Guilt Trip

I tell you, it's enough to give a guy a complex.  ProfessorRoush spent the early summer thinking that the two-year drought had eased, only to watch June and July turn completely dry in this area.  I can't count the number of storm fronts that I've seen split and go north and south of us, or watched as they came in from the west and petered out at the edge of the Flint Hills.  By Sunday, July 28th, this area was 2 inches below our normal July average, 4.92 inches (22.8%) below average for the year.  Tuttle Creek Reservoir, just north of Manhattan, was at a record low elevation of 1074.49 feet.  I was beginning to feel like a pioneer Kansan of the late 1930's, praying for rain,  not for the crops, but so that the six-year-olds can see water fall from the sky.

Then, last Monday morning, July 29th, I started north at 4:30 a.m. for a business trip to Omaha Nebraska.  It began to sprinkle on me when I was 10 miles north of Manhattan and it rained all the way to Omaha (3 hours drive).  According to the paper, by 7 a.m. Monday morning, it had rained 0.98 inches in Manhattan.  By Tuesday at 7 a.m. it had rained another 2.1 inches.  On Wednesday and Thursday there was minimal rain, but Thursday night there was another 1.89 inches.   I came home Friday night to a 5 inch rain gauge by my vegetable garden that had overflowed.  No more deficit presently for 2013. We now have a surplus of 1.85 inches for the year-to-date.

I'm now feeling a little guilty for not leaving town sooner.  We rarely get Spring-quantity rains here in July and August, and if I'd been here watching the storms, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have rained in any measurable quantity.  Others may have recognized my odd recent power over the weather as well.  I texted a friend late Tuesday, saying "Evidently, all I had to do was leave town," and he replied "well, you can come back now, we're drowning."

The result of all this rain in my garden is a previously dormant lawn that now needs mowed, some very happy roses, and the rising dominance of the fungi.  The large one pictured above, and the others sprouts shown here, have popped up in the location that I usually see them, an unusually damp spot along my "viburnum" bed where the grasses are always a bit greener.  I fantasize that it must be the site of an old buffalo wallow.  Or perhaps there is a subterranean spring lurking just below the surface here;  a "dowser" witched out the spot last year and told me I should drive a well there.  I'd have been more impressed by his abilities if the grass where he was standing wasn't emerald green while the grass 10 feet away was as brown and dry as a paper grocery sack.

I'm now afraid that if the weather turns dry again, I'm going to wake up to neighbors with torches and pitchforks ready to run me out of town.  If so, I plan to use this blog as an emergency beacon, so please monitor it closely over the next few months and be ready to rescue me from the lynching townsfolk.  Or just give me a quick ride out of the area.

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.

Three Years and Blogging

Earlier this week, ProfessorRoush noticed the proximity of his third anniversary of blogging on Garden Musings and began toying with the thought of a deep, reflective blog entry to commemorate the occasion.  Since then, I've mulled over ideas and chased after flickering images and begged the garden deities for a theme.  I wanted to find a way to tell you (and me) what I think I've learned from blogging; to tell you how 525 blog entries have changed me and changed my writing and why I may not quite be done.  Alas, a useful blog muse just kept eluding my efforts.   Until Friday morning, that is, as I was leaving for work and experiencing an odd feeling that something was undone.  Something was calling me from the garden. 

Since I was not in a frantic hurry to make a living that morning, I took a moment just to walk out back onto the slightly wet patio and listen to what the garden had to say.  My back garden, softly lit from the glowing dawn and covered in glistening jewels from an early morning sprinkle, waited patiently for me to find its secret.  Glancing around, I focused quickly on a Northern Bayberry, a fine and nondescript green shrub of my landscape, that I otherwise rarely notice.  This time it drew my attention by shouting at me, a dying branch brown against the rest of the thick olive-green foliage, demanding attention.  And there it was, suddenly there.  My blogging metaphor.

Somehow, my garden chose to surprise me once again, as it does over and over, this time unveiling a volunteer Redbud tree within the bayberry, strong, 8 feet tall and healthy.  This adolescent woody treasure must be every bit of three years old and all this time it has been protected from my pruning shears, hidden within the heart of the nurturing bayberry bush.  Despite my claims that I pay close attention to my garden, this stealthy native has exposed the lie, laid bare the fantasy that I'm in charge of my garden.  It is completely out of place, this Redbud, and it will someday demand that the nearby lilac and cherry tree and perennials bow to its dominance, but I can't remove it now.  Such a will to live must only be respected and cherished.

And therein lies the story of this blog.  The entries are sometimes informative and sometimes inane, sometimes funny and sometimes foolish. There are bad pieces that simply bomb, as unsatisfying to me as they must be to you.  But occasionally, just as an occasional surprise to myself, I find a lyrical voice or pen a written phrase that lifts me up and calms my desires.  I hope and believe this is happening more often.  In a personal blog there are no copy writers, no editors to correct my mistakes, no rewriting once the "publish" button is pressed.  As it is cast upon the ether, the writing is either good or it isn't, but there it is.  Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, has made the observation that exceptional talent is not just born, it requires 10,000 hours of practice to arrive.  If he's right, then I have only 9500 more blogs to go before I'm complete.

As I wrote on the day that I started this blog, three years past, I write not out of narcissism or for profit, I write simply because I must write.  If you find it interesting to follow the twists and turns of my mental meanderings, then please, keep reading.  And I'll keep trying to surprise you, just like the shy Redbud popping into my garden.    

Pink Poppy Perfection

During the three short years of existence of this blog and its 520+ entries, I can't believe that I haven't written about or shown you a single photo of one of my favorite garden plants.  At least, I think I haven't, because one sometimes loses track of 500 blog entries and searchable text can only carry me on its back just so far. 

This beautiful salmon-pink pompom is present in my garden as a legacy, a descendant of seed given to my father by the father of a childhood friend of mine, who grew them in a large garden en masse for their "wow" effect every year.  I'm not positive of the exact species, but I suspect that this is a plant sometimes described as Papaver laciniatum, a highly double and deeply lobed variant of the bread poppy.  Notice how carefully I'm dancing around the likely accurate species name?  All I know for sure is that here and there in my garden, when the cold, wet soil is disturbed enough in early spring to allow this annual to take hold and grow, I get these gorgeous flowers back as a gift in mid-summer.  They pop up at random spots for me, often near desirable plants where I slow down my weeding enough to identify what living thing I'm uprooting.  They self-seed effortlessly, and all I have to do is to avoid hoeing them out when they are mere babies.

The plant itself  has a nice blue-green shade and healthy foliage, rarely shows insect damage or fungus, and doesn't care if rain comes often or doesn't come at all.  The leaves are lobed enough to be a mite prickly, although I can pull the plant bare-handed when I need to.  I don't pull them bare-handed though, because if you do, your hand gets covered in the sticky, white sap of the plant.  As they begin to flower, first you see these swelling, drooping buds, which later stand up proudly on their short day of open life.  After the petals fall, the seed head magically becomes a shaker that opens when the seeds dry so that a few seeds are flung by each gust of wind or nudge of a passing animal.  What a perfect plant to place in Kansas; a drought-tolerant self-sowing annual weed that is distributed farther each time the wind gusts get stronger!  Even better, they bloom at the height of heat and summer, as other flowers are fading and before the ornamental grasses claim the garden for their own.

I only regret that I am terrible at sowing them to come up where I want them.  I've tried mass plantings, but I sow them too thickly and they don't thrive, or I sow them too late and then they don't grow, or it is not wet enough for them to get established.  I also suspect that they may need a period of cold stratification to make them start to grow.  Someday, I'll figure out the formula and then I'll have a "wow" factor in my garden too.   Until then, I'm thankful for this passalong plant and the Kansas winds that spread it far.