There is one group of easter flowers that always bloom a week or two before the others. This year the first blooms came out on February 28, 2017, as the following photo shows. Although I thought that was early, I found a picture of the same flowers from last year that was dated March 7, 2016.
And, as the following photo shows the elderberries are also leafing out.
What is your definition of a weed?
Are weeds still weeds when they are such a beautiful part of this world?
Joseph A Cocoannoeur thought there was a place in agriculture for weeds when he published a book in 1950 with the title:
Weeds: Guardians of the Soil
When I am out walking around the fields, I am frequently amazed at the beauty of the various “weeds”. The pictures below were taken last Summer and Fall and show plants (usually two pictures of each variety) that you can have fun trying to identify. I don’t think any are noxious in the county where the property is located. Although they spread from year to year, most are not aggressive “Rule The World” types.
Can you name the “weeds”? Both common & Latin names?
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What is your name for these flowers with no clothes?
There are lots of plants scattered around for the butterflies to consume as in the following two pictures. When I mow a field I often skip around the milkweed plants and leave them standing.
Here is another flower that is about 15 inches tall and that pops up at scattered places.
After grafting one seedling pecan tree last May the buds on the scion were very slow to pop and then they only grew about two or three inches during the season. Normally, the expected growth with this size seedling stock tree would be one to three feet. When I took a closer look at the graft union this Spring, I could guess what happened. The graft method was a three-flap – or banana graft – so named because after the seedling stock tree is cut off, three flaps of bark are pulled down about three inches and the inner core is cut out. Then the scion is carved so that three faces of exposed inner wood slightly shorter than the three flaps of the stock are separated by narrow strips of bark. This carved scion is inserted into the three flaps of the stock with the flaps completely covering the faces of the scion wood and the combined graft wrapped up tightly.
As you can see in the next three pictures below only one of the three flaps on the seedling stock tree mended together with the scion. Despite the flubbed graft the scion did manage to survive.
In May of this year I decided to cut off last years graft and graft the seedling tree again. If my grafting skills have improved, maybe the tree will grow better this year – hopefully it will grow out one foot or more before Fall.
And, of course, there are more bloomin’ flowers to show.
Last October I collected some Chinese chestnuts from the Chestnut Charlie Orchard in Lawrence. After placing them in plastic bags with enough moist moss to cover them I stored them in the refrigerator at a temperature of about 35 degrees F. A note about the plastic bags: I poke a few tiny air holes near the top of the plastic bag after enclosing the nuts. One year I double bagged the nuts before placing them in the refrigerator, and, when I opened up the bags in April there was a strong aroma of alcohol and the nuts had spoiled.
In February the nuts started sprouting. By mid April most of the nuts had a single small white root growing out of them. I then placed each sprouted seed nut in a one gallon plastic pot and put the pot in a wire cage box to keep away the mice and squirrels. Although it would have been better to put them in pots earlier, they should still produce small trees this summer. The following two pictures show the box with the pots inside.
The following two pictures show a pretty flower that has popped up in road side ditches during the last couple of weeks. I need to do some research to figure out what it is.
Everyone who has ‘gone fishing’ has probably snagged something on their hook that they did not expect – maybe a log, an old tire, the line of a nearby fisher-woman, etc.
But, there is one type of fishing that depends on snagging the fish with a hook rather than the fish taking the bait. Anglers working the rivers and lakes of Southwest Missouri use this technique to snag paddlefish.
Bragging rights for this endeavor seem to take the form of displaying the ‘catch’ by cutting off the bill and part of the head and mounting it on fence posts as in the two pictures below.
Driving through the countryside you sometimes come across the bounty of fishing trips displayed on a row of fence posts as in the following photo.
Paddlefish have an interesting history. Paddlefish have been called “primitive fish” because their appearance today has changed little from 70 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period. The American paddlefish is native to the Mississippi river basin. When the price of caviar taken from the beluga sturgeon of the Caspian Sea rose to high levels late in the 20th century, the eggs(roe) of the paddlefish were sometimes sold as fake caviar. Although I have never eaten caviar I do remember the catfish roe that my mother fried up with the rest of the catfish – of course we enjoy deep-fried foods for the taste of the batter.
And here are some more blooms of Spring.
The crab apple tree is showing its bright red blossoms again.
And that beautiful yard flower is popping up all over the place.
There should be a law against spraying herbicides on plants with such beautiful yellow blooms!
On April 6 there was a chicken snake crossing the road over to a neighbor’s property, but, I never figured out why the chicken snake crossed the road.
This is the first year the Nanking Cherry bushes have bloomed. After transplanting two bushes from pots in 2013 one bush has grown quite well but the other plant had some die-back last Summer. But, this Spring both bushes are covered in pretty white blooms. The pictures below illustrate the beauty that Lee Reich describes in his books.
The same bunch of Easter flowers that bloomed weeks before their neighbors last year have bloomed early(March 7) again this year.
And, the elderberry buds are popping out new leaves.
