When a Kansas drought ends....

...it really ends.  If you've been wondering where I've been, I've been in Garden Depression-land, with only time to spare on weekends for watering everything that I didn't want to die.  It has been bad between the drought and the winds that took out several trees in my yard, among them my beloved ornamental Red Peach tree.  The only bright-side of my summer has been that I only mowed once from mid-July to late August.  Dry grass is tolerable when the mowee, i.e. me, doesn't have to sit on a roaring lawn mower for several hours each week.  

Two weeks ago, I happened to look in the local newspaper at the weather snapshot, to find out that, as I suspected, around 12+ inches of rain had fallen in Manhattan this year and we were 10+ inches lower than average.  So we had half our normal rainfall and all of our normal hot July temperatures by the middle of August.  I have been collecting weather radar pictures of storms going north and south of us all summer for the purpose of blogging about it, but couldn't bring myself to include you in my depression.  

And then, surprisingly, it started to rain.  Yes, here, in the Flint Hills!  In the past two weeks, we had several 2-3 inch rains that probably totaled 10 inches so I thought we were back on track, although the paper yesterday said that we were still 6 inches behind normal.  I forgot that annual rainfall is a moving target but at least we were catching up.  Suddenly everything is green again and I've had to mow weekly the past two weekends.

But last night the skies fell in!  From midnight to 6 a.m., the rain overwhelmed all my gauges, including the 5" gauge in the front landscaping on the blue hummingbird pole (2nd picture from top) and the 7.5" gauge in the back of the house at the top right. If you can't tell tell from the pictures, both are filled to their rims.   I have no idea how much rain we really had.  The pots with plugged drainage holes, above and to the left, also filled up to their brims, but at that point they were probably splashing out more droplets than were staying in them.  So your guess is as good as mine.  All this water was dumped into what is known as the "Wildcat Creek Basin," flooding an apartment complex, the town soccer fields, and a shopping center on the west side of Manhattan.  We even made the national NBC news tonight!  And now, some chances of rain are forecast 6 days of the next 7.  Can somebody please control the spigot better?

So, I'll try to blog from time-to-time again, since I have a garden and it seems to be green in places.  But I might get caught up in a whole series of new experiences.  For example, this morning, as I walked from the front yard around the house to the back, I was hearing the sound of a waterfall.  Waterfall>? Wait, what?  And then I realized; my neighbor's pond, which doesn't hold water and has been dry all summer, had filled up and was overflowing around the edge.  I, of course, rushed inside immediately to tell Mrs. ProfessorRoush that I had finally gotten her the garden water feature she's been wanting!

Incidentally, I thought about titling this blog entry, "When it rains, it pours."   Too cliche though, right?

2015 EMG Garden Tour

The 2015 Riley County Extension Master Gardener's Manhattan Garden Tour (27th Annual) came and passed last Sunday, and I believe it was the best ever.  Today, we learned that it was, in fact, the most attended ever.  For a small band of gardeners and a small city in the middle of the country, Manhattan gardeners did themselves proud.  ProfessorRoush could be slightly biased, however, because one of the gardens on the tour was that of a friend.  Of likely greater consequence in my bias, however, is my "status" as the tour day roving photographer for the Master Gardeners.

With a relatively new Nikon camera, I captured over 600 pictures in the six tour gardens in 3 hours, not including over 250  additional photos of the gardens last Thursday on the "pretour."   These, I have culled down to about 600 photos that were in reasonable focus, of decent composition, and pretty cool.  For instance, I hope the painted pine cones above captured your attention as surely as they did mine.  They were a table accent in one of the gardens and a fine accent at that.  The fabulous deep red lilies against the white fence in another garden provided another bright spot of color.  Make sure you click on the photos to see them a bit larger.

Due to various and sundry Federal regulations, the vast mass of which I'm completely unaware and likely violate to some degree or another on a daily basis, I can't show you any photographs of people on the tour or I'll violate HIPPA or FIRPA or one of the OTHER-PAs.   I can, however, show you these two ingenious "pot people", Clay, and Terra.  Near them; in timeout, the gardener had placed their daughter, Mary Jane.  Get it?  Timeout?  Mary Jane?  How's that for garden creativity?  I sense these homeowners may have some history within the 70's as former hippies.

The same gardeners with the pot people also had a wonderful butterfly garden, where I captured these two beauties feeding on the milkweed.  Here lives a gardener that truly practices what she preaches.

On the garden pretour, near the end as dusk was falling and a storm cloud was rolling in, the night lighting and landscaping around this pondless water feature turned the whole area into magic.  I could have spent hours taking photos from every angle at this garden.












As a gardening voyeur, ProfessorRoush is mad about plant combinations, and several of the gardeners could teach lessons in style.  One standout is the grouping around this angelic statue; blue spruce, Japanese Maple, variegated Fallopia japonica, and yellow-tipped arborvitae, an almost flowerless garden with lots of color, restful and serene.  The same gardener had the spot of various hostas accented by a green globe seen at the left, below.  A green paradise in a single photo!


















Another combination I appreciated was the soft gray foliageand pink daisy combination from a second garden:















ProfessorRoush does not get excited over heuchera as a general rule.  I've lost several varieties to sun-burn in my  own shadeless garden, but I could not ignore the beauty of the dappled sunlight on this specimen heuchera.  What a sight!






 I'd love to show you the whole photo set, all 600+ of them.  They might not appeal to your everyday crowd at a NASCAR race, but I suspect that many of you would enjoy seeing them.  I'll leave you, however, drooling at the prospect of another few hundred fabulous photos and contemplating this simple photo of a statue that left me determined to locate a copy of my very own.  This little reading child would look great in my reading-themed garden.  And if I  can't find a copy, well, do you think this gardener would notice its replacement by a cement pig with wings or a nice stone rabbit?

Praise Be

According to yesterday evening's Manhattan Mercury, a miserable daily rag which keeps the wailing gardener informed of each and every increment of annual water deprivation, we had received 8.37 inches of rain year-to-date, with a deficit for June of 2.67 inches and a deficit for 2012 of 6.67 inches.  Yes, that's correct, we have only received 55.6% of our normal rainfall in 2012, adding more pain to the drought from Fall of 2011.

We have been seemingly deserted by the rain deities.  Just last Sunday, I watched a cloud split and go north and south of us, leaving this area clear and dumping 4 inches of rain on areas only 1/2 hour away.  The storm must have known that I had sworn to dance naked on the driveway if it rained and thus, in its wisdom, spared my neighbors from such a blinding glimpse.


Last night, I made no such threat of joyful full-exposure, and, safe from that unsightly danger, a gorgeous front formed and commenced to downpour here at 11:00 p.m.  ProfessorRoush, of course, went promptly into the most restful, worry-free sleep in weeks amidst the lightening and thunder and rain pounding on the roof.  And woke up this morning to the beautiful sight of both rain  gauges (I keep one near the house and one near the vegetable garden), containing 2.2 inches of rain. Even the daylilies are happy, although the dewy specimen above will likely be a bit spotted as the day wears on.

The forecast still shows chances for rain of 50%, 30%, and 60% respectifully for the next few days and, not normally a greedy sort, I'd  be pleased to see similar rainfalls every day of the next week. Yes, surely, Praise Be.

Glorius Sunrise

There are mornings, beyond understanding, when we wake up and the world that has lately seemed small and brown and drab is suddenly made golden and magical by the sunlight.  As I went outside to do the morning thing with the dog, what greated me on a recent morning was this sight at sunrise:

Sometimes the gray, late Fall mornings just steal the life from the morning here on the Flint Hills, but other times, most times, the sun turns haze to a prism and brings the prairie alive.  Yes, the picture shows this area of the garden needs some ornamental grasses moved and a better wall to block garden from prairie. And yes, the milk jugs protecting the new rose bands distract from the picture. And, yes, my Marsala Aga statue in the center background looks lonely and small on the greater scale of the garden. But the morning dew has picked up the red tones from the grass and the few evergreens in this view are holding on bravely.  And I'm happy that the prairie has chosen to greet me with a smile this morning.

I've often said that Manhattan has the most sunny days of anywhere I've ever lived and somewhere, sometime, I always remember that I heard the number quoted as 330 sunny days a year.  However, I confess that I can't find anything near the 330 day figure on an Internet search.  According to a USNews report of best places to retire, Manhattan only has 36% (131) sunny days/year.  Okay, that site may not be accurate anyway, particularly since it states that the OZ museum is in nearby Lincoln (it's in nearby Wamego, 20 minutes away, and the closest Lincoln is Lincoln, Nebraska at 2.5 hours away).  Manhattan is listed as having 127 sunny days/year on an astronomy site, 145 clear days on a Hi-Tunnel Gardening site (126 additional days that are partly cloudy), and 219, 218, or 214 sunny days as listed on various pages of bestplaces.net and finally 218 days on realestate.yahoo.

Who's to say who is right?  The low figures seem to count only cloudless days, and since our clouds here are often small and intermittent, the 271 day total listed on the Hi-Tunnel site as having some sun may be closer to our real figure.  I don't know where the real answer lies except to say that there seems to be plenty of sunlight here to feed the full value of life and I'm thankful for what each day brings.