The End of June

“The best index to a person’s character is how he treats people who can’t do him any good–and how he treats people who can’t fight back.” – Abigail Van Buren

Well June pretty much flew by, it's hard to believe this weekend coming up is already the fourth of July. Back when I was a kid, I sometimes worked summers for a hay bailing outfit in the valley, cleaning up the straw left behind after the swathers and combines had taken the millions of pounds of tall fescue and perennial ryegrass seed that the Willamette is famous for. It was often an index of the season if the straw bailing started before the fourth of July as that meant it had been an early season. I spent a lot of Independance days, however driving a tractor towing a hay bailer at about 2 miles an hour through hundreds of acres of windrowed straw. Every so often I could see the fireworks as tiny little puffs of light from one of the valley towns like Brownsville or Tangent. But usually the dew would come down and the straw would get too wet sometime around midnight, long after the fire works had finished. We would pile into the farm pickup for the hour or so drive back to Salem, faces covered in dust, and sometimes we would talk about how many mice had been picked up by the bailer tines and flung into the waiting talons of  the red tailed hawks that followed us around the field in search of an easy meal. No big life lessons here really, just recollections and memories of growing up in the country. The spring gave way to summer although the weather didn't totally agree who was in charge as it went from 90 and sunny to 50's and rainy this past week. 

The lily bloom is going well this year. 

This is a new one for me, the supposedly Hardy Amaryllis 'Alaska' I'm trying out next to the colchicums in the foundation bed.  

I've been adding a lot of lilies to the rock garden lately. 

Lilies and a Hesperis foil, make a good combination.

Anya and I and some of her school mates made the brutal descent into Tumble lake from French Creek to see what we could find of the mountain flora. I was thinking it was early but pleasantly surprised to find some nice things blooming. That is Detroit lake in the background. 

It was a great hike, saw some Calochortus, saxifrage, a lot of different color forms of penstemon, it was early for the lilies though. I remember nice patches of L. washingtonianum from this hike and they were still a few weeks out. 

Anya finished up her Junior year aquaponics homeschool project and turned in her final report. It was a fun project and we both learned a lot about what works and what doesn't in using fish to make fertilizer for your vegetable production. One big lesson, the racoons will wreak all sorts of havoc in the fish ponds, but they don't particularly care for baby ceasar romaine which produces well  in that environment. Hard to believe she is a Senior in Highschool now.

My little pastoral country road got 2 huge streetlights installed this week and it really rocked my world, no notice from the county and PGE told me they can put them wherever they want, I literally have flood lights shining directly into my windows and can read a book in the middle of the night from the intensity. It made me think back to those long drives home from the straw fields well past midnight on the country roads of the willamette valley and how I may have taken for granted the ability to look up and see the stars at night. It's sad to see the sprawl continue unabated, the valley isn't the same place as it was when I was a kid, that's for sure.  You probably haven't heard the last of this one as I'm gravely concerned about the effects of 24 hour lighting on the nursery production and am doing everything I can to get rid of them. 

From one of my favorite bands, the Arcade Fire:

                              "Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small

Then we can never get away from the sprawl
Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there's no end in sight
I need the darkness someone please cut the lights"


Mark

June..........oh June, you used to be a summer started.

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

I'm still here, although somewhat stunned, shocked, baffled, disheartened, enraged, and engaged in what it is going on in the country right now. I could fill pages and pages with discourse on the murder of American citizens by Police, unleashing the Army on it's own populace, the rise of a racist and fascist leadership in America, white supremicists patrolling the streets of my own home town with assault rifles and all the hell that is breaking loose coming with it. If you don't know where I stand at this point politically then please thumb back a few pages in this blog and figure it out. If any of my standpoints offend you then I have made sure to do my bit to speak my mind. I recognize how privileged I am to have been able to get an education, find gainful employment doing what I love and even start an independant small business without facing racism and discrimination that could have made all my dreams impossible. Take a minute, no take all the time you need to process your own privilege and then think about how you can be active in making sure other people get the same opportunities we did. If you are reading this there is a chance you have some disposable income to spend on flower bulbs, so that means you likely made the most of the opportunities that were given to you. Lets all start to think about how we can use our privilege to give opportunities to others who have been less fortunate then us. 

There are flowers in the garden, seems almost silly to be talking about them as our country descends into chaos but I had to get a June post in between attending protests and planning the overthrow of the Nazi regime currently seated in the White House. 

The calochortus look great in the rock garden

The rock garden is really starting to come into it's own at illahe

The marks on the ground are the addition to the rock garden at illahe, It's actually done now and we added a succulent bed, with a road punching through to the RV rental campground that we rent out to hiker/bikers/

Some years ago, Rick Lupp donated a bunch of plants to a Norman Singer Endowment funded Sensory Rock garden project at the Oregon School for the blind, I asked Rick if he could put together a collection of Alpines that the blind and visually impaired could "feel" there way through a mountain top. That garden was eventually bulldozed for development and the blind kids kicked out on the street by the State of Oregon. This is a rescued Dianthus from that project, and thank goodness for kind hearted people like Rick who would give to those who have less. For a while at least some kids who may never get a chance to botanize above the treeline got to experience that. Lets make opportunities for those that are less fortunate then us. 

A marguerite daisy in the rock garden at illahe. This was a chance seedling by a local grower who was sowing clear white marguerites but ended up with this lovely pink form. I propagated a bunch of them overwinter and it's quickly becoming one of my favorites.

Maybe I really run a nursery business not to sell flower bulbs but to be able to have a forum where political dissent can be featured. The flowers just make it all possible. 

The weather is wet

Mark