gardening – Page 10 – grouchyfarmer

Miscellaneous Stuff & Retired?

Cactus

I think Mr. Spiny the cactus is about to bloom! The cactus has been doing really well out there tucked up against the side of the house but it hasn’t blossomed in two years. It is currently loaded with new pads, but I noticed some of the new buds looked different, and may be flowers, not pads. I really hope so. The flowers on this plant are absolutely spectacular.

Whitefish Dunes State Park has become one of my favorite places. It has about 880 acres of shoreline along Lake Michigan up in Door County, and it’s well worth the price of admission. I’m not sure what the cost is because I get a yearly pass as part of my conservation patron license, but I think it’s about $8 for a day pass.

It’s hard to pick out a single photo from the park that is representative of how beautiful it is, but perhaps this one will do:

People seem to think Wisconsin is a rather dull place, with flat land, corn, cows and football. But we have more than 14,000 lakes, plus Lake Michigan. We have cliffs, rivers, forests, water falls… Well, you get the idea.

Alas, I’m not sure how long the state park system is going to continue to exist, though. The current administration down in Madison has cut off all state funding for the park system. It’s only funding now is what it can generate from entrance and camping fees.

Lichen

I continue to be fascinated with lichen for some reason. If I’d ever actually gone to the botany class I signed up for in college I might actually know something about it. But I find the colors, the forms, and everything about it fascinating, and if you’d look through my photo library you’d find a lot of images of lichen and mosses. Most people find the photos rather dull, without the splashy colors of my flower photos, but I think lichen has it’s own unique beauty. Like this, for example

The subtle shadings of greens and yellows and browns, the amazing shapes. Like I said, I’m fascinated with it.

Storms

We’ve been getting a lot of them of late. We’ve had severe thunderstorms roll through here two or three days in a row now, and we’re getting a bit tired of it. Here at the house we’ve avoided the worst of it, but there have been trees taken down, power outages, minor flooding and building damage all over the area with every one of these. It’s kept the SkyWarn people busy, as well as the utility crews trying to keep up with the damage.

I was really glad we had the backup generator yesterday. Power was out for about 45 minutes and if I hadn’t been able to use the generator we’d have ended up with about a foot of water in the basement because of the heavy rains. We got over an inch and a half of rain in about half an hour here. The sump pump was kicking in every 2-3 minutes all the while.

We actually have 2 generators. One is a little 2KW Yamaha inverter that was originally intended just to run the radio equipment for field day or in emergencies for ARES operations. The other is a big Generac 9KW that was intended to power most of the house. The intention originally was to put a big connector on the outside of the house going to the Generac and using it to run the whole house. As long as we don’t use the ovens, turn on every light in the house, etc., it would have enough capacity to keep everything going. But we never got around to installing the bypass switches and connectors necessary. And when we do have a power failure, the little Yamaha can keep the sump pumps going as well as the radios and a few lights. It’s also much, much easier to move around and get started. It also uses a hell of a lot less gas and is much, much quieter.

Roses! The first roses of the season have popped open at last. I’m not a huge rose fan. I like them, but generally I find them a bit fussy and fiddly to deal with. The one we have in the front of the house takes care of itself pretty much. It just keeps coming back year after year, surviving drought, wet, cold, heat…

That’s my kind of plant – just stick it in the ground and ignore it and it takes care of itself.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of plants, we found this incredible tree up in Door County as well when we were up there on Monday. Neither of us had ever seen anything quite like it before. Covered with these beautiful red, white and yellow flowers.. Absolutely breathtaking. I don’t know what it is. Have been too busy (i.e. lazy) to actually do research to look it up.

Retired…

I turned in my resignation at work last week and I am still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I am unemployed. Willingly unemployed. It doesn’t seem right somehow.

Well, it isn’t like I was putting in a lot of hours at the job anyway, to be honest. The position I’ve been in for the last two years or so was part time, and more or less on an “as needed” basis. I worked for events at the theater, filled in when one of the day guys was out sick, or there was a situation that required extra help, that kind of thing. A lot of weeks I didn’t work at all and it was rare for me to put in more than 20 – 30 hours a month.

Still, not having a job? It feels — strange. Feels, oh, not right somehow.

Gardens, Flowers and Mr. Spiny

I never thought I’d have a cactus growing outside in my garden here in Wisconsin, but this is the third year we’ve had Mr. Spiny and he really seems to like it here.

When we pulled this guy out of the compost heap and brought him home I never thought he’d survive more than a single summer. Instead it’s been thriving back there against the wall of the house. When we got him, he wasn’t in real good shape to begin with, but he showed his appreciation for being rescued by putting out brilliant yellow flowers, then embarked on more than doubling his size by shooting out new pads. Then last year he put out more new pads, and this year I counted 40 new pads sprouting off him.

I admit I know nothing about cactus, so him surviving and thriving is due more to him and dumb luck, but I’m pleased. Since we got him, I’ve found the same type of cactus out in Wyoming (found the hard way, I knelt on one. OMG did that hurt!). So if they can survive Wyoming winters, it makes sense that they could survive here.

These guys put on a brilliant show in early summer, but to be honest I don’t really like this plant all that much. The long, pointed leaves flatten down to the ground and look shaggy and unkempt and kind of ratty. But when they flower they do look pretty for a while.

These — I love the flowers, but they’re annoying. The flower stalks are spindly and very tall and tend to fall over. And they’re rather aggressive, getting into everything. Still, they’re really cheerful looking

I’m eagerly awaiting the lilies. They’re loaded with buds this year. Ours are coming a bit late. Some of the neighbors’ are in full flower already, but they’ll be here soon enough.

This guy, he popped up out of nowhere, a “volunteer”, as they call them, I guess. We didn’t plant him. It’s always fun when surprises like this pop up in the garden. Well, sometimes. Sometimes there is stuff you don’t want, like creeping jenny and ragweed, etc. But when something this pretty pops up? It’s delightful. Our maple tree in the back yard was a volunteer, springing up from seed in one of the vegetable beds one year, so we let it grow there for a couple of years, then moved it to a more hospitable area before finally putting it in its permanent location. It’s about 8 inches thick now and 20 feet tall.

Hidden Beauty

Hidden beauty because these pretty little flowers are generally overlooked because they are very small, maybe a quarter to three eighths of an inch across, and because they often grow in a place where people don’t want them, in lawns. I love finding beauty in unexpected places like this. These were growing in grass on an empty lot that’s up for sale here in town.

Farm Catch Up

Organic: Is it, or isn’t it?

There was a rather troubling item released the other day showing about 40% of organic produce tested was contaminated with pesticides that are not permitted for use by organic growers. The article in Wisconsin Agriculturalist talks about the whole organic situation briefly.

While organic growers in the US are fairly well monitored, the same can’t be said for sources outside of the US. And with up to 80% of organics being sold in this country coming from elsewhere, that’s a bit troubling. USDA doesn’t have the staff or funding to do more than token inspections of organics coming into the US and has to rely on certifications and inspections being done in the country of origin. And considering the horrific stories coming out of places like Brazil involving the meat industry, well, let’s jus say that the inspection systems in other countries are a bit problematic and leave it at that.

And am I wrong in this, or was one of the principals of organic farming supposed to be that food should be grown close to where it’s consumed? Organic isn’t just about growing crops without pesticides. It was a whole philosophy of reducing the use of fossil fuels, producing crops in a sustainable manner, tying to keep food production as local as possible. If you’re shipping “organic” produce 5,000 miles in massive container ships or flying it in via cargo plane, how exactly is that “organic” in the first place?

Canola Oil – The Short Story

I ran across this item over on Wisconsin Agriculturist. It’s a brief little item about how canola oil, one of the most important vegetable oils we produce, was originally developed and how it’s become one of Canada’s most important ag products.

It’s an interesting story. Canola oil didn’t even exist until the mid 1970s when plant scientists bred a type of rapeseed plant that lacked the undesirable traits of the original plants, and processing technologies permitted turning the seed of the plant into one of the most widely used vegetable oils we have. The problem rapeseed had originally was that it contained relatively high concentrations of euric acid, which can be toxic in large amounts. The new plants still have some trace amounts of euric acid.

Then, of course, they had to change the name of the stuff because “rapeseed oil” isn’t exactly appealing for consumers, so they came up with the name “canola” for it. The rapeseed plant’s name has nothing to do with acts of violence, but instead comes from the latin word rapum, which means turnip.

Anyway, go give it a read. It’s a nice little article.

In the “What the Hell Is The Matter With Them” department, we have Illinois

It seems that no matter how bad things get here in Wisconsin, we can always indulge in a bit of schadenfreude by looking at our neighbor to the south, Illinois. No matter how corrupt, inefficient, callous and cruel our political system here in Wisconsin has become, we can always look south and say “well, at least we aren’t in Illinois”.

Illinois is in the middle of a financial hell hole of it’s own making. The state just failed to pass a budget. Again. They haven’t had a state budget in two years, and are well on their way to three years in a row without one. The state is operating largely on a serious of short term spending resolutions, court orders forcing it to pay people, and legally mandated debt payments. Other than that, the state is in financial hell as bills continue to pile up, interest piles up, it’s credit rating plunges, and a bond rating that is just one level above junk bond status. The interest payments caused by it’s failure to pay bills promptly is going to cost it almost three quarters of a billion dollars alone.

This didn’t happen overnight, of course. The state (and the city of Chicago) has a long history of playing fast and loose with it’s bookkeeping practices, using accounting tricks to cover things up, postpone paying things into the future, shortchanging it’s pension funds and basically engaging in practices which, if done in the real world, would have ended with a lot of them going to jail for a very long time indeed. It owes it’s pension fund alone something like $129 billion because of it’s fiscal mismanagement. But since it’s the government and they make their own rules, they’ve been getting away with it

For those of us in Wisconsin who are sitting up here chuckling over the misfortune of the FIBs, well, it can happen here. This administration has been fiddling with the books as well, using accounting tricks that would be illegal in the real world to postpone debt payment, borrowing money to prop up the budget, especially the transportation budget. At the moment about 20% of every dollar going into the transportation budget is being used to make payments on past borrowings because the administration hasn’t been willing to fully fund all of the road projects it has mandated. This budget cycle we’re looking at the state borrowing another $500 million to try to keep it’s road projects going.

If you think Illinois can’t happen here, just remember what happened to the money the state got from the settlement with the tobacco company years ago. Wisconsin got almost a billion dollars to settle up with the tobacco industry. The money was supposed to go to health care, tobacco prevention programs, and programs to help people get off of tobacco addiction. It didn’t, of course. The state just flat out stole it, using the money to plug a hole in the state budget.

Weather Related Crop Failures

I haven’t seen a lot of news items about it yet, but we’ve already seen a lot of crop failures due to unusual weather all around the country. In many of the counties around here we’ve seen an almost total failure of the alfalfa crop, with losses as high as 80% or more. Down in Georgia and South Carolina there is a near total failure of the peach crop, with losses as high as 85%. The blueberry crop down there was hit hard as well. Farmers there are looking at a $300 million loss to the fruit crop. Large parts of the midwest have had significant delays in getting the corn and soybean crops in the ground because of abnormally wet weather. Up in Canada one region has been unable to plant tens of thousands of acres of wheat because of wet weather. Down in Australia they’re having the opposite problem, not enough rain, with significant damage to the canola and garbanzo bean crops.

Curiously enough, the commodities markets seem to have been ignoring all of this and there has been little movement in the futures prices except for the usual thrashing up and down a few cents.

Pink Slime Redux

Remember “pink slime”? You may not. It’s been a while since that scandal story hit the airwaves. ABC ran a story about this stuff, “finely textured beef”, that was made from stuff scraped off the bones of cattle, left over from the trimming process, basically stuff that would have otherwise gone into pet food or be thrown out, which was then ground up, had the fat removed from it, was treated with ammonia, and then injected into hamburger, and then they didn’t tell anyone about it. The stuff is… Well, let’s just say it’s not exactly appealing and leave it at that. Even more troubling was the fact that this was being done without any labeling or any indication that something other than normal beef was in your hamburger.

One of the major manufacturers of the stuff was not happy about the story because their sales plummeted, and they sued ABC and several individuals back in 2012, and it’s finally going to be coming to trial. The company is asking for about $1 billion in damages.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this one. Despite everything the company says, I don’t remember ABC claiming anything that wasn’t absolutely true during the report. But the way things are these days, the outcome of the trial is a coin toss, really. Whatever happens it will probably end up in the courts for years with the losing side appealing.

It’s a sad but true fact that you pretty much don’t know what the hell is in the food you buy unless you’re preparing it yourself.

Grain Facility Explodes

A corn processing facility in Cambria Wisconsin exploded, killing two and injuring more than a dozen others. According to the story in the link above, the facility had a history of safety violations, including failing to properly control potentially explosive dust.

These facilities can be extremely dangerous. Grain dust is not just a fire hazard, it is also an explosive. Until government agencies like OSHA clamped down, grain elevators and other grain processing facilities used to explode every year. There is a mill just down the street from my place and until fairly recently it was a running joke that the place burned down every year, and just a few years ago they had a massive fire that had units from a dozen or more fire departments scurrying down our street to try to get it under control. For an entire day after the worst was over, we had water tankers running down our street every 4 minutes (we timed it) to dump water on the smoldering remains.

Irises!

This Tree is Amazing. No words, just photos

click the first photo for the slide show

Garden Stuff

It’s been a ridiculously pleasant day, warm, sunny. But we have thunderstorms moving in now so I have a chance to get caught up here.

The falling petals from the pear flowers almost make it look like it’s been snowing in the backyard. We’ve had better flower coverage last year, but the tree seems to go in two year cycles, a year of ridiculous overabundance, with it being a bit less ridiculously loaded with fruit the next year. Doesn’t matter. Even in a poor year we generally have more fruit than we know what to do with and end up giving away buckets of them in September when they come ripe.

We still haven’t done anything with the raised beds, but that will be coming as soon as this rainy spell passes. It was in the 70s today and it’s supposed to hit the mid-80s tomorrow. That’s only going to be for one day and then they claim it’s going to get back to more normal temperatures.

I wasn’t sure the lilac was going to blossom this year. We hacked it back almost to the ground because it was so badly overgrown, but it’s a good four feet tall now, most of it new growth, and it’s covered with budding flowers. And the smell is absolutely amazing. I love the smell of lilac. It seems just about everyone had a lilac lurking somewhere in their yard because when I walk through town I smell them almost everywhere I go.

I’m not sure how Mr. Spiny manages to survive the winter, but he somehow manages. He needs a good wash, I think, but he did not get the name Mr. Spiny for nothing. You can’t really see them in the photo, but the spines on this guy are absolutely vicious. Maybe use the carwash brush on him? And volunteer poppies are coming up all over back there, too. I frankly don’t know how anything grows back there. The soil is horrible, it gets very little moisture because it’s under the eaves of the house.

One lonely tulip popped up amidst the daffodils. I’d forgotten it was even in there until a single yellow flower popped up the other day. Probably should move him. He’s never going to make it in there.

My wife’s sister gave us some raspberry plants a couple of years ago. We decided to move them last fall, dug them up and planted them in the garden behind the garage. I didn’t think they’d make it. My wife says you couldn’t kill these with a gallon of RoundUp and a flamethrower, and it seems she’s right. Not only did all of them survive they seem to be thriving back there with tons of new growth. I love raspberries, but I have ‘issues’ as they say; diverticulitis. I’m not supposed to eat anything with seeds, nuts, anything with chunks that could get caught in the plumbing, so to speak. But when a fresh raspberry is sitting there all red and juicy… who can resist?

My neighbor’s crazy old apple tree is in full blossom. It needs to be pruned badly but we seem to keep forgetting to do it. Not that the tree seems to mind. It’s loaded with fruit every year.

One of the neat things about this town is that there are fruit trees all over. Walk around a corner and Bam! There’s another burst of white or pink or red color with an apple or pear in full bloom. What a beautiful time of year! May is absolutely amazing.

And speaking of amazing, May is also our wedding anniversary. They said it would never last, and maybe they’re right? It’s only been thirty-seven years now, so we’re still pretty much newlyweds, right?

Garden Updates

Even the local dentist’s office is looking colorful these days. Had to stop and take a picture of these guys. There is color bursting up all over, despite the cold weather we’ve been having.

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Apparently once you have catnip in your garden, you will always have catnip in your garden. We made the mistake of putting one plant in about fifteen years ago, and we’ve been trying to get rid of it ever since. The stuff is ridiculously prolific, spreading all over. Still, the cats do like the stuff when we bring in a few leaves for them. They roll around on it, sit on it, rub their faces on it, then fall asleep for two hours. Great fun.

I’m looking forward to seeing these guys come into blossom. These asiatic lilies usually put on a spectacular show later in the season.

This is our lettuce/greens bed. About four feet across, this circular, partly shaded bed provides us with more than enough lettuce and fresh greens during the season. It’s a bit early, but MrsGF seeded this one over the weekend. I dumped about 4 inches of compost on the bed earlier and worked it in so we’re hoping for better results than we had last year. We had plenty of greens for salads, but the growth was a bit disappointing. The nice thing about this bed is that it’s partly shaded which helps to keep the lettuce from bolting before we can use it. We generally re-seed in late summer so we keep getting fresh growth right up until frost in the late fall.

This bed was a motley collection of — of stuff. And the soil was absolutely terrible. MrsGF was very fond of some of the flowers in here, but even she had to admit it needed to be worked up and replanted. We removed old growth, transplanted some root stock she wanted to save, and then worked it up with the tiller, hauled in about 6 inches of compost, worked that in, and she’s put in a mixture of different flowers. I’m looking forward to this. She put in a section of alyssum which smell absolutely heavenly when they come into bloom.

It’s hard to believe how fast the hostas are growing. Just two weeks ago this plant was little more than a couple of green spikes sticking out of the ground. Even with temperatures dropping to freezing overnight they’ve been growing like crazy. I don’t know how some of these plants survive the frost. It’s been down to 28 degrees at night around here for the last few days.

Then there is these little guys. They pop up in the most unexpected and sometimes ridiculous places, and I always have to smile when I see one. I love their color, their texture, like dark purple velvet and then that burst of yellow in the center. This little stinker popped up right in the middle of the lawn.

Pear Blossoms And More Little Purple Thingies

The pear tree is coming into full blossom. This dopy tree never ceases to amaze me. It is gnarled, misshapen, leans over at about a 35 degree angle and any arborist would wince at the sight of it. But holy cow, does it produce pears! Some of the most delicious, luscious pears I’ve ever had. We look forward to mid to late September when the fruit gets ripe. At their peak the pears are so sweet, so juicy and lush they melt in your mouth when you eat them. Alas, while they are amazing for eating fresh, they’re terrible for canning because the buttery texture that makes them so delightful for eating fresh means they disintegrate when canned. They do make great jam, though!

We tend to ignore the goofy little bushes on the north side of the house. They are generally rather nondescript and often annoying because they grow like nuts and have to be trimmed frequently, and some of them have vicious thorns on them. But every once in a while this one decided to bloom. Tiny little lavender-purple blossoms that are so small they’re easy to completely ignore.

They’re sort of like, well, people. Even the most ordinary, the most nondescript, have incredible beauty within them if you look past the surface.

Hostas! And Little Purple Thingies!

I love hostas. Easy to take care of, can survive a variable climate. The flowers, well, they

Every single one came back! I am enormously pleased. They’re looking wonderful.

don’t do very good in the flower department, but that’s not why I grow them. It’s the foliage. Over the years growers have developed dozens of different varieties with a huge assortment of different types of foliage; yellow, striped, speckled, different shades of green, different leaf shapes. They’re great fun.

A couple of years ago I ripped out the entire front mess between the house and the sidewalk and put in a hosta bed. Even went to a professional hosta grower to get the plants. Spent way too much money. And much to my surprise, every single one of them has been doing beautifully up there, surviving the cold, the rain, the snow, the ice. Great plants, hostas.

Was out walking with MrsGrouch (She’s not really a grouch, just the opposite, but this is Grouchyfarmer.com, so what, I should call her Mrsdotcom?) and we ran into these and I had to take a photo. In an otherwise totally nondescript front yard, this cluster of brilliance was sitting there near a step, this tightly packed cluster of brilliant joy… Wow.