Utterly Ridiculous!

All right, who's responsible?  Snow?  On the 23rd of April?  Unheard of.  I have never seen snow this late in the year in the 24 years I've lived in Kansas.   The latest I can remember was the devastating late snow of April 5th, 2007, the year I now refer to as "the year without flowers."  It is 32°F here this morning, heading for a high of 43° and a low tonight of 25°.










I can only surmise that this is yet another predicted calamity resulting from The Sequester.  It's being blamed for everything else right now, why not this aberrant weather?  The Feds must have furloughed the guy responsible for Global Warming.  If not, then I want that guy fired immediately because he's not fulfilling his promises.  At this rate we're going to slip back from zone 6A to 5B.  According to the Midwest Regional Climate Center we are 13 days past our median last FREEZE of 28°F in Manhattan, 8 days past our median last FROST!  Our 95% frost free date here is May 9th.  Will we be extending that this year?  Will we break the freeze all time record of May 27th, set in 1907?  I'm starting to wonder.

The plants here knew what was coming.   Everything is late to bloom, and I've had little reason to blog.  Unlike 2007, not even my earliest lilac has yet bloomed, but it was only a couple of days away, as was my ornamental Red Peach tree.  But they're not delayed enough.  Tulips in the snow?  I've seen daffodils in the snow several times, but never tulips.  My peaches and apples were blooming this weekend, so I can kiss those crops goodbye.  The star magnolia and 'Ann' and 'Jane' magnolias are in full bloom right now.  Goodbye magnolias.  My 'Yellow Bird' magnolia is still in bud phase, but I don't know if those fuzzy buds are tight enough to stand tonight's freeze. 






I stand here in Kansas, rejected, dejected, and neglected, as the snow continues to fall.  The picture below was taken early this morning at first light.  It has since snowed another inch and it is still coming down.  The prairie grass is completely covered now.   I've got 11 new rose bands currently in transit, with delivery expected on Thursday.

There is a predicted high of 81°F this coming Sunday.  Just in time to roast the just transplanted roses.

Burning Day

Last Saturday was "burning day" for myself and my neighbors, as we took advantage of cool temperatures and the recent rains to "safely" burn the prairie surrounding our homes.

Prairie burns, as I've discussed before, are an important factor in prairie maintenance.  Burns act to keep the prairie clear of invasive trees and non-native "weeds", and they increase the quality and protein levels of grassland intended for livestock pasture or hay.   As a consequence, of course, our intrusive government tries to regulate and prevent this useful and quite natural act, particularly during April when the burns are carefully monitored to limit their contribution to ozone pollution in overcrowded cities to the east. For untold millennia, prairie burns occurred as a result of lightning or the actions of Native Americans, but widespread burns today are unusual and it falls to the homeowners to nourish the prairie and to protect humans and human property. 

This year, we burned starting early in the morning.  Night burns can be spectacular, but our quiet morning burn was still beautiful and fretful and frightening, all at once.  Our primary goals are to keep the burns from escaping into town, and to burn our pastures thoroughly without burning our homes and outbuildings and my garden.  Hence, we usually "backburn" the perimeters of our landscaping into the wind, and then set fires to run with the wind to hotly and quickly finish the job.  In that final phase, sometimes it seems like the whole world is on fire.














Based on long experience together, none of my neighbors trust each other with a match in hand, and so burning is coordinated in person and by cell phone and burn tactics are chosen by consensus.  I view my neighbors as crazy arsonists hell bent on roasting my garden, but in their defense, the largest uncontrolled fire in this area occurred as a result of me trying to clear a bed for tulips a decade or so back.  Every year, somebody's pine trees get singed or a burn eats into someone's landscape mulch, but this year it was a perfect burn and there were almost no casualties, except for the accidental burning of four large hay bales owned by a neighbor (his own fault).  

I say almost no casualties, but at approximately 6:50 pm, several hours after the burns died down, our electricity died as well.  Pack rats often infiltrate the ground-hugging transformer boxes and nest there, and the nests will catch fire occasionally and smolder for hours in the boxes before finally taking our electricity with them.  Sure enough, on a neighbor's land, a blackened box was smoldering away and there was a large hole dug underneath one side.  Even in death, pack rats will get their revenge.   

I'll leave you teased with the view above, the blackened hills leading into town after the burn.  You can clearly see both the brush that gets burned and the rocks that litter what I call soil in this area. In about 2-3 weeks, I'll post this view and before's and after's of others, to show you the emerald paradise that burning creates on this Godforsaken land.

Warning for the UnWary

NewsFlash!  Read All About It!  This is a Special Edition of the Garden Musings blog written to you from breezy Kansas.  ProfessorRoush, your renowned gardening investigator, has caught a big box store in the act of practicing horticultural fraud!

Actually, Folks, ProfessorRoush just wants to remind you that sometimes things aren't always what they seem at the big-box gardening centers.  I was at a local vendor today, looking for shelves, not garden plants, but I couldn't resist wandering through the newly arrived shrubs and perennials to see what was available.  'Sky Pencil' hollies are on a wish-list for me, so I was drawn to these 3 foot tall specimens from across the parking lot.  Unfortunately, as you can clearly see in the front container, these specimens were recently transplanted from a one-gallon container into these three gallon containers, presumably so that they could be sold at the $25.00 price, instead of the $6.95 or $12 price that a one-gallon plant would command.  Unaware consumers that buy the other plants lined up behind this corner specimen are paying at least $12 for the 2 extra gallons of mulch.  Quite a steep price for mulch, isn't it?

Please remember, my gardening friends, that it is a good practice to shop only reputable nurseries and even then to occasionally slip plants an inch or two out of their containers to see if the roots have reached the edges of the pot, or, in the other extreme, if the roots are pot-bound and tangled.  Plants like the one above are the worst of both worlds; a pot-bound plant that was recently "planted up" without any effort to free the roots into the new soil. 

I have a feeling these 'Sky Pencil' hollies are never going to grow tall and reach the sky.  They haven't been given the chance.

Marriage and Magnolias

After years of study and accumulated evidence, ProfessorRoush has reached the conclusion that in an infinite number of universes, there are only three possible gardening relationships between spouses.   First, there are those sad couples where neither person gardens but where one grudgingly assumes the duty of pushing a roaring machine across a postage stamp lawn every week from April through October.  Often, such couples ultimately retire to a high-rise apartment with a potted and dehydrated cactus on the balcony.  Second, there are those mythical unions where both spouses share equally in the garden's triumphs and disappointments, planning and working together in perfect harmony.  The only documented example of such a relationship, of course, ended when Eve gave Adam a bite of the apple.   The third marriage, a land where there is an unequal and uneasy union between an avid gardener of vision and a less knowledgeable but still mildly enthusiastic spouse, is the one that most of us navigate, bouncing between the shores of two visions for our garden.   In these ungodly unions, in the interest of marital harmony, the gardening spouse must, at times, be willing set aside his or her grand vision to accommodate some ill-considered whim of the partner. 

My latest personal sojourn into such a gardening quagmire came last weekend, begun in an ill-considered moment when I asked Mrs. ProfessorRoush if she'd like to accompany me to one of our favorite local nurseries.  Presumably I was feeling a weak moment of the guilty pleasure of a weekend spent alone in the garden, and Mrs. ProfessorRoush was missing human contact, even if such contact occurred only in the presence of a sweaty, dirty, and sore older gentleman.  My punishment came quickly upon arrival at the nursery, where the only visible bloom was from a group of Magnolia 'Ann' and it was announced loudly that I had to purchase one immediately, regardless of my whining protests and the squeak and groans that occurred during the act of prying apart my wallet to purchase the $70.00 extravagance.

As background information, it is important to note that I had long ago considered and rejected the feminine wiles of  'Ann' for several reasons, not the least of which is that my garden already contains her lighter-pink sibling 'Jane', purchased for far less at $10 several years back.  I really don't need the sisterly rivalry to disrupt the ambiance of my garden.  Another deterrent to her purchase was that, although I am fond of magnolias, they are still reluctant participants in my garden regardless of the best efforts of global warming trends.  The more hardy magnolias will bloom occasionally here, but the blooms seldom last long in the strong prairie winds and they are sometimes caught out naked in a late freeze.  Finally, I had no inkling of where to possibly fit 'Ann' into my garden, although I freely admit that such a consideration has never stopped me before.  Thus, I grumbled and gritted my teeth, but Mrs. ProfessorRoush twisted my arm, and home we came with a pot-bound and prematurely blooming 'Ann'.

I have since planted 'Ann' in a site where she is destined to be the centerpiece of a new bed, a burgundy-colored beacon to explore deeper into the garden.  Anticipating a few days of gentle rain and mild temperatures, I lovingly teased out the root ball and fought my way into the anaerobic clay to bed her down, and I've now had two days to fondle her thick petals and inhale her thick musty fragrance.  Tonight, of course, the unpredictable Kansas weather is rolling back the clock with a predicted record low of 28°F and possible snow flurries on the 10th of April.  Tomorrow night there is a similar forecast.  There were evenings, in my younger gardening days, when such a prediction would have sent me scurrying around the garden with armloads of blankets to cover tender plants but I am long past such foolishness.   I have instead bid 'Ann' a reluctant goodbye and cast her fate to the Gods.

Next time, I have vowed to swallow my guilt, stay home, and divide a daylily or three.  Such an action may not provide any traction towards marital harmony, but at least my wallet will be more thick.