Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
The tulip poplar, Liriodendron tulipifera, is one of the most common trees in the Carolina woods. It’s also one of the tallest. According to the Wikipedia article, it grows up to 165 feet tall in virgin Appalachian forests. I have a lot of them in my woods and around my house. These trees like a lot of light, so they do well at the edge of woods, or standing alone in the open.
These photos were taken from a ladder. The blooms are rarely found close to the ground.
I first became aware that the new honeysuckle had arrived when I awoke during the night and caught the scent of it through the bedroom window.
And the grass just gets better and better.
Grass after today’s downpour: If I’d had it last year I’d have saved some soil and some hard work.
One of the things I’ve learned from building a house is that half the problem, both for the house and the landscaping, is water security. Rain comes in two types, I figure. Just plain rain, which gets to everything that is exposed. And downpours, which can cause heavy runoff and ugly damage.
Here in the South, downpours are common, especially from thunderstorms. Early last summer, almost three inches of rain fell in a violent storm one night before I had established ground cover. The result was ugly and depressing — muddy gullies, parts of the driveway washed out, and young grass washed away before its roots were deep enough to hold on. I’m on a steep hillside. Simply holding the soil has to be my first priority. That’s one of the reasons I’ve not cut my grass. But even when the landscaping is mature enough to not wash out during a downpour, one wants to hold as much water as possible, let it sink into the ground, and either feed the underground aquifer or cause something to grow.
Today just before sunset we had a downpour of between a half an inch and three-quarters of an inch in less than an hour. I did what I always do after a heavy rain. As soon as the rain stopped, I did a walkaround to see how the water was flowing and how things held up. This downpour caused no trouble. No soil washed away. And the tall grass captured a lot of the water so that there really wasn’t much runoff.
Ultimately, with terracing, thick vegetation, and healthy soil, I would like to be able to capture virtually all the water that falls here, with as little runoff as possible. Rain should stay put and make something grow, not run down the hill in a gully.
This bank on the uphill side of my driveway was my most difficult runoff problem. It was nothing but a muddy scar after the driveway was made last spring. Now it’s covered with talls grass and lots of day lilies.
The driveway culvert: running clean and light after a heavy rain
The uphill side of the driveway: not much runoff, even though there’s quite a large watershed above it, and no mud flowing
Corporations and their propagandists are always complaining, with great shrillness, that the United States has one of the highest tax rates in the developed world (35%). To which advocates for tax fairness always reply: Nominal tax rates are one thing, but actual taxes paid, because of loopholes and shelters, is something else again. To figure out just how much in taxes big corporations (and rich people) pay is very, very difficult. It’s one of the things that they very, very much don’t want working people to know.
Here’s a number in the Washington Post story on Obama’s plan to put an end to offshore tax havens:
“The tax havens allow major U.S. corporations to pay taxes on only a fraction of their profits. According to 2004 numbers, the most recent the administration has on hand, U.S. multinational corporations paid an effective tax rate of 2.3 percent on $700 billion in profits.”
Of all the billions and billions of pages on lawn care to be found on the Internet, it is exasperatingly difficult to find information on the practical and biological consequences, pro and con, for letting grass go to seed. Apparently there is a small school of thought that it’s beneficial to let grass go to seed once before mowing it for the first time. I have no idea what the reasoning for this is. And then one comes across lawn “experts” who deliver severe scoldings to anyone who would consider letting their grass go to seed before mowing it. One of these experts did at least make reference to some rational reasons — is the grass a hybrid and will the seeds be “true,” how the grass deploys its energy to different parts of the plant, etc., etc.
I have seeded my acre of sun again and again since the pine trees were taken down in March of 2008. I’ve used a lot of Kentucky-31 tall fescue, simply because this is the cheapest grass seed, it’s available everywhere, and it’s well adapted to this area. But I’ve also made an effort to work in other types of more expensive fescues, with the hope that whichever type of grass was best suited to a particular area would dominate in that area.
Is Kentucky-31 a hybrid? It’s amazing how hard it is to find that information, but my guess is that it is not a hybrid and that the seed it produces will be true Kentucky-31. But what about the other fescues I planted? Were they hybrids? Who knows.
In any case, what if I do have some hybrids, and their seed yields poor quality grass? I think the answer is, who cares? Because the grass from better seed will dominate over time.
One of the arguments for gardening with heirloom vegetable seed is that, over time, as one selects the best specimens of vegetables for seed-saving, your vegetables adapt themselves to your garden.
I can’t think of any reason why the same should not be true for grass. If one starts with a mix of fescues and lets it go to seed again and again, then eventually one’s grass will adapt itself to the land on which it’s growing.
After all, that’s the story of how Kentucky-31 — festuca arundinacea — was discovered in the first place. A professor of agronomy from the University of Kentucky had heard of a “miracle grass” growing on a hillside in Menifee County, Kentucky. This miracle grass was thriving during a drought. That was 1931, hence the name Kentucky-31.
Horrors. Someone let some grass go to seed on a hillside. And it adapted. What lazy lawnmower-hating slacker let that happen?
I guess I’ll just have to run my own experiments with letting grass go to seed. Yes, it starts to fall over when it gets tall. But, growing at the base of the clump of tall stems there always is a clump of new, short stems ready to take their place.
I have lots of questions. How does tall grass handle dry weather? Does tall grass require net more or net less water? I suspect tall grass may conserve water, because it shades the soil, and mowing grass apparently makes grass very thirsty until it recovers from the mowing. Will tall grass smother out clover and wildflowers? Maybe that’s why so many wildflowers have tall stems. I’ll report on my experiments periodically.
One thing though, is already very clear, and it’s in accord with what the “lawn experts” say. I was unable to establish grass in the spring of 2008. The grass was not able to develop a root system before the summer heat scorched it. The only stuff I had growing in the summer of 2008 were the hardy, native species that volunteered. However, the grass I planted in September of 2008 took off like crazy. It now has thick, deep roots. So it certainly seems to be true that, when starting fescue from seed, you get much better results in the fall.
See the follow-up to this post from eight years later: On letting grass go to see (follow-up)
The chickens are now big enough not to get through the wire, so today I let them go downstairs and check out their small coop for the first time.
They were nervous at first, but soon they were contentedly pecking at the ground.
Yesterday I installed an electric fence wire around the bottom of the coop to provide some extra defense against night predators. I don’t think predators could break into this coop anyway, but it’s best to teach them to stay away, lest they make a habit of coming back every night and digging and worrying around the coop.
I tried to keep the hot wire as close to the ground as possible.
Lily sees the chickens for the first time and starts to stalk.
Closer…
Closer…
The chickens see her. Heads up!
The chickens run to the other side. Lily quickly lost interest. I think she realizes that she can’t get at the chickens. Plus, she’s probably heard them and smelled them for days and days. The electric wire is turned off, by the way. Lily is not in danger of getting zapped.
A green exuberance returns to the area around the house which a year ago was bare after the elderly pine trees were removed.
The garlic bed
The chickens are growing a new set of feathers and look pretty ratty at the moment.
“Knockout” roses
Blackberry blooms
Carnations
Purslane, to be eaten for its omega-3
A deciduous magnolia in a sea of fescue. At the bottom of the sea of fescue is a layer of clover.
Red clover
A day lily strains to get its head above a sea of fescue.
Catnip, which grew from last year’s roots
A baby apple tree inside its deer cage
A day lily, which somehow survived the ditch witch when the water pipe was buried
The magnolia grandiflora puts out new growth.
A vegetable bed, just getting started
By Anivid in the south of France
It was a sunny day in April, a perfect day for trying out an ice cream dessert before the saison of tourists started.
Instead of lunch of course – ice cream desserts being on the rich & heavy side, especially when being enjoyed in the most luxurious place of the town 😉
The one I chose, called Melissa, consisted of vanilla ice cream, drenched with sauce caramel, sprinkled with caramel pieces, nuts, grilled pine kernels, cinnamon (your mouth water starts forming ??) and topped with a lot of chantilly (whipped cream). Finally two sticks of wafers as antennae for decoration.
It was served with the usual tap water carafe.
Need I say it was heavenly ??
Especially the combination of icecream and pine kernels was delicious, pine kernels as a soft chew together with the soft caramel and ice enveloping the toungue.
There was just the correct mix of everything, and it was so sweet & cold as to rise the IQ (my mother always told me to keep my feet warm and head cold 😉 and as the brains preferred energy source is carbohydrates – I thought my choice very wise (and my mother’s maxime satisfied 😉
I sat outside by the little stream led through the city and thoroughly planted with beautiful flowers following the changing seasons.
There might be not so pretty quarters elsewhere in the municipality, but the stream with its flowers & bridges are always kept picturesque – a joy to greet for citizens & visitors.
The pleasure costed app. 14 $ – and my mouth can still remember the feeling of its cornucopia 😉
Signing out Anivid, Southern France, Gastronomy & Culture
Mixing my shellac sample
First, I apologize for not having yet posted interior photos. I’ve been really busy trying to keep the interior work moving while also getting some garden going. Also, it seems that every time I get the house cleaned and tidy, we mess it up again. The current clutter is for the installation of the kitchen cabinets. Anyway, I’ll have photos as soon as I come up for air.
It’s daunting to see how much wood I have to finish — floors, doors, trim, stairs. There probably is more than 2,000 square feet of wood to finish. I’ve put a good bit of time, anguish, and research into what to use. I have never liked the polyurethane finishes. It’s just a skin of plastic that doesn’t soak into or nourish the wood. After asking a number of people how floors like mine would have been finished in 1935, I came to understand that the answer was almost certainly shellac. Shellac is a natural resin made by a tropical insect. And what goes on after several coats of shellac is old-fashioned Johnson’s Paste Wax.
I ordered a sample of some “button” shellac on line from the Shellac Shack. It’s a lower-cost shellac, with a reddish color that I think will work well for pine. I started mixing the shellac tonight, and I plan to do some tests tomorrow. If I like the results, that’s what I’ll use. Premium shellac, by the way, costs about $20 a pound, and for jobs like floors two pounds of shellac would be mixed with a gallon of denatured alcohol. The shellac I’m planning to use is a grade that fine furniture makers probably would scorn. I would not be able to afford furniture-grade shellac for floors and doors.
The Wikipedia article on shellac describes the source of shellac and how it’s used. Says the article, “These modern chemicals, while some come closer than others, can never completely replicate the warm, inviting glow that shellac lends to wood. ‘Wax over shellac’ (an application of buffed-on paste wax over several coats of shellac) is often regarded as the most beautiful finish for hardwood floors.”
Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini [Times of London]
Everyone should read this remarkable interview with Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, who is now 100 years old, and who won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for her research on the brain.
“The secret of life is to keep thinking. And to stop thinking about ourselves. That’s the only message I have.”