What is your name for these flowers with no clothes?
Squirrelly Little Guy
After placing some sorghum grain on top of a pile of straw bales intended for the various birds to nibble on, this brazen little guy discovered the location and decided to help himself.
One night when I returned from town at about 10 pm there were four raccoons – three babies and one adult – sitting on the straw bales helping themselves. When I shouted at them, two babies just stared back at me with their bandit eyes.
Sprouted Seed Nuts
The seed nuts placed in pots in a previous posting have emerged and are growing.
The following two pictures show the same box from the previous post filled with small trees – the Chinese chestnuts are in the back rows and the pecans are in the front.
And, here is another bloomin’ flower.
Butterfly Food
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.
Last Years Graft
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.
Sprouting Chinese Chestnut Seeds to Produce Seedling Trees
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.
Snaggin’ Fishes
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.
Crab Apples & Dandelions
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.
Early Birds of Spring
The first buzzard of 2016 was sighted as it soared/floated around on the strong and gusty March winds on March 15. The winds were so strong that it was doing acrobatics and never even flapped its wings.
This past week I cleaned out the bluebird houses installed in previous years – six had nests from last year, one had fallen down, and the entry hole of one had been redesigned by woodpeckers making it inhospitable.
After making two more houses I put them up out in the field by attaching them to t-posts and placing a piece of metal pipe on the post between the ground and the house. The pictures below show one of them.
One of these days I hope to put up a martin house and also construct a small shed for barn swallows to build their mud nests in and poop all over any equipment stored inside it.
Cherry Blossoms
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.
