Thank You

 I've been thinking about my dad a lot this past few weeks. 

His 101st birthday falls on Thanksgiving Day. One week after that is the anniversary of his death last year.

He lived long. I hope he felt that it was a mostly good life. The first two decades, though, were difficult. The  Great Depression colored his life as an adolescent and teenager. 

He didn't say much about those years, except to comment that he didn't much like beans. His family consumed a lot of those during the Depression.

Then again, I never asked him about life during the 1930s, the Dust Bowl years. I wish I had. One doesn't get a real sense of historical events unless you hear people's stories. Especially when it comes directly from someone's lips to your ears.

I did hear first-hand accounts of his time fighting overseas during World War II. 

He saw fierce combat; saw his best friend killed next to him on the battlefield. German troops captured him and others in his group. They were nearly executed, but then spent several months in a German POW camp. Not a fun experience.

But he did what he had to do. All of his life he just did what he had to do without complaint. At least I never heard him complain.

As I face an uncertain world, I will strive to draw on his strength, to do what I have to do without complaining (much, anyway). 

Lend me your strength, your resolve, your conviction, Dad.

And I will do what I must do.

Thanks.

Burn It

 

Sometimes you've got to let it burn.

Fire clears the way, gets rid of useless debris, and allows the sun to warm the soil to make way for new growth. 

A few weeks ago two people from the fire department set our 10 acres of weedy brome grass ablaze. Today the field is green with fresh, succulent growth.

We're not sure whether we'll take the next step of killing out the brome grass with herbicide to clear the way for seeding native prairie grasses and wildflowers next year. Or will we let the brome grow a while for hay?

If we kill the brome and don't get the cost-share fund to help us seed it to native grasses next year, we'll be left with a dead field full of weeds and no hay. We won't know until next year whether we get the funding. Federal agencies are notoriously slow. 

Of course, a method exists by which we can plant native seed without poisoning the brome, but it takes longer. And we still won't get hay because the brome must be kept mowed too short to bale.

Or we can simply grow and maintain a good stand of brome grass and see if our neighbor wants to use it for hay.

None of the choices are entirely satisfactory. I want native prairie, which can make great hay, too. But uncertainty plagues us. Will we get cost-share funds? Native prairie seed can be quite expensive. Could we renovate the field without cost share funds? 

What's our next step?

At least the way is cleared.

Sometimes you've got to let it burn.

Fire moving across the field.

Late Harvest

 Honoring the Ancestors at this season. Lighting a candle to show them that I am thinking of them and that they are welcome guests at my feast in their honor.

This is the time of the last harvest (not really, but it's all root vegetables and leafy greens), but I celebrate the late harvest and pray for sufficient food to get me through the Winter. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.

This also marks the traditional Celtic New Year. May your year be full of blessings, love, and appropriate abundance. Share your wealth.

Seeds

Spent flower heads of Compass Plant (Silphium laciniatum). 

Autumn is a time of gathering in...

Gathering in the final crops of the season... sweet potatoes, winter squash, winter radishes, cabbages (if you were fortunate enough to have a fall crop of cabbages... mine failed), and seeds. 

The spent flower heads above have dried, bearing mature seeds. Today I collected the last of them, which I will share with a couple of native plant enthusiasts.

The compass plant that bore the seeds is somewhat precious to me. Several years ago I found compass plant, which typically grows in open prairies, growing among a grove of red cedars. I was told that the presence of compass plant could indicate that an area is unplowed native prairie. This intrigued me. Beneath those trees lay an unplowed prairie that might spring back to life if the trees were gone.

Well, I wasn't going to cut down all those trees... but what if I tried digging up one of the compass plants?

I consider compass plants to be quite majestic. Their basal leaves look like large ferns. The flower stalks can get very tall. The stalk bearing the above immature seed heads was at least seven feet. The flowers look somewhat like small sunflowers rising above the prairie grasses. 

I have always been enamored of compass plant, which seems kind of rare.

The name "compass plant" comes from the tendency for the basal leaves (the leaves growing from the base of the plant) to align their edges north and south. Some indigenous people believed that lightning struck frequently where compass plant grew, so they would not camp in those areas. They also then burned roots of the plant to ward off lighting during storms. 

I wouldn't want to burn the roots of this precious plant no matter how vicious the lightning.

The roots grow very deep, which is why the plants survived to live among the cedars. I knew that digging up large tap roots to transplant can be chancy, with no guarantee of a new plant.

So I went out with my shovel in late winter/early spring to dig one plant.

I was ecstatic when I saw the first new leaves later that year. 

It took a few years for the plant to get as large as it is today, but it is a beauty. Starting it from seed will be a new project for me. Many native wildflowers require "stratification" (freeze and thaw) to germinate, so I will start them as a "winter sowing" project. I wrote about winter sowing as part of a post nine years ago. I also found a site that gives a good step-by-step for winter sowing, but focuses on garden vegetables instead of wildflowers. I've never tried it with veggies, but have had success with wildflowers. Winter sowing is a great activity for the Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas season.

Seeds of native plants also make great gifts for any native plant enthusiast, by the way. Vegetable and herb gardeners also might enjoy receiving seeds of new or unusual varieties. Get your holiday gift buying done early!

Dig This

 

Pruning shears for size reference.

I dug one hill of sweet potatoes yesterday to see if it is harvest time.

And look at this! 

All of this from just one plant, and 24 more plants in this one bed. Of the six beds of sweet potatoes -- approximately 250 plants all totaled -- this one bed might be the highest producer. It was one of the first beds planted and the orange sweet potatoes -- Beauregard -- tend to be larger with more sweet potatoes per plant than either of the whited-fleshed or all purple ones. The Beauregards planted a couple of weeks after these also might produce less. The only way to know for sure is to dig them up.

Today I removed the fencing and cut away all the vines in this one bed. I will wait a couple of days to dig. That supposedly gets the curing process going. It also makes this big job (remember, 250 plants more or less) a little more manageable, taken in smaller steps.

In the meantime, my husband is cutting back the vines poking through the fencing. I was depending on the deer and rabbits to keep the vines pruned back to the fence. After  a solid start on the task though, they got lazy.

Once we get all the roots dug up, I will cart the sweet potatoes (500 pounds and more, we're hoping) up to the attic in buckets. This is the warmest place in the house when the sun shines, so it will provide a good temperature for curing. The sweet potatoes will get packed into boxes and crates to maintain humidity. The curing process changes starches to sugars, making the sweet potatoes sweeter and tastier. You can eat them right out of the ground, but they don't taste as good. About two weeks is the recommended curing time, but longer doesn't hurt.

After curing, we'll pack the sweet potatoes into sturdy plastic crates, sorting by size and variety, and put them in the root cellar. The best temperature for long term storage of sweet potatoes is between 55 and 60. Packing them in crates keeps the humidity high around them.

My husband ate through last year's crop by January or February (they're mainstay of his diet), so I'm hoping this crop lasts a bit longer. The rains we had in late spring and early summer helped get the sweet potatoes on a good start. And I watered them regularly. 

Anything you can do with regular potatoes, you can do with sweet potatoes -- stews, fries, chips, mashed -- plus. They also lend themselves to sweet dishes, and don't necessarily require additional sweetening.

The white-fleshed sweet potatoes are even sweeter than the orange ones, while the all-purples ones are starchier, but oh so tasty and pretty. 

Nutritious, flavorful, and pretty easy to grow. That's the sweetness of sweet potatoes.

Asters and Goldenrod

 The asters are beginning to bloom among the goldenrod. Here, the purple flowers of a lone New England Aster pops out in the yellow field of goldenrod.

A beautiful symbiosis of color, as the goldenrod seems to allow a spotlight on the aster.

Why do asters and goldenrod look so beautiful together?

That was the question Robin Wall Kimmerer (author of the much loved and acclaimed book "Braiding Sweetgrass") said she wanted to answer, when asked why she wanted to become a botanist during her freshman entrance interview for college. 

Of course, the "real" scientist interviewing her scoffed at that answer. 

But... why do goldenrod and aster bloom together, the colors yellow and purple complementing each other so well?

It's almost as if some intelligence designed it that way. Mother Nature is such an artist.

White Snakeroot, Ageratina altissima

Other asters also bloom at this time, but they are mostly white-flowered. Some of the "asters" are fleabanes, which are related but in the Erigeron genus. They can be distinguished from the true asters by the fact that their flowers have many more petals.

Tall Boneset, aka Tall Joe-Pye Weed also blooms white in the meadows now. A closely related species, White Snakeroot, lights up the edges of the woods with its fuzzy white flowers. 

The most famous of our yellow flowers, of course, is the sunflower -- rather sunflowers. So many species of sunflower populate the meadows and roadsides that it's nearly impossible to tell which is which. Except for our common, annual sunflower, Helianthus annua, with its large, dark center. Many of the other sunflowers are perennials, including sunchokes (most commonly, Jerusalem artichoke) which provides a tasty tuber. 

But these are not the flowers Robin Wall Kimmerer expressed curiosity about when she sought to be a botanist. It was the beauty of the asters and goldenrod growing together that most impressed her. 

So, why do they look so beautiful together?

Did they evolve together for our benefit?

Not likely. We, perhaps, simply evolved in order to be able to appreciate their beauty.

Precious

 

It's paw paw season here in Northeast Kansas, and some people are out hunting for this precious treat, trying to beat the local wildlife to the ripening fruit.

Maybe 15 years or so ago I discovered a couple of paw paw trees growing just beyond the edge of the woods around our house. I noticed the first one because of its deeply colored, bell-shaped flowers that are large enough to be seen from a moderate distance. Even though paw paws are native to the eastern third of Kansas, I had never seen a paw paw tree before.

I was delighted to discover the tree's identity. The paw paw is the largest native fruit in Kansas, and seems more like a tropical fruit than a temperate region one. The fruit is probably about the size of a medium to small orange, but oblong in shape (as you can see in this photo). It is sweet and custard-like in texture when fully ripe.

The tree I found in our woods never produced fruit, although it had numerous blossoms. And it died two or three years later. I discovered another one in another area nearby. It is still alive, but is struggling. This rocky hill is not the best habitat for a paw paw tree.

The paw paw tree does prefer a shaded habitat, but does best in rich soil, especially near water. I've heard that many can be found in the woods around nearby Clinton Lake.

About 10 years ago I planted a paw paw tree near our house, but out in full sun next to some other fruit trees, which are now gone. I shaded it when it was young, but a mature tree can handle sun. It started fruiting about three or four years ago, but not prolifically. We did get nine paw paws last year. Such abundance! About a month ago I found four paw paws lying on the ground beneath the tree. It was a hot day and they were lying in the sun. They still felt firm, although warm. I brought them in the house and set them on the counter. It was far too early to harvest paw paws, but they do ripen off the tree. In about a week they were ripe enough to eat. So we ate them. 

One paw paw still clung to the tree, and I checked it frequently, fearing squirrels or some other wild being would make off with it. Squirrels often steal apples from our tree.

A few days ago I couldn't bear it anymore and plucked the above pictured fruit from the tree. It is now ripening on the kitchen counter, and has softened some. Soon we'll feast on paw paw.

You can learn a little more about this tasty native fruit at Kansas Wildflowers and Grasses.