Monthly Archives: April 2017

Digging a hole

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We bought some crape myrtles and hollies for the yard between the side of the house and the driveway a few days ago, and on Wednesday I started digging a hole for one of the crape myrtles. The crape myrtles are in five-gallon containers, so they need a hole a foot deep by about four or so feet wide. That’s a big hole, but that’s not the whole story.

Here is one of the crape myrtles in the ground. It’s about six feet tall.

And here is the start of a hole for the second crape myrtle.

About half of the dirt taken from the hole is wrapped up in the tarp behind the crape myrtle. I dumped the rest down near the woods because it is too hard to use for planting. About four inches below the surface there is a layer of incredibly hard, almost black clay. It is impossible to dig this soil with just a shovel. It’s not easy to do it even with a pick. The clay breaks into rock-like chunks that are impossible to break up with a shovel. Our regular hard red clay can at least be crumbled with a shovel, but this dark clay is impervious. Our neighbor John, who did the clearing and grading for us, lent us a gasoline-powered auger to use for planting. I tried it. The auger bit dug a few inches into the soil and stopped at the clay level, leaving a nice, polished surface where the auger spun uselessly against the clay.

I take the clay chunks out of the soil and use the loose soil that’s left. There’s no way I can put the hard clay back into the hole with the plant, even amended generously with compost.

Planting guides usually recommend against so generously amending the soil that goes back in the hole with the plant because it encourages roots to stay within that good soil and not penetrate out into the rest of the soil. Here, though, we’re going to have to treat the crape myrtles almost like potted plants because the clay is so hard.

Each of these crape myrtles holes take me most of an afternoon to dig. I have wondered about dynamite.

The ground is especially hard now because we haven’t had a measurable amount of rain for about two weeks. We have watched the weather radar as heavy showers pass north or south of us. A few days ago a good shower passed over town. We could watch it from our front porch.

We got a sprinkle. I assume that at least the rain that passes close but misses us helps recharge the ground water, so maybe our well won’t run dry.

Time, Time mag, mag*

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Back when I used to go over to my mother’s house in the 1990’s, I would sometimes sit in her living room and read a magazine while she watched the Braves or NCIS reruns. There were a few of the classics, like National Geographic, or a good consumer magazine, like Consumer Reports. I would also find the occasional issue of Money magazine. I never could figure out why she subscribed to that magazine. I couldn’t find anything interesting in it, and I doubt she could either. Maybe that’s why we weren’t rich.

Anyway, so time passed, my mother went to live in Virginia for a year with my brother while he finished seminary school, and then moved into an assisted living facility for a few months, and then went back home to die.

And still the Money magazines kept coming. They ended up being mailed to my brother’s house in Chattanooga. I don’t think he thought much about it. He just assumed my mother had a subscription that would soon run out, and he wouldn’t renew it, because he never found much to read in the magazine either, so he’s also not rich.

But still they kept coming. And, as is so often the case, the whole matter just sort of drifted along just below his conscious mind. Eventually, however, as the months became years –almost four years, in fact – it occurred to him to look at the subscription information on the mailing label. My mother’s subscription to Money magazine was good through 2047.

I can imagine very well what happened. Someone called my mother and urged her to subscribe at a good rate, a tremendous rate, a truly Trumpian rate, and she agreed, despite the fact that she had been retired for 30 or 40 years and did not have any money to speak of. And then they kept calling her back, because she wouldn’t want to let a subscription to such a wonderful magazine as Money expire. And of course my mother agreed that that would truly be a tragedy, so she re-upped. And they called, and they called, and they called, and my mother renewed and renewed and renewed. All the way out to 2047, when she would be 124 years old.

I’m sure it never occurred to the truly wonderful, tremendous magazine subscription salespeople that no one alive in, let’s say 1997, would want to read Money magazine for the next 50 years, no matter how interesting and useful the articles might be. I’m sure they didn’t even consider the fact that it is as near a certainty as one is likely to encounter that Money magazine will not even exist in 2047.

So my brother called the Money magazine subscription department and described the situation. To their credit, when the staggering absurdity of the situation was explained to them in a manner befitting an ordained Presbyterian minister, they agreed that there might need to be some adjustment in the subscription particulars. They agreed to refund payment for some of the excess subscription. Quelle surprise.

Just last week my brother sent me a check for half of the refund. It was nearly $300. So, imagine that, if you will. The people behind convincing little old ladies to renew useless magazine subscriptions out decades beyond their likely death squeezed almost $600 out of my mother.

*Thanks Joan Baez. Yes, it’s Money magazine, not Time. But Time Inc. owns Money, so I think the title of this post is appropriate.

Dusty napping

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The front porch is Dusty’s domain, at least when Sylvester and Smokey aren’t trying to stare him down. One of his favorite things is napping.

Sometimes he lies on top of his house. He have a cat house with a heated pad, enclosed by this foam insulation board to keep the rain and wind out.

He needs a pillow.

Sometimes sometimes the sun is too bright.

 

Spring walk

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The woods on the mountain are beautiful in the spring. I like the brilliant, yellowish-green of the new leaves. They are especially beautiful against a deep blue sky.

This was down near the bottom of the mountain. Even with the few hundred feet difference in elevation from the top of the mountain, the trees at the bottom are deeper into spring.

One thing I noticed on my dog walk Sunday morning was that a few trees seem not to have recovered from the drought of last summer. This one seems to have lost a major branch.

Some of the upper branches on this tree are leafing out.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I was afraid some of the dogwoods on the mountain had died from what I presume was drought stress. Their leaves had turned brown on the trees, and the dogwoods did not shed those leaves as usual. Most of the dogwoods are now blooming or leafing out, but I am noticing a few that remain brown. The dogwoods down off the mountain seem to be in pretty good shape. I see quite a few in the woods along Technology Parkway as we drive into town. I see very few blooming dogwoods higher on the mountain. This is one of the few. It’s near the corner of our property.

I identified several dogwoods near the house last summer. I can’t find any of them that show any signs of life now.

I have also mentioned that some of the pines on the mountain, including quite a few on our property, seemed to be dying. Most of those are showing no sign of life, but a few seem to be sprouting new needles. The one that seems most likely to survive is a loblolly. The shortleaf pines don’t seem to be recovering. Maybe later in the spring they will.

I am sad to have to report that it looks like the little longleaf pine I planted at our old house seems to have died. All the needles have turned brown. I suppose it’s possible it could recover, but it doesn’t look good. It was just reaching the bottlebrush stages

The full moon will be April 11. (Since this will be the first full moon of spring, next Sunday will be Easter.) It seemed pretty full Sunday as it rose. I thought it looked nice through the bare limbs of our pet maple.

This was a time exposure with my Olympus mounted on a tripod. The exposure was long enough that the floodlights on the front of the house illuminated the tree. This is more like what my eye saw.

I like both images, but I prefer the darker silhouette. Unfortunately, when I zoomed out with the camera on AUTO, the camera extended the exposure enough that the maple was no longer just a black silhouette.

Although the maple looks like it’s also dead, it has the red tips that show first on maples.

Stormy weather

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The dogs don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky. Seems like it keeps raining all of the time. Stormy weather.

The dogs agree: stormy weather is bad. Stormy weather, and especially thunder, necessitates seeking refuge, usually in a closet or at the feet of one of the humans.

Mama will keep us safe

This shot was from a few days ago when severe storms came through Georgia, causing at least one tornado. Fortunately the really bad weather missed us.

This shot was from Wednesday when another round of storms hit.

Under the table, between Mama and Daddy’s feet. Safest place around.

The storms on Wednesday were worse than those of a few days ago. We heard a report of another tornado south of us, which was where most of the really bad weather hit. The storms came through in the form of isolated thunderstorms rather than as a uniform wave of bad weather along a front. Here was one pretty severe storm that passed just north of us.

The red pushpin is our house. We got a light sprinkle from this storm, along with some lightning and thunder. The storm that passed south of us was also bad, but it gave us only distant thunder.

I have been working for a few days on channeling the runoff from the yard so that heavy rain won’t wash away what little topsoil remains. This is a partially-finished channel from one downspout of our newly-installed gutters.

It’s a little hard to tell, but there are ripples in the water. It was a fairly strong stream. I will eventually line both sides with stone from around the mountain and put commercial rocks in the actual stream bed. I will probably get some tennis-ball to softball-sized stone from a landscape company to make a bed further down the yard.

This shot doesn’t show the other canyons being dug in other places in the yard. They will get their own treatment soon.

I’m not sure how much rain we got, because our fancy tipping bucket rain gauge seems not to be tipping reliably. I guess I’ll just have to get one of the old-fashioned glass tube rain gauges.

As I write this there are still storm cells tracking towards us and the rest of Georgia, and Sam is under the table at my feet. I keep hearing thunder and Leah sees lightning. We may still get severe weather right here on top of the mountain.

The storm that passed north of us was producing hail around three-quarters of an inch in size. One of the Atlanta TV stations reported that the storm had a BTI of 2.5. Now you may be wondering, as I was, exactly what in the heck a BTI is. So I looked it up. It turns out that it is a commercially-produced index indicating likelihood of tornado production. It means Baron Tornado Index.

As it happens, I know where BTI came from. A Huntsville, Al, TV weatherman named Bob Baron decided to leave TV weather forecasting and form a company to sell weather visualization and analysis software, mainly to TV stations. I remember watching him when I lived in Huntsville. After searching for BTI, I went to the Baron company’s website. I was a little surprised to see how much the company has grown. I looked at their “leadership” listing, and was not surprised to find that everyone they list was basically in sales. They claim to have developed some pretty sophisticated software to forecast hurricane tracks, among other things. That kind of software development and meteorological capability requires a very good development team, but they were nowhere to be seen on the company website. That figures. The ones who do the work get no recognition. The ones who do the selling get all the glory. And, I suspect, most of the money.

They did mention their “chief scientist” in one news release. However, it would have been nice to see at least some mention of the rest of the staff that does all the work behind the glitzy products the company sells, rather than just the salesmen. Maybe they are mentioned somewhere on the company site. They are probably just hidden away so they won’t embarrass the salesmen.