Republican Primary?..

...No, just half a dozen red-wings contesting squatting rights at a little pond. 

It's loud and raucous, with lots of displaying, but no sucker punches. About half a dozen of these guys are trying to stake claim to this insignificant retention pond. In my opinion it's not worth the fuss, and the losers are almost certain to find someplace better. 

Light rain, followed by a heavy downpour of about half an hour's duration, followed by sun, followed by clouds. Even a rumble of thunder off in the distance. 

This will green the grass. 

New Iceboat Video

A short, well edited video of the Nite Nationals. Lots of shots of Wombat (red, #10) with Bri at the helm; and a fun shot of Solstice (yellow, #165) with Tony at the helm hiking up while rounding the weather mark.

Chestnuts Planted

Vi will be keeper of the seeds. 

If things go well, we should be able to harden them off and plant them out sometime in June. 

The radicle is the proto root. Chestnuts have long tap roots, so the starting containers need to be tall.

Rainy Sunday

Steady rain all day. Chilly. What might be expected in early spring, in fact better than what could be.

Milwaukee and Fox Point

Fun day at the St. Patrick's Day parade, and doing garden work at Bywater Lane. 

We had a sky box at Grand Avenue Mall

Lots of green here. 

Katy stained half the new raised bed. 

Making the mix for soil blocks. 

And the blocks being made. 

An Old Chestnut

And four new ones. 

These are not chestnuts.

Foggy morning followed by a sunny day. 

The American chestnut was perhaps America’s greatest tree—until the chestnut blight was thoughtlessly imported from the Orient in 1904. It was giant tree with beautiful rot-resistant wood and a tasty and nutritious nut that fed a vast amount of wildlife and was an important food source for native Americans and European settlers. Some autumns chestnut mast would be over ankle deep in Appalachian forests. 

Within 40 years of the blight’s arrival in New York over 4 billion chestnut trees were dead.

But a few survived hither and yon, including several in Wisconsin, and in 1983 the American Chestnut Foundation initiated a herculean effort to bring the tree back, employing selective breeding/backcrossing.

First an American chestnut is bred with a blight resistant Chinese chestnut, and the nuts are planted. This is the first filial or F1. At about 8 years of age these offspring are infected with blight fungus. Only those few trees showing exceptional resistance are kept. These are then bred (through controlled pollination) with an exceptional native American chestnut which shows some blight resistance on its own. The nuts are planted. This is back cross one, or BC1. The process in repeated until the third back cross is reached. Then two BC3 trees are bred. Finally, the best trees of this generation are bred once more. This makes for BC3F3 which is very much American but with good blight resistance.

BTW, the Chinese tree, apart from its blight resistance, is a wimpy little cousin the the American tree, so the goal is to borrow its good qualities, but get back as close as possible to the American original.

When neighbor Vi lost her huge silver maple last summer (at last giving our garden sufficient light) I suggested she might want to plant a chestnut. She agreed, and together we joined the ACF which entitled us to 4 BC3F3 seeds. The seeds arrived today. Vi has agreed to be tender of the seedlings. If all survive, each of our yards will be home to a marvelous tree, and, with our annual reporting responsibilities, we will be contributing in a small way to its restoration. And we might have two little trees looking for a good home.

Under The Weather

Only enough energy to pick up pine cones in the back yard, and watch basketball. 

But there were quite a few cones of the the red pine, Pinus resinosa. These cones drop their seeds beginning in the fall of their second year on the tree, and the cones themselves drop off the following spring. I forgot to count, so have to estimate, that the pickup amounted to 50 cones. Also down on the ground were the tips of many red pine twigs, presumably cut by squirrels, for some reason. Is it to eat the buds? I know that the little pine squirrels on Manitoulin cut and drop cedar and spruce cones in late summer and fall, but when they do it it's because seeds are in the cones. 

The red pine is a conifer, and thus a gymnosperm, and thus quite bit more ancient than an angiosperm like the crabapple or oak.

Make America Great Again

All Kinds of Widlife

Spring peepers at the prairie marsh. Redwing blackbirds loud in the brush along the creek. College students everywhere, strolling, jogging, playing basketball or softball.

Pax and I took a leisurely ride to the prairie, which he seemed to enjoy very much after his morning visit to the vet (for his annual tuneup).  At one point he made a mad dash into the pond where he frolicked for a while before dashing out. Was he thinking of Lake Huron?

With the patio snow pile gone, we see what was lurking underneath. 

Hot In The Sun

Lovely day, somewhat tempered by a bit of the flu. 

Vernal pool in the hollow of the old sugar maple alongside the driveway. This tree has been a prodigious sap producer, sugar coating any vehicle parked under it. Oddly, no sap running yet this year. Has the tree succumbed to the vicissitudes of time?

And then this ash in the park. From the base all the way to the topmost twigs, it looks like tha bark has been scraped with a razor or draw knife.  And the trunk is riddled with holes, but not the typical D-shaped holes of the Emerald Ash Borer. All I can think is that the tree was home to many borers but woodpeckers got to them before they coud emerge, stripping off vast amounts of bark as they worked. What else could it be?

Shirtsleeve Weather

Sunny, with a high in the middle 60s. 

Perfect time to:
Reconnect the hose,
Sweep the patio, 
Shake the rugs,
Flush out the garage,
Wash the truck, 
Fire up the motorcycle,
Ride the bike,
and, of course, walk the dog.

Below, a view of the patio redbud garden on March 7, 2016—today. 

And here, a view of the same garden on March 5, 2014. 

Fox Pointed

Afternoon helping out there.  

Whitewter Creek

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating form the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive." —John Hay, The Immortal Wilderness.

Waiting For Warmth

Sixty-five exceptional selections plus half a dozen poems, plus an introduction by me and a "To Think About" section with questions for most selections. It has been an enjoyable retirement project. And I do think that anyone reading it front to back will be mind-altered. I'll send it in to a few potential publishers, but expect my own limited edition (10 copies) to be the extent of it. These 10 however, will certainly be collector's items.

Above freezing today with snow melting. but still cold—gray skies and a damp and chilly wind from the NE.

Interval

Stuck in a patch of weather between the taste of spring we recently had and the forecast of spring, just ahead. These four or five days are not really winter, but still cold and wintry. And, although most of today was sunny causing a little melting, more snow is anticipated any minute. Forward March, I say.

Above, a swamp white oak tenaciously holding on to its leaves, begging the question, "How long can it keep doing so?"  When will these guys go so the new leaves can get about their business?

I've tried in the past to pay attention to the changeover, but I always seem to miss it. Not this year. I predict this oak will be completely free of last year's leaves by April 17. Mark my words. 

Garbage Day

Before dawn in the dark months, and regular as clockwork. Impervious to weather. Federal holidays the only delay.

What else—but garbage trucks? Two every other week (one being the recycler), then a singleton other times because garbage can’t wait.

They roar up in that state between sleep and awake, announcing emphatically that the new day has begun.  With a clank and a bang the mechanical arm lifts a toter and and slams it back down.  And it’s Thursday.

While this is not quite the clip-clop of horseshoes, and not the rattle of milk bottles, it is, oddly, reassuring, even to someone normally contemptuous of the noise of noisy village.

So, I ask, is it the routine of regular repetition that makes it less than objectionable? Has it, somehow, become a ritual? Does the satisfaction I feel come from seeing the unwanted go away? Is taking out the garbage Wednesday night the highlight of my week?

Or is it that the regular arrival of the garbage truck shows our system to be working? The globe spins and garbage is collected, and all is right with the world.

So now, in that state between sleep and awake, on days wen the garbage trucks are not rumbling by, I worry that a guy named Trump will so disrupt the ordered operation of what we consider civilization that instead of taking out the garbage every Wednesday night,  I will be eating it.

New ice. What had melted has now refrozen. 

Single Digits

Cold this morning, but maybe the last of it. By late afternoon, drops dripping off southern exposures.

Here's a shot of Bridal Veil Falls, taken two days ago. Winter still reigns on Mnitoulin. 

Robins In the Snow

Hundreds of birds today at the feeder: robin, cardinal, junco, chickadee, nuthatch, starling, jay, crow, woodpecker, finch, dove, and varieties of sparrow. When the starlings arrive everyone else moves off stage, though it would be interesting to see what might happen if the jays wanted space at the same time. 

Blowing snow on a driving wind, wih 4 to 5 inches accumulation. Once again waking is difficult, 

Leap Day

Mimi and Bubba spent the day in Fox Point getting to play with Will, and, later in the afternoon, Katy (once she stepped off the school bus). Will and I biked and then took the steep ravine path down to the Lake Michigan shore, where the water seemed high, which it is surprisingly—actually higher than this time last year. Katy read me a 48-page book, cover to cover.

Winter storm warning tonight, just as we were all starting to feel comfortable with an early spring. 

Quiet Sunday

Still warm and very windy, but with rain and falling temps now at dusk.  Yesterday was more newsworthy, so photos from then.

Note the missing front teeth.

Forget the DN. These are Nites of old.

Greased Lightning

What a day. Temperature below freezing up until about 8 o'clock a.m., then a rapid climb all the way up to 55 F. Bri and the three girls, and Mimi and I, got to the ice on Pewaukee a bit after 9 to start setting up the boats. That, of course, for various reasons, took longer than might have been hoped, and we started to think "slush" and "waste of time," and stuff like that.

But no! The ice stayed rather good, and the wind came barreling out of the south, and away we went. The kids had controlled high-speed rides, with ice chips stinging their faces. Then Mimi took charge, and took the them to the shoreside restaurant and, eventually, home. Thanks, Mimi. (Actually, we all had an exceptionally fine lunch of chicken tenders, potato wedges, and Bloody Marys.)

And then, Bri and I went screaming—probably going faster than what the human body was designed for. And. Very nice to have two boats, so we could fly in formation and do two-dimensional aerobatics.

All in all, great fun, although now today's extreme stresses are making it hard to stand up or sit down.

Thanks to Bri for the video. Shooting while sailing is difficult. As you can see here, we had to slow the boats down as much as possible just to get some photons to register in the camera.