Hours and hours have been spent preparing multiple beds and planting 16 flats of annuals and vegetables and numerous perennials, some bought and some donated. Also planted a lot of seeds and will distribute them as they are bigger to beds What I really need to do is mulch all these beds to minimize their watering and weeding. I also planted dahlias, gladiolas, Cana and calla lilies. Aside from making some of my planters prettier and never ending weeding, I am almost done
On some mornings, I am up before 6 riding my bike or running when there is less traffic, heat and wind. I am still not running as far as I was before my injury but I am gradually improving. I have biked more; so far almost 2100 miles between the indoor and the outdoor bike.
I have hosted work friends one night which was warm (too warm) for us all to sit outside. All the kids and grandkids came over for Mother's Day. It was the first time the cousins were all together since the pandemic. Oliver had his first vaccine a few weeks ago; Daniel will be eligible this summer. Might be in the fall when they approve it for the under 12s. Michigan in April had one of the highest Covid caseloads in the country. Too many stupid trumpers. But finally the infection rate has gone down considerably. As some of the newly eligible are not adults, in some states, they need adult permission to get the vaccine. Other states let the kids decide. Lots of cases where the kids want the vaccine but their ignorant parents won't let them.
But as it is warm out, I can meet with my friends outside and have which is nice. The CDC says that the vaccinated can sit inside without masks with each other though some of my friends do not want to take chances. Vaccinated people still can get sick but they rarely die so I feel much better about the pandemic now.
Some states are providing financial incentives for vaccines. Ohio had a million dollar lottery for the newly vaccinated. Ha A Michigan person won.
9 comments:
You have been busy.
I adore columbines and hope ours come up again this year.
Our vaccine program is a fail. The very vulnerable at the top of the list(s) have not yet been fully vaccinated and the fear of blood clots has been making people very wary. Lotteries/similar rewards are apparently being considered.
I have had my first shot and the next is booked in for early July.
Oregon also has that million dollar offer. Although it pisses me off to pay people to do what is morally and physically right for themselves and others (and, in the process, bypassing those who had already done what was right), I might support it anyway if it would inspire large numbers of people to get a vaccine, but I know of no evidence to suggest that it does.
Are you sure that your tree is a Chestnut and not a Horse Chestnut (or its close relative, the Ohio Buckeye)? I know that work has been done to develop blight resistant American Chestnuts, but I hadn't heard that the work succeeded to the point that they are commonly available.
EC Alas my work might be undone by a late unexpected frost last night. I was up early spraying water on my plants but I don't know if I saved them Very upset
clots are a common side effect of Covid itself, much more so than from the vaccines but people seem to have a poor understanding of risk. I am assuming you got the Moderna one
Snowbrush, you are right that I don't have a true chestnut, more likely a cultivar of a horse chestnut. The squirrels love them and they pop out where the squirrels forgot they buried it. Buckeyes, common to our south, don't survive out in the open as these trees are. There are some isolated stands of American chestnuts in Michigan on the islands (the Manitous) and my friend has one too though she has to fight with the squirrels for their fruits. I had read that 1 out of 4 trees in the Northeast was an American chestnut.
Fortunately for the Italians, the European chestnut didn't get the blight. After the war, that was all some in the south had to eat.
Horse chestnuts are a large and beautiful--and common--street tree here in Eugene, but I don't remember them at all from the South.
I don't recall the exact stats, but learned from a nature show that squirrels remember where they buried something like 90-95% of the thousands of their nuts. When I've tried to crack horse chestnuts, I've had little luck, and the fruits were too small--for me--to be inspired to bother with anyway since I didn't have to rely on them for food. I also understand that they're poisonous and must be cooked--roasted, I assume--to neutralize the poison.
What kind of hummers do you have, by the way? Here, we have Anna's and Rufous.
Astrazenica. None of the others have been made available to people in my age group. I hope your garden survives.
It did I sprayed the outlaying gardens with water. I assumed flowers close to the house would survive
Out here in the Midwest, we have only ruby throated hummingbirds which are quite a bit smaller than your Annas Snowbrush. Do you ever get those pretty, tiny Calliope hummingbirds? Or do they need to have the high elevation of Mt Hood
I saw the most variety in hummingbirds staying around Tuscan during migration season though their usual year around resident the Costa, was quite striking
Harder to crack are black walnuts, which are all over the place near where we live. My mom , a fan of free food, would task me with extracting them. They are encased in a black oil that stains skin badly and has lots of nooks and crannies to get the meat out. Crows have been known to drop them on roads hoping the traffic will crush the shells.
I saw the same nature show on squirrels. Their brain swells in the fall from making all those extra memory connections to recover their hundreds of stashes. They mentioned that ground squirrels (versus tree squirrels) aren't so bright and have just one huge cache of food. Fine unless some other critter finds it. The chipmunks here are a pain, stealing the bird food and digging up my plants. We have been trapping them humanely and relocating them further and further away. So far we have trapped 10 and I can see two more. Hopefully we will get them today.
"Out here in the Midwest, we have only ruby throated hummingbirds which are quite a bit smaller than your Annas..."
I just read that the ruby-throats are 3" long compared to 3.5" for the Annas (which is still not quite large enough to carry off a dog that would be big enough for much of a meal). I spent my first 37 years in south Mississippi, and ruby throats were the only hummers we had. They're every bit as pretty or prettier than Annas, although I am awfully attached to the Rufous (more about them later).
"Do you ever get those pretty, tiny Calliope hummingbirds? Or do they need to have the high elevation of Mt Hood."
Wikipedia lists their size as 2.8" to 3.9", which strikes me as one heck of a range! They don't live in the Willamette Valley, but, also according to Wikipedia, "Nests have been observed from as low as 600 ft in Oregon and Washington to the tree line at over 11,000 ft. Well, Oregon has no 11,000' mountains, but Mt. Hood and two other local peaks (Jefferon and South Sister) rise above 10,000', and a number of other mountains in the Oregon Cascades are nearly that tall. Several Oregon mountains had ancient glaciers when we moved here in '86, but they have have since disappeared or greatly receded.
Oregon has many radically diverse climate zones, and so it has quite a number of hummingbird species. The only two in the Willamette Valley are the Annas and the Rufous. I think the Rufous are prettier, but we seldom see them at our feeder, and when we do, it tends to be in cold weather.
"I saw the most variety in hummingbirds staying around Tuscan during migration season though their usual year around resident the Costa, was quite striking."
Are hummers your chief birding interest? Three weeks ago, a mourning dove appeared in our backyard, and stayed there for, I would guess, for over a week. I soon came to doubt that it could fly, but I hated the thought of scaring it. After several days, I slowly moved in its direction, finally proceeding on hands and knees until I got to within three feet, at which point it flew fifteen feet before stopping. I also observed that it would stand with its back to the shrubbery without even looking around. I contemplated trapping it and taking it to a wildlife rescue place, but I feared injuring it in the process. It finally disappeared, and I stopped looking for it after two or three days. We regularly get a pair of collared doves in our yard. I asked Peggy which she enjoyed more--hummers or doves--and she said hummers. I prefer the doves. We also get a great many ducks, blue herons, kingfishers, and green herons in the drainage canal across the street, and on several occasions, we've had flocks of turkeys in our front yard, back yard, and near our yard.
cont.
"Harder to crack are black walnuts, which are all over the place near where we live."
Such pretty trees. They grow here too, by the way, although the main nut that grows here (commercially and otherwise, it being a native) is the hazelnut--filbert in some places. In Mississippi, pecans reigned, but the hickory tree had prettier bark.
"My mom, a fan of free food..."
In my view, free food would be a strange thing to NOT be a fan of. However... Peggy and I take buckets down alleys each summer to pick the blackberries that--god knows why--no one else is interested in. And many people here have plum trees in their yards, but in most cases, the fruit rots. I can't get my mind around such waste.
"Crows have been known to drop them on roads hoping the traffic will crush the shells."
I heard of some famous person (whose name escapes me) who was killed by a shellfish which was dropped by a seabird in order to break open its shell. One day in the woods, I watched a squirrel industriously (lazy squirrels being a minority) burying nuts while a Stellar Jay watched from a tree. Every time the squirrel would go after another nut, the jay would swoop down and steal the last nut he had buried.
"I saw the same nature show on squirrels."
Was it THAT show, or was it another show on which a squirrel thwarted another squirrel (a thief) by only pretending to bury nuts?
"Their brain swells in the fall from making all those extra memory connections to recover their hundreds of stashes."
I don't know how scientists justify killing a healthy and active animal that has intelligently worked to insure its future welfare simply so that they might examine its brain for signs of enlargement caused by harvesting activities. In my last post, I didn't address this per se, but I did address the killing of nonhumans.
"They mentioned that ground squirrels (versus tree squirrels) aren't so bright and have just one huge cache of food. Fine unless some other critter finds it."
I guess it's like with those tree squirrels being killed by scientists, my point being that bad things happen no matter how hard they--or we--try to prepare for them. Imagine a tree squirrel sitting in its nest under its reading lamp as it considers items on a list of adverse outcomes and how to avoid them, only to forget to include the possibility of being shot dead by a curious scientist who wishes to dissect its brain! By the way, don't chipmunks and other ground squirrels tend to spend their winters underground, which does, as you pointed out, leave them vulnerable to some things, but probably saves them from others.
"We have been trapping them humanely and relocating them further and further away."
I respect your efforts--not to mention your patience under trying circumstances.
So far we have trapped 10 and I can see two more. Hopefully we will get them today.
I like lots of birds. May is when we get the most diversity in our yard: orchard and Baltimore orioles, rose breasted grosbeaks, cedar waxwings along if the constant sparrows and cardinals. I do have a fondness for woodpeckers. We have Downy, red breasted, nut hatch (2 kinds),hairy, northern flicker. There are pileated and red headed woodpeckers about but not in my yard. Lots of turkeys here too. I have several pair of mourning doves. They are clumsy not so bright birds. I do have barn and tree swallows and keep homes for wrens who do bug patrol in my gardens. We also have a variety of finches too.
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