A Beautiful Day for a Burn!

We interrupt the "Tolerating the Uglies" series to bring you this news flash:  Today was an absolutely perfect day for a prairie burn!

It is VERY dry here, so I was a little hesitant, but the conditions were so perfect that we held our breaths and went ahead with our plans.  The winds stayed under 10 mph and were fairly steady from the SW (as predicted), Greg had recruited a couple techs from his clinic, and (most crucial of all) it was a weekend day.  During Kansas springtimes, it's a rare occurrence to have good winds and weather, the free time to burn, AND help with burning all come together!

Greg had mowed the firebreak last weekend, so the only necessary prep this morning was to gather the rakes, shovels, water buckets, burlap sacks, and water packs, then to stretch out the hoses.  We called in the burn permit...and we were off!

We started the burn very slowly and relied on backfiring the entire time to keep things under control.  This kept the flames about 3' high and moving slowly, instead of the lightning fast and 10-15' tall they probably would have been if they had been moving with the wind.

Greg and Pat went along the north and west sides; Justin and I took the east and south sides.  Our job was to patrol the edge of the fire at the firebreak, making sure that the flames didn't move out into the mowed area very far, which would have risked the fire jumping over the firebreak and getting out of control.  The fire basically burned from northeast to southwest, directly into the wind.

When we were done, our privacy from the road was totally gone, but the black ashes will absorb the springtime rays of the sun and heat up the soil.  The nutrients in the ashes will fertilize the soil, too.  With some rain (hopefully coming on Wednesday), we should be seeing green sprouts and then lush growth before long!

Many, many thanks to Chris, Justin, and Pat for their help!

A Wintery Mix

Saturday brought us the legendary "wintery mix" of precipitation.  Luckily the weather forecasters had seen it coming, because the temperatures dropped along with the precipitation and it's likely to be several more days until the roads are clear again.  We made sure that we had the basics ahead of time so we were able to relax and cocoon all day Sunday.

Cocooning didn't mean confining myself to the house all day, though.  The clouds moved out around noon; mid afternoon found me outside, seeing what I could photograph to share before wind and cold drove me back inside.

Truthfully, I'm glad that we got the moisture, even if it came in a less-than-gentle form and is limiting our mobility a bit for a while.  We've been getting pretty dry.

Everything looked soft and tranquil....

...but certain angles showed the reality beneath the fluffy snow: about 1/4" of ice, coating absolutely everything.

At times like this, thick evergreens are particularly important as shelter for wildlife.  Eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana), our only native evergreen out here on the prairie, is particularly valuable in weather conditions like this.  In the hedge by our driveway, there were all sorts of mammal tracks along and underneath these trees, as well as signs that birds were roosting in the refuge of the thick branches.

Looking across the front tallgrass, colors were rich but the snow seemed muted - captured and contained by the tall prairie grasses covering the soil.  There won't be much runoff here, as the grasses will hold the snow in place as it melts, allowing the soil to absorb the precious moisture.

Behind the house, one of our cats had walked boldly out, through the Courtyard hedge, into the grasses of the Beyond....

...without even stopping to investigate the myriad twisting strands of bird tracks that meandered between and around the plum bushes which grow under the Amur maples that anchor the Courtyard hedge.

A feather on the snow added a small, rather dramatic spot of color and texture....

Skeins of geese laced the sky....

The path to the Back 5 cut through the Indian grass and big bluestem of the Beyond...

...then crossed the draw...

...and skirted the edge of the big grove of redcedars in the Cedar Grove.

On the south end of the Cedar Grove, a pair of redcedars caught the evening sun and looked like rich Christmas trees glinting in a story book tale.

I think we're actually going to have a white Christmas this year.

 

Rock-A-Bye...Raccoon?

One advantage to owning two large German shepherds when you live out in the country is that they HAVE to have their morning walkabout.  In the last several weeks, we've had several "cold" snaps, accompanied by snow or freezing rain or ice pellets.  These are definitely NOT considered sufficient reason to stay inside by The Boys.  It doesn't matter how ugly the weather is, they need a bit of romp time...and so I "suit up" to suit the weather and out we go.

Although it's hard to convince myself of the positive side of these walks when I'm donning waterproof shoes and wind-and-rain-resistant coat, facing cold winds that will cut through everything I have on, I do get to see some things that I'd probably miss otherwise. 

Sometimes I even have my camera along to capture the experience.  Here, for example, is one such time....

Look closely at this photo.  See anything much besides a bunch of snags and last year's dead plant stems, waiting to decompose?  I took this photo a week ago, on the day we woke up to snow.  This was taken about mid morning, after most of the snow had melted but while the temperatures were still quite chilly.

Look more closely at the center of the photo, right at the top of the broken black willow, where the top part of the trunk heads downwards at 90%.  (Yes, it's ugly.  No, I shouldn't have had someone out to "take care of it."  And this is why!)

See that bundle of gray fur?  I think it's a raccoon, perhaps the one that I photographed a couple weeks ago, climbing up a nearby black willow that was similarly "past its prime."  It could, however, be an opossum.  Anyone who is better than I at identifying fur is welcome to chime in with a positive identification!

Whichever it is, this is evidently a favorite hangout, especially (weirdly) in cold, wet, spring weather.  I saw it again this morning, similarly curled up, with enough rain falling that I'd taken neither my camera nor my binoculars along on our walkabout.  There it lay, seemingly snug as a bug in a rug.

Raccoons denning in hollow trees.  Raccoons napping in snags.  Woodpeckers nesting in holes, drilled into standing dead trees.  Insects overwintering in standing dead plant stems or snuggled deep in leaf litter.  We humans may see dead plants as ugly trash, messing up our landscape, but wild amimals view dead plants as shelter - safe, comfortable places to weather storms and cold and rain.  Secure places to raise the next generation. 

So, before you automatically cut down that dead tree at the back of your property, stop a minute and really analyze the situation.  Is it likely to fall on a building or a person passing by?  By all means, cut it down, and the sooner, the better!  But if that dead tree is not likely to cause any harm, then consider leaving it as a sort of wildlife hotel.  You never know what may decide to take up residence there!

Crazy-Making Weather

As I sit at the kitchen table on a beautiful, sunny, April 29th afternoon, the thermometer nearby reads 87 degrees.  The record high for this date is 96; the normal high 72.  So we're a little over halfway between normal and record heat, on the high side.

This wouldn't be anything to think twice about except for the fact that 4 days ago we were at the end of a record-setting cold streak, having set record cold temperatures for April 23, 24, and 25th at 32, 25, and 33 respectively.

And in 3 1/2 more days, we are supposed to be right around freezing again, probably another record cold temperature. 

Our poor plants don't know whether to go ahead and leaf out and bloom, or continue to hunker down.  Gardeners are having troubles too:  do we go ahead and put the tomatoes out yet, or wait another week?  Surely NEXT week will bring stabilized temperatures! 

Last Monday night through Wednesday morning were particularly challenging:  Monday had been a pretty spring day with warm temperatures.  Thunderstorms moved through on Monday night, bringing lots of wind, lots of rain, and a fair amount of hail.

By Tuesday morning, the temperatures had dropped precipitously and the plants were showing the effects of the previous night's storms.  Despite the fact that it had been several hours since the last hail fell, there were drifts of small hail storms that ended up lasting most of the day.  Here is one such drift beside the front walkway....

Another drift of hail was near some heirloom red tulips.  Can you tell which way the wind was blowing?

In case those tulips didn't let you know, maybe these Willem de Oranje tulips will give a clue....

Or these pretty pink heirlooms....

All things considered, the garden weathered the hail, winds and large amounts of driving rain amazingly well.  When we woke up on Wednesday morning, though, the weather had another surprise waiting for us:  temperatures in the mid-20s and about 1/2" of snow.  Many plants, like the summer phlox and asters shown here, still showed the wind direction of the storms on Monday night, now overlaid with a coat of frozen white stuff.

Others hadn't kept a coat of snow on, but were definitely looking a little worse the wear because of the freezing temperatures.  The foliage of the red buckeye (Aesculus pavia), just beginning to fill out after emerging, looked particularly vulnerable.

My two little mayapple shoots (Podophyllum peltatum) didn't look too glamorous either.

I wondered about the heirloom pink tulips, now frozen over in their windblown position, but hoped for the best.

Other plants, like the clove currant (Ribes odoratum), didn't seem affected much at all, despite the fact that it had already leafed out and was in full bloom.

The pasqueflower (Pulsatilla sp.)

and the Tharp's spiderwort (Tradescantia tharpii) actually seemed to be wearing their coats of snow with panache and style!

A week later, I can happily report that none of these plants suffered much damage at all.  A few leaves on the buckeye were frozen solid and now are hanging down blackly, but most recovered with no sign of injury.  The ever-fragile Bradford pears lost a lot of leaves and may not bear much fruit this year.  Otherwise things look good.

Prairie plants have to be tough.  Most true natives are still underground and only beginning to think of sending their fragile new growth skyward.  A late spring, like this one has proven to be, illustrates the encoded wisdom of the prairie's late green-up timing, even though the human spirit is aching for earlier signs of spring.

As I swelter in today's heat, I can't help thinking ahead to Friday morning's cold - hopefully it will not get as low as they are predicting.  Even prairie plants and tough non-natives will get hurt by late freezes eventually.  Not to mention that this prairie inhabitant is ready for tomatoes!

Facing Into the Sun

This morning's exercise in photography - trying to capture the beauty of a world encased in ice - provided a philosophical lesson as well as an artistic one:  sometimes the only way to see the real truth of a situation is to look directly into the light.

Looking directly at the light can be painful.  In fact, it can be blinding. Done correctly, though, it can show us exactly what's going on.

Looking away from the light can be misleading, making us miss the reality of a situation.  The above two photos were taken less than a minute apart, simply by changing the direction that I was aiming the camera.  The first picture shows the reality of the ice coating everything.  The second photo looks basically normal - you have to look hard to see any evidence that anything is different from a regular spring day.

Moving from ice storms to a broader view of life, this metaphor works well for a "controversial" issue facing our society today:  climate change.  Truly, there is no scientific controversy concerning this issue.  The scientific community is shining the light of their research and knowledge, showing us the reality of climate change.  However, too many people are turning away from the information the scientists are providing because it hurts - and, truthfully, it's pretty scary too.

Looking away from the sun this morning, I could hardly tell this wasn't a perfect spring morning but, looking towards the light of the day, I could see that there was a hard layer that was affecting everything.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has been addressing the issue of climate change for some time.  Here is an article they shared on Facebook this morning, giving a specific example of how the truth about climate change is being hidden for political reasons:  What South Carolinians Deserve to Know About Climate Change.

The National Center for Science Education is another group that has picked up the job of getting scientific information about climate change into the public arena.  They, too, had a good article that they shared this morning addressing the issue of climate change, A Denver TV Meteorologist...in His Own Words.  This article was actually originally posted by The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.

There are many other groups and individuals trying to share scientific facts, as well as the predictions based upon those facts and upon the best scientific knowledge we currently have about how our Earth's atmosphere works. 

There are also those groups and individuals who are afraid they will lose a great deal of economic and political power if climate change is acknowledged and if, as a country, we start to work to keep the worst of those scientific predictions from occurring.  Because these latter folks currently DO have a great deal of economic and political power - and money - their views are getting much more attention than they should.

Too many people are looking away from the light of knowledge, into the "pretty picture" that distorts the reality of the situation.

On this issue, as on so many other issues, be very careful where you get your "knowledge".  All information is not created equal.  Even if it hurts and is frightening, we all need to look at the world through the best light we have available to us, instead of turning our backs to the truth.

Springtime Ice Storm

Yup.  It's spring on the prairie.

We woke up, this 10th day of April, to a covering of ice on everything above ground level.  Oh, I've seen worse, but this is enough to make the branches clatter in the slightest breeze and to make the foolhardy plants with new leaves look miserable.

The evergreens aren't looking too happy either.  Yet another reason why there's really only one evergreen native to the prairie, the eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana).

At this time of year, it's especially obvious which plants aren't prairie natives:  the Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana), with its heavy load of full blooms....

the lilac (Syringa vulgaris), with its newly opened and expanding leaves...

the red buckeye (Aesculus pavia), also with newly open and expanding leaves.

Unlike the lilac or the Callery pear, the red buckeye is actually native to North America, but to parts east and south of here, rather than to here specifically.  Sometimes that can really make a difference.

I'm not too worried about most of the natives we have, and the ice doesn't seem heavy enough to cause much branch damage, even to the non-natives, but I doubt we'll have much of a Callery pear crop this fall.  The cedar waxwings will miss the berries.

On the plus side, as I hurriedly walked about, trying to keep my camera dry, one item I saw made me extremely happy.  Do you notice anything special in the photo below?

If you look a little closer, you'll see what I mean!

The draw has water in it!  Enough water that I couldn't walk across it without getting wet up to my shins!  Too much water to jump across!

I haven't seen that much water in the draw for probably 2 years.  This is certainly a major silver lining to this cloud of an ice storm.

A Winter Redux Interrupting Spring's Advance

We woke up this morning to snow.  Five inches of snow.  Pretty white stuff, clinging to the sides of trees and shrubs and buildings, covering the ground, burying the newly planted broccoli, cauliflower and kale plants....

Yeah, about that.  I let the 80 degree temperatures a week or so ago get me into gardening mode and I started to get busy. 

Not being in a regimented frame of mind this year, I decided to do a little of this and a little of that.  That way gardening remains pleasureable and I don't get the feeling of having to finish a marathon when dealing with a big task.  It also helps me ease into the spring gardening season a bit, which becomes more and more important as increasing years bring on increasing aches and pains.

The first lettuce, spinach, chard, and tomato seeds were planted a little over 2 weeks ago.  They are coming up nicely, under lights and protected in the back shop.

Next on the agenda was beginning to clear out last year's dead flower stalks to make way for new growth.  This is where the "little of this, little of that" really began.  Rather than start at one end of the front flower bed and systematically uncover the entire thing, I decided to start by clearing out around the emerging daffodil clumps.

There was some method to my madness.  The temperatures haven't warmed up as much as they did during the last several Marches, so I've been feeling a bit dicey about uncovering everything already.  Yet the daffodils definitely were being overwhelmed physically by last year's remnant flower stalks.  Hence the compromise.

On the plus side, this gave the daffodils room to open freely and kept me from trying to do too much at one time and then suffering early spring gardener's remorse.  On the negative side, it's not very satisfying visually, since the remaining garden debris is what catches my attention still as I look at the beds.

In between cutting back flower stalks, I took the time to clear out the 2 worst vegetable beds from last summer, left full to overflowing with the carcasses of crab grass clumps and dried Burmuda stalks that had been allowed to overtake them due to the killing heat and drought.  (Yes, I broke my own cardinal rule:  Never let the weeds go to seed, because you'll regret it severely for several years.  And, yes, I fully expect to suffer the consequences of my lack of heat tolerance last year.  My consolation is that only one bed got really bad.  Somehow I kept up on the others reasonably well.)

Having 2 vegetable beds clear, I couldn't resist planting out a couple, purchased six-packs of early spring crops:  2 kinds of broccoli, cauliflower, and 2 kinds of kale. 

Meanwhile, the crocuses quickly finished up blooming and the daffodils began to unfurl.

A pasqueflower ventured TWO blooms this spring, and tulips, naked ladies, grape hyacinths, and standard hyacinths started pushing their green leaves up into the spring light.  I even noticed the newly planted clump of rue anemone blooming a couple days ago.

Now the snow.  I'm not too worried about the wildflowers or the spring bulbs - they should all be quite capable of handling some snow, as well as the predicted lows around 20.  However, my gamble garden of broccoli, cauliflower and kale may not be so lucky.  I'm too chicken to tramp out and look; I'll find out soon enough.  I'm actually more worried about how the low temperatures will affect the young plants, if it gets warm enough to melt the snow off today, than I am about what damage the snow itself will do to them.

I think all gardeners (and farmers) have a bit of the gambler in them.

Winter Wonderland

Having received 14" of snow last week, we were a little dismayed at predictions for another 12-18" inches of snow, accompanied by strong winds, for the last 48 hours.  Yesterday we waited all day for the blizzard to begin, but temperatures hovering around 35 kept the worst from happening.  We got the strong winds, but most of the precipitation fell as light rain and acted to melt much of the snow that we already had.

Last night, as we went to bed, the temperatures dropped, the electricity flickered, and the weather decided to give us a small taste of what might have been.

So this morning we woke up to a winter wonderland again - about 5" of wet snow with a little underpinning of ice, plastered to the trees and shrubs, coating the ground beautifully and softly.

As I plodded out to follow our morning routine of checking for the paper, a track in the snow told of a bird's passage - presumably a pheasant from the size.  It looks like he half walked/half flew, leaving wing tip prints, but also dragging his tail and putting his feet down every 3 feet or so....

TJ, our 9 year old cat, isn't too excited about being out in the wet, cold white stuff, but loves hunting the birds through the window.  Here he is, several days ago, "talking" to them through the sliding glass door as big flocks of red-winged blackbirds and cowbirds chowed down on the bird seed I'd spread out for them.  Every once in a while, one would try to fly into the kitchen through the door, and TJ would jump 4 feet up in the air to greet it.  Several of those birds are still alive only because of the miracle of modern windows!

When we get this much snow, we've had to add a new task to our country lifestyle:  cleaning off the shade cloth over the kennels.  Greg literally had to shovel snow off the shade cloth because it was weighed down so heavily, sagging about 3 feet.  One side recovered its spring pretty well; the other side may have to be replaced this spring, despite his attempts at saving it.

It's an interesting start to the year:  an almost totally dry winter until late February, then 2 snowfalls giving us the snowiest February on record.  Feast or famine.  While hope springs eternally (especially in the springtime gardener's mind), concern and foreboding aren't too far behind, at least as far as weather is concerned.  This promises, once again, to be an interesting garden season.