The weather’s 40 by day and 20 by night, which means that the trees are confused but budding and the sap is rising fast. This means get out there and trim and clip and rake…I got half the apple tree pruned and the wands diced for the bin, we have a bin-full left from last fall and no pickup until March, but I’m filling garbage cans to dump into the green can when it’s empty. One smaller limb of the hawthorn broke in this last week’s wind, and that has to be dealt with—it’s an aged tree, so this sort of thing is to be expected. And we can’t put a thick bit of wood into the green bin…has to go in the trash. Plus there’s going to be a pond cleanout and refill, part of the spring routine, plus renewing the netting.
I’m also raking pinecones, or fir cones or whatever they are. Lots of them. If only these were a food crop, eh? But I have to vary jobs because my back just won’t take one steady job for hours.
Next comes the annual checkups, and more dental work. Sigh. I so do not look forward to these. But spring is out there, the sky is brilliant blue, the weather is crisp and sweatshirt weather while you’re actively working, and we’re off on our latest weight-loss effort.
Blaargh. How did your last outing to the dentist go?
Pine nuts are a food crop, but I have no idea of how to get the nuts out of the cones. I am also slower than most squirrels.
Only some pines have ‘pine nuts’ suitable for eating. Here in South Australia they were known as monkey nuts (before the European food influence kicked in), and were planted in many schools in the old days, including my primary school. This variety has big squat cones roughly the size of a grapefruit, and a large untidy looking tree. The shell of the nut is very hard, and as kids we loved smashing and eating them. Our parents and teachers were not so keen, given the black resin we got all over our fingers, which was very difficult to wash off.
Fairly ghastly. I’m going to have work on both sides and will endure about 3 months of grafts and waiting-for-grafts-to-take before they can manage implants which may not ‘take’. It’s due, partly, to a bike ‘accident’—or attempted assassination—when a clown in a car deliberately swerved at me and forced me onto a drain grid that some other clown had set sideways (incorrectly) and I dropped a bike wheel into it at full speed on a downhill. The bike flipped and I did a landing that, if I hadn’t been in great shape, would have broken my neck. I karate-chopped the pavement with both arms as I hit, and carried myself forward, still pavement burned my throat, and pretty well broke a number of side teeth, not the front, thank goodness. I still pay for that jerk, in considerable inconvenience. He sped off and left the scene.
I’ve never seen one of those grids that was set across the direction of travel so bikes could cross safely, and I rode a bike for years! Don’t ask why. I don’t know.
My goodness, that must have been extremely painful! How did you manage to get back home?
freezing rain here, winter weather advisory….we’ve had days when it was in the 60s, other days when it was -10. Welcome to Ohio, you don’t like the weather, stick around 5 minutes, it’ll change….
I have a rather large shrub in front of my house that HAS to come out. I’m afraid that I’m going to have to resort to the chain saw, a sharp spade to cut the roots (if not a full blown axe), and a winch to pull it out of the ground. It grows very quickly after I’ve trimmed it to about 5 feet in height, reaching up to the eaves. (I have a one-story house.) It hides one of the windows, which makes it an inviting place for a burglar to try to get into the house. Sadly, if I am not at home, the cats won’t do much to prevent such entry. The windows in that room are about 7 feet off the ground, so it would still be a task but not an insurmountable one for a youngster who could jump up and pull themselves over the sash. They would have to get the window open, though, and seeing as it’s on the front of the house, the neighbors would probably see it as it happened. They DO look out for my house when I’m not there.
I’d try just the chainsaw first and cut it off at two feet rather than five. If it lives, you have a short bush that can be handled with clippers; if it dies, you will have a sitable stump until it rots.
Second the chainsaw pruning; if you get it low enough that it won’t obscure the window but can be kept in check without power tools, it will be enough of a pain that burglars won’t want to climb through it to get in that window.
Our tame astrophysicist was talking about how the new solar telescope, DKIST, has channeled the airflow around it to make some fairly gusty winds in its vicinity when the wind is up, like last week. Good thing he didn’t get blown off the mountain!
I had an accessible window behind a camellia, at a house I was renting. I planted mint under the camellia – if someone tried to come through, they’d be noticed. (It was powerful spearmint.)
I grabbed the chain saw this afternoon and cut that offending shrub down. I didn’t get away unscathed, as the branches are intermixed with another shrub, I suspect honeysuckle, and I got fairly well scratched on one hand. Yes, I know, GLOVES!!!! But it was just a quick swath with the saw, don’t you see? Anyway, now the fun part is getting all of those branches out of the front yard and into the chipper to make mulch.
I got out my little (8″) electric chainsaw to start my annual apple tree pruning. I have 6 in my backyard, all from scions of trees on the property for probably more than a century, when this was a farmstead. They’re grafted on M7A semidwarfing rootstock. Four are Esopus Spitzenberg winter apples, which I’ve praised in the past (Thos Jefferson said they were the best eating apple in the country.), and two are early fall Gravensteins.
I have a hand pole pruner, hook-shear on one side, saw on the other, on a 5′ pole with an extension inside. The Gravensteins don’t take kindly to the rootstock and want to be BIG. I’m always shortening their leaders to just a few inches, but they’d gotten over 15′ just on the leader, not to mention of its “watersprout” competitors. Last year I couldn’t do anything effective–the pole pruner saw is too thin and weak.
So, for the first time I got out my little electric chainsaw, which also has an extensible 5′ pole, and cut them back to about 10′ tall. That’s just the leader. Now it’s on to all the branches and THEIR watersprouts. It’s going to be days with the pole pruner and hand shears cutting as weather allows. It’s said a robin should be able to fly straight through a properly pruned apple nary a wing tip touching. And then days more trimming the trimmings (so they’ll make a dense enough burnpile) and cleaning up the lawn.
CJ, look at the needles. On pines they’re in little bunches of 3, 5, or so, wrapped with a little papery husks. Firs have individual needles. Not sure about spruce.
Here it is not even the middle of February, the 40′ southern foundation planting bed has only a handful of blooming daffodils, and today I did my burn-pile! Generally I’m waiting until April or sometimes May. AND I had to get out one of my “shorty” hoses and a sprinkler head to water the potted plants on the patio. In the area of Portland, Oregon?!
Spruce have individual needles, but they grow all around the twigs, not in pairs like firs. (We had a Christmas tree that was a dwarf spruce.)
Here in L.A. I woke up about 4am when a front came through: the temperature dropped about four degrees *inside*, and the wind is blowing. Again.
Douglas Fir needles grow all around the branches and individually. Grand Fir needles tend to grow to both sides on horizontal branches, all around on vertical leaders. I have 2/3A of both beside the house and run a little U-Cut Xmas Trees business seasonally.
The Dutch names for those trees come with a built-in mnemonic: “Spar = Solo” (Picea, Spruce, has single needles, so the same mnemonic would work in English), and “Den = Duo” (Pinus = Pine, has two needles together, emerging from the same attachment point).
Then Firs = genus Abies: those are called “Zilverspar” here (“Silver spruce”, as their needles often have a pale underside; their twigs are smoother than the rough spruce twigs), and I never heard a mnemonic for them, other than the name itself referring to the silvery stripe on the underside of the needles. Because it’s got “spar” in the name, people often don’t realise it’s a separate family.
The supposed third (or really, fourth) “naaldboom” (“needle-tree”, as opposed to “loofboom” = leaf-tree) family that is common here are Larix (Larches) which have tufts of short and fairly soft needles that all emerge from little nodes together, and are deciduous (colors up in autumn and sheds the needles, bare in winter) and are different enough that one does’t confuse them easily.
Cedar is apparently used for both genus Cedrus trees and Cypress conifers (Juniperus) – the only one of those we have around here is the Juniper conifer, which has berries instead of pinecones, and prickly conifer foliage instead of needles – that one too is different enough no mnemonic is needed to recognise it, so I can’t help with recognising those.
Firs are in the genus Abies, spruce are Picea, and Douglas fir is Pseudotsuga (it’s actually closer to larches).
It’s little tufts of needles that depend from the branches. It’s Canadian—something. Not cedar. I know that. Which leaves pine, fir, and spruce. But spruce is all up and down the branch. We have several small ones.
That’d be a pine.
I need to stimulate the economy and see if I can get a yard guy to come and do some yard chores, like weed and fork that front bed. I have a packet of wildflower seeds of species native to Tx to sow once the ground is ready for them. They are self seeding. I also need a little old wood pile taken to the alley. There is a wood-burning fireplace in this house, but it is now behind glass because the flue leaks and when it’s cold there’s a downdraft out the fireplace right onto where I sit, and when it’s hot, it sucks all the cool air up the chimbly . . er . . chimney.
Was anyone else amused by the seeming oxymoron of “Falcon Heavy” as the name for a rocket? — No romance in calling it “pellican” or “crane,” I guess.
Falcons fly faster than pelicans or cranes. The fact that it could lift so much would account for the “Heavy”, yet achieve escape velocity would account for the “Falcon”. IMHO.
I had a different take on the genesis of the name Falcon Heavy when listening to SpaceX’s “Mission Control” during the blast off. In their excitement, it sure sounded like they were saying (you insert the actual pronunciation here) “F—ing Heavy”!
And you know, it really is an f—ing heavy rocket.
I’ve heard it also has to do with a certain fictional spaceship.
One has less than no knowledge of plant life, tree and flower names, and how to tell them apart. One would be quite literally lost in the woods without a guide for what was what and what was edible.
So the botany discussion was very welcome. I don’t know if I’ll retain it, but that there are such distinctions available, I likely will retain. (And the way my brain works, I’m more likely to remember spar and den, naald and boom and loof, and how they’re cognate. Funny how natural talents work.)
(I’d guess nagel might be the Dutch cognate for nail? But hammer is likely the same?)
This reminds me of the few times we were at the family farm where my dad grew up in Virginia, and my dad trying to remember and explain how to tell apart all the different kinds of maples around there, with names like Silver Leaf, Golden, Red, and other Maples, plus sassafras (which maybe I’d recognize still). I wouldn’t know what poke looked like if I saw it now (as in, yes, poke salad or poke berries). And hah, it’s been so long since I looked at how to recognize poison oak, poison ivy, and poison sumac, that I’d have to look it up again.
A very few things, I can recognize.
My grandparents on both sides were farmers. My maternal grandmother loved to garden and loved her flower beds. These were as much a source of relaxation and enjoyment for her as for CJ and Jane. It was a form of art and beauty and meditation for her, though I’m not sure she’d say it that way. My dad grew up a farm boy and my mom grew up a city girl with farm relatives, and her dad (the biological granddad I hardly ever got to see, his own misdeeds) liked to hunt. So my parents both liked gardening, but didn’t do nearly as much once I was an older kid and beyond. City life and making a living had them too busy. But there were grandiose plans for the home and land where I grew up, up until my junior year of high school. (They’d thought maybe six kids. Mother Nature had other plans. They got me only, and didn’t adopt or foster, dang it.)
Ah, there was a great story about the mama dog I grew up with, and a large few tomato plants near the air conditioner compressor, at the home where I grew up. It seems they’d planted a really wonderful large tomato plant (several together) and the plants loved where they were and grew like crazy. The plants started putting out tomatoes, and my mom and dad kept getting frustrated, because something was coming along and pulling off a tomato or a few, taking a bite of the green tomatoes, and phew, sour, dropping them. So they were getting hardly any tomatoes, despite a good-sized planting. It was not their young son (I’m not sure how old I was then, but old enough I wouldn’t do that. I liked tomatoes fine, and would have wanted them to get ripe too.)
The home was on the edge of town, and there was uncleared land, including a patch of woods and mostly fields beyond our fenced home and business, on our land, and then more uncleared land beyond that, that wasn’t ours. (They’d planned on lots of kids and home gardening and farming, remember.) So this meant there were deer, raccoons, opossums, someone’s goat that wandered into the yard and got on top of the family car, at one point, and rodents and snakes at times. And stray cats and dogs, because heartless idiots would dump them along the highway, because it was the edge of town.
In other words, if any wildlife (oh, many kinds of birds too, plus squirrels, rabbits, whatever) could get in the yard, then they might think they had a nice tomato salad dinner all set out for them.
Mom and Dad therefore set out a plan to watch the tomatoes and find out what critter or person was munching tomatoes and leaving them. They didn’t get cameras, it didn’t get that elaborate, and I don’t know what sorts of things would’ve been available then (1970’s). There were not significant thoughts of revenge upon the perpetrator of tomatoey theft. (OK, maybe some wishful thinking they didn’t say much about to said young son, haha.)
And then one Saturday afternoon while Dad was out doing yard work, aha! They found the culprit.
Our sweet mama dog, who also liked Mexican food with hot sauce (discovered because she got into a sample with hot sauce) — had been enchanted by the lovely smell and looks of the big green balls that were the unripe tomatoes. So she just couldn’t resist taking one. And ooh, ugh, sour! That’s not good to eat and not a good ball to play with! And so she’d drop it and go on, looking sheepish and disappointed. And uh-oh, she’d been caught at it, by her humans! Oh, that was not good.
Hah, Dad said it was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen, and he figured the sour tomato was punishment enough, she was a good dog and knew she’d been caught doing it. She just couldn’t resist how they looked and smelled, and they were basically balls, either tasty or good toys, right? She didn’t learn from repeated tries. (I guess they were not so awful that she’d be put off from trying it again.) Lucky for her, they weren’t going to hurt her, with what she was doing.
Well, sometime thereafter, the big bunch of tomato plants were removed as being a good idea that worked, and yet didn’t. Thereafter, any tomato plants resided elsewhere, beyond reach of the tomato-stealing but much-loved dog.
OK, so it’s not a conifer story. Texas does, however, have the Piney Woods, full of yes, pine trees and other trees, and plenty of wildlife and walking trails. That’s further northeast of where I am, hmm, and somewhere more than midway toward where CJ grew up or where I have cousins from my grandmother’s siblings.
Hmm, IIRC, first cousins are your aunts’ and uncles’ children as related to you. Then their kids would be “once removed” and so on, removed down through generations. Then, IIRC, “second cousins” are how you’d be related to your great-aunts’ and great-uncles’ children (the children of the siblings of your grandparents). — I don’t deal with that often enough to keep it in memory.
So there are first cousins of my mom there, second cousins to me, and once and twice removed, for their kids and grandkids, as related to me.
At the last family reunion I know of for my dad’s siblings and down, it was a very funny thing for me to see cousins’ kids and grandkids running around, with some looking much like my cousins and me when we were kids, and one or two of the little boys or older boys looking about like one of my closest cousins or myself at those ages. Only a very different world they were growing up in.
Nope, I haven’t heard from any cousins, aunts, or uncles in several years now. A few years after my grandmother died, I realized I was the one calling them and not getting calls back, unless I lucked into reaching them. This got to me, and I stopped calling. Particularly irked me for a cousin and family with kids, who couldn’t manage to call back. — But I wish it wasn’t like that. Everybody lives across the country, and I think everyone who did keep in touch, pretty much now have their own lives, kids, and grandkids now. Cousins drift apart, and my youngest living aunt and uncle are in their upper 70’s.
That gets to an oddity of how families are traced in English and most European languages. On my dad’s side of the family, only myself and one other cousin, my dad’s brother’s son, “bear the family name,” because the other siblings and cousins trace down female lines and family names trace through patrilineal (male parentage) lines instead of matrilineal (female parentage) lines. That cousin only had a daughter of his own and a stepson who didn’t take the stepdad’s name (good decision, kid, I know my cousin; he’s a boor). And I don’t have kids, never married, I’m gay. — So there are plenty of female cousins and female cousins’ children and grandchildren, and plenty of male kids through female cousins, and plenty girls and boys through my dad’s and his brother’s sisters, female siblings, with male and female descendants. But because we don’t trace through female lines or through both, well, there are only two guys with the “family name” and neither of us had sons to carry on the “family name.” But there are plenty of female cousins with kids now, and plenty of male cousins or their kids, male or female. So the family goes on, but the family name will end that branch with my cousin and me. (He’s about five to seven years older, but without the common sense or education. I wish that weren’t so true.)
The other funny thing being, those cousins bear a family resemblance, more or less, some stretch the boundaries more than others, but that’s a good thing. But if you saw an old photo of various male ancestors and relatives, and probably some of my male cousins, on either side of my family, haha, there’d be a family resemblance that likely won’t get noticed, because of time and space distances.
There are plenty of other branches of my family name, all distant cousins, likely. The name is somewhat rare, and depending on where you look, it’s either English from near the Scots border (with a telltale sound change common to the Middle English and Early Modern English dialect there before standard English) or it’s from Germany or Denmark or Holland, because of that same telltale sound common to all four languages. And my family name is one or two letters off from two other, way more common versions of the words in more common English dialects.
@BCS, yes, hammer = hamer in Dutch (with a long A so only one M, to break the syllables as ha-mer not ham-mer which would make the A short; the unrelated food called ham is the same in both countries so maybe the longer A provides more distinction between the two words).
Nagel is the common word for fingernail, but is a bit oldfashioned or countryfied to use for nail in the sense of “hammer and nail”, though still in common use in some combinations, like “nagelvast” = firmly attached, or “klinknagel” = rivet, a specific type of nail where you hit the nail all the way through both plates to be joined, and then flatten the end so it can’t be pulled out.
The usual word for ordinary hammerable nails would be “spijker” (related to English “spike”).
Here, it’s definitely winter with a fair covering of snow.
It was -30°C as I was walking to work this morning (-41°C with wind chill. My thighs were tingling:) ) Temperature is supposed to rise to 0°C by tomorrow afternoon, then drop back down to -25°C the next day. It’s bouncy weather time!
My mother lives in the Okanagan. It’s probably about time to call her up so she can describe how the crocuses are about to bloom.
We’ve had lovely early spring weather here, with snowdrops, crocus, winterrose (hellebore) and winteraconites (Eranthis hyemalis) in flower, and a nice dry not too windy cold sunshine most days (temperatures below freezing at night, and above it by afternoon: swinging between -5C to +5C, or 23F to 40F). Someone filmed part of my old trip to highschool today and put it on twitter: https://twitter.com/herbert_tiemens/status/966589288501710854?s=20 – no crocusses in view, but lots of bikes 😀
I’ve been keeping an eye out here just outside Boston for our first snowdrops, but no sign of the blossoms yet. The past two days were totally unseasonably (and delightfully) in the high 60’s/low 70’s Farenheit — today it is snowing.
…soon, soon but not quite yet.
Robins quivering
in the old cherry tree.
Snow tonight?
– Peter Kendall, ARS-PDX