Monthly Archives: September 2014

Grass

I met Maureen and Sokho for lunch today over at Fallsgrove and when I came back to the car I noticed this grass growing in the area between two rows of cars. Rather than use all underground drainage in parking lots, the current style seems to be to leave spaces every few rows and turn them into drainage ditches but with ornamental plants that can take a certain amount of flooding. I think this is a nice trend and some of the plants used are quite nice. This grass, for example, it nice. This photo has the feel of the country, not the middle of a busy parking lot.

Sesame Seeds

I like plants and gardening and I know a little about both. I try to know a something about the plants from which most of our vegetable foods come. Sesame seeds have been a bit of an exception. I knew that they come from an herbaceous (non-woody) plant that grows in tropical regions, but beyond that didn’t know much about them. Four countries, Burma, India, China, and Sudan account for more than half the world sesame seed production (about 56% of 4.76 million metric tons). The sesame plant, Sesamum indicum, is an annual, growing to about three feet in height, bearing (usually) yellow flowers, and producing the seeds in small capsules.

Crab-Apple Stump

For yesterday’s photo I posted a picture of a man cutting a fairly tall but completely dead tree in our next door neighbor’s yard. Today I cut down a much smaller but equally dead crab-apple in my Brady and Albert’s front yard. While a chain saw makes a big difference when doing something like this, unless you have a well tuned saw and unless you know how to deal with a few problems, it can be as much a frustration as anything. My saw runs fast. Until recently it ran so fast that when I squeezed the throttle it would stall. I managed to adjust it a bit and now it runs well when cutting. I need to slow the idle speed a little.

The real problem I’m having now is that my shoulder gives out before the work is done. So, I cut a little while, then rest (and rest the saw). Then, back to work. I managed to get the tree down this far before my arm refused to do any more work for the day. Sorry, guys, but I’ll be back to cut the rest of it when I get the chance. Thanks for the firewood.

Lobelia cardinalis (Cardinal Flower)

Cathy and I thought we’d go for a walk today, around lunch time. It was unexpectedly hot, so we didn’t go as far as we had thought we might, but we were out a little while. We walked around the edge of the woods near the various buildings of our office campus. In addition to blue mistflower (Conoclinium coelestinum), we saw this cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis), one of the showier native wildflowers of our area.