A tree grows in Taiama

OK, its been 4 months since my last blog. I've been a little busy. Frankly, I made have had the time to blog, but not the energy... or the energy (and ideas) but not the time. Nevertheless, here I am with something to report. I am not holding back on this blog, but I am not being condescending either. I am guilty. However, I have, over the past couple of years had the fortune, blessing, divine intervention, (call it what you like) to experience a very illuminating and life changing perspective from which to view my life and my existence. And from that experience, contemplate my purpose and direction for the time I am given on this planet. I would speculate that most people in the "enlightened" nation of the USA have done little or none of either. So, if you don't want your toes stepped on, move on to the next blog or webpage, go check to see how your 401K is doing, or go back to shopping Amazon and Ebay. I'll be here nursing my own sore toes.

Did you know that there are about a billion people on the planet that live on less than a dollar a day? We here in the affluent West, the developed nations, the all-powerful, all-consuming nations of the world, eat too much, buy too much, and consume too much. We waste and think little about conservation. While nearly 20% of the population of the world live each day on little more than we pay for a candy bar. Now, I do not advocate giving these people large sums of money to buy more food. It sounds odd, but money itself does not solve the problem of poverty. What if someone who made a dollar a day could make two dollars a day? I mean, if you could double your income wouldn't you be excited? How much more impact would doubling a dollar-a-day income make for those people than doubling a $50K, $80K, $100K. Suddenly, those dollar-a-day families can afford to send a child to school (in most third world countries, education is not free like it is here in America). They buy or rent more land to grow more crops. They buy more goods from their neighbors, who, in turn, buy better seeds, or better fertilizer that will increase their yields. Maybe they can all cooperate and hire transportation to ship their products to a better market. Maybe they invest in a drip irrigation system so that they have crops when crops are scarce and they can get a premium price for them. The possibilities of doubling an income are endless. So then, how do I, an "agricultural missionary" double someone's income? Just ask them "what is it that keeps you from making two dollars a day?" Sounds simple, and it is. These dollar-a-day farmers know what they need to increase their income, they just do not have the means to acquire it. It takes every penny they make to survive.

A couple of months back when I was a couple of months ahead of leaving for my mission trip (aforementioned in this blog) I was faced with the delima of trying to raise the funds to pay for the trees that we planned to purchase for the Taiama Farm in Sierra Leone. I thought of several ways to raise money, but the simplist was to just put the word out and have people sponsor trees in honor or memory of someone (or themselves). I bought some aluminum embossing tags to hang on the trees and set a price of $5 per tree. The actual cost of the trees ranged from $3.90 to $4.60 but the extra would pay for shipping the trees to the farm. Would anyone buy a tree? Could I hope to pay for all the trees? The wait was not long.

The money came in slowly but surely. Day by day, week by week it came. And it came, and it came, and it came. I made tags, and more tags, and more tags! Thank goodness some people just bought trees and didn't care to have names on tags or I would have had to order more tags with little hope for them arriving in time. More than 300 trees have been purchased and my heart has been so warmed by this that I think you could fry an egg on my chest. I cannot wait to see the impact.

The kinds of trees were Avocado, Plantain, Mandarin, Grapefruit, Pineapple, Lemon, Moringa, and Calliandra. These latter two trees are special soil improving trees that fix nitrogen in the soil and increase yields of vegetable crops grown around them. They are planted closely spaced in rows with vegetable inbetween. This process is called alley farming (see picture). In particular, the Moringa tree is also called the "miracle tree." Its leaves are edible and highly nutritious. It grows in even the poorest of soils and makes excellent animal fodder and compost for vegetable crops. The Moringa is also being investigated for its incredible pharmicological properties. Please go to www.treesforlife.org and search "Moringa." You will be amazed.

So, I leave for Sierra Leone in 11 days. On New Year's Day i'll be planting trees, building a composting operation, educating the farmers about utilizing the Moringa, maybe working with the school kids on gardening, or who knows what else. I will be working day by day, contemplating life by the hour, and living in the moment. Oh, and loving every second of it. What will you be doing?

The Girls of Summer

Ecclesiastes says "for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under Heaven" which is to say: Everything has its place. The Daylilies are fading now. We've harvested most of our seedpods. There are a couple of rebloomers standing like that unidentified man in front of a tank on Tienanmen Square in China oh-so-many years ago as if to say "Daylilies will last all summer... someday." The time for Daylilies has passed. Now the dog days have begun and while most things in the garden are wishing they had an umbrella to shade the scorching heat of the sun and one of those crazy hats that holds two cans and lets you take a drink anytime you get thirsty, a few stalwarts are standing in the middle of the ring, belligerently taunting the others in their corners saying "bring it on..." These are the "Girls" of summer! Veronica 'Sunny Border Blue' and Phlox 'Nikki' to name a couple. But pictured below is the queen of the heat. This is a patch of 'Blackeyed Susan' (Rudbeckia 'Goldstrum') beside our driveway.
The summer heat and drought have thrown their best punches and this little gal is still standing with only a black-eye.



Now, allow us now, to introduce our only staff person at Molehill Gardens. He has no name but his title is "Keeper of the Falls." He keeps watch over the goldfish pond and waterfalls, reminding us to keep the water level up. He was referred to us by our good friends Tonya and David Nash. He works real cheap and hasn't quit us yet (even though we left him outside all winter one year). A true garden lover, he is always smiling. Or maybe he just likes sushi?

The rest of the story

The OBXperience is over and we have once again left a piece of ourselves out there. I sure hope it isn't another seven years before we get back. Alison commented that she is infected with "OBitis" and regular hits of it are necessary to sustain a tolerable quality of life. I think fate has over looked the fact that I was cut out to live somewhere extreme like that... maybe someday. The OBXperience included an all to brief visit to a Nature Conservancy site called Nags Head Woods that is a unique ecosystem called 'forested dunes' that will almost make you believe that you are in the mountains on the other side of the state. Miles of trails wander through this gorgeous place. A bit of arm twisting was required to get the boys out to Jockey's Ridge. "What's so special about a big sand dune?" was heard more than once. Well, once there we had to twist arms to get them to leave (that and a reminder that we could hit the beach when we got back to the rental). Jockey's Ridge is the highest sand dune on the east coast and is quite a site. In its wandering around over the years (as active dues are want to do) it has swallowed a motel and most of a putt-putt golf course. The latter still has a castle visible on the east side.



Later in the week, the surf began to get higher and higher. The undertow was quite strong by Friday thanks to swells from Hurricane Bertha waaaaay out in the Atlantic. Great boogie boarding conditions were there for the waiting, although on a less sloping beach the conditions would have been to die for. A care eye was kept for Rip Currents and some additional instruction given in the boarding school. Despite the rough conditions, those boys learned pretty well how to handle a wave and best of all how to shake off getting flipped when a big one hits!

OBXtrordinary

Not a garden post this time. After the Open Garden, which I will blog about at a later date, we lit out for a well earned vacation to the Outer Banks of NC. We snagged a house on the Upper end of the town of Avon, NC. A grand time... sight seeing, relaxing, hitting the waves and let me tell you, despite my age, I can boogie board with the best of them.

At right, my youngest son Colin, is offering the gratuitous Hatteras-in-hand pose from the day we visited the south end of the island. When we lived out here by the OB, we actually got to visit the lighthouse before they moved it. It really was in danger from the encroaching sea. Now it is safe and a nice place to visit. We made it up the highest lighthouse in North America with no incident!

On the other end of the scale, there is the shortest lighthouse on the Outer Banks, the Ocracoke Lighthouse. Alison and I agree that if you want to vacation in the village of Ocracoke, you have to really want to be a beach bum for a week. The is just about nothing else to do except fish, sunbathe, wave play, and just hang out. You are a ferry ride from anywhere and there are only a few touristy shops in the village. Sounds like my kind of place.

Boogie boarding has long been my favorite thing to do at the coast. The day before this video was taken, I broke a board when I dropped off the top of a 5-6 wave and got flipped and rolled a couple of times. Now, I can't tell you that I bounced back up after that like I did when I was 21, but I did get right back in the saddle. Had to show those boys of mine how to get it done!

OBX... if you haven't ever been there... you gotta go. Beats the heck out of ANYWHERE on the Gulf Coast and all of those over crowded mega vacation spots on the East Coast (Myrtle, Daytona, Va Beach, Charleston, etc.

Deadhead party

No jerry Garcia was not here, nor was Bob Weir, or any of those guys. The Grateful dead did not play here but the "morning dew" was all around. We did have a dead head party, but not that kind of Deadhead party.

What we call deadheading is all about removing the blooms from Friday so that they aren't hanging and mushy the next day at our Open Garden for the visitors to see. Every year on the evening before the Open Garden, we start at one end and move to the other end picking off that day's blooms. The picture shows you what it looks like after you've walked through a garden with hundreds of daylily plants blooming their heads off and removed every bloom, piled them in the wagon for disposal. It is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

What would you do?

I don't get very many chances to do hybridizing as the flowers are just beginning to open when I leave for work. On big bloom days though, I come back home for an hour or so, if I can, and dab some pollen. Alison usually leaves the "diploid" hybridizing to me. Diploids are flowers with the correct number of chromozomes. The majority of daylilies in the trade today are called "tetraploids" they have two sets of chromozomes. I digress. So there I was yesterday, standing in the garden, pollen in hand... what should I cross??? The pollen I had was from a spider type called 'Skinwalker,' pictured left. It's registered at 9.5 inches in size. As I stood there, a devilish thought crossed my mind... "do it... do it..." it said. So I did. And I didn't stop there. What I did was to cross it with every miniature I could. A "Mini" is the smallest size category of daylily, less than three inches in diameter. Not only did I just cross it to minis, but to this mini-double (below) called 'Micro Dots' registered at 2.875." Who knows what will come of it? A mini spider? An extra large double spider? A big pink/orange mess? Time will tell... if it makes any seeds that is. That's the beauty of hybridizing with daylilies, you never know what you're going to get!

Call us weird, but we get excited about our seedlings. We were happy enough that we bloomed 'Maret,' (pictured below) one of the darkest red/purple daylilies that we have ever seen, and happier still that someone saw it and purchased the naming rights for it last year in a fund raiser we had for the Africa Mission. I can speak for myself (Craig) when I say that we were just plain beside ourselves when we bloomed two progeny of 'Maret' this year. This is my favorite of the two but not by much. If I can find a pic of the other I will post it.

Got Maret?

Well, we're one week and one day from our Open Garden and things are looking good. It is always hard to predict three months out which weekend will be closest to our peak bloom. Peak bloom is the day when the most number of varieties of daylilies are blooming. We have more than 350 varieties and on the day of peak bloom we have generally had around 210-225 varieties blooming. One year, 2006, we hit it within one day. This year, beacuse of the cool spring, the bloom seems to be spreading out over a longer period. Yesterday we had 163 varieties blooming; some are nearing the end of their bloom period and there are many that have yet to start. If I had to predict right now, I would say about Tuesday June 24th would be peak.

Our hybridizing is coming along nicely. Alison spends most mornings in the garden dabbing pollen on pistils, making tags of what she has crossed, and checking for pods that have set from the previous days. We have acquried several very new, cutting edge varieties (by purchase and trade) over the past three years to accelerate our hybridizing and we are blooming our first efforts from that and I hope to post a seperate blog on that in the next few days. Although I dare not speak for my wife, Alison seems to be working heavily with full formed flowers that are green edged and heavily ruffled, as well as some with patterned eyes. I like to work with reds, and those with unusual characteristics like streaks, doubles, bicolors, and highly contrasted colors. Sometimes, when Alison sees what I am hybridizing, she will howl like a coon hound. This is to signal to me her belief that what I am hybridizing will turn out to be what is refered to in the trade as a "dog." A dog is a flower that has muddy color, spotty or blotchy, bland or just plain ugly. I just respond with "You never know." I get to do very little hybridizing however since it is best done in the mid morning hours when I am at work.

This little gem, named 'Maret,' is one of eleven seedlings that we have been bringing along that, last year, several friends paid for naming rights by making a donation to our Africa Mission to Sierra Leone. For $100, interested folks got to select a flower from our seedling beds and tell us what they'd like to name it. Mr. Tom Sinemma named it after his grand daughter. I really need to post a blog for those to. My favorite name of those submitted was 'Downtown Millie.' As I recall, it is a medium red with a dark red eye and petals that curl back to a point. Another of those named seedlings is on the upper right of this page. It is a stunner that is named after the village where we go in Sierra Leone for our Mission work, 'Taiama' and is pronounced "ti-AM-uh."

Home of the Whopper

Came upon this seedling in the garden today. It is from a cross we made about three years ago. This is the first time it has bloomed for us and the ruler is there for scale. To be considered large flowered a bloom has to be at least 5.5 inches in diameter. This one easily exceeds the dimensions for extra large and is in fact considered an Unusual Form. The coloration isn't anything to write home about but i'll be keeping it just because it is our first WHOPPER!

Meanwhile, we continue to get ready for the upcoming Open Garden. Our annual Open Garden event was begun as a way to not only share our garden with folks in the community, especially our fellow Master Gardeners, but also as a way to show just how big the world of Daylilies has become. Daylilies have come a long way from the "ditch lily" and the "Stela d'oro" with which everyone has become familiar. Two years ago we decided to make a fund raiser for the Africa Mission that I am involved in to Sierra Leone, West Africa and the attendance exploded. Last year we had more than 80 folks turn out and raised more than $1100! This year, thanks to an error in the Paris! in the Summer magazine, it looks like we will be having two dates! I submitted our Open Garden to their events calendar originally for the 21st of June, but then when I called to change it to the 28th... well, it was so long until publication that... hmmm, somewhere, somethign went wrong! Guess we'll be having two!?!

Bayou King

Everything is beginning to pop in the garden now. Warm rains and warmer nights (we have been in the 50's at night for so long!) are starting to have effect. If only for a while however, the Louisiana Iris is taking over as the "eye-catcher" in the garden right now. We have only a few of these regal specimen, but they really stand out now that the Bearded Irises have faded off into the sunset. Louisiana Irises LOVE to be wet and can grow easily in standing water (best way to control the weeds, that's for sure). We have one in our goldfish pond! But they are actually thriving on the driest, sandiest part of our garden and even doing very well in the shade of a big peach tree too. The foliage is usually much more slender and the rhizomes smaller than its bearded cousin. Ryan took this pic. I am trying to teach him something about photography and what better way than to let him in on the blog action. This L. Iris is called 'Black Gamecock' and is a stunner! Ryan has yet to master the shake of the camera but after only a couple of trys he got the framing down pretty good. I taught him the meaning of the A, S, and M settings and we did these pic in the A(perture) mode. The second pic is of a Red Hot Poker (Kniphofia tritoma) and I love the framing he did on that one. The Red Hot Poker is a tough perennial that lends a tropical look to any garden. Just be sure to plant them in the middle of a two-sided border or the back of a one-sided border; they can get quite tall!

First Blog! Here is a view of our garden taken in 2006. We have since double the size and need to take a new one. I guess I hope to be able to post up a blog every now and then about what is blooming in the garden (and pics of course), some thoughts on gardening, what has worked for us and what hasn't. Right now we are working hard to get ready for our annual Open Garden event. It has really taken off in the last couple of years since making it a fund raiser for the Africa mission of which we have become a part.

I have to thank my friend Rob for the idea to do this. You can view his cool blog at http://collagebarrage.blogspot.com