Prairie View

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Followup on the Plagues

It’s late afternoon and I’ve just made a round in the gardens. I am not encouraged. All the little tomatoes have many dings or cutouts on the west side, where the wind-driven hail attacked them. I counted 10 "divots" on the west side of a golf-ball-sized tomato. Even cherry-sized tomatoes have half a dozen dings. The corn is laying flat with the root end at the west end. All the leaves in the garden have many holes, and many upright stems on vining crops are broken. The onion tops look sandblasted and crippled. All the colorful stems of the Bright Lights Chard are visible, no longer hidden by the leaves. The developing potatoes are exposed to the sunshine, the vines no longer protecting and shading them, and the soil partially beaten or washed away.

The grasshoppers are thriving though. Our county horticulture agent said to spray them with Permethrin. I've put aside my principles and bought some. It's an ingredient in Eight.

On the tomatoes, one fat green worm had the audacity to feed sumptiously on the battered foliage. I hate pinky-finger-sized tomato worms with a passion, and find the process of disposing of them very distasteful. Nevertheless, I tried to knock this one to the ground with a steel rod fence post so I could dispatch it. Wouldn’t you know, that worm defied me? He whipped his tail or his head (couldn't tell which) back and forth in the air so ferociously that it made an audible snapping sound, and the plant he was on shook violently. He was not dislodged, even with three sharp raps on the tomato stalk he was attached to. In the face of such resistance, I decided to leave him for Hiromi to deal with. He’s on the Fabulous tomatoes, on the fifth plant from the south end of the east row. I miss the ducks I once had in a pen right beside the garden. They happily gobbled every tomato worm I tossed in their direction. They loved me so much at that time of year, they immediately came quacking to the fence every time I showed up in the tomato patch.

When the UPS man delivered a package today, he asked, “Are you in the dark?”

“No. Only for about two hours last night.”

“There’s a pole down about a mile and a half north of here,” he told me.

“Our power comes from Partridge,” I said. Partridge is south of here.

“Oh. You’re lucky.”

This morning, Lowells and Myrons still had no electricity. I don’t know how it is now. Lowell also told me that the wheat is significantly compromised. Whatever that means, it can’t be good.

I learned a bit more about Joe’s barn. He had put new steel on the roof, and concreted the floor. He had also purchased steel to cover the walls. The entire west side of the barn was open, as part of the refurbishing process. So when the wind howled in from the west, it filled up the barn cavity and apparently exerted such force that the structure failed, and sort of imploded. Joe’s been dreaming about what that barn will become for a long time, but I’m sure a pile of rubble wasn’t part of the picture in his mind’s eye. People were gathering there today to help clean it up.

My friend Marian, who grew up on the place where Joe’s barn stood, once told me “I love ordinary days. My girls wish so much for excitement. But I’m happy without excitement. Boring is good.” Marian is in the hospital right now, recovering from surgery for cancer. The barn’s collapse is an example of the kind of excitement Marian is probably glad to have avoided. But a hospital room in Wichita is hardly the kind of boring environment she longs for. Peaceful days at home are more like what she had in mind. Many of us would echo Marian’s sentiments. When it comes to weather, boring is good.

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Later. . . .Internet service was unavailable yesterday afternoon and evening, so I didn’t get this posted when I intended to.

Today’s paper had an article on Joe’s barn here.

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This morning I found ten tomato worms in a five-foot long double row of Nicotiana, plus some potato beetle larvae. Which is why I kept circling the Nicotiana bed and peering venomously into the leafy, flowery canopy. The nerve! I collected the specimens in an old dishpan and notified Hiromi of its whereabouts. He informed me later that he put water in the dishpan and they're all drowned. I hope he's right.

Nicotiana is also called Flowering Tobacco, which explains why the name is reminiscent of nicotine. It is a member of the Solanaceae or nightshade family, as are tomatoes and potatoes. That's why some of the same pests find them attractive. It's also why the tobacco mosaic virus can be spread to tomatoes by people who smoke in the vicinity of the plants.

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Some people in the county apparently weren't getting electric power restored till today. Poor souls. Doing without air conditioning would be one good reason to avoid a power outage.

A number of poles are broken, and in town, branches and trees have come to rest on power lines.

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Have I mentioned Freecycle here? Most areas have a local Freecycle group. On this site, you will find listed messages with one of several types of headings, each related to the exchange of free goods. The heading may be offer, wanted, pending, or taken. A subscriber is asked to post one offer before posting any wanted messages. In the past we have given away a built-in dishwasher and gotten a portable dishwasher through Freecycle.

Last week we posted a wanted ad for an evaporative cooler, and someone promptly called us saying they had one to give away. Hiromi has been getting it all up to snuff. With it we're making an effort to get a shed cool enough so that the large display fridge we have inside can function to cool its contents--part of our flowers and produce gardening operation. The fridge works fine until the ambient temperatures are too high for the "radiator" to release its gathered heat into the air. Blowing cooled air across the radiator is supposed to help.

Do a search for Freecycle if you're interested. Then you should be able to locate the closest group by scrolling through your state's listings. This probably doesn't apply to readers who do not live in North America.

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Brian and Sherilyn are doing a Mittleider garden this year, so we've been exchanging some information occasionally. They invited us over for supper last night, and we had a wonderful meal and time of visiting about gardens and education and tracking rainfall data, etc. Brian has a Big Mama of a rain guage, accurate to hundredths of an inch. (One 6-8 inch callibrated tube holds one inch of rainfall, with the hundredths clearly marked.) He reports all rainfall amounts to a website set up in Colorado after a disastrous event when two weather-tracking stations completely missed data on significant rainfall between them that resulted in flooding, with the weather service not providing any warning. Maybe Brian will post the website address in a comment here. I asked him to send it to me some time, but this would work too.

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Apparently my incorrect use of the term "tornado" (See comment in previous post.) is a widespread error. Writers of articles in today's paper used it a number of times just like I did--when "funnel cloud" would have been more accurate.

In one of the weather broadcasts on Monday evening at the height of the local storm activity, one official observer in Arlington reported "torrential winds." That provided some welcome mirth for the fruit room crowd in our basement.

3 Comments:

  • My, is every summer like this out there? Reminds me of Little House on the Prairie books...
    I was curious what Mittleider gardening was and so I googled it. Interesting. I've been pondering your previous post about gardens, seeds, etc. and realized I'd be hopelessly ignorant about gardening if I couldn't go to the local greenhouse and pick up the seedlings and seed packets that I need. Guess this gives me an idea of where to get the info I need.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 6/17/2009  

  • No, not every summer is like this. Spring (extending through most of June) tends to be our most active-weather season. We get most of our moisture in spring and fall, with relatively dry summers and winters. Of course, this past winter we had a massive early April blizzard, and the winter before we had an enormously damagaing ice storm, so we do get some winter moisture sometimes--not always in gentle forms.

    To add credence to the "mostly normal weather" claim, you should know that I actually know only one local family personally whose home was destroyed by a tornado. I can think of more wind damage events to the belongings of people I know. We do also alternately have flooding and drought, but again, I don't actually know anyone personally whose home was destroyed by flooding. Drought is another matter. It's a rare summer when there is not some time when Christians pray fervently for rain. No one would consider trying to grow a garden without provision for irrigation.

    Several of the factors that affect our weather in a major way are these: 1) We are in a mid-continent location, where there is no temperature effect from nearby bodies of water. 2) Because we are not near water, the air is relatively dry, unless winds transport moisture into the area from the Gulf of Mexico. Dry air fluctuates much more widely in temperature between daylight (when the sun shines) and dark than does moist air. 3) This is not so much a weather effect as a weather awareness factor, but our wide-open spaces mean that we can see a lot of the sky at any one time, and I think we are much more conscious of its presence in our "landscape" than are people whose sky view is limited by surrounding hills or mountains.

    Especially in dry summers, we always have some grasshoppers, but the infestation in our garden this year seems unusual to me.

    By Blogger Mrs. I, at 6/17/2009  

  • Sorry, I hadn't gotten the link to you yet. It is called Cocorahs, which means Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network. The basic premise is that rainfall amounts vary, even between relatively short distances. This website gives volunteers the opportunity to track and report rainfall at their specific locations.

    As mentioned by Mrs. I, the rain gauge is noteworthy. Since even fancy digital/electronic gauges vary quite a bit, every Cocorahs volunteer uses the same type of rain gauge. It is approximately 4" in diameter and 14" tall. When you see it, it's not hard to understand how you can accurately read hundredths of an inch. It will hold up to 11 inches total. More information on the rain gauge here. (If you sign up, don't order a gauge off a website right away. Your local Cocorahs coordinator may have one that you can buy without having to pay shipping charges.)

    If reporting every day looks daunting to you, don't let it scare you away. The only days you really need to report on are the days you've received precipitation. For the dry spells, just go to the appropriate page once in a while and simply click on each day that you've had no precipitation and you're done.

    You can learn a whole lot more at the Cocorahs website. Happy rain catching!

    By Anonymous Brian M, at 6/18/2009  

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