Bursting with Promise

No, this is not a photograph of a psychedelic alien landscape from a light-lifetime away, nor is it a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  I promise that neither Gene Wilder nor Johnny Depp is going to pop up from those hairy green pillows and sing to you.  And for those who were young adults in the 70's, you should not worry that this is a flashback from an old LSD trip.  This candy-colored scene is brought to us by way of a 1956 single-flowered peony introduction by Falk-Glassock, the aptly named 'Scarlet O'Hara'.

I'm not intentionally trying to imitate Bob Guccione, but these are, in fact, the....ahem....sex parts...from one of my earliest and most favorite peonies.  And what a brazen display Ms. O'Hara is giving us!  She has erected bright red walls to enclose and protect the participants in today's drama.  Inside the scarlet petals, tall golden stamens loaded with pollen are crowded around the shockingly-pink stigmas atop each pistil, a beacon to beckon the bachelors forward.  The swollen pistils beneath the stigmas are already soiled, basking in the afterglow, their hairy buxom surfaces dusted with the golden packages of chromosomes.  I'm not even going to mention the presence of the white foam at the base of the pistils.   But can't you feel the excitement in this photo, the promise of new seed forming and new life beginning?

'Scarlet O'Hara' is a peony that should be in everyone's garden, She stands right now about 3 feet tall, and wide, a crimson beacon shining across my garden.  There is no other scarlet red flower blooming right now for me, and certainly nothing to match the size and vivacity of these 6 inch diameter blossoms.  The photo of the whole plant at the right displays the usual poor reproduction of red tones by a digital camera and it doesn't adequately communicate the true brilliance of color of this peony, but it does give you an idea of the impact of these flowers in a landscape otherwise filled only with green Spring foliage, the blues and golds of irises and the white clusters of a few remaining viburnum blossoms.

Perhaps a  recent wide-angle view of my "peony bed" will emphasize the importance of 'Scarlet O'Hara in the garden.  There she is, at the top of the photo, glowing ahead of the hundreds of bulging buds of other peonies, all aching to follow her lead and explode into 2015.  'Scarlett' O'Hara' exposes promise for us on a microscopic level; the promise that reproduction will always go on, au naturel and without shame for appearance or wantonness.  The other peonies of this bed show their own macroscopic promise of a massive display a year in the making, a spectacular future fireworks created from sunshine and rain and chlorophyll.  Over it all, a concrete cherub urges the peonies to turn their bacchanalia into a more quiet party, to turn a pretentious display into a coordinated and respectful celebration.  Behind the camera, ProfessorRoush, garden voyeur extraordinaire, breathlessly awaits the chorus to come.      

Promise within and promise without.  Of countless such moments, a garden made.

Cynical Composting

Some years back, ProfessorRoush ran across some compostable water bottles at a Starbucks in Seattle and, because of the skepticism deeply embedded in my academic soul, I thought it would be a neat idea to try to bring them back in my luggage and test their compost-worthiness at home.  Unfortunately, the TSA must have deemed the empty bottles in my checked bags as a potential terrorist threat because the bottles were not in my suitcase upon my arrival at home.

I was more fortunate last year when I ran into these certified compostable cups at a pizza parlor in Fort Collins, and I was able to ultimately get them into my 65 gallon Lifetime tumbling compost bin by sneaking them home in my car past the marijuana-alert sentries on the Kansas border.

These Eco-Product® cold cups are, as printed on the cups, certified by the BPI, or Biodegradable Products Institute, to be compostable in a municipal or commercial composting facility.  The BPI is a "multi-stakeholder association of key individuals and groups from government, industry and academia"....that tests products by written ATSM standards and certifies them.  I should reveal here that whenever I see the popular buzzword "stakeholder" these days, my cynical hackles are immediately raised and my blood pressure rises.  Materials tested by the BPI must include the ability to "biodegrade at a rate comparable to yard trimmings, food scraps and other compostable materials, such as kraft paper bags," and they must "disintegrate, so that no large plastic fragments remain to be screened out."

I placed the new cups pictured in the top photo into my tumbling compost bin on 5/26/2014, along with mature compost and grass clippings.  You can see immediately above this paragraph several periodic photos taken over last summer, a time span when numerous additions of kitchen scraps, grass clippings, other organic materials, and water were composted in the pile alongside these cups.  The cups did not disintegrate, as you can see, although they flattened and tore, probably from the repeated tumbling alongside wet and heavy clumps of compost.  The organic materials in the bin repeatedly became decent, black homogeneous compost with which any gardener would be happy.

This week, almost 11 months after the start of the experiment, I again opened the compost bin and found the cups as photographed yesterday and shown at right.  Now, in fairness, I should note that the BPI website states clearly that these products are not meant for home compost piles, but only for "well-managed municipal and commercial facilities."  Home composters "typically do not generate the temperatures needed to assure rapid biodegradation of this new class of materials. For this reason, claims are limited to larger facilities."

That's all well and good, friends, and I can accept that ProfessorRoush is likely a terrible composter, but shouldn't we at least expect that now, 11 months later, the ink would faded and illegible?

Furthermore, and while I'm on a rant, what exactly constitutes an "acceptable municipal facility?"  Does my local county recycling facility, which routinely composts leaves and other materials, qualify?  It isn't listed at the findacomposter.com website printed on the cups, nor is any other facility within 50 miles of me.  How many of these cups would actually make it into a "well-managed commercial facility" anyway, rather than just being tossed into the restaurant waste cans with all the other debris and taken to the usual county shredding facilities?  How much more energy and chemical processing is involved in making these cups over the standard red plastic cups that we love to make so much fun of?  Which is more likely to be recycled and have the least long-term environmental impact?  Is this merely more marketing misinformation to muddle the minds of the masses?

I can't help thinking that while compostable cups make us all feel good, this whole certification system seems designed just to keep us from noticing the man behind the curtain while we slurp the Koolaid of environmental ecstasy.  It is only a matter of time before we'll hear offers for a free carton of these cups with every thousand carbon credits we purchase.

Snakes, Rats, Rain, and Thunder

Mindful of President Bush's somewhat premature declaration of victory in Iraq over a decade back, I'm not ready to declare victory against the pack rats, but I'm winning.  My current casualty count is up to eight pack rats with the addition of a nice plump peanut-butter loving rodent this morning.

However, during my disposal of said carcass from the battlefield, I glanced down to find this quite docile little cutie trying to hide next to the rocks.  There's no size scale to the picture below, so you probably can't tell that he was only about a foot long .  If he was contemplating swallowing the nearby pack rat carcass whole, then I'll give him credit for courage because that would be quite a feat for a pencil-thin snake.

This is a ringneck snake (Diadophis punctatus), probably a southern ringneck (D. p. punctatus).  It lives almost everywhere in the United States, but is nocturnal and seldom seen because it spends most of it's time hidden under rocks, logs, or debris during the day.  I've seen exactly three in my lifetime.  This one, another little 4 inch long baby that was under a stepping stone that I moved last week, and the third, another small one seen about 8 years back when I lifted a stone.  Are my two recent sightings a coincidence or a sign of increasing population density?  Gracious, perhaps it was caused by global warming!

In Kansas, a long-term mark-recapture study of snakes was performed by naturalist Henry Sheldon Fitch (1909-2009), the former Superintendent of the University of Kansas Natural History Reservation.   Professor Fitch estimated that ringneck snakes commonly exist at densities greater than 700-1800 per hectare (2.47 acres) in this area, suggesting that on my 20 acres there are likely over 6000 of these little guys slithering around.  Thank God that I'm no longer scared of snakes, partially desensitized after a zillion encounters with them here on the prairie.  Ringneck snakes are both predator and prey in this ecosystem, and mildly venomous due the presence of a Duvernoy's gland behind their eye, but of no danger to humans. They eat earthworms, slugs, amphibians, lizards, and other small snakes during their nightly forages.  If you want to know more about how many snakes are likely living in my backyard, you can read Professor Fitch's paper, Population Structure and Biomass of Some Common Snakes in Central North America  online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.  Just don't tell me about it because I'm probably better off if I don't know the actual numbers of other snake species around me.

I wish now that I would have reached down and given this little guy a nudge (with a stick of course), because the dull brown top of his body hides a beautiful yellow underbelly that they expose when touched.  On second thought, however, maybe I'll just keep from forming a habit of poking snakes.  With 6000 of them around, you never know what they might dream up together as a form of revenge.

One final thought; the drought seems to be ending here today.  At noon today we had a year-to-date total of 5 inches of rain, with a deficit-to-date of 2.95 inches.  But it rained buckets all afternoon and the local news at 9:00 said an official total of 3.65 inches fell today in Manhattan and it is still raining tonight.  Even better, there are chances of rain (good chances!) for 6 of the next 7 days.  It will take about that much to refill the groundwater reservoirs here, so you won't hear me complaining until the day I need to start building an ark; or until the pack rats and snakes float into the house, whichever comes first.

Pack Rat War; The Second Front

Okay, okay.  I'll end your suspense over the two unaccounted pack rat deaths that I claimed in my last post.

Sometime in late January, I noticed that my John Deere tractor (which I had thought was safely housed in the barn adjacent to the donkey stall) seemed to be sprouting wisps of hay around it.  Hay that I initially thought was just stray debris from carrying bales around it while feeding the donkeys. At one point, however, I chanced to lift the hood off the tractor and found the entire engine compartment stuffed with hay, and bits of donkey food, and rat droppings, and, most irritating of all, blocks of unchewed rat poison that I had placed in the barn this fall to guard against such an occurrence.

Further investigation revealed that there was a pack rat midden growing beneath a mower deck against the wall, and that my tractor was merely a forward position for the pack rat duo who had evidently made my barn their home.  I also realized, as I began to clean out the engine, that a lot of wiring had been chewed bare by the pack rats in their quest for food.  Revenge fueled by anger became my quest.  If they wanted to be fed, then so be it.  I banished the donkey's from the barn, sealed it, and placed out a more enticing table of D-Con pellets mixed with peanut butter.  The initial offering, two entire trays of poison, disappeared in the first night.  Three days later, no more food was disappearing.  At that point, I celebrated my partial victory, kept the barn sealed (sorry, donkeys), and awaited warmer weather.

Recently, I reentered the battlefield, cleared all the debris from the tractor by hand, coated the bare wires with electrical tape, replaced several wiring connectors, and then, with a hose running nearby and several fire extinguishers at hand, I started the tractor quickly and moved it from the barn for a more further cleaning.  Once the tractor was safe, albeit jury-rigged, I backed it into the barn and moved equipment around until I could lift the mower deck off the midden and destroy it.  I found the pair of pack rats at the center, long dead, and I unceremoniously tossed them out into the prairie.

In retrospect, I should have recognized that something was out of hand when I first noticed these cute footprints in the dust on the seat of my tractor.  The brazen little thieves obviously had no concerns about leaving evidence behind that would enable me to track their crime spree.

And, for those now wondering if it was wise for me to throw rat carcasses full of poison onto the prairie, you should know that I had no problems with pack rats in my tractor last year when I had two wonderful cats living in the barn during the winter.  Two wonderful cats that were  likely casualties of the coyotes that roam the prairie at night.  The same coyotes that might just possibly chew on a rat carcass or two if they came across them.  In unconditional war, one uses every weapon available to win.