosaurs all over again, man.  Except that we're the dinosaurs."

"Oh, that's probably pretty unlikely, pal.  Let me call someone and ask about it for you, okay?"

"Look, there's one right there.  He climbed 20 feet right up that brick wall, just to spy on us.  Don't you see what's happening?"  ProfessorRoush began to run now, heading for the front door, slashing the air with the trowel, shouting "They're already here, you're next, you're next!" as he ran.




Sad, but relieved of fears for my personal safety, I watched ProfessorRoush run inside.  The 911 operator was very calm and polite and said they'd send some help right over.

At least I think that was the response. We didn't have the best connection.  The operator sounded like he was calling from the bottom of a well and his voice was a little hoarse, like he had a frog in his throat.

They're Inside the Perimeter!

In my ongoing series of skirmishes with the fluffy-tailed, cloven-hoofed denizens of my local prairie, ProfessorRoush must admit that some strategic and tactical setbacks have occurred recently.  To be more frank, in less carefully-chosen phrases, I'm losing the battles AND the war.

After my earlier discovery that the local antlered vermin had been feasting each night on my prized strawberry patch, I responded with efforts to fortify the electric fence and increase the nightly watch.  I recently discovered, however, that my trail camera surveillance system had been mysteriously rendered inoperative for the past month.  I've hypothesized that it might have been hacked, in like manner to the recent Sony incursion by the North Koreans.  I don't believe it is too far-fetched, based on current evidence, to imagine a command center of hacker white-tailed deer, sneering behind their computer scenes as they erase any digital evidence of their glutinous feasts and plan further raids.  Regardless of the exact cause of camera failure, I have no recent intelligence of the number and distribution of enemy forces who form nightly incursions into my garden.

Further, early today when I accompanied Bella on her morning duties, I saw, in the melting remains of yesterday's snowfall, evidence that the brazen venison-carriers are now venturing right up to the castle drawbridge.  The first picture, above, is evidence of a hoof print approximately 10 feet from the sidewalk in the front of the house.  The second picture, at left, shows a print mere inches from the front sidewalk, and illustrates that this enemy soldier is probably within range of sampling my infant Japanese maple.

That is suicide bomber range, folks.  I mean DefCon 1, Emergency Alert status, zombie herd is coming, range.   Strap a little C4 to these fleet garden terrorists and they could take out command post and gardener in a single strike.  What am I to do?  I'm afraid the fallout from nuclear strikes in the scrub brush of the draw where they sleep would drift back over home.  I would just cry havoc and release the dogs of war, but my personal "dog of war," Bella the beagle, is a great alarm system but a coward at heart, and that won't work either.  I need a new plan.

Toad Behavior

So, there I was, rushing home from a trip to Kansas City at 4:00 pm. on a hot Saturday afternoon because I had to go out and mow in the boiling sun and be showered again by 5:30.   "Why," you ask?  Because Mrs. ProfessorRoush, always mindful of social opportunities, had asked me earlier in the week if I would go out to dinner Saturday night with a couple of old friends who were going to be in town.  Ever the indulging and doting husband, I had agreed immediately, not knowing that "going out to dinner" would ultimately also include a plan for visiting my garden prior to dinner.  My garden that I have abandoned to the heat of summer, sans weeding and mowing for three weeks.

The lack of regular maintenance is not as big a deal as you might surmise, primarily because our ample rains of early June ceased around June 20th and we haven't seen a drop since then.  All the prairie grass has stopped growing except for a small rim around the asphalt where the grass gets more runoff.  And weeds have stopped sprouting, except for my Ambrosia sp. nemesis which seems to merely require dehydrated concrete to grow.  So, except for finding a few giants that I've missed, the garden really wasn't too terrible, but I still couldn't let it be viewed in its current condition.

Anyway, at minimum, the fuzzy edges needed to be trimmed, and here was Mrs. ProfessorRoush, trying to talk me out of it, telling me the garden looked fine.  I responded poorly to the discussion, stormed out into the heat, and proceeded to perform my impression of a Tasmanian Devil from a Bug's Bunny cartoon as I rushed about performing emergency cosmetic surgery on the garden.

Why?  Oh why, I ask you?  Why didn't I just point out that impromptu visitors to my garden are no different to me than impromptu house visitors are to Mrs. ProfessorRoush?  She goes into a tizzy every time visitors are nigh, despite keeping a house so constantly clean that I could safely eat off the floors at any random moment.  That simple analogy would have so easily been game, set, and match in favor of ProfessorRoush.  Alas, it seems instead that I was close to testing out my theory of eating off the clean floors for awhile.  

(The toad picture, BTW, is merely for blog decoration and is not a comment on the actions of any individual mentioned herein.)

Wanton Whimsy

Gardeners one and all, please forgive me for the crass display you are witnessing.  I took a long step this past week beyond acceptable garden ornamentation, crashing and burning far past the gates of conventional decorum.  I created, in my unsuspecting garden, as you can plainly see here, a bottle tree.

I've lusted for a bottle tree for years and I still can't explain the urge.  It's like I am a Babtist preacher who keeps coming back to Mardi Gras.   I normally strive to maintain a garden that the general public will likely approve of, even as I push back against pruning conventions to the irritation of those who like their shrubbery carefully clipped and marching in step.  The existence of a bottle tree in my garden is a leap far past the line of whimsy for me, a singular incongruity like a wart on a princess.  I've flirted with whimsy before, bringing yet another rabbit statue into the garden, but until now I've stayed on the safe side, refusing to add figures of gargoyles and peeing little boys.

There are commercial bottle trees available, even an entire company dedicated to their creation, but I had to make my own.  For one thing, I felt the commercial trees were too small, usually under 5 feet tall and seldom holding over twenty bottles.  And they're pricey.  And I was worried about anchorage against the Kansas winds.   A bottle tree that has to be straightened after every storm would be exhausting.  So I created my own, cementing a treated landscape post into the ground so the trunk would be over 6 feet tall. I cut rebar for use as "limbs".  Best of all, I can add to it merely by drilling a hole and adding another limb.  I want lots and lots of bottles.

The King of Bottle Trees, Felder Rushing, who himself has fourteen of them, believes that bottle trees date as far back as men have made glass, from back when the belief arose that spirits could live in bottles and that evil spirits could be captured in them. Rushing also relates, and I agree, that blue-only bottle trees are the best.  Doubt me?  Click here to be convinced by a picture of Rushing's blue tree covered in snow.  Mine would be all cobalt blue already, but Mrs. ProfessorRoush and her friends insist on choosing wine for its taste instead of the pretty bottle it comes in.  Consequently, I have only one blue bottle at the moment, but the Internet may come to the rescue since I can buy a dozen cobalt blue bottles there for a mere $19.99.   I think making an all blue tree will really spruce up the bottle tree and my garden. 

(Get it?  "Spruce up my bottle tree?")

 

Donkey Droppings

There were times this winter, as I trudged through bone-chilling early morning winds and snowstorms to feed the cats and donkeys, that I wondered if deep insanity had prompted me to adopt these money-burning parasites or if I had merely been prey during a weak moment.  Today, however, I was reminded why I took on housing of the donkeys, Ding and Dong.  It was all about their poop.

I trust that many of you who read this blog followed your normal Sunday routines this morning, perhaps coffee and paper with a loving spouse, or time spent in pursuit of spiritual knowledge or experience. ProfessorRoush, however, was not engaged in such high-minded or polite endeavors.  I was loading donkey crap into a cart shovelful by shovelful (as pictured above) and then, as any self-respecting rosarian would, unloading it in measured fashion as more shovelfuls onto my roses.  Four carts of donkey dung were distributed among approximately 200 roses by early afternoon, interrupted only by a minor drip in the basement ceiling and by personal time to rehydrate.  I threw donkey poop onto the feet of 'Charlotte Brownell' and 'Maria Stern'.  I cast manure onto 'Queen Elizabeth' and at 'Madame Hardy'.  I even tossed a little donkey crap on 'Jeri Jennings'.   I should apologize to the latter since it is entirely possible she could run across this blog entry, but Jeri is an outstanding rosarian of great reputation and I'm sure she will understand my transgression.
  
Four heaping carts of donkey crap may sound like a lot of work, but I'm a long-time feces-slinger.  When I was the tender age of 12 or 13 or so, at the end of our first year with registered Polled Hereford cattle, my father decided the barn needed cleaning and bade me to load the accumulated manure into my grandfather's 2-ton manure spreader.  "It'll only be a couple of loads," he said.  Two weeks and 28 tons of manure later the barn was clean and Dad and I had reached an understanding that he was going to buy a front-end loader for the tractor.  Today's job was not nearly so taxing as that, and this afternoon I have a garden that looks like the bed pictured at the left, roses surrounded by piles of donkey poop.

There were learning opportunities today, as always.  After some period of applying donkey-based fertilizer, it dawned on me that Mrs. ProfessorRoush was not going to be happy about the aroma in the vicinity of our house after the predicted rains later this week.  Additionally, based on personal experience, I can now recommend that those who shovel donkey excrement into the face of a Kansas wind gusting up to 41 mph should take care never to exert themselves to the point of breathlessness and open-mouth breathing.  Such inattention to detail may have dire consequences, the least of which is the likelihood that Mrs. ProfessorRoush, upon reading this blog, will subsequently withhold any affections until she forgets or at least stops gagging at the thought.  The latter is, as stated, the least of my problems because after shoveling, unshoveling, and aspirating dust from four cart loads of donkey muffins, I could frankly use the rest.

Shotgun Gardening

Image from www.flowershell.com

While some conspiracy theorists believe that shadow organizations such as the Illuminati or the New World Order or the American military-industrial complex are heck-bent on taking over our lives, ProfessorRoush has long suspected that "Marketers" are the real shadow organization that will bring about the downfall of civilization.  After all, they've already convinced us to buy bottled tap water at prices exceeding that of our dwindling oil supplies.

As further evidence of my theory, I learned today that an Indiegogo campaign has formed to convince willing fools such as myself to part with money for the promise that a prairie garden can be created by haphazardly firing shotgun shells packed with flower seed into a field.  Several hours ago, if you asked me what I thought "shotgun gardening" was, I'd have envisioned a haphazard assemblage of shrubs, flowers, grasses and plants stuffed hither and yon into the landscape without a specific plan.  I certainly wouldn't have expected that it meant that I could step out on my back porch and, true to VP Joe Biden's recent suggestion, "fire off a couple of rounds" and create a garden. 

Indiegogo, for those unenlightened gardeners who actually spend time in their gardens instead of reading about gardening online, is a site that lets anyone use its "powerful social media tools" to create "campaigns" for "raising money" (the latter a nice euphemism used in lieu of admitting that it helps you find suckers to fleece).  The Shotgun Garden Indiegogo campaign is run from www.flowershell.com, where you can purchase twelve-gauge shotgun shells loaded with twelve different kinds of seeds including peony, poppy, cornflower, daisy and sunflower seeds. 

I have a plethora of experience strewing tons and tons of variously marketed "meadows-in-a-can" around my environment without altering the forb/grass ratio of the native prairie to any appreciable degree, so I'm somewhat skeptical that a few shotgun shells full of flower seed will improve the outcome.  And these are live shells, dangerous in their own right.  What if I mistook Flowershells for rock salt while chasing off the pack of teenage boys who constantly circle my daughter?  "You're no daisy" might not work anymore as a 19th Century throwback insult for those boys.  I certainly can't risk the chance of contributing to their delinquency if their backsides each sprouted a personal poppy field.

No, Indiegogo's efforts are wasted on me because I'm certainly not going to waste my hard-won cash on Flowershells, despite how interesting and tempting they might seem to a bored gardener in winter.  My gardening money is going to have to be wasted the old-fashioned way, attempting to grow meadows from a can.   

Thoughts From The Abyss

Wednesday morning I walked through my garden with trepidation, fearful that at any minute I would slip and fall into one of the drought-created crevasses that lurked everywhere, sometimes obscured by a tuft of bluestem grasses, often hidden by a thin bridge of grass mulch.  These clay canyons, pictured here and just below to the left, are deep, Grand Canyon-style deep, perhaps opening all the way to the bedrock below.  Last weekend I chose to water a few of the less-established roses and I poured water from the hose into one of these caverns for over 2 minutes and never filled it up.  Finally, I gave up and moved on, fearful that the water was just gushing through the Earth to China, where the accumulation of all the moisture might make the Earth lopsided and spin us out of orbit.

I can't fathom how so many of my plants survive, roots anchored into parched soil like this.  If I would slip an endoscope into these cracks, would I see bare roots spanning the abyss like a primeval bridge, or would I see broken roots, snapped off under the tensile strains as the soil dried and shrank?  Are there entire new desert ecosystems growing deep inside the chasms, xeriscopic fungi gardened by thirsty insects with hardened chitin shields?  However the manner in which the soil splits and cracks, the survival of most of my plants right now stands as a testament to the natural selection pressures over the past 12 years in this garden.  It also illustrates just how drought-tolerant established roses can be.  If you want flowers in Kansas, grow roses.

This morning, Thursday morning, there is a mist in the air and the 0.9 inches of rain that fell last night (the first moisture in over a month of hot days) has begun to erase the fissures.  Taken at the exact same spot as the first photo above, you can see in the photo at the right that the edges of the canyons are eroding, and that the soil, although not nearly wet enough to be classified as moist, at least appears softer.  Always the cautious gardener, however, ProfessorRoush stayed away from the rims of the abyss because he knows that the now unstable edges might crumble beneath his feet, sweeping me down into the depths.  I fear that Mrs. ProfessorRoush would just never accept that explanation of why I was calling collect from Canton, China.  

Turkey Crossings

Or should it be "turkeys crossing?"  ProfessorRoush came across this delightful family troupe on his way to a local Iris sale early Saturday morning.  I hope everyone appreciates the pictures, blurry though they are, because taking them made me miss the mad initial rush of iris fanatics into the piles of iris starts, and thus I missed out on all the best iris cultivars.  Certainly the drivers of the two cars that passed me as I was stopped in the middle of the road and taking pictures with my iPhone must have thought that I was a mad as a hatter.

The Wild Turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, is native to North America, although by a quirk of history it was named "turkey" because the trade routes from North America to Britain in the 1500's were routed through Constantinople, and thus the British associated the bird with the country, Turkey, and the name stuck.  Wild Turkeys are certainly prevalent in Kansas, and I often find them visiting my garden in early Spring, although sightings this time of year, when they are keeping their broods to the woods, are unusual.  They don't seem to harm my garden (with the sole exception of one previous incident noted here) , and they can be quite entertaining as they strut from bed to bed.

If you are the sole remaining American that hasn't heard yet, Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the Wild Turkey the national bird because he thought the Bald Eagle was lazy for stealing fish from other birds.  It is unfortunate in some ways that Wild Turkeys didn't win out over the Bald Eagle.  Turkeys get a bad rap for being stupid, but that's just because of our impressions of their big, fat domesticated cousins.  Wild Turkeys are exceptional citizens and good parents.   Just take, for example, the wisdom exhibited by the three hens in this covey.  They've kicked the bothersome polygamous males out of the group and they are sharing the burden of herding and henpecking the five youngsters, much like the soccer moms of our own species.  As I drove up on them, and by them, they kept the little ones in the center, pushed them to the edge, and then put themselves between their offspring and my car, offering their last feathers as protection.  Obviously the poults are not yet into the turkey equivalent of their rebellious teens or the hens wouldn't have been quite as blindly devoted.

These Wild Turkey's are probably the Rio Grande subspecies (Meleagris gallopavo intermedia) because of their geographic location and the buff, light tan color of the tips of the tail and lower back feathers.  They have longer legs than other subspecies, presumably better adapted for the tall grasses of the prairie, although I don't know if their legs are longer so they can walk better among the grass or because long legs make the females more attractive to males for other reasons ("Don't preen for that one Fred, her legs are so short and stubby that the grasses cover up her tail feathers").  Darwin's Natural Selection is still likely active though, although our human reasoning may fail in understanding the true mechanisms.  Heck, it's a well-known fact that most human males prefer human females with long slender legs over short stubby ones, and no one really knows why (I'm going to refrain here for my own good from the usual side reference to Mrs. ProfessorRoush).   Human females don't spend much time strutting in the grasses these days, so the height of the prairie grass probably isn't the driving issue. Well, I don't think so, anyways.

Bench 2.0

ProfessorRoush places a high value on permanence when selecting garden ornaments or furniture.  I like concrete or iron rather than plastic or wooden.  I want unpainted statuary versus stained or painted figures that need to be refinished every few years.  Heavy pieces are chosen so that I don't need to travel to Missouri to find them after every thunderstorm. Tasteful pieces appear when I can find them, although my tastes are subject to debate and questionable in many instances.

Consequently, when my old iron and wooden garden bench to the right of the front walkway started to deteriorate beyond the point where staining the wood was curative, and to the degree where sitting on it was a chancy proposition, I knew it was time to find a new one, but I couldn't part easily with the ironwork.  This old bench had stuck with me through wind and rain, snow and heat. Who wouldn't have a little interior rot when you spend each of 10 winters outside under a blanket of ice or snow? This bench deserved a second chance and I was just sentimental enough to give it one.

Enter Bench 2.0, my amateur remake using the original iron sides and back.  I used composite/permanent redwood-colored deck material for the seat and back.  The decking material didn't come in the right widths, but I overcame and adapted with selective use of the pre-drilled iron holes and bolts with lock washers.  I tend, when building something, to build crudely but to over engineer everything, so I assure you that six weight-challenged individuals and a dog could sit safely on the new bench.  The curved back iron piece would have required too much work to make it fit, but I reversed it and screwed it back onto the back to increase the weight of this piece and keep the floral print visible.  At this point, nothing short of a tornado is going to move this bench, which I've relocated to my growing "redbud grove" near the shade of a Cottonwood.  Not as formal, but still classy, eh?  It won't need to be redone again for like the next 6 million years and only then to repaint the iron.  And the cost to redo?  Less than a new bench (in fact less than the metal bench that replaced it out front).

You're wondering about the light blue sides aren't you?  That happens to be my "color" for the garden.  I paint almost all the iron in my garden that hue of rust-inhibiting paint, known variously as "wildflower blue," "brilliant blue," or "periwinkle blue" depending on the brand.  I think it looks nice when placed among almost anything in a garden, and it stands out just enough to call attention to itself without screaming at visitors.  Please don't tell Mrs. ProfessorRoush that my garden has a "color" though.  She'll laugh at me and call me strange. There is no accounting for taste is there?

Garden Bookoholics Anonymous

It is not often that ProfessorRoush steps away from his libertarian politics and asks for action by the authorities-that-be, but someone really needs to step in and close down Half-Price Books before this vile, crack-den masquerading as a commercial enterprise drags me deeper into garden book addiction and debt.

We should form a club of garden book addicts, calling it Garden Bookoholics Anonymous or something similar, with our own twelve-step program.   I'm already a member of Garden Statueholics Anonymous, so I'm already halfway down that path anyway.  I've always enjoyed reading garden-related literature, particularly essay-type pieces based on experience, but whenever I cross over the threshold of Half-Price Books, I seem to fall into an abyss, wild-eyed and avid, with no evident self-restraint or shame.  Take last week for example.  I was on an innocent visit to my parent's home and wasting time while my wife shopped, when I happened across this local book-pusher's establishment.  On the feeble justification that I only had a few minutes and wasn't likely to buy anything, I stepped inside.  In hindsight, I now recognize that such excuses are common among addicts;  "I only tried the Burgundy to see if it differed from the Boone's Farm," or "I only stepped inside the strip joint to see what it was like," are identical in intent, if not in prose. 

In five minutes I walked out with 6 hard-back books, all purchased at "a bargain," and all irresistible to a garden-book collector.  How could I deny that I needed Gardening With Grasses by Piet Oudolf himself?  How to abstain from the pleasures of Suzy Bale's The Garden in Winter?  Peter Loewer is a well-known garden author and I couldn't forgo Thoreau's Garden, could I?  Growing Roses Organically just spoke directly to my rose-nut soul and I listened.  A trip to another Half-Price Books addict den two days later yielded another four books.  Jefferson's Garden by Loewer was another classic.  Bizarre Botanicals was essential in case I ever wanted to grow a Venus Flytrap or some other tropical monstrosity.  McNaughton's Lavender, The Grower's Guide had some beautiful pictures that might help me identify the varieties in my presently-blooming lavender bed.

As others with similar addiction know, I've previously reported cataloguing my garden books collection on a nifty little phone app, and it came in handy on my recent binge, preventing me from buying books I already own.  To reveal the depths of my depravity, I will note here that my collection now includes 486 gardening-related books.  Yes, I know that one is not supposed to reveal the extent of one's collectibles on the Internet in case enterprising thieves are lurking, but I feel there is little danger that someone will break in to steal my garden book collection.  Anyone who wants the collection for their own use deserves only my sympathy and pity, and, for money-motivated thieves, the whole collection is probably worth about $12.78 if sold to a second-hand book store.

Gardening bibliophiles with a similar addiction, please repeat after me.  "I admit that I am powerless against the lure of books by Sydney Eddison and Henry Mitchell and Sara Stein."  "I hope to believe that a Power greater than myself can restore sanity (if not God, at least a forceful spouse might intervene)."  "I will continue to take inventory and promptly admit when I've bought a bad book."   Oops, that last one may not help. Curses, a pox on Half-Price Books!  I don't really want to stop.  Can it really be that terrible if my garden book addition keeps me away from the Devil's Brew and out of strip clubs? 

Ambrosia Abounding

The quote "Earth laughs in flowers," is from a Ralph Emerson poem named Hamatreya, and it really doesn't have the sweet, happy meaning that everyone attributes to it.  In Emerson's poem, the Earth is literally laughing at Man; any Man who dares to presume that a portion of Earth is his, denying that man dies while the Earth endures....laughing at us with flowers.

I realized today that "my Earth" laughs at me too, only it laughs in Ambrosia artemisiifolia.  That's Common Ragweed to you and I, also known as Annual Ragweed.  Everywhere that I sink spade in soil, this pernicious weed pops up.  I never see it on the unbroken prairie and I've never let it set seed in my garden, but I would estimate, from the frequency it crops up as a weed, that half of the mass of any given spadeful of my soil must actually be ragweed seed.  

I had an infestation in my iris bed this year so bad that I considered, for a time, selling the house merely to rid myself of it.  Here it is (above), growing in the middle of a daylily.  There it is (below), hiding at the roots of a rose.  It spreads, I think both by runners and seed.  It laughs, I know, at my feeble attempts to remove it.  It's partially resistant to glyphosate, shrugging off the first blasts from the sprayer like it was being watered.  I suspect that it suppresses growth in plants who dare to grow in the same soil with it, like a walnut tree with soft velvety leaves and a pollen that brings tears to the eyes of man.

I've got a hunch that the very name, Ambrosia, was a joke by Linnaeus himself.  Ambrosia, of course, was the food of the Greek gods, thought to bestow immortality to those who consumed it.  "Food of the gods," my royal hiney!  The only immortality ragweed provides is to itself.  Once established, it's impossible to unestablish. 

My favorite wildflower website, kswildflower, lists the habitat of Common Ragweed as "disturbed sites, roadsides, waste areas, prairies, pastures, stream banks, pond and lake margins, old fields, fallow fields; wet to dry soils."  Mull on that for a moment.  Ragweed grows anywhere that the soil is disturbed, like it was created for the sole purpose of badgering mankind.  Each plant produces over a billion grains of highly allergenic pollen in a year.  I don't believe all that pollen is necessary just for reproduction.  Perhaps one billion pollen grains per plant is just the Earth's way of getting even with us for disturbing it. 

Crabby old Emerson was  only partially right.  The Earth doesn't laugh at our fleeting folly in flowers.  It laughs in ragweed.  Thoreau probably learned that at Walden's Pond, but never bothered to tell Emerson.

Blue Grass Marriages

Sigh....Mrs. ProfessorRoush informed me late last week that my "blue grass" was looking very pretty.  Like many gardeners, deeply engaged into my own vision of the garden, I asked "what blue grass?" wondering if perhaps a long-deceased small clump of blue fescue (Festuca glauca) had miraculously reappeared in my peony bed.  Alas, Mrs. ProfessorRoush had merely noticed and appreciated that the various lavender species were blooming in the rock edging just outside our back door.

It's a broad divide, this chasm between gardening and non-gardening spouses, seemingly as unbreachable as the differences which currently divide the red and blue state mentalities.  Like many such marriages, ours is tested by a constant skirmish between the siren call of the garden and the mundane honey-do chores of changing light bulbs and tightening the screws of kitchen drawer handles.  Mrs. ProfessorRoush has recently offered the preliminary terms of a truce, taking over watering of the windowsill boxes of herbs on the deck and the two containers of annuals near the front door, and I very much appreciated and accepted this initial overture, even though I sometimes notice wilting basil and begonias and am thus compelled to remind her that it is time to water.

Mrs. ProfessorRoush has further offered to help me in mowing and weeding chores, but I have so far rejected both proposals out of hand.  Mowing was rejected for reasonable and practical reasons.  I bag lawn clippings and use them as mulch at this time of the year.  Mrs. ProfessorRoush is unable to repeatedly lift and empty the two 80lb bags, which is actually viewed as a virtue by a gardening husband who sleeps more secure in the knowledge that she would be unable to move and bury a body without help.  There are some parts of my gardening persona that would welcome help with the weeding, but those fools are shouted down by the isolationist gardener in me.  Like the East Germans of the early 1990's, I'm deeply afraid of the consequences of tearing down the Wall.  Comments about our "pretty blue grass" provoke gruesome mental images of a newly-weeded bed, ragweed standing proudly among the uprooted and dehydrating carcasses of irises and daylilies. Oh, the carnage! Oh, the horror!

I am content, at present, simply to accept this unsolicited compliment from a non-gardening spouse and to let the slowly grinding wheels of diplomacy work through the other issues.  As I age, I recognize that I may someday need help lifting the clipping bags myself, and I may also be less reticent about the occasional loss of a few defenseless yarrow.  Aging, however, also carries the dangers of still more conflict.  I might, for instance, expect more help from a similarly aging spouse while Mrs. ProfessorRoush might envision hiring a work force of muscular, sweaty, shirtless young men to trim the roses.  If the latter is my destiny, then I simply welcome the growing gender equality of the workforce and must make sure that I remain in charge of the interview process.

Hoe Hoe Hoe

ProfessorRoush just returned home with a vast number of new gardening implements and ornaments purloined from the home farm in Indiana, which, as I've noted before, my parents are selling.  Among other items from my father's vast tool collection, I present to you the half-dozen hoes I brought home.  I could use some help identifying some of them, if you know about them.  Maybe my hoe-collecting friend Carol, of May Dreams Garden, can help out.
 
Pictured from left to right, they are: a common garden hoe, a Razor collinear hoe, a Dutch-type or push hoe, a Ho-Mi (Korean) hoe, an unknown monstrosity, and my grandfather's "tomato-planting hoe". 

I haven't a clue what type of hoe #5 is.  It has no markings to aid identification.  It could be even be something other than a hoe (a gravel-spreading instrument?), and it is fairly heavy, but the curved edge opposite the triangular tines is beveled and quite sharp.  I've spent several hours searching the Internet for it, including pages and pages of Amazon.com garden hoes, but I can't match it.  And please, be careful searching the Internet for "garden hoe".   The term brings back a much broader set of images than you would expect.  You might be surprised by the items and pictures you find, the most benign of which was the Dirty Garden Hoe coffee mug I ran across and the Gale Borger mystery "Death of a Garden Hoe" (about the murder of a prostitute and a missing garden hoe, of course).  Researching various garden hoes, however, is always rewarding.  I had forgotten, for instance, that collinear hoes are "thumbs-up" hoes, to be used in a pull-scrape motion rather than hacking at the ground.

I'm most intrigued to test the Ho-Mi Korean hoe, although I have no idea where my father came by it. The name translates to "little ground spear" in Korean and the tool was first made in Korea during the Bronze Age.  Jeff Taylor recommended it's use in his book, Tools of the Earth.  It is light and seems similar to a Warren hoe, my favorite planting tool, but also seems to combine the best features of a Warren and a Collinear hoe.  I'm already planning to try it out as soon as the ground thaws here. Five thousand years of use is about as time-tested as anyone could want, but I'll put in my two cents as well.

The award for sentimental value, of course, goes to the heirloom tomato-planting hoe.  If you look at the picture of it closely, you'll see a narrowed, darkened area near the midsection, the result of years of hard use and calloused hands.  Modern ergonomic designers could take a lesson from this hoe.  When I grasp the hoe at that spot, it balances perfectly and seems to snuggle into my hand, transmitting in an instant the infinite toil and sweat this hoe has shared with my ancestors.  I'll also use it this Spring, planting my tomatoes with it and carrying on a tradition embedded deep in my genes.

I already had a number of hoes, so this collection adds to my own swan-neck hoe, half-moon hoe, Warren hoe, and Nejiri gama hoe.  The new hoes will take a little work over the next week; they all need sharpening and rust protection, and their handles need a good coat of linseed oil.  My father and I share the gardening gene, but only I hold my maternal grandfather's respect for care of my tools.  At the home farm, I left behind the scuffle hoe (which I used as a young boy and have an intense hatred of) and our venerable two-pronged hoe that my father plans to keep in use at his new home.  And stay tuned for blogs about other items I brought back.  My trip to Indiana was primarily to retrieve a grandfather clock, but I think my garden benefited the most from the trip.  In the meantime, ProfessorRoush wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Garden Hoeing.

 

Zombie Gardening

As near as I can tell, the gardening industry has overlooked a vast area of marketing that has the potential to start a new gardening revolution among young folk and thus to grow a new generation of gardeners in this country.  Following in the footsteps of a current wildly successful television series, The Walking Dead, and alongside the frantic marketing spin offs such as the Airsoft semiautomatic plinker pictured here, ProfessorRoush thinks that some creative gardener needs to spin off some zombie-related gardening programs and paraphernalia to enrich our gardening experiences.  That should be me, so that I could make a zombie-related fortune and hire other people to do my digging, but it could also be you as well.  Just cut me in for some of the profit from the idea, okay? 

If you do a simple Google search on the words "zombie" and "gardening", you get some nice links to a zombiefied garden gnome named "Gnombie" ($224.99), and a resin zombie garden sculpture that resembles a corpse crawling out of the ground from thinkgeek.com ($69.99).  You also are referred to several links that will enlighten you on kitchen scraps that will regrow in your vegetable garden (celery, avocados and pineapples. among others).  All-in-all, I suppose those are all nice products and suggestions, but they're just scratching the surface of what I'm proposing.

I'm thinking of a line of Zombie Pesticides, with nice green fluorescent labels, that will paralyze Japanese Beetles so they don't squirm when you pick them up and squish them, or a Zombie Insect Spray that will cause your hornworms to blunder blindly about your tomato plants without damaging them.  I'm thinking about a group of specialized gardening implements, for instance a Zombie Repelling Hoe with a spike opposite the hoe blade so that it can be used for defense if you're attacked in the garden by zombies (or by city administrators, often difficult to distinguish from zombies, who demand that you rip up your front vegetable garden).   I envision a Zombie Compost  Fork with an ergonomic handle designed to decrease arm fatigue whether you are tossing compost or zombies.  I myself would surely purchase a Zombie Water Cannon with a sensor primed to shoot when large moving bodies such as zombie deer cross the path (I think this product may already exist, but it is missing the added zombie marketing power).

We need a garden prophet creating videos and pamphlets about plants that will fortify your grounds against zombie invasions (a nice hedge of Rosa eglanteria might suffice), or plants that will recover quickly from trampling damage caused by hordes of aimlessly rambling zombies (they would also be useful for gardens frequented by neighborhood children).  We need a writer proposing designs for garden "rooms" where we could escape and hide from zombies (or nongardening spouses).  We need Scott's to quit poisoning the environment and fund the breeding of a Zombie Grass that would stay neat and green without mowing or watering.

I suppose the latter suggestion is a little too fantastic to hope for, but any or all of the others should take the gardening world by storm and bring a few of the television-addled zombies out there back into the garden.  If some editor out there wants to put together a Zombie Garden Manual, count me in for a chapter on roses.  Is anyone out there interested in a very dark red, extremely thorny rose called 'Zombie Lover?'   Even better, it could be alternately marketed as 'Zombie Knockout'.  That will, based on my previous experience, really draw in the zombie gardening multitudes.

No Change in 2017!

Every year, at the beginning of November, I envy all of my garden plants, but never has my envy of their chlorophyllic leaves been greener than it is this year.  However rough their Spring began with a lion's roar of departing winter or the lamb's bleat of April; however tough their Summer swelter and that ever unexpected cruel first frost, my plants have not had to sit through months of electioneering drivel and sky-high promises.  They've not had to hope for change, nor do they find themselves with their backs against a fiscal cliff.   Yes, some plants, somewhere, have withstood a late season hurricane or a summer's drought, but they're all better off than their gardeners are here in early November.  For our plants rest in blissful slumber on and after that first weekend of November, oblivious to man's futile desire to rearrange the cosmos for commercial gain. 

I speak, of course, of the dreaded seasonal time change, that heartless manipulation of our biological clocks by totalitarian government fiat. It struck me this morning, waking to my regular internal clock but at a time far too early to begin the day, that my plants are the lucky ones.  They don't listen to a distant master and open their blooms while the world waits in darkness.  They don't mind that their evenings have been cut short so that they drive to work in daylight.  The green life goes on, oblivious to all but the regular rhythms of the sun, as certain as the ground beneath their roots.

Every year I joust at the windmills of Daylight Savings and its reversal.  But this year I'm no longer complacent in my temporal misery.   I begin my campaign for the Presidency today, with a single slogan, "No Change in 2017!"  ProfessorRoush's 2016 campaign will not dillydally with foreign affairs, nor with monetary policy.  I'll not speak of building walls to keep out foreign plants, nor of surplus harvest distributions.  I'm an old man, wise enough to know better than to trifle with the goals and aspirations of determined female gardeners.  But I WILL stand steadfast against the continual upheaval of our daily routine and ask only for the votes of the millions who are rising at their regular schedule and finding the stores and businesses still closed, their televisions still offering  infomercials.  If the Green Party or the Libertarians are smart, they steal this issue from me and make it their own.  I predict a landslide victory.

It's for the children, you know.  It's for my plant children, who I can no longer tend in the evenings because the sun falls before I leave work.  It's for the human children walking to school, who are at risk now four times a year as I drive down a long hill into the blinding morning sun first in late September, and then again in November after the time change, reversing the dangerous pattern again in Spring.  And it's for my children, my blessed half-clones, who deserve at least to have their sleep patterns undisturbed while they pay off the bills my generation has generated.  No Change in 2017!

Do My Hips Look Big?

'High Voltage' rose hips

ProfessorRoush believes himself the successful survivor of a long-term marriage, if only because the bruises and welts from Mrs. ProfessorRoush's rolling pin have been infrequent enough that I haven't sustained memory loss or cognitive dysfunction from repeated concussions thereof.  At least I don't think that my increased frequency of rummaging around in the mental attic recently has anything to do with such spousal corrections.  I'm confused, however, and not sure.  Regardless, one of the reasons I view myself as a successful husband is that I learned early on in our blissful honeymoon days to feign deafness when asked to answer that most treacherous question of all married wives, "Does this (...outfit, pantsuit, belt, chair, blouse, sofa cover, etc) make my hips look big?"

'Morden Centennial' rose hips

But now, I ask you, do my hips look big this year?  One of the side benefits to being a lazy rosarian is that I can use the excuse that I'm allowing the roses to develop hips instead of running around in a frenzy deadheading any bloom that is more than a day old.  It's all for the benefit of the avian wildlife.  What, you didn't know that birds will eat rose hips?  Well, maybe it's advantageous to keep the roses from stressing themselves over summer trying to bloom too heavily.  It develops stronger canes, you know?  Oh, you've never heard that either?  Okay, then will you accept that the red rose hips make nice winter ornaments in your garden?

Because they do, you know, make nice natural ornaments in the few days in Manhattan Kansas when the snow falls.  Most of them do, anyway.  It never seems to work out exactly like I wanted it to.  Some roses that I didn't expect to develop hips are reluctant to rebloom and are covered with hips (like 'High Voltage' that I wrote about recently).  Others are widely touted to have large, tomato-red hips.  The Hybrid Rugosa 'Purple Pavement' is such a rose, but this summer, the large red hips swelled, showed promise, and then shriveled.  First, they turned into reddish-orange prunes like the picture at the right, and then they just turned brown and ugly like the picture below.  Who really wants to show off a bunch of prun-ey shriveled old hips unless they have no choice?


I don't imagine these dried hips of 'Purple Pavement' would make very good eating, either.  I'm aware that rose hips are rich in Vitamin C and were harvested in Britain in WWII to make rose hip syrup as a vitamin supplement for children.  Rose hips are also promoted for herbal teas, sauces, soups, jams, and tarts.  These days, health experts far and wide are proclaiming the anti-cancer and cardiovascular benefits of the anthocyanins and other phytochemicals contained in rose hips.  I ask you, looking at the picture at the left, would you expect any medicinal benefits other than as a purgative?   They have even been used to control pain from osteoarthritis in a 2007 Danish study.  Maybe so, but I ain't eating them. 





For now, I'm quite happy to leave my rose hips for the birds or to let them drop to the ground and occasionally grow more little roses.  As long as I don't have to deadhead the bushes.  And maybe it is my aberrant "Y" chromosome, but I don't care if you think my hips are big.  I think they're beautiful.

Green Gold

News flash!  Stop the presses!  ProfessorRoush has won the gardener's lottery! 

Sunday, I noticed that my southern neighbor was out doing chores, so I walked down the road to greet him with idle chatter.  He was out removing the dried remnants of native Baptisia australis (Wild False Indigo) from his western fence line. Baptisia blow around like tumbleweeds out here on the prairie and then act to catch snow drifts and help pull down fences.  During a 20 minute conversation, that mainly consisted of cursing the damned Baptisia, another neighbor came driving up in the way of country folk, whose neighborhood meetings are often spontaneous roadside conclaves convened to discuss the weather and current state of the Kansas State Wildcats football team.

This latter neighbor, however, had an agenda.  She wanted to ask me if I'd like to be the beneficiary of weekly reoccurring five gallon tubs of purest manure from her horses.  Would I???  Quickly picking my jaw up off of the gravel, and putting aside any qualms about who I'd have to kill for her in trade for the manure, I accepted on the spot and without reservations, doing a little dance of joy in my soul.

I'd been wondering, in my treeless landscape, how to make up for the compost generated annually from the 50 or so bags of leaves that another friend had previously supplied.  That, now former, friend had listened too well to my advice about starting her own compost pile and, thusly realizing the value of what she had been giving away, had chosen to cut off my pre-compost supply. 

It seems, however, that what the Garden Gods taketh away, they giveth back, in plentiful greenish nodules of purest gold.  I finally stopped to take the photo above after I had already emptied half the tub around some rose plants and realized that I should stop to commemorate the occasion.  From this day forth, every Saturday will find me picking up another five gallon bin of odoriferous splendor, and spreading it to the hungry roses.  My garden is now a happy place, and destined to remain so until the first rainy Spring day when Mrs. ProfessorRoush opens the windows and learns what I've been up to.

Spider 1, Mrs. ProfessorRoush 0

For those who were rooting for the spider outside Mrs. ProfessorRoush's kitchen window, I thought I'd take this occasion to ease your fears.  Several hints and eventual outright demands last week for spidercidal action by the gardener of this marital unit went unheeded as I feigned deafness.  As a side note to other non-gardening spouses, be advised that there are times when accusing your spouse of being "increasingly hard of hearing" can backfire on you.  I fully agree with Mrs. ProfessorRoush, in fact, that I find it ever more difficult to hear suggestions for chores that I have no desire to accomplish. 

Outside looking in

After a few days of procrastination by her noncompliant and reticent husband, Mrs. ProfessorRoush took broom in hand and wiped the offending speck from the outside of her window in a merciless surprise attack.  I mourned the poor little guy briefly, but then went about readying the rest of the garden for Fall.  Just two days later, however, there it was one morning, the web restored to its former architectural disarray, and the spider back, calmly sitting in the middle of my spouse's long-distance view.  As an old and wise gardener would be advised to do, I carefully concealed my pleasure and quickly set about to ensconce the household brooms.

The view from the inside

You've got to give this spider some props for both persistence and pure gall.  When a wild-eyed, flailing monster wipes out your home and food supply in a fit of irrational fear, not all of us would have the will to rebuild, let alone right back in the face of the enemy. I've also got to give him some credit for his choice of venue.  His web design is haphazard, but that kitchen window web is protected from North and West winds, shaded from the hot sun, takes advantage of radiated heat from the brick behind it, and it sits right over the barbecue grill, a prime source for luring food to the web.  Talk about prime real estate!

I will attempt to remain, like Switzerland, a neutral and aloof observer, bemused at the struggle of life and death taking place in my very home, but I sense that I will yet be drawn into the conflict on the side of the aggressor.  A gardener is ever reminded what side his bread is buttered on and we have a particularly uncomfortable spare bed upstairs.  Although I still fear for this individual spider, I fear not for the future of his race however, because I know that somewhere out in the garden, others, who have chosen safer and prettier homes for the time being, are biding their time and making plans for window domination.