Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Aug. 3

Happy August, everyone! Don't you love the photo above?

I spotted this little cutie a while back near our front doorway, and it let me get pretty close up for this iPhone 15 picture. The purple coneflower it's supping from is a native prairie plant that is both perennial and self-seeding, so it can take over a good-sized flower bed in just a couple of years, but they're easy to control - you can just yank them out with an easy pull. But when they turn to seed in the fall, they attract the most strikingly-beautiful goldfinches, bright yellow bodies set off by black wings with white streaks. Unfortunately, there's no way you can get close enough to get a good photo of them, and we usually get at least two mating pairs gorging themselves all day.

I'll send a different picture of the coneflowers in a little bit, along with a picture from my(our) backyard gardens, but right now Mrs. Jimm is calling me for dinner.

Many thanks -

Mr. Jimm

Well, now it's good evening, Katy!

(Ummm, ummm. Ravioli, Italian bread, and freshly-picked cucumbers for dinner. Wife of 43 years takes good care of me...).

I'm sending a slightly different picture of the coneflower bed which might better illustrate the 'they take over everything' description I gave in my commentary; I'll let you decide which one should get posted.

Nice.

That trumpet vine is at least 50 years old; what you're looking at is mostly new growth, of course. I've spent the last 6 years training it into a halo around the 4-foot tall statue, using a cast iron hoop we found behind some bushes in our backyard when we moved in 10 years ago. The statue is plaster but made for outdoor use, but we all know such things really only last 2-3 years if you leave them 'as is'. So I take it indoors for the winter and spray paint it with an outdoor enamel when it starts to show some weathering, and it still looks freshly-bought to me after 6 years. The black trellis you can see in back of the statue supports a Jackmanii Clematis which really isn't doing very well due to inadequate sunlight, so both the trellis and the clematis plant will probably get moved next year which will help with the 'halo' maintenance.

Thank you so much, Katy!!!

Mr. Jimm

Nice design. Moving it sounds like a lot of work!

Edible Gardening/Putting Things By

Dear K.T.,

Attached are two photos of my garden, one of table grapes and the other
of pears. Both are doing very well. Here in Kenosha, in SE Wisconsin,
the summer has been quite warm, but not oppressively so - at least where
I am, which is a five-minute walk from Lake Michigan. As you can see,
both grapes and pears are thriving. Touch wood, there'll be lots of
grapes next month, and pears come September.

I didn't get any peaches this year, because the peach tree had been
attacked by a fungal wilt; but the tree has recovered and is growing
vigorously, and I have every hope that I'll have a crop next year,
assuming the weather cooperates.

Regards

Nemo

Glad to hear about your peach tree recovering. The pears and grape vines look great!

By-Tor from a few days ago:

Today's haul of habaneros from my container garden. And a few tomatoes. . .

These were green forever and turned orange basically overnight.

Habaros are very, very hot. But not the hottest anymore:

What’s So Hot About Chili Peppers?
An American ecologist travels through the Bolivian forest to answer burning questions about the spice

A wiry 40-year-old ecologist at the University of Washington, Tewksbury is risking his sacroiliac in this fly-infested forest looking for a wild chili with a juicy red berry and a tiny flower: Capsicum minutiflorum. He hopes it'll help answer the hottest question in botany: Why are chilies spicy?

Bolivia is believed to be the chili's motherland, home to dozens of wild species that may be the ancestors of all the world's chili varieties—from the mild bell pepper to the medium jalapeño to the rough-skinned naga jolokia, the hottest pepper ever tested. The heat-generating compound in chilies, capsaicin, has long been known to affect taste buds, nerve cells and nasal membranes (it puts the sting in pepper spray). But its function in wild chili plants has been mysterious.

When people call chilies "hot," they're not just speaking metaphorically. Capsaicin stimulates the neural sensors in the tongue and skin that also detect rising temperatures. As far as these neurons and the brain are concerned, your mouth is on fire. (Similarly, mint stimulates a type of neural receptor sensitive to cool temperatures.) With enough heat, adrenaline flows and the heart pumps faster. This reaction, according to some physiologists, is part of what makes peppers so enticing.

The scale that scientists use to describe a chili's heat was developed in 1912 by Wilbur Scoville, a chemist at Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company in Detroit. He would dilute a pepper extract in sugar water until the heat was no longer detectable by a panel of trained tasters; that threshold is its Scoville rating. A bell pepper, for instance, merits a zero, while a typical jalapeño falls between 2,500 and 8,000 Scoville heat units (SHUs). Last year, the naga jolokia, which is cultivated in India, rated a whopping one million SHUs. What's remarkable is that this variation can occur within a single species. The cayenne pepper, C. annuum—50,000 SHUs—is the species from which countless domesticated varieties of bell peppers, jalapeños and poblanos were derived.

Tewksbury first studied chilies near the Tumacácori mission in the mountains of southern Arizona—home to the world's northernmost wild variety, chiltepins. The Rev. Ignaz Pfefferkorn had developed a liking for chiltepins there in the 1750s. Pfefferkorn (whose name means "peppercorn" in German) called them "hell-fire in my mouth." In 1999, Tewksbury and Gary Nabhan, who co-founded Native Seeds/Search, an organization that works to preserve indigenous agricultural plants of the Southwest, established the Wild Chile Botanical Area in Tumacácori. That's when Tewksbury started wondering why chilies were hot.

The Rev. Ignaz Pfefferkorn. Hmmmm

Some photos and tips from Diana. There are more to come:

Please find attached some pics. Some are of gardens (I have goumi berry bushes and paw paw trees).

The goumi berries are quite prolific and well behaved. I have seaberries, elderberries, and goji berries, but would not recommend them except in restricted environments (they are quite invasive). More well behaved berries include honeyberries, currants, and gooseberries. The honeyberries and currants sometimes need to be sprayed, as they can get some type of mold issues.
Surprisingly I also have dill that comes back every year and this year the plants are quite tall.

Tomatoes and peppers - my cousin waters them with epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) and they become monsters.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Goumi berries

Asian pear blossoms

Perennial Dill

That perennial dill looks like a great thing! Anybody making pickles?

The Asian pear blossoms are beautiful, and it's great to learn about the goumi berries.

Forests and Fire

August is prime fire season:

The Park Fire, north of Chico, is now the fourth-largest wildfire in California's recorded history.
An all-hands-on-deck approach by CAL FIRE, federal, state, and local partners have allowed the team assigned to reach 24 percent containment, as of this Aug. 2 post.
Note from… pic.twitter.com/AIdQ8XYxKk

— CAL FIRE (@CAL_FIRE) August 2, 2024

NorCal Sierra Foothills Lurker has sent in some pertinent articles:

"Loggers/logging was always good for the forests. Takes them this long to rethink what they've done."

Tyler Durden:

Millions of Albertans, and indeed Canadians, are mourning the destruction of a site where they have memories of recent and childhood trips. We can be thankful that no lives have been lost, but the loss for residents of Jasper is unimaginable. I grew up in the town of Banff and can’t imagine watching my hometown go up in flames.

Banff may very well suffer the same fate as Jasper soon, though, as it is nestled within the same kind of beautiful, but highly flammable Rocky Mountain forests as Jasper. When the Jasper fires have been extinguished and the rebuilding process begins, we must have a serious appraisal of our forest management practices and act as soon as possible. Otherwise, it won’t be a matter of if another community is lost to a wildfire, it will be a matter of when.

The fingers are pointing and the partisan sniping has already begun as politicians and activists try to lay blame of the Jasper tragedy upon others. But we must set aside partisanship, and even ideology, and work towards solutions before we see more losses.

To begin with, it must be accepted that fires in boreal forests are natural and inevitable. It has only been in the last couple of centuries that humans have entered the scene and meddled with the natural cycle of burning and rejuvenation of forests. What we are seeing today is the consequences of deferring the fires that would have naturally burned. The forests have become overgrown, unhealthy, and cluttered with layers of extremely flammable deadfall. Forests in that condition burn hot and fast, leading to fires that can’t be extinguished. Many communities in Canada are surrounded by forests like this and are but one spark away from a disaster.

It’s not reasonable to just let fires burn naturally in populated areas. That means we must manage these forests and our communities to reduce the chances of wildfires and mitigate the damage they cause. This has been done to a degree in areas, but not adequately.

Forest management to reduce wildfire risk is not new. Logging, tree spacing, and prescribed fires are all methods used to reduce fire hazards in populated regions. Unfortunately, when politics get involved, the wisdom of foresters can be lost as elected officials face backlash for supporting the cutting or burning of brush.

Jasper is a prime example. . .

Details provided.

Andrew Pollack: How Trump Can Save Western Forests from Wildfires

Government policies are not helping.

I own a ranch in rural Oregon that borders land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. It is immediately obvious where my land and the land of my neighbors’ ends, and where the land managed by the BLM begins. While the trees on my property are green and healthy, the trees on BLM land are dead.

Beetles are killing these trees, and unlike the privately held land, the forest service isn’t taking care of their property. Cedar and pine tree beetles can be killed with insecticidal spray. The Douglas-fir beetle generally prefers larger trees of 12 to 14 inches in diameter. Cutting down old trees when an infection starts can help control it. These are things that private landowners will do, but that BLM just won’t.

Sometimes, leaving the environment completely untouched by humans is counterproductive. Take hunting, for example. Leaving deer and elk populations alone leads to boom and bust cycles, where populations increase until they overgraze and don’t have enough food to feed all the animals. When that happens, populations crash, and there is mass starvation—not exactly a very humane outcome.

Similarly, BLM policy leaves our forests untended, which leads to deadwood and fires, which leads to calls for further restrictions on private land use. President Trump needs to break this destructive cycle. Appointing a head of BLM who has actually owned private forest land would be a start. Implementing Schedule F to make it easier to actually change BLM policy would be another good move.

But ultimately, American land would be in better hands if it were tended to by American citizens.

In the meantime, how can we reduce fire hazards on our own properties?

Art

Eugène Samuel Grasset (25 May 1845 – 23 October 1917) was a Swiss decorative artist who worked in Paris, France in a variety of creative design fields during the Belle Époque. He is considered a pioneer in Art Nouveau design. . .

. . . Grasset's work for U.S. institutions helped pave the way for Art Nouveau to dominate American art.

French posters became popular in America during his lifetime. A typeface was patented in his name.

Ah, Nature

The tiny egg and the life it produced

📹 Adrian Kozakiewicz

pic.twitter.com/3rLEKPqHpa

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) August 3, 2024

By-Tor:

Saw this Red Tailed Hawk on the way to tennis. On a busy street near the freeway, which is unusual.

Adventure

Water in the desert at Arizona's Salt River
Jake Case

Gardens of The Horde

From Diana:

Inviting.

Hope everyone has a nice weekend.

If you would like to send photos, stories, links, etc. for the Saturday Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, the address is:

ktinthegarden at g mail dot com

Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.

Week in Review

What has changed since last week's thread? Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, July 27

Any thoughts or questions?

I closed the comments on this post so you wouldn't get banned for commenting on a week-old post, but don't try it anyway.