Picture from Fairdale

On April 9, a tornado tore through Fairdale, IL, 25 miles straight south of where we were. A few days later, Terry read in the paper about a person in Harvard finding a wedding picture from Fairdale. Last Wednesday, Terry found a torn and muddy photograph on our land. We don’t know for sure that it came from Fairdale, of course. It is not unreasonable to think that it came from the inside of a house, which is where photographs are generally kept, although I suppose it could have come from a garbage can or landfill.

Picture Terry found on Wednesday

I saw there was writing on the back. I wiped the mud away with a damp paper towel. My first thought was that it said “illy Stone 98.”  Billy Stone, perhaps? I looked at the picture again. A young boy in a tank top holding his shoes in the dark. A camping trip. The writing on the back wasn’t a name; it was a place. Jelly Stone. No doubt a reference to Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park Camp-Resorts. That boy would be a man now.

Writing on the back

Hilda decided she needed a shed by the garden so we would not have to constantly be walking up and down the hill schlepping tools and running after things we had forgotten. It was delivered Thursday. The most fascinating part of the whole thing was a remote-controlled trailer. The delivery man was able to pivot the shed with a hand-held unit that moved the end of the trailer to hoist one corner of the shed and move it sideways. It is hard to describe, so I took a video. Terry kept walking in front of me in his usual oblivious way.

The whole rig

Unloading the shed

In other news, the garlic is up. Hilda kept meaning to get down to check its progress. One day she realized that it had gotten big enough that she could see it from the house.

The garlic bed

The asparagus is starting to sprout. So are the thistles in the asparagus bed. We’ve had some cold nights since Wednesday. Most of the asparagus froze, but the thistles are doing fine. It’s a good thing classes will be ending soon, as I can start working outside as soon as I can find time.

Asparagus sprouts

Finally, the trees are flowering everywhere. Most people don’t seem to appreciate the sexual nature of trees because they fail to closely inspect the trees right after the buds open. That subtle pale green of the willows and the red of the box elders aren’t all leaves. In fact, it’s mostly flowers. Because these trees are wind-pollinated, the flowers aren’t showy like the apple trees. Still, these flowers get the job done. A new generation is forming right before our eyes. Spring has come.

Willow flowers

Quick trip to Houston

Just so you won't be in suspense, Nelly Elly was cured of broodiness by two days in the cage. She seems fine now.
Some months ago, we received a wedding invitation from Terry’s niece, Robyn and her betrothed, Matt to their wedding on April 17. Why not? My semester would be winding down. Terry’s season would just be gearing up. I went to Robyn and Matt’s website (oh, the modern age) to book the room at the Marriot in Sugar Land, TX and the flight on Spirit Airlines, the least expensive of the links that Robyn provided.

The closer the date loomed, the more I wondered what we had been thinking. I took care of some of my weekend chores in advance, such as making a batch of yogurt. Terry was also having misgivings. In the planning stages, he figured that all of his trees would have been delivered by this time. In reality, he was still waiting for most of his shipments.

“I know it will be fun when we get there,” I told him, “and if we never go anywhere, we will never go anywhere.”

I was up at 4:00 Friday morning to take a quick shower, pack the last minute things, roust Terry out of bed, start the dishwasher, and get in the car at 5:00. We got to Jane’s right on time at 6:00 and were to the airport a bit before 7:00.

Our flight left and landed on time. Our deboarding was delayed by 40 minutes because of a malfunctioning walkway. As the website said, it did cost $90 to take a taxi from the airport to the hotel. I was not concerned. I had no desire to rent a car and drive through an unfamiliar big city. Seek professional help.

We got checked into the Marriot and met two of Terry’s sisters coming out of the elevator as we were going in. They told us that several of us were at the pool.

Sugar Land Marriot

The hotel hand soap came overpackaged in a pyramid box, although the shape of the soap was fairly usual.

We dropped our bags, hung up our wedding clothes, and went to the pool to say hello. All of Terry’s surviving sisters had made it to the event—Carol, Elaine, Kathy, Judy, Gloria, Rosie (mother of the bride), Abby, Iris, and Laura. The wedding was at 7:30 with dinner to follow. Plans were afoot to have a late lunch at 2:30. Ten of us met in the lobby and walked across the street to the Lasagna House. We got in just under the 3:00 deadline for lunch.

At 5:00, the skies opened up and rain POURED down. We hardly ever get rain like that in Illinois. Wind, lightning, the whole deal. It continued to rain torrentially for the next several hours. We rode with Carol and Jim to the wedding, leaving at 5:45 and sitting in a rush hour/bad weather traffic jam most of the way through Houston.

We got to the venue, Briscoe Manor, at 6:50. Walking around to see the beautiful grounds was out of the question. Jim let us off under the awning and parked the truck. Even with an umbrella, he was soaked by the time he got in.

The service was delayed a few minutes to wait for those who had been delayed by the storm. The minister asked everyone to silence their cell phones. Nevertheless, two people had weather alerts go off in the middle of the ceremony because of flash flood warnings.

The service was very nice, lasting about 30 minutes. The family hung back for pictures, which the photographer dealt with quickly and efficiently. We were then excused to walk across the courtyard to the reception area. Champagne, wine, and beer were abundant. The food was served buffet style, and was outstanding. I had a proud moment when Terry read the menu and knew right away what haricots verts were.

We stayed until midnight, talking, laughing, dancing. Shouting more than talking, really, as the music was cranked up. It was a good time, but we were all hoarse the next day.

I didn’t take my camera. It seemed like something that I was entirely too likely to misplace under the circumstances.

In spite of not getting to bed until 1:30, I was awake for good at 7:16 the following morning. I ran to the Starbucks next door for lattes and bananas. Terry ate his leftover anchovy pizza. I had the remainder of my penne olio, giving myself garlic breath for the rest of the day. We ate our food cold, since we had no microwave, and with our fingers for lack of forks. Not so much of an issue for the pizza.

We took a walk through the area around the hotel, mostly high-end boutiques and lots and lots of restaurants. The plaza by City Hall was being set up for an Earth Day fair of green businesses. There was a sculpture of Stephen F. Austin pulling a horse out of a river. The history of Texas was written in a stone river that meandered from the fountain across the plaza. I read it up until Austin (“The Father of Texas”) died of pneumonia at the age of 43. There was no mention of the horse rescue story.

The Sugar Land City Hall with sculpture of Stephen F. Austin and two horses

Flood remnant

This sign near a restaurant was made by potted plants in a framework

Palm tree landscaping

We went to Rosie and Dick’s house to talk and hang out by the pool. Robyn, Matt, and Matt’s family came around at 2:00 for the Opening of the Gifts. And then we hung out some more. Two large birds caught my attention as they flew into a neighbor’s palm tree. They looked like ducks, or maybe geese. They flew in a most unusual way with their bodies nearly vertical and their webbed feet dangling below them. They had a high-pitched clear staccato call very unlike a quack. Not ordinary wood ducks, certainly. Rosie’s son, Jonathon, got his binoculars from his car. The striking feature of the duck we could see was a bright orange bill. It also had a gray head, black underside, white stripe on the wing, and rusty breast. Jonathon got out a Golden Guide, and we identified it as a black bellied whistling duck. I tried to get a picture with my silly little camera, but the images were so bad, I won’t bother posting them. I didn’t take my good camera and telephoto lens. I was going to a wedding, for heaven’s sake. How could I have known I was going to see a black bellied whistling duck? It isn’t every day I see a duck in a palm tree, that's for sure.

Most of the crowd left at 4:00 to drive to Dick and Rosie’s beach house. The rest of us went out to dinner. Abby’s son Andrew dropped us off at the hotel. We went to bed straightaway at 8:30, since we had to be ready to go at 5:00 the next morning.

We were in the lobby at 4:40 to check out. The cab was 10 minutes early and, traffic being light, we got to the airport at 5:30. Our flight to Minneapolis was supposed to leave at 8:05, which would allow us time for coffee and breakfast. Before I was fully aware of what was going on, we had seats on the 6:05 flight directly to Chicago. No time for anything! We went through security and hauled tail to the gate, arriving just as the attendants were shutting the door. The flight was pretty empty, and I assumed that they needed more room on the later flight.

Since Jane was just getting up when we landed at O’Hare at 8:30, we had time for breakfast before she picked us up. We were home by 11:30, when we otherwise would have just been taking off from the Minneapolis airport. It was good to be home, and good to be home 3 hours early. 

Gardenfest and Broody Hen

Yesterday was Gardenfest. Hilda and I rushed through the chicken chores to get on the road at 7:15. We got caught on our way in not only behind a hay truck but also following a very slow moving construction truck. Fortunately, the keynote speaker began at 8:15, not 8:00 as we had thought. We had 10 minutes to spare.

The keynote speaker was Roy Diblik of Northwind Perennial Farm. Loyal readers may remember that we visited this nursery following my birthday boat tour of Lake Geneva last June. I enjoyed the talk. Hilda, not so much. She had trouble hearing him, for one thing, and found him to be negative.  I could see her point, as he was adamantly opposed to traditional gardening methods that separated plants and surrounded them with wood chips. His point, with which I completely agreed, was that plants don’t normally grow in wood chips. Plants are social organisms, he said over and over. They need to touch each other, just as we do. He gave a brief summary of the recent shift in agricultural practices. In the 1930’s, magazines talked about gardening as an enjoyable passtime. After World War II, when the munitions industry switched over to making chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, gardening became yard work, “work” being the operative word.  We have spent too long trying to make plants do what we want them to do, completely ignoring what the plant wants to be. We are not the Land of the Free, he said, “We are the Land of the Neat and Tidy.” Get to know the plants. Plant them the way they want to grow. I could listen all day to someone who talks about plants like they are dear friends. My kind of guy.

We spent the morning learning more about identifying plants in winter, which is much harder than doing it when they have leaves. In the second session, we heard a talk on hydroponics and aquaponics. I expect you know that hydroponics is growing plants without soil using nutrient-laden, aerated water. 

Hydroponically-grown lettuce at various stages of growht

The instructor in front of hydroponic tomatoes and cucumbers being trained to vine onto strings from the ceiling

Aquaponics adds fish into the system. In theory, it makes a more sustainable system. Fish put nigrogen into the water in their waste, and the plants take it out. Nile Tilapia is the fish of choice for aquaponics because they grow to market weight (2 to 2.5 lbs) in six months. An aquaponics producer, in theory, should have two sources of income: the vegetables and the fish. Unfortunately, China has so flooded the market with farm-raised tilapia that most people running aquaponics operations are only able to profit from the vegetables. [I just finished reading Cheap: the high cost of discount culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell, which has a chapter on food that has made me unwilling to knowingly eat anything produced in China. Ever. The trouble is in the “knowingly” part.]

 The instructor explained that the water in the fish tank was naturally and normally murky. He wasn’t kidding. He said there were 16 fish in the tank, which was far below its capacity. I forget what he said capacity was, but it astounded me. It is an intensive system. I looked into the tank from the top and could not see a single fish, and it wasn’t a large tank. I have often heard Terry say that a fish will taste like the water it has been. Seeing this tank did not make me eager to try aquaponic tilapia. I am a reluctant fish-eater under the best of circumstances.

Aquaponics: the tank with the window (right) is for the fish; the two tanks to the left are filters, and the beds with the plants get the water from the filter tanks. The water is then pumped back to the fish tank.

The lunch break was an hour and 15 minutes. It took us about 20 minutes to eat. As we were finishing, three Master Gardeners joined us at our table. One of them was bent about the keynote speaker, saying that a lot of what he said was simply not accurate. Oh well. She likes neat and tidy gardens, I bet.

We dropped our tickets off for the drawings and looked through the vender stalls, which took another 10 minutes.  One of the vendors had shovels with pictures cut into them. "I think those would be hard to use," I whispered to Hilda, who giggled.

Vendor stalls

Not very useful shovels

“Now what?” Hilda asked.

“We could go to my office and check our email,” I suggested. We went upstairs. The email didn’t take long. I made us cups of tea and got out my Pocket Farkel. We made it through a game and a half before it was time for the afternoon sessions.

In the afternoon we learned about native pollinators and starting plants from seed. There was new information for both of us. It was a nice day.

Today, I set about the task of trying to break Nelly Elly of her broodiness. Hilda noticed that she rarely left the nest box maybe two weeks ago. With one thing and another, we haven’t had time to deal with it. What, you may ask, is a broody hen? The primordial chicken, of course, laid eggs to reproduce. As part of that cycle, the hen incubated, or brooded, the eggs. When the eggs hatched, she returned to normal. Through domestication, much of the broodiness has been bred out of the chickens. Some breeds are more prone to it than others. Buff Orpingtons, it would appear, still get broody. The difficulty is that the eggs are never going to hatch. Indeed, the eggs are not even under the chicken since Terry installed the roll-away ramp.

Nelly Elly brooding

I’m not exactly sure why broodiness is a bad thing. The hen stops laying, which decreases production. I think the larger problem is that she doesn’t eat much, and without the cue to stop brooding when the eggs hatch, I suppose she could starve. It does seem like when one has a broody hen, one must Do Something.

I did a search on backyardchickens.com. Most of the people in the first forum I read solved the problem by getting the afflicted hen some fertilized eggs. We are so not going there. I read another post about putting four ice cubes under the hen, one each on front, back, left, and right. The other suggestion was to put the hen in a cage with a wire bottom and a fan blowing on her underside. Apparently, when the hen goes broody, a brain hormone causes her belly to get warmer to properly incubate the eggs. Cooling the belly feeds back to the brain and stops the release of hormone.

I didn’t have time to get a cage set up during the week. We didn’t want to get the nest boxes all wet with ice cubes. We tried an ice pack wrapped in a towel. No success. This morning, I dragged the cat’s kennel into the chicken run and set it up on cement blocks so the wind could take the place of a fan. I had to put the cage sideways because the wires at the bottom were too far apart for Nelly Elly’s feet. Also, the solid metal bottom could act as a shade for the afternoon sun. I put Della’s food and water bowls in there because they attach to the cage, and Nelly Elly would not be able to tip them over. Della said she didn't mind.

Nelly Elly was NOT excited to be removed from her nest box. The video shows her when I first installed her. Another thing that broody chickens do is puff themselves up, which can be observed in this clip. The other girls were either concerned or curious. As soon as I left the run, they crowded around the cage for moral support or because they wanted some of the food. Lizette (the white one) seemed particularly eager for a snack, but had trouble figuring out how to get her head through the bars. Nelly Elly settled down some and pecked at the food. I took these three video clips in a 5-minute span of time.

Nelly Elly has not yet tried to sit down. I will likely take pity on her soon and put in a 2 x 4 so she can rest her feet. I hope one day in the cage will do it. We’ll have to put her in the coop for the night for safety and warmth. Chickens. It’s always something….

Why is today Easter?

I got up at 5:20 Saturday morning. The moon had a notch out of it on the left side that didn’t look like a normal phase. A few minutes later, the notch was bigger, confirming my suspicion that we were having a lunar eclipse. I haven’t been paying too much attention to the lunar cycle lately. A check of the calendar confirmed that it was a full moon. The first full moon after the first day of spring, which is why Easter was today (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring). What a whacky way to set a holiday!

Lunar eclipse

Just as the sun came up, I saw something fairly large moving through the field. Through the binoculars, I saw that it was a coyote. That one ran off, but a second one was quite busy nosing around at the edge of the tall grass.

Coyote hunts at sunrise

Meanwhile, the Holy Family Potato continues to grow.

Holy Family Potato

The poinsettia that we got at Christmas (of course) has started developing pods. Can’t imagine how it got pollinated. Not that the house isn’t overrun with box elder bugs and ladybugs at the moment, but I haven’t seen any on the plant. Another interesting thing is that there are yellow petal-like structures (the red things are really modified leaves and not true petals) that have filled with sticky and presumably sweet liquid. I didn’t have the nerve to taste it. I assume this is to attract pollinators, although it is not closely associated with either the anthers (pollen-producing structures) or the stigma (pollen-catching structure).

Sticky drops of liquid in yellow petal cups; developing pods on poinsettia

We’ve had a nice couple of days this weekend, sunny and relatively warm. Windy as all get out, but Terry keeps saying that April is our windiest month.

I’m going out for a walk.