Skinking around

My fears were misplaced but not entirely misdirected.  Last Saturday, ProfessorRoush set out to move 26-or-so landscaping concrete blocks that surround his trees and protect them from too-close-string-trimmers and fire-bug neighbors.  Specifically, the blocks of interest were around a Black Gum tree that HAD been damaged by a prairie fire and around a Sugar Maple that was snapped in half during a storm last year, and I wanted to move them to be around two still-living trees which were without even that inadequate means of protection.  Knowing that the blocks had been in place for several years and had likely become the adopted home of a prairie snake or two, I was carefully flipping them over one-by-one, constantly poised to take flight in the event of a slithering serpent.

By approximately block #13 or so, I had become complacent, having encountered only some ant nests and the occasional beetle.  Just as I relaxed, of course, lifting block #15 casually and with no trepidation at all, the slinking skink pictured at the top came flying past my pant legs, causing me to fling the block isideways while briskly backpedaling from the area. 

This is, of course, a Northern Prairie Skink, Eumeces septentrionalis.  I identified it from the from the marvelous text, Amphibians and Reptiles in Kansas, by Joseph T. Collins.  I've seen them here before, but not in the numbers that I encountered last Saturday when I found that blocks #15-26 covered a colony of a minimum five adult skinks, some of which just tried to burrow deeper as I disturbed their chilly environs (as you can see by the tail visible in the picture at right.  They are carnivorous reptiles, not amphibians as I originally thought them to be, eating insects and spiders and small lizards as their normal diet. Despite my initial panic when they appear, I always go out of my way to leave them as undisturbed as possible so they can continue to compete in their ecological niche.  After all, a skink in the stones beats a snake in the grass anytime, in my opinion.   God knows, I've got enough of the latter around.     

My Amphibians and Reptiles in Kansas is the 1993 third edition, published through funds from the Chickadee Checkoff, a special contribution we can make on our Kansas tax returns that is directed to natural resources in the state.  The text may be authored by Mr. Collins of the Natural History Museum in Lawrence, Kansas, but the wonderful color photographs, a change in the 3rd edition from the previous black and white editions, were contributed by Suzanne L. Collins, she likely an enlisted and long-suffering spouse much like the delightful Mrs. ProfessorRoush is for me.  Where, I ask you, would science sometimes be without a more-or-less-willing spouse content to carry a camera and go through heck and back alongside the focused fool leading the expeditions?

I Just Love Spring!

There is nothing quite like the satisfaction of a gentle, lamb-like spring easing into summer.  The world reborn, brown changed into green, rainbows all over the landscape.  Crocus yielding to forsythia bowing to redbud and magnolias, ceding to viburnums.  Peonies budding up to be the next star in the garden beds.  The feel of warm sunshine on skin, the smell of damp earth stirred by fingers, the cold undulations of disturbed earthworms in turned soil.  Sore muscles unused from winter, aching rough hands, and a tired gardener each night.  Yes, there is nothing like a good spring.

Spring continues here in full force, best evidenced by the fantastic bloom this year of our purple wisteria, a mere generic Wisteria sinensis, but a pleasant surprise for Mrs. ProfessorRoush when she discovered it.  She told ProfessorRoush she liked the fragrance of his yellow wisteria more, causing some confusion on his part since he doesn't have any yellow wisteria and had never heard of the existence of  yellow wisteria.  As it turned out, Mrs. ProfessorRoush was confusing the name "wisteria" with "forsythia," further confusing ProfessorRoush because he doesn't remember his forsythia having much fragrance.  Ah, the perplexities of long marriages of dissimilar interests.

Still further confusion ensued later, when intrigued, I decided to search the internet for yellow wisteria.  There are fabulous pictures everywhere on the internet of bright yellow pendulous blooms labeled Yellow Chinese Wisteria (which I want lusted for instantly), and offers for seed from any number of irreputable sources, but no descriptions of yellow wisteria from either more scientific sources or offers of grown plants by reputable nursery wholesalers.  Wisteria, I maintain, likely only comes in white, lavenders and blues, and offers to purchase seed for the mystical yellow forsythia are likely hoaxes, but I'm happy to be educated if I'm wrong.

I've stayed busy in the garden this week.  One major project for me this year is to mulch many of the beds with straw.  For years, I have mulched most of my larger garden with lawn clippings, but because of all the dust I raised last summer during mowing, which continued into the first mowing this year, I think this year the lawn needs the clippings more than the garden beds.  Maybe a year's worth of thatch will begin to restore my prairie.  Besides, don't the lilacs look happy at the anticipation of far more moisture conservation and cooler soils from me than they've know in the past?  I think so.  That 4 inches of packed straw will eliminate any weeding this year and maybe the next in this bed. One bed down, six to go. 

Showing the Crazy

 ProfessorRoush has missed posting a couple times this week.  I have not been entirely idle in the garden but there didn't seem like there was much to tell.  Some early henbit needed mowing, so the lawn mower was fired up and the mulching plug put in.  I loaded up the trailer and brought home 16 bales of straw to use as garden mulch.  That seems like a lot, but there will be a lot more this year since I'm mulching everything with straw and putting the lawn clippings on the dusty lawn.  And I noticed my Paeonia tenuifolia is blooming and snagged the bumble picture at the upper right.  Notice how full his pollen basket is and yet, he continues to harvest the bountiful yellow pollen in a bee-frenzied fit of gluttony.

Yesterday, I also did the craziest thing I've done in the garden in ages.  While purchasing the straw at a local garden center, I couldn't resist the swan call of these two plants, a Crimson Sweet Watermelon, photo at left, and the Ball 2076 muskmelon pictured below.

 Normally, I plant these from seed sometime in June, but they begged me incessantly to take them home.  I checked the 10 day forecast, saw no nighttime temperatures below 42ºF, and so decided that this year, if by some miracle they survived, I might be able to beat the local markets for homegrown melons and thus not be too late to gain Mrs. ProfessorRoush's admiration and gratitude.  Previously, by the time my seed grown melons are ripe, she has already bought several at the local markets and is sick of them, leaving me dejected and without praise.

Some of the straw went to mulch the garden all around the melons; at least the ground around them will stay nice and moist and cool all summer and I'll be able to avoid weeding among the vines.  If I'm lucky, the straw will also make it harder for the rabbits to find these melons.

Early bloomers continue to pop up everywhere in the garden since the frost has stayed away for a week or more.  My Red Peach is a bright beacon in the back of the garden, a standout in the evening sun.  Alas, last year in a storm, I lost the red peach tree in front of the house, pictured in the link, but this one is doing just fine.

And, to my surprise, I noticed this iris blooming (here, right and below, left) yesterday.  I have it planted in a corner of the vegetable garden, an experiment from when we just moved to the prairie which I never got around to  transplanting into a perennial bed.  I don't know it's name, but here it is, in a hurry to be the first, several weeks ahead of my other iris.

Viburnums are blooming too; at least some of them, but that's another story for a later time.  Check back here soon and I'll tell you that tale just as soon as I solve the mystery of why some are MIA.

Burned the Cold Away

Sunday morning, bright, sunny, and my Iris tectorum variegata is a standout in the garden.  I just love the way these green and yellow leaves catch and amplify the sunlight in the early spring.  Every year, I divide and spread this iris across my garden, now 10 clumps from the original one.  It's one of the few plants that I grow specifically for the joy of the foliage rather than the flowers.  Although the flowers of I. tectorum are nothing to sneeze at since they are plenty fragrant as well!



My neighbors and I burned our little spot of prairie yesterday.  The burn went well, a decent wind for headfires but under control when we were careful, and there were no mishaps like last year when my neighbor burned out one of my small apple trees.   It was the second really cold morning (approximately 32ºF) of the week and as there are no other mornings in the immediate forecast that cold, I think we can truthfully say we burned away the last of winter, in many, many ways.   The ground, now black and foreboding, will quickly warm and in two weeks it will be a carpeted vision of Eden. Thankfully, no more frost is in the immediate forecast because I had three gallon-size roses come in last week for planting and I've got several more coming this week.  Yesterday, I planted "La Ville de Bruxelles', 'Park Wilhelmshone', and 'Rosalina', a damask, modern gallica, and Hybrid Rugosa respectively, and then covered all three plants with glass cloches which I will remove in the mornings of next week when we have 80º highs predicted.

At last, Mrs. ProfessorRoush's favorite tree is blooming, the redbud outside the kitchen and laundry room.  I always think of redbuds as the real start of the garden year, this major landscape tree associated in my mind with so many other garden chores (the start of asparagus, the timing of crabgrass preventer, etc).  Pictured here with 'Annabelle' lilac, also just beginning to bloom, the redbud is as late as I've noted before, on a par with 2005 and 2006 for bloom time.  Our late spring continues on the Kansas prairie.