Evasive Maneuvers

Well, since Connie at Hartwood Roses has been distracted this week with a resident mockingbird and now a vacant nest, I feel I should gamely (chuckle) follow that theme and show you my own avian close encounter.

Mama Killdeer looks angry!

Again this summer, the long straight lines of my lawn mowing pattern have been interrupted by an intractable Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) who has insisted that her nest be placed in my front lawn in the short grass.  I thought I would avoid the problem this year by leaving a few areas unmowed on the fringes of my mowed prairie grass yard, but evidently the shorter grass is the preferred habitat.  I first spied this little dinosaur remnant staring at me as my mower edged closer and closer.  She is definitely give me a beady-eyed stare.

Killdeer feigning a broken wing amidst the buffalograss

As you get closer to their nests, those of you who know about Killdeer know that they will try to lure you away by pretending that they have a broken wing, hoping the stupid roaring green predator (I mow with a John Deere tractor) will ignore the nest and go after the injured bird.  They have a pitiful cry as well (the "vociferus" species name), just in case the broken wing wasn't enough to lure you in.  If you follow them, they'll stay just far enough ahead to keep you coming on, away from their nest, until they decide that enough is enough and demonstrate that they can fly quite fine, thank you.

If you notice where the little harlot started her dance, you can get a visual treat and see her clutch of (usually) four eggs laid in a small depression in the ground, camouflaged by their shell pattern and surroundings, but without any other protection. Once I find the nest whose position the parent betrayed to me, I give it a wide berth with the mower.  No sense in having smashed eggs or mangled little chicks on my conscience on top of everything else.  And anyway, Killdeer primarily consume insects, including grasshoppers, caterpillars, and other pests.  The more Killdeer I have around, the healthier my garden is.



Killdeer nest on bare ground

Killdeer can have two broods a year, and both the male and the female incubate the eggs and rear the young, so I really don't know if my pictures are of a male or female (I thought it would be rude to lift her tail to check).  In a couple of weeks, these eggs will hatch some chicks who will appear to be composed primarily of legs.  They will leave the nest behind within a couple of days to seek shelter in taller grass, so unless I watch them close, I'll see eggs and then see nothing, just a little tuft of dead grass on the lawn to tell me where they used to be.  Nature waits for no gardener.

Buck's Golden Princess



Rosa 'Golden Princess'

Now that we've had a day of sunshine, I can't wait any longer to show you my two-year-old toddling princess from the breeding program of the late Professor Griffith Buck.  So, without further ado; live from the Flint Hills of Kansas and having barely escaped drowning and freezing to death; the slightly rain-damaged blossoms of 'Golden Princess':

'Golden Princess' seems to be a little-known output from Dr. Buck, but I believe she deserves better recognition.  The earliest official description I have from an often copied, old type-written font sheet, is that she is a yellow-blend shrub rose of 1984 vintage.  The current Iowa State extension website describes the rose and its coloring in dry terms as "The large, ovoid-pointed buds of pale aureolin yellow (RHSCC 12D) open to double (30-35 petals), cupped, open. 4-4.5 inch blooms of deeper aureolin yellow (RHSCC 12A) tinted spinel red (RHSCC 54A) on petal edges, and finishing pale spinel red (RHSCC 54C)."  I suppose that if you have a Royal Horticultural Society Colour Chart, you could make probably some sense of that cold scientific description, but suffice it to say that the picture at upper right is accurately hued, and the rose is essentially a yellow-cream-golden blend fading to pink and almost red at the edges.  For those who like golden-yellow-peachish-orange blooms such as Peace and Alchymist, this rose is a "must grow." 

'Golden Princess' blooms all summer in clusters of 1-5 and the blooms have a moderate degree of fragrance.  The rose survives here in Zone 5B Kansas with some tip die-back noted both years that I have grown it, but the semi-glossy, dark green foliage is iron clad during the growing season and requires no spray for disease.  Parentage was a little hard to come by, but is listed on the Elko County, Nevada, Rose website and on helpmefind as "Hawkeye Belle (seed) X (Roundelay X Country Music) (pollen).  I don't know how those writers know that, so take that information with a grain of salt.  Regardless, as a shrub, 'Golden Princess' is small, only about 2 feet tall and 1.5 feet wide beginning its third summer for me, so it is perfectly suited for a small garden.  As the only drawback that I can see, it has large tan thorns that are a bit on the wicked side when it comes time for Spring pruning.

Give her a try for a manageable shrub rose of startling beauty.  Did I mention that the best part of this rose may be the just-opening buds?

A Little Whitewash

We've now had 6 inches of rain in the past 6 days, the weather has turned cold again, and my  roses, at peak bloom, are drowned and misshapen.  You can stop now, God, and I promise I'll stop complaining about the lack of rain around here for awhile.

But I will take advantage of the lousy weather and lack of decent rose pictures to slip a little gardening tip into the blog.  I've written previously about obtaining some nice glass cloches last January that I was, and am now, immensely proud of.  They served me well through a frigid winter and a cold and unpredictable Spring here in Kansas until a few weeks ago, when the weather hit the 80's.  I found then that some of the new roses were getting a little bit "burnt" in them.  And no wonder, because I found later that a clear glass cloche in my garden, at an ambient air temperature of 81F on noon of a clear sunny day, has an interior temperature, measured by my soil thermometer, of 140F!  Time for the cloches to come off, but the weather has been so variable, and with night temperatures reaching into the 40's, that I really didn't want to keep them off, nor did I want to be running around every day and night covering and uncovering them.

So, when the rose leaves began to fry a little, I got it into my head that I could whitewash the cloches, just like K-State does its glass greenhouses.  I did a quick search around town for some plain old whitewash, thinking that a little "shading" would improve the problem, and came up empty.  So I turned to the Internet, the modern Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and came up with a simply made whitewash formula.  After coating the interior of the cloches with my homemade whitewash, as shown above, the interior temperature on the same sunny day was only 98F, a vast improvement and survivable by the roses, particularly during weeks like this, where the high temperatures have been in the 70's recently, the nights in the 50's, and it has rained for days.

Remember fellow gardeners, cloches are just mobile greenhouses and whitewash does wonders for the plants under the glass.  The formula, cut down to a small, manageable amount, is below:

3 parts hydrated lime

1 part salt
8 parts water

If you substitute the word "cups" for "parts" above, it will make about a half-gallon of whitewash, which goes a long way, so you can cut it down if you need less (that's why I converted the recipe to "parts").    Be careful to mix in small amounts of each ingredient slowly, so that the powdery lime doesn't just clump up and become hard to stir. It was recommended to let it sit overnight, but I used it immediately and it seemed to work well. It's fairly watery when mixed, but remember it is a wash, not a paint.  I did use a paintbrush to slop it on the interior of the glass, though.  So nice to "paint" and not worry about how much I drip on the ground!

Picture This entry for May

My entry to Gardening Gone Wild's Picture This contest for May is below:  The iris 'Victoria Falls,' with its throne revealed after a walk up the velvety-blue corridor and the cellular structure of the cathedral awning above.