Dung Beetles

Ladies and Gentlemen, gardening friends of all ages, I bring you today, for the first time to be witnessed by many of your naive eyes, that most industrious of insects, creatures without which the world would be in a sh**storm of trouble.  I bring you the lowly dung beetle.

Look how busy Frick and Frack dung beetle are.  They had formed this almost perfectly round ball of cow or donkey manure (likely since those are the major source of poop in the area) and they were rolling it across a 15 foot asphalt road in the hot afternoon sun.  Why they didn't build their home on the same side of the street as the poop, I'll never know.  I'd love to tell you what species these guys are, but since there are several subfamilies of dung beetles in the superfamily Scarabaeoidea, and more than 5000 species in the subfamily Scarabaeinae alone, I don't have a chance of even coming close.  For some fun dung beetle facts, consider the following:

a)  There are three groups of dung beetles;  rollers (like the ones above), tunnelers (who bury the dung wherever they find it, and dwellers (who just live in the manure).
b)  A dung beetle can bury dung 250 times its weight in a single night.
c)  Dung beetles are the only insect known to navigate using the Milky Way.
 d) It is likely that this ball of crap I photographed is intended as a brooding ball; two beetles, one male and one female, stay around the brooding ball during rolling, the male doing all of the work (as usual).  When they find a spot with soft soil, they bury the ball and then mate underground so the female can lay eggs in it.
e)  The successful introduction of 23 species into Australia resulted in improvement and fertility of Australian cattle pastures and reduction in the population of bush flies by 90%.
f)  If the idea of these things grosses you out, try and remember that the Egyptians worshipped the scarab, a dung beetle.

Hey, waste collection is a lousy job, but somebody has to do it.

Here and Gone

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of hosting a tour group of gardeners from Omaha for a brief period.  They scheduled a tour of the KSU Gardens through the Chamber of Commerce and had asked to visit a couple of "large gardens" while they were in Manhattan.  So a little over a hundred gardeners suddenly descended on my garden this past Saturday evening. 

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

They seemed to enjoy the visit.  Sadly, the roses were all almost gone, with 'American Pillar', at left, bringing up the rear as usual.  Some Asiatic lilies were beginning to bloom and some late, frozen over roses were blooming out of turn.   I heard "beautiful" a number of times and I answered questions as fast as I could.

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

When a group of unsuspecting gardeners encounters a rose zealot in his natural environment, they risk an epidemic of glazed eyes and aural exhaustion.  That's me, holding forth on the right of this photo.









I was most often questioned about this plant, a giant fleeceflower or knotweed (Persicaria polymorpha), slightly drowned by the last rain storm, but still a spectacle in the garden.  You can read more about Persicaria in a blog later this week.

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

Bella, our not-so-new-now-puppy, was excited by the visit and all the new people she got to meet.  That right ear seems to flop up whenever she gets bouncy.  But doesn't she stand with pretty lines?

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

The tour group was here, and then just as quickly gone on their buses, but they left behind a nice gift certificate that I used to purchase two new daylilies and a hollyhock.

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

The garden is quiet again.  All the photographs here, except for the Persicaria, were taken by a family friend, Ben Brake, whom Mrs. ProfessorRoush imposed on at the last minute.  Ben can be seen with a camera at every K-State sports function toting a Nikon camera that makes me salivate and he's pretty good at it, don't you agree?  Photos of people enjoying the garden are always so nice to view again after the frenzy is over.

 

Intuited Love

'Red Intuition'

This, friends, is the rose that ProfessorRoush has been waiting for.  I don't recall where or how, but somewhere last year, I came across a picture of 'Red Intuition'.  Given my fondness for striped roses, it was inevitable that this one would eventually grow in my garden.  I bided my time over the past year, staring daily at the post-it note above my phone with only its name listed in my poor penmanship.  And this Winter, while ordering roses for the current season, I obtained it from Palatine roses in Canada.  

And ever since then, I've been waiting still.  The bare-root, grafted rose came on time, went straight into the ground, and began to leaf out.  I had a brief scare with our very late April frost, which knocked it back a bit even though I had covered it up overnight, but it shook off the frostbite and eventually sent up a bud.  A bud that opened slightly 3 days ago, as you can see below at the left, and then proceeded to tease me petal by petal until today, in the late afternoon, when it was finally fully open (as above) and met all my expectations.

'Red Intuition' is recorded as discovered in France by Guy Delbard in 1999, and introduced in 2004. It is patented in the US as DELstriro.  The rose is described as red, with dark red streaks, stripes, and flecks, and double with 31 to 39 petals (it's also listed as having 17-25 petals on the same page of helpmefind.com).  It's a large bloom of about 4.5" diameter, borne solitary or in small clusters.  The bush is described as tall, nearly thornless, and with semi-glossy foliage.  'Red Intuition' is a sport of 'Belle Rouge' (or DElego), a 1996 Hybrid Tea by Delbard.

'Red Intuition' is certainly a beautiful rose all on its own, but my interest in it goes far deeper than its stripes.  There is a "lost" Griffith Buck Hybrid Tea rose that Dr. Buck patented and named 'Red Sparkler' and I'm playing a hunch.  I've only seen one really poor picture of it (the same picture is reproduced everywhere), and to my eyes it was the splitting image of 'Red Intuition'.  Official notes indicate that 'Red Sparkler' was the same 4.5" diameter size as 'Red Intuition' and had a similar number of petals, but it differs in that it is listed as a velvety red rose with pink AND WHITE stripes so maybe I'm all wet.   My concern is that 'Red Intuition' has leathery, semi-glossy foliage, while 'Belle Rouge' reportedly has glossy foliage, so if 'Red Intution' is a sport of the latter, it was a double sport, both in foliage and in flower color. That would be darned unusual.  Add that to a rumor that Dr. Buck is rumored to have sent bud wood of 'Red Sparkler' to Europe at one time and maybe you can understand why I'm going to get a plant of 'Belle Rouge' and grow it right next to my 'Red Intuition' to compare the foliage.  Just in case the lost rose isn't really lost.

Made in the Shade

ProfessorRoush has had a busy week of gardening with more to come.  In addition to last weekend and the evenings, I took a couple of days off work so that I could exhaust myself in the garden.  Two days, sunup to sundown, and I'm tanned like a tanning-bed addict.  No, now don't get too excited, girls.  Only on my arms, face and neck.  My snow white legs are the really titillating image.  A classic "farmer's tan" on a gardener.

It's time to unveil  the skeleton of a project which began on delivery of a large package last Wednesday.  There, down in the vegetable garden.  Do you see it?  I'm not going outside on this rainy Saturday morning to give you a better view, but how about the closeup below?  Sorry about the window screen in the way, but that's a frame for a shade house, amazingly and partially erected by yours truly.




I can live without many things in my garden, but I'm tired of growing a nice crop of strawberry plants each spring and then watching them burn to a crisp in July and August.  So I resolved this year to build a shade house to help the plants get through the brutal Kansas sun so that I can enjoy a proper harvest next year.  This shade house is 24'X14' and covers the entire patch.  Using a sledgehammer for the first time in a decade, I drove the 14 posts down through the rock and clay all by myself in a single evening.  Well to be honest, I drove 10 of them and I dug and cemented the 4 corner posts in place to help hold the house down against the occasional tornado.  Chalk up one victory for the aging gardener!   Right now I estimate the first ten years of strawberries will work out to about $1/berry.

By no means is this the end of my gardening week, either.  Today, over 100 gardeners from Omaha are visiting my garden.  They came down to Manhattan to see the KSU Gardens and ended up asking the Chamber of Commerce to visit a couple of "large" local gardens.   My garden may not qualify as unique or educational, but "large" got me on the list.  The garden, despite the waning roses and the long gone irises and peonies, is in about as good a shape as I've ever had it after a week of effort.  And to top it off, tomorrow is the annual Manhattan Area Garden Show and I'm the roving photographer for it.  My gardening week will end Sunday night, and for once I'll be glad to leave the garden and go back to paying work!