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!

Miscellanies

 In his latest attack...er...foray into his second favorite world, the literary dimension of Half-Price Books,  ProfessorRoush came away with an embarrassing number of additions to his "collections."   Of the coveted group, however, I've been most pleased, surprised in fact, by the easy readability of a 2003 text, The Secrets of Wildflowers, by Jack Sanders.  Addressing approximately 74 different wildflowers, one might think initially that this would be a dry field guide, but it instead is composed of 2-3 pages about each species, all common to North America but not necessarily native here, written in what turns out to be entirely conversational style.  It is as if Mr. Sanders was sitting here in the room with me, telling me the most interesting facts about each.

I give you, for example, the first page of the entry about Rudbeckia hirta, the Black-Eyed Susan, as an example.  A little history, a little botany, a little information regarding propagation, and several pages later, one looks up and then is drawn to the next wildflower, Bindweed in this case, in sequence.  I was enticed to purchase the bargain hardback, by the way, by its description of Goatsbeard, page 113, noted for "two kinds of clocks."

Otherwise, it is just a typical lazy Sunday in Kansas.   We had an 80% chance of rain today and didn't get any (thankfully, for once, we don't need any), but I did venture out to snap this picture, taken from my front steps looking northwest, which perfectly illustrates the capricious nature of rain in the Flint Hills.  Somebody on my horizon WAS getting rain, although likely it was only a single property, or group of solo properties in a Northwest to Southeast line.   The small downpour illustrated here missed us, anyway.  Click on the picture to see and magnify the area of rain in the center.

We've had enough recent rain that my yard is sprouting these mushroom caps everywhere.  I'm inclined to leave this group alone, hoping that it is the beginning of a new "fairy ring" that will spread in this lawn long after I'm gone.  Of course, I'd like to know the proper scientific name of this fungus, but I'm afraid that my identification of the above-ground appearances of mycelial colonies is inadequate for the dozens or hundreds of possible fungi that manifest in lawns as "fairy rings."  I'm content to observe it, leave it alone, and certainly promise to not consume any of it.  Additionally, I was horrified enough by finding this pamphlet listing fungicides approved for fairy ring elimination from lawns, that I'm considering starting a National "Save the Fairy Ring" Foundation.  What nature-hating, environmentally-unconscious kinds of people write these things?  Fungi are people too.

July Drive-By

My, my, how time flies by and leaves us standing in the dust of our best intentions.  I was on track for several months to add bi-weekly notes to this blog, but in the middle of June my resolve ran up against the Kansas climate and melted like butter on a stove. This toadstool photo, taken this morning, is illustrative of our gardening year here.

You see, friends, I came into this gardening year so excited for new life and new growth.  Ample rains in March and April erased our long drought and opened up all the nascent promise of
my garden, a green and growing paradise in my immediate vision.  It was almost perfect right up until we received the hailstorm in the last week of April, a hail that stripped leaf and promise and future.

May was quiet here, quiet except for the few peony buds and roses that survived the hail.  There were few irises, peonies, and roses in my early garden, and as the season developed, it was apparent that there were to be no strawberries, cherries, peaches, or apples to console my feelings.  I struggled even to enter my garden, pained by the lack of bloom and vigor, but I held out hope for my stalwart daylilies.

And then, in late May and through June, the heat struck and the rain stopped.  The garden dried and the ground cracked.  The grass turned brown and even the daylilies slowed their onslaught.  Hemerocallis is a tough genus, but not tough enough for early drought.  They bloomed, but not in their usual numbers or robust cheerfulness.

In late June and early July, it rained again, and kept raining at regular intervals, a unusual pattern for Kansas, and the grass greened up and the weeds rushed in.  Weeds, weeds everywhere, but not a domesticated flower to be seen.  Normally, in July, I can count on mowing every other week and relaxing from the heat.  Not this year, for I have been forced into weekly mowings of the entire yard and weeding at every opportunity.   Roundup is my new best friend.  And the ground is wet, wet enough so that toadstools grow in July right by the front walk.  You can guess that the tomatoes in this area are not performing very well in the wet clay.  Right now, the only crops that look to be decent are watermelons and cantaloupes.

And so I stand, on the brink of August, too busy with other things to garden, too depressed to even look at my devastated strawberry bed, too chagrined to even hope for a colorful fall.  I'll write when I can.  I've saved a few photos of the best of the year.  Maybe I can summon the cheerfulness in August to highlight them.

Until then, adieu.