Glens Falls (NY) Online Book Discussion Group discussion
What are U doing today?
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What are U doing today? (Ongoing thread)
message 3251:
by
Werner
(new)
Aug 24, 2012 05:45PM
Sorry, Jim! I guess I'm a slow study. :-) (But keep trying; every good comedian runs into a tough room sometimes!)
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Jim wrote: "Werner wrote: "Maybe that's why the fancy term for a large group of crows (really) is "a murder of crows." :-) ...I should never bother with puns. No one ever gets them."
Jim, I figured it was a pun, but a very oblique one. :)
["Jim had written: "a Huge flock came in & they were murderous."]
I also made a pun with 'foul'.I guess I read too much Zelazny. I'm getting obscure in my old age.
;-)
Jim wrote: "I also made a pun with 'foul'.I guess I read too much Zelazny. I'm getting obscure in my old age. ;-)"
Ah, yes, I see the pun in Message #3246.
" ...crows ... Walking across the lawn was dangerous. Huge, nasty poops & as foul as anything I've ever seen."
That was REALLY hidden! :)
Yes, too much Zelazny!
You know, I was going to say that. :)
Here's a quote you'll like:
“The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.” -Milan Kundera
Nah, Jim, you're not old! (You're getting obscure in your middle age. :-) )
Werner wrote: "Nah, Jim, you're not old! (You're getting obscure in your middle age. :-) )"LOL
Claire Boothe said it this way:
"I'm in my anecdotage." :)
OR there's this one:
THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE:
1) You believe in Santa Claus.
2) You don't believe in Santa Claus.
3) You are Santa Claus.
4) You look like Santa Claus.
LOL!, Werner.Good one, Joy.
I got a nice compliment today. A neighbor had given me some wood & I made them a bowl. They really liked it & he dropped by this morning to give me more & got a tour. While holding a bracket I'd made up out of used horse shoes, he said, "I'll bet you could make something pretty & useful out of dirt."
Jim wrote: "... I got a nice compliment today. A neighbor ... said, "I'll bet you could make something pretty & useful out of dirt." "I'll bet you could too, Jim! :)
We were talking about cutting bushes back. I posted some pics of my Rose of Sharon & Weigela bushes to show how far I cut them back & how they've recovered so quickly.https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?s...
Jim wrote: "We were talking about cutting bushes back. I posted some pics of my Rose of Sharon & Weigela bushes to show how far I cut them back & how they've recovered so quickly.https://www.facebook.com/med..."
Wow! That's pretty impressive, Jim.
I think it's your good soil that has helped a lot.
I plan to do a lot of cutting back soon. It's long overdue.
Thanks!
Today I am visiting my cardiologist. I had a hearth catheterization last Wednesday and today I get the results. Wish me luck.
Good luck, Mary! Joy, we have horrible soil, mostly clay, although I add horse manure on occasion. No, the plants in question are weeds & did well where they are. That's my secret to gardening. Plant lots of weeds & some will make it.
;-)
Rose of Sharon are one of my favorite bushes because they're pretty & plentiful. Plant one & the birds make sure lots of babies are distributed about the place. It's very important to find them after a good rain & pull them out by the root. They can then easily be transplanted or tossed. If you break them off, they will form a root that you have to kill with an herbicide, though.
They're very versatile & can be planted in a tight group so you get a multicolored flowering bush, that is actually several. They can be trimmed into something resembling a flowering privet hedge, although they lose all their leaves in the winter. As you can see, they get quite tall & the birds love them near the feeders. The hummingbirds drink out of them all the time, too.
Weigela & Forsythia are easy to spread, too. Just leave a limb long, strip the leaves off a section & bury it in the ground. The next year you can cut the limb off the mother plant & have a whole new one with great roots. It can either be left or transplanted elsewhere.
Mary, I had a heart catheterization myself several years ago, so I can relate. I'll be thinking of you today; good luck!
I'm taking off work in a few minutes for a 1/2 day of vacation today followed by all day tomorrow & a 3 day weekend. Yeehaw!Actually, the hurricane is supposed to dump rain on us tomorrow & I have a few things I'd like to get done first; spraying some weeds, mowing the lawn, & cleaning up where the dirt/manure pile was. I need to seed that area, too.
Good for you, Jim; enjoy your time off! Labor Day is just another day at Easley Library. (Sigh!) But I'm not jealous... okay, maybe just a little. :-)
Mary JL wrote: "Today I am visiting my cardiologist. I had a hearth catheterization last Wednesday and today I get the results. Wish me luck."Good luck, Mary JL.
Hope you get a good report!
Jim wrote: "... Rose of Sharon are one of my favorite bushes because they're pretty & plentiful. ... Weigela & Forsythia are easy to spread, too. ..."Thanks for the info, Jim. I am mulling over in my mind about plans for next year's garden.
We have Forsythia and I know how easy they are to have in a garden. Our problem is that we are very lax about pruning our bushes. I am trying to improve on that.
I'm going to look into Rose of Sharon and Weigela.
We have some Purple Leaf Sand Cherry bushes which are doing OK but would do much better if we pruned them properly. See them here:
http://www.daylilyparadise.com/treean...
They're very good for color-accent.
Jim wrote: "I'm taking off work in a few minutes for a 1/2 day of vacation today followed by all day tomorrow & a 3 day weekend. Yeehaw! ..."Enjoy your time-off, Jim!
We have one of those Sand Cherries, Joy. I've whacked it back a couple of times. It looks pretty good now, but it took it a couple of years. I was afraid to take it back too far the first time & got it unbalanced for a while, but at least it didn't break up in the ice storms.I had a good day. I got the paddock & some of the fields sprayed. I use a 4 gallon Solo backpack sprayer. It gets heavier every year, but part of the issue is that the weeds are further apart so it took me well over an hour of wandering around to empty it. I picked up the ponies' paddock & only got one tractor bucket of poop, rather than 2, so that's good, too. Then I graded & seeded where the dirt/manure pile was that I moved earlier this week. I spread a couple of bales of old hay & straw over it.
The evening we all went for a ride. Poor Chip caught his shoulder on the light switch coming out of the grooming area & cut himself pretty good. Probably could use a stitch, but Doc Marg stuck some blue goop on it after we were done. It didn't slow him up any. We had a lot of fun, although it was too hot to do much. We just bopped around bareback, a bit of cantering & trotting. No jumps tonight except when my neighbor fired his gun. It sounds like a big one, maybe a .45 or something.
I'm looking forward to piddling about in the shop tomorrow morning before I mow. I should have done that this evening, but it's been a while since I rode Chip & Lily needed some quality time. She helped me pick up sticks around the goat's paddock & scope out where we might expand it into the woods.
Jim, I think your animals have more fun than *I* do. LOLToday we went for a boat ride. The line got tangled in the prop. The captain had to go into the water to untangle it. Then the side window canvas blew off the boat and sank. We each blamed the other for the mishaps. Otherwise we had a wonderful time. :)
Our animals are horribly put upon, Joy. Just ask them & they'll tell you. We never give out enough treats. Chip only got 3 cookies today & the goats were severely disappointed that I didn't bring them any grapes or plums. Lily & Jazz never get to run enough, either. It's a rough life, but somehow they manage to make do with us.;-)
Oh no! Sounds like one disaster after another. Those hunks of canvass are expensive, too. Is the motor alright?
Jim, my sympathies to your animals. LOLThe motor seems to be OK but there was a loud snap when the rope went taut. I guess that was the rope complaining. We did have a nice ride; the weather was gorgeous. We'll see what the canvas will cost (it has have a plastic window in it too). Lord knows we need to have the seats reupholstered too. It's an old boat... for two old goats. :)
Werner wrote: "Mary, I had a heart catheterization myself several years ago, so I can relate. I'll be thinking of you today; good luck!"Mary you will be in my evening prayers. nina
Yeah!After over ninety days with barely a tenth of an inch of rain Isaac arrived to welcoming arms this afternoon. He is welcome to stay longer.
Enjoy your rain, Nina. :)But don't send any to us.
We want a sunny Labor Day Weekend! :)
It just rained here. Lexington (SE of us) got 1/4", Frankfort proper, which is about 400-500 feet below us got 1/3", Louisville to the west got 9/10ths" & we got 1.5", half of that in the first 10 minutes of a 30 minute storm. Wow!
Most didn't enjoy the much longed for rain. It poured seven inches and many had flooded basement. We just had a small amount because our hard working sump pump never stopped pumping all night long and into the next day. Our ground is so hard from lack of rain; one hundred day drought, that the rain rain off any place it could get to and there are many cracks around the foundations...and donw it went.
Well, Jim and Nina, the rain must be making up for lost time! We have wet weather here after a beautiful Labor Day Weekend. Hope the sun comes back soon.
I wondered about that, Nina. I heard people in your neck of the woods were trying to water their foundations. We had the same problem back in 2007. And once it started raining in October, it didn't seem to stop. We went from dust to mud so deep poor Marg was losing her boots going in & out to the barn.This year we had a bad drought in July, but August has been great. Our fields are green as can be & I'm going to have to mow again soon.
Jim, glad to hear you had a good August. Ever since you mentioned the "Rose of Sharon" bushes, I've been noticing them all around the area. Do they bloom all summer or just once? The ones I've seen still have flowers on them.
There are a couple of plants called "Rose of Sharon". The one I'm talking about is Hibiscus Syriacus, even though it's not from Syria.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibiscus...
I didn't plant these, so don't know if they're a specific cultivar or not, but they seem to be the same as the ones I had in MD which came from a huge bush that was never pruned out behind the dairy barn. Occasionally the ice would tear it up, but in a few years it was OK again.
They're another invasive from Asia, but not bad as invasives go. While ours do have quite a few babies, they don't grow well enough in the woods or anywhere to take over. They are easy to spread, though. Just watch for a baby to start, wait for a day when the soil is wet deeply & pull it up by the root, them put it in where you want. Don't try that on a dry day or it will break off & the root will go deep. Then you have to use an herbicide to kill it off.
Ours tend to do a big bloom in July, but keep flowering into September, but the last 2 months tend to be more spotty. The flowers don't last long - I think just a day, but they get a lot of buds on new growth. How well they flower depends a lot on the water available & how hard they were cut back. They'll go wild if you don't cut them back, but then you run the risk of breakage. They're not very strong, so wind & ice will break them if they get too big & heavy. They do bend a lot, though.
I think I'm going to let the ones in the back yard go next year, but I have some young ones out past my shop that I'll trim back hard for a couple of years to get them to bush out more.
Jim wrote: "There are a couple of plants called "Rose of Sharon". The one I'm talking about is Hibiscus Syriacus, even though it's not from Syria.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibiscus...
I didn't plant..."
Yes, those are the ones I've seen around here. I just realized that our neighbor has a couple of the bushes. I'll keep my eye on them.
At the link you provided (Hibiscus syriacus), it says: "can be stiff and ungainly if badly pruned"...." Of course, I know you know how to prune correctly. :) I wonder what "badly pruned" means exactly.
Pruning is kind of an art on trees & Rose of Sharon (RoS) are more like small trees than bushes. It's not just to make sure they're balanced, but also to make sure the branches are good ones & don't interfere with each other. If they rub, they'll damage each other & create rot & weak spots. V forks aren't as strong as if the angle is larger, more of a U shape. The Feds have a good page on it here:
http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/how...
You may need to adjust a bit for looks. I let some of my bushes put out lower branches pointing down in some cases, not in others. Depends on mowing conditions, usually. RoS generally get their lower branches pruned once they're well established, about 5 years old.
They can be interesting to prune if they're planted in clumps, which mine in the back are. The previous owners put 3 to 5 plants together in a hole so they look like one bush with multiple color blooms, but each bush only gets one color; white, purple or pink. They were tiny when I moved in & the drought that year didn't do them any favors. Plenty of water a couple of years later, not to mention the extra time, made them suddenly spring up. I've been pruning them back a bit more each year to untangle the interior limbs & balance them up. It's not perfect, easy or quick, but I think they'll be pretty good from now on - after 3 years of fiddling.
I don't get fancy with anything, but try to leave enough of a stub so that the tree/bush can heal by dying back an inch or so on each cut, yet not leave enough to rot nor a flat spot for water to gather. I never let the bark strip back on the tree nor do I use any kind of sealant. It tends to trap more water & encourage bugs.
Until I saw the Wikipedia article, I didn't know that the flowers were edible. Not sure I want to try them, either. I do know that the deer & rabbits love the new growth. They ate the tops off the ones by the shop the first year I planted them. One was down almost to the ground. It's now as big as the others, about 6' tall. Those have never been pruned by me before & aren't real bushy, but look pretty good.
Writing that last message made me think about time & the farm. I rarely do any plantings or projects without thinking in terms of years, any more.
Jim wrote: "Pruning is kind of an art on trees & Rose of Sharon (RoS) are more like small trees than bushes. It's not just to make sure they're balanced, but also to make sure the branches are good ones... The Feds have a good page on it ..."Thanks for that link, Jim. ( http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/how... ) Looks like a good one. I'm going to send it to Eddie because he usually does the pruning. Maybe it will get him motivated. :)
(I usually do the nagging.) :)
Jim wrote: "Writing that last message made me think about time & the farm. I rarely do any plantings or projects without thinking in terms of years, any more."With trees and bushes you have to think of years. If you don't, the tree or bush may not be given enough space.
joy, I ask a favor of you. Could you post for me how I can find the Goodreads review of, "Night Circus?' Thanks. I would like to recommend it to my Book club and I have forgotten how to find the reviews.
joy, I ask a favor of you. Could you post for me how I can find the Goodreads review of, "Night Circus?' Thanks. I would like to recommend it to my Book club and I have forgotten how to find the reviews.
Nina, if it is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, just click on the title here & you'll see reviews listed below the book description.You can find any GR book by just typing the author's first or last (don't do both) name, then a comma, a space, & a few words of the title into the "Title/Author/ISBN" box at the top of every GR page.
Joy, that's true about leaving them space, even though it can look weird at first. Some don't work forever, either. Various Juniper & Yew bushes near a house come to mind.
Jim wrote: "Nina, if it is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, just click on the title here & you'll see reviews listed below the book description.You can find any GR book by just typing the author's first..."
Jim, thank you for answering Nina's question. I never received a notification about her post.
Nina, Jim's explanation is a good one. Hope it helps.
Jim wrote: "Joy, that's true about leaving them space, even though it can look weird at first. Some don't work forever, either. Various Juniper & Yew bushes near a house come to mind."Jim, that is so right! We have Junipers next to the house which desperately need pruning! They choked out a couple of cute little "Bird's Nest Yews" (not sure of the name) a long time ago. The bushes were here when we bought the house.
We put in a dwarf(?)rhododenrum (sp?) several years ago and it's doing beautifully. Hardly gets any sun but still grows. No flowers though. It's hidden by other evergreens though. Wish we had money to get professional help in that area of the yard which is right in the front of the house.
Bushes next to houses are kind of a pain, Joy. I see your problem, too. James recently had to cut & dig one out next to his place & I did at our last house, too. They get too big & cause water problems in basements. Their basement used to flood, but since he pulled it & regraded where it was, it doesn't. They can also cause houses to rot. A friend of mine found that a Yew held enough water against his house that an otherwise good outside wall was rotted just where the bush was. His siding at the time was asbestos shingles backed with tar paper, too. It just couldn't breath enough.Yew bushes can be pruned back very hard & still regrow fine. Of course, if you have a basement, the roots are just more of a pain. I've made some wonderful bowls from the root balls of mature ones. The grain is all over the place & yew is a pretty hard wood.
I have some variety of Junipers outside of my house. They can't be cut back much or they die. I have 3 in front of my porch & the one on the left is way bigger than the other two. I trimmed it back this year & that helped, but I couldn't take it far enough back. I'm not positive, but I think if you cut all the leaves off a branch, it dies off. I want to keep the bushes since the porch is about 4' off the ground. I have myrtle (periwinkle) planted under it too, so the little bit most people see looks pretty good.
I don't want to put lattice up. That's such a pain, especially with all the animals around us. Something would make a home under there & it's always a pain to get in & out, no matter how the lattice is put up. Of course since they've come out with vinyl lattice, it's much better to deal with. The treated wood lattice kept being made worse & worse, not that it was ever much good. The vinyl has the color all through it, so it never has to be painted - a job that used to take hours even with a spray gun. Also, it's formed in one piece so it never falls apart nor does it rot or break. Fantastic stuff.
Jim, we have only a crawl space, no basement in that part of the house. I'd like to get rid of all the bushes in front and start fresh with a good landscaper but it's cheaper to leave things the way they are, just keeping things trimmed.The yews next to the junipers are in very bad shape because over the years the deer have been nibbling on them. We finally devised a winter wire fence which we now put up during the winter to keep the deer away. We tried an electric fence but it didn't stop the deer.
That's why landscape architects make the big bucks - knowing what to plant, how it will grow, & dealing with all the other problems, like avoiding plants that deer like to munch on. My cousin, Cam, is a landscape architect. His wife, Wanda, is an Extension Agent & between then they are a veritable encyclopedia of plant knowledge. Actually, they know so much as to be useless for a quick question since everything has to be taken in context. They're horrified at my gardening methods - toss plants in to fend for themselves with some horse manure for company, but have to admit that it works pretty well for me & Mom. It is a lot of work ripping out an old garden & putting in new plants. I pulled one of the Junipers next to my house (besides 3 in front of the porch, there are 3 along the wall north of the porch, too.) because it got too big & put several varieties of hosta in there instead. I 'll likely pull out the other two in a few years. I don't know what to do with them, though. They don't have a deep root system & are pretty easy to transplant, but I don't know where I want to put them. I tried putting the one out by the barn & it did fine until the grass went, then the horses ate it.
I guess I could put it on the front bank down to the road to help expand the gardens there, but I don't like bushes on a hill side unless they're surrounded by garden. They're a pain to mow around. I think that area might be too dry & sunny for them, though. The species could take it, but these have been used to just morning sun & wet feet. The one I put by the barn got plenty of water, but sunburned badly when I first moved it since it wound up getting sun all day.
Thanks for the goodreads review info, Joy.
Jim wrote: "That's why landscape architects make the big bucks - knowing what to plant, how it will grow, & dealing with all the other problems, like avoiding plants that deer like to munch on. My cousin, Cam..."Jim, I'm surprised that your horses will eat juniper. It seems so prickly.
At our house downstate, we had a juniper which had no trouble living at the top of a rock outcropping with very little soil. So I always thought juniper were hardy bushes. It probably depends on the species.
Nina wrote: "Thanks for the goodreads review info, Joy."Nina, you should give Jim the credit for that. He jumped in when I was absent because I hadn't rec'd a notification about your posting. Nice of him.
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