Dear Redbarn

Just thought you'd like to know about our rain over the weekend....more than 4 inches!  We noticed lots of lightning when we went to bed and even a few rumbles of thunder, but they were off to the east.  Blake said he even checked the radar before he turned out the light and assumed we had missed the system when he saw the bright colors over Maryville.  Well, Sunday morning he went out to check the gauge and came in asking whether I'd dumped the rain gauge after I ran the sprinkler Saturday (because no matter what the rain chances, I am running a sprinkler when it is 99 degrees.  Keeps me sane.) I said I'd made a particular point of dumping the gauge. Well, he says, we've had a big one then.....

I took a picture of the little test tube gauge....were it not for surface tension, I think it might have overflowed.  Ann and Matt's gauge is bigger....all the better to record an extra half inch, my dear!

I am grateful.  Though a drive through the country later Sunday afternoon showed lots of road damage south of town and even some leaned over corn, this rain was still a plus on the ledger.  Lee thinks the soybeans at the greenhouse grew six inches.  And that may be; I have to think they were all curled up conserving moisture by reducing surface area these last few days. Now the countryside, the gardens, the sweet corn and the people can exhale and relax.

Well, not quite everybody.  Ryan noticed that the big greenhouse was flat as a pancake.  Then he noticed the electric pole holding the transformer was black!  REA came out to replace the transformer and we got the power turned back on down there but I bet we find some damaged goods in our infrastructure at Deadman's Hollow. Betcha that's not the only line crew out at work today....

Tracy posted some very pretty daylily pictures today, giving you all the credit, Mama, for her love of gardening and daylilies in particular. Ben's daylilies are almost done down in K.C., but I still have some clumps of later ones with generous stems of  big fat buds.  The coneflowers are also going strong and the first hibiscus blooms have appeared.  I have, unfortunately, seen a few Japanese beetles for the first time this summer.  I picked and squished them off the canna they were hatching on (?) but haven't seen a widespread outbreak.  Something voracious really chewed up a couple of sunflowers but I know this will not cause Blake any grief.  Also looks like I have a couple of casualties among the vine crops.  While the airplane came over Deadman's Hollow to clean up the caterpillar and beetle problems there, the garden at Spruce will just suffer through without spray.  There are just so many butterflies and assorted bees that I hate to discourage...

It was a busy weekend with some of the best entertainment that small towns can offer.  We started off early Saturday morning down in Osborn, Mo, a small town just a mile south of highway 36 between St. Joseph and Cameron, the jumping off spot for this year's Farm Bureau Tractor Cruise. Last year there were 89 tractors, but the numbers were down somewhat Saturday...due to the hideously hot weather, I'm sure.  The tractors were umbrella-ed and the drivers well-hatted. One gentleman on his IH tractor was decked out in a IH pith helmet, reminding me of Grandpa Renken in his gardening gear.  Fortunately, everyone ate lunch at Lathrop in their clean and cool cafeteria.  And they got to eat ice cream at the Shatto Dairy for a cool down before the last leg.  In the past, Lee and I have been responsible for taking pictures of the drivers and their tractors, but someone else was deputized this year, so we took our time driving the byways of Clinton county, enjoying the farmsteads and scenery.   Blake has always been second in line driving one of Vern Hart's John Deeres.  Last year something on the tractor broke, but he completed the ride without incident or accident this time around.  Ben and Levi drove up to watch the sendoff, and I took a really cute picture of Levi and his grandpa.  He is smiling big, but Blake reports he wasn't real confident about his seat in the open air, unlike when he rides in the combine! Maybe he thought he was going to have to drive the whole way!

And on Friday evening, we enjoyed a theater outing in Rock Port to watch Lizzie and Abbie and Josh (and Aaron in a "cameo"appearance as the king) in "Frozen Jr.", the culmination of the week long kid's theater camp. They sang and they danced with great energy and smiling faces. The kids' enthusiasm would have melted hearts of stone, but the audience of moms, dads, family and friends was primed to be entertained, cheering for the songs and laughing with the jokes.  It was impressive and surely rewarding and encouraging for the adults who worked with the kids all week.  They have a leg up on future thespians! Not only that, but Lee reports the weekend gave a healthy boost to the Liberty Theater coffers.  The renovations are very nice...so many improvements from the very first time we played over there in the Sound of Music!

The last of the summer hibiscus will be delivered this week...we will have cheated the weather gods and sold almost all of them without hail or major breakage or plague.  We canned a batch of bread and butter pickles this afternoon...it was a real pleasure to have the windows open and have all that steam escape.  Blake is of the opinion that no sandwich is really complete without pickles; this was a start on filling the shelves in the basement.  Abbie has picked a generous bowl of cherry tomatoes leading to a recipe search for luncheon dishes that will use them up!  Tomorrow's choice: Spinach tortellini salad.   With tortellinis and cherry tomatoes, what could go wrong.

Ryan and Matt went down to the sweet corn patch to pick late this afternoon. The kids sold sweet corn in Torrey Pines' parking lot last year and made some nice money.  The corn is a couple of weeks later this year, but the ears Ryan brought up to the house look nice....nicer than they would have without our weekend rain!  We are hoping this bodes well for the field corn of the same vintage.

And I guess that's about it for this week's news.  Weather and kids and flowers and Farm Bureau...a pretty normal mix, right?  We miss you a lot and love you more,

Julie

Let It Go

December 2012

Christmastime 2013

Aunt Kenzie knows little girls, despite being the mama of a soon to be 7 year old boy. She is responsible for the first, but not last, karaoke machine in the family.  It was a gift to both Lizzie and Abbie Christmastime 2012.  They wasted no time in serenading us all, but found Grandpa Blake a particularly appealing...and captive....audience when he was ensconced on the leather couch.

I don't remember what they sang when they were five years old, but by Christmas the next year,  there was only one soundtrack on everybody's mind and that was 'Frozen'.  In the third photo, Lizzie is dancing her little heart out in front of the Christmas tree to 'Let It Go'.  

I learned to love musicals from my parents. My dad was in the pit orchestra when Carousel first broke my heart. We saw How to Succeed and Guys and Dolls live. I was crushed when I first heard a recording of my spoken voice and realized how awfully squeaky it was.  And even though I could carry a tune and read music, my singing voice was just plain ugly.. Even in church, people would turn around.  'Life upon the wicked stage' was not going to be in my future.  

This makes watching the grandkids grow up in our local theater ever so sweet.  From Aaron's first appearance as Louis in the King and I through a fine menagerie of imaginary chorus creatures in Little Mermaid, Shrek, and Beauty and the Beast, the children have song and danced their way with joy and enthusiasm with the help and encouragement of parents and music loving volunteers. 

And...needless to say... Blake and I have watched and laughed and cheered.  We also applaud the patience and cunning of the producers and directors who realized what the addition of all these cute faces and costumes to the stage would do for the box office of the Liberty Theater!   

And now the little girls who sang to their Grandpa are singing to a crowd, acting alongside their friends, putting their hearts and hands and smiles into the story of Elsa and her kingdom like it's the first time told....and the magic isn't just in the fairy tale, or the tunes.

July 2019

The magic is in the theater itself...it's in the lights and the applause and the generosity of the volunteers who put community into their theater.  And in the applause, the bravos, and the tears of  those in the seats who can't sing, can't act...but love those who do!

Mid-season Wrap-Up

  

Dead Week, otherwise known as the All Star break is upon us, and despite the numerous urgings and notifications on my cell phone, I’ve managed to resist place holders like the Futurity Game (a tie) and the Home Run Derby (like we need more!)  Rather, I’ve chosen to spend these several evenings strolling among the flower beds, snipping a mulberry here and pulling a strand of the noxious Honeyvine Milkweed there. In baseball, July is the Continental Divide of the season and soon the teams will divided like the sheep and goats, the contenders and tailenders, the buyers….and the sellers.

Similar categories can be applied to my garden. Some of the successes are by design; some attributed humbly to Mother Nature.  Some of the failures will be blamed post mortem on all kinds of factors...too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry...the usual suspects.  And some of the attempts are strictly bad judgement, otherwise known as operator error.

Unlike our floral posts from Hurst Greenery, where, like Lake Woebegone, all the women are strong, the men are good looking and all the children are above average, not every pot and planting at 502 Spruce is a winner.  In the interests of truth, justice and the American way, here’s my annotated photo album from this All Star Break, dishing the dirt on the losers and praising the winners as worthy of imitation and increase.

First up: an All Star lineup of winged wonders.  This July has outdone itself in volume of butterflies:  every foot step through the clover sends a cloud of Painted Ladies into the air. The representative photo of a Painted Lady as far as Google is concerned shows one delicately perched on a lantana.  At Hurst Greenery, the butterflies have upped their game, settling one, two, and even three at a time on a single bloom. It’s not much of a challenge to photograph a Painted Lady on a bloom! 

Lately the Swallowtails have taken over the spotlight. Their arrival coincides with the peak bloom of the purple coneflowers.  I know their caterpillars favor members of the carrot/dill/parsley family, but coneflowers seem to keep a flighty swallowtail’s attention longer than any other flower.  Fortunately, I have groves of free range echinacea so I occasionally will get a decent photo with my phone if I don’t get greedy.

 The Black Swallowtails found the Liatris in the front flower bed.  Liatris is a tricky plant: a hardy prairie flower that flourishes on hot roadsides in southwest Missouri during the summer, but is difficult to site on our better soils here.  At some point in time, I planted a couple of white ones in front; gradually, they reseeded and volunteered, reverting to the pinky lavender color I would characterize as Crayola ‘Thistle’ and making a cheery combination with the lemony Happy Returns daylilies.  Liatris blooms from the top down rather than the bottom up like other spiky flowers such as snapdragons or gladiolus.

I guess it’s all the spring moisture, but I have never seen so many tiny toads and frogs.  The guys in the garden pond are downright conversational at night in voices I can only describe in human terms.  One’s a shrieking soprano, another an inquiring alto while the odd guy out has taken up residence in my ceramic fountain on the back patio.

For those who don’t think amphibians can be cute, try this guy out….

That’s daylily ‘Prairie Moonlight’, one of the few daylilies in my garden whose name I remember!  Taking pictures of the daylilies is a temptation I don’t try to resist. If you have a summer garden with daylilies, you will never be cheated of color in July.  Any color. All colors. The bugs won’t eat them….and they will forgive you for overwatering, underwatering, lots of sun, too much shade. They’ll fight through the weeds and come back each spring as sure as the sun.  Can you tell I’m a fan? By the way, they go great with purple coneflowers…..

Thus far the beauty and success has all been Mother Nature’s doing.  So let’s take a look at the back patio..

For real garden impact for hot summer places, it never hurts to slip in a few tropicals.  I have palms and ginger for the south facing, but very shady, front porch and bananas and colocasias for the very hot back patio.  Sometimes I forget how big these plants can get when they are happy!

For instance, who put this huge plant in this tiny pot?  This 10”pot looked just fine back in May, but is totally overwhelmed and needs to be watered all the time now in July!  Note to self: tropicals start out slowly but catch up quickly when the weather warms up!

 These Sunpatiens baskets were planted back in February.  Why are they still pretty? Because I dutifully water them every single day.  And why are they still in their original 10”baskets? Because that’s the size that fits on my hanging basket tree.  Do what I say and not what I do….if you buy a 10”basket, bump it into a 12” basket or even a 14”basket. By the time you acquire your 10” blooming basket, it has been using up the soil mix and fertilizer in its container for a couple of months and needs a reboot in order to bloom to potential all summer long.  Don’t let your basket be a casualty of July! Don’t be that guy! I wish I had a picture to show you what a 10” sunpatiens basket looks like when transplanted into 14”....like Ben has done with his. So much flower power! And a great object lesson about giving your flowers plenty of room…..

Here’s another combo pot.  What? You don’t see the combo part of combo pot?  Well, there are a couple of ‘River Walk’ coleus peeking out from amid the vigorous stems of coleus ‘French Quarter’.  I really did read the tag on these two coleus and according to the labels, these two plants should have played nice with each other.  Wrong. French Quarter is a plant and a half and has totally overwhelmed the River Walk, normally a pretty potent plant itself. Live and Learn and pretend I intended this all along…..

Final exhibits in this mid season wrap up are two pots that prove I can learn from experience.  That purple plant is strobilanthus, a plant that sulks for the two months it lives in the greenhouse, barely growing and causing much consternation.  Then, magically, when June comes around, it turns into Cinderella, growing long iridescent silvery purple veined leaves that shine unfazed by heat, humidity, or sun.  You can see that it grows to match its companions: it matches up with the canna and big yellow coleus...and it is well mannered and contained with the pentas and white sunpatiens.  Don’t be afraid to ask for strobilanthus….you’ll be so glad you did….

Second half of the season is upon us.  Day games are brutal. But the hardy hibiscus are on deck with flower power to burn.  Enjoy! And we’ll catch you in the stretch run….