Fall Colors II: Mums Glow with Light from Within

Nothing says fall like asters and mums. For years I have looked at the gorgeous asters at our favorite garden center, and passed on getting them because, well, everyone knows they are hard to grow, they get the yellows, our soil is bad for them, etc. But this year I finally coughed up $5 on the first day of October and brought this specimen home.

Norm repotted it and placed it at the corner of the front wall in the midst of our luxuriant (and still growing, nearly 4 weeks later) sweet potato vine. Yes, that is one vine, and it's in a pot. It drinks like a sailor, though--we had to water it every day, sometimes twice a day, in the hot summer weather. One thing about a sweet potato vine, you don't have to guess when it's thirsty.

After two glorious weeks, the aster had bloomed itself out, so it is now retired and resting out back until we can find a spot to plant it. We rotated this bronze mum into its spot about a week ago and it is still going strong. So is the sweet potato vine. Our plan is to see what kind of tuber it has produced and if it looks healthy, we will keep it in the basement this winter and plant it again next spring. We did that a couple of years ago with another prolific vine. The mum will get planted in the flower bed in the wall, probably. Sometimes they survive the winter and sometimes they don't.

This is another bronze mum that has survived for about three years now. We planted it next to the front porch steps and I think this is its best year since we did that. I didn't pinch this one back this year because it stayed compact, and it also didn't set buds until sometime in August.I love these flowers because they seem to glow, even on a cloudy day!

Another hardy returning mum is this red one...I think it is an unusual red because most "reds" I see are really burgundy. this one occupies the far end of the wall next to Mr. Guy's property. For a while this spring I wasn't sure it had survived (this is its third year) but then some foliage poked through the mulch. This is such a vibrant color.

This white mum that looks like it is trying to pretend it's a Shasta daisy is actually one of two plants that we divided in their second year because they were overgrowing everything else planted on the wall. They bloom really early. They were keeping the aster company back at the end of September and early October. They are completely finished now, but they were our first harbinger of fall.

These pink mums hold the volunteer record...I think they have been out back under the lilac since at least 2006, maybe earlier. They spread out more every year; this is just one cluster of the entire sprawling group. Usually I pinch them back severely, but we were gone in June when I should have done it, and July was so hot they grew slowly. After the first fall wind, though, they really flopped over. This was a semi cloudy day with the sun wanly showing, and they still glowed. I can see them from the kitchen window and they are so cheery. They will persist until frost.

These sunny yellow flowers occupy the "welcome" spot beside our front porch steps and when they fade, they will get planted near the front door or in the wall as well. They were the third new plant I bought this fall.

Leaves are starting to fall from the oak, the maple, and all of the neighbors' trees as well, which makes it hard to keep the flowers visible, but we give it a try anyway. Soon enough the leaves will be raked, the plants will be heeled in to the ground for winter, the bird feeders will be up, and I'll be looking for where I packed my longjohns. Today it got to 75 degrees. Tonight we had thunder and the first rain in over a month...we got about an inch or more in less than an hour. Now there's a small stream flood advisory for North County. As my dad would have said, when it rains, it pours. But I'll take it.

Next up: Persistent Geraniums and other summer plants that don't know what season it is.

Fall Colors I: Trees

Fall officially started a month ago, but trees in our neighborhood are just now showing color, and leaves (except for the cottonwood, which started shedding in August) are just now beginning to fall. Today it is almost 80 degrees, with showers forecast for later, and a breezy south wind that is ringing the wind chime on the front porch. The doors are open, and we haven't thought about replacing the screens with the storm windows yet. It seems like summer wants to linger longer, and we can't really object. One of the first colorful trees we can see from the house is our backyard neighbor Mark's sassafras tree. Behind our garage, it looms up with fiery glowing branches.

Across the street, our neighbor Karen has two hard maples in front of her house. This one is blazing gold right now while the one next to it is still green. We look out the front door and see this glowing golden mass of leaves that shines even on a partly cloudy day, like today.
This week has been a sickly one, with one of the season's famous "two weeks no matter what you take for it" colds that included fever for a while, and now a racking cough that sneaks up on me. So although it is a lovely day for a drive, my leaf peeking so far has been at home. If I had more ambition I would start cleaning up the house plants on the porch, since surely they will have to come inside some time. Yet our highs will be in the 80s through Monday and even at the end of next week, on Halloween, the low will be only in the 50s. So, not yet.

A couple of years ago I posted a new photo almost every day for a month as our backyard sugar maple turned colors. I won't do that this year, but will note that on this date, there is just a tad of orange showing on the tips of the outer branches, and most of the interior is still green. One exception is a group of branches high up, as in 30 to 40 feet, that are becoming yellow. This tree needs trimming and thinning every 5 years or so, and this is its year. Yesterday the company we have contracted with called to say they would be out next Tuesday. We said, not yet. It's better to trim it after the leaves have fallen, and Sugar Maple isn't going to let go of all of its ton or so of little oxygen factories for a couple of weeks, I'm betting.

Next up: Fall Color II: Mums both new and volunteer

Confluence Casino Defeated--For Now

Last year just about this time, I blogged about the threat to wildlife and tranquility near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. That post can be found here. This week there is some good news. The North County Casino was one of 4 finalists being considered on Tuesday by the Gaming Commission for a license that came available this summer. The developers asked for an extension because they said they didn't have all the financing in place. The Comission said "no." So now there are three. One of them is also on the Mississippi, south of Interstate 270 at the Chain of Rocks, and it too is an environmental threat and of concern to the drinking water supply of the City of St. Louis. (The other two proposals are in Cape Girardeau, which will hold a plebiscite on Nov. 2, and near Kansas City.)

The chair of the commission has said they may not award any license this round, and that would leave the door open for the North County Casino partners to try again. The land has been rezoned, and many area cities and school districts are pressing for "jobs" and "revenue." But for now, the folks who are more interested in migratory birds, wetlands preservation and the historic significance of this Lewis and Clark exploration site are warily cautious that better times are ahead.

By the Waters We Lived, and Still Do

Hyco Creek, Deep Creek, Yadkin River, Belews Creek, Janes Creek, Lynn Branch, Turkey Creek, North Fork Red River, Lake of the Ozarks, Arkansas River, Little Spring Creek, Lake Taneycomo, White River, Turnback Creek, Lake Fort Gibson, Walnut Creek, Roaring River, Platte River, Current River, Mississippi and Missouri rivers. All of these “waters” have played a role in my family heritage, going back to 1785 when Laughlin McElyea got a land grant of 200 acres “on the waters of Hyco Creek” in Caswell County, North Carolina. Both my father’s and mother’s families, as well as Norm’s, lived or played alongside the waters I have named above—and many more that I can’t think of. Photo above: North fork of Deep Creek, Yadkin County, NC.

From an early age, I was forbidden to go out our back gate and into the creek, but it fascinated me. The boy next door would go fishing for crawdads in it. One day we found an empty beer can floating in it, and I was horrified that anyone would trash my precious creek, with its rock walls that went back to the WPA that now had tall saplings growing up out of them. Once the creek flooded and came far up into our yard, causing a lot of excitement in the neighborhood. A few years later, it was covered over and buried…turned into an enclosed storm water drainage system. Further from our block, it still remained open and free, and once I was old enough to venture out on my bicycle, I would still visit it regularly. I came to respect water and the creatures that depend on it as I explored Walnut Creek. Photo above: Linville River just above Linville Falls, Blue Ridge, North Carolina.


When I think about it, most of my family has lived near a creek or river at some time. I treasure a photo of my grandparents celebrating their engagement in a park alongside the North Fork of the Red River in Oklahoma. Before oil was discovered, before agricultural runoff became commonplace, before sewers were discharged into rivers instead of septic fields….our nation’s waters were a delight. As a Girl Scout camper in Oklahoma, I enjoyed wading through Little Spring Creek and canoeing on local lakes. Norm’s mother and her siblings appear in a photo taken when they were swimming in the Smoky Hill. Photo above: the Calusahatchee River estuary at Fort Myers, Florida, just before it joins the Gulf of Mexico.

Water is basic not only to our pleasure, but to our life itself. And yet our streams and lakes are often abused, used as a dumping ground for pretty foul stuff. I remember learning in high school chemistry that water is “the universal solvent” but we are pushing our luck today. In parts of the Western U.S., aquifers are depleted, making deeper wells necessary and the rivers above them are now always dry. Elsewhere in the world, waters that fill with snow melt are shrinking with climate change, and others are swelling as severe rains drench impoverished peoples in India, Pakistan and China. In the middle east and elsewhere, wars are fought over rights to fresh water since it is so scarce. Photo above: Lakes Park in Fort Myers, FL, nature reclaimed from a quarry.

One important local issue for me is a proposal to build a large casino and entertainment complex right next to a wildlife refuge on a wetland along the Mississippi River just past its historic confluence with the Missouri River. There are more kinds of pollution that just the icky stuff in the water, but it’s also true that this project is just upstream from the intake for the city of St. Louis’ drinking water supply. Photo above: Confluence of the Missouri (left) and Mississippi (upper right) rivers north of St. Louis. There's a proposal to build a casino complex just downstream from this historic site.

DoSomething.org < http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-pollution> quotes these facts about the effects of pollution in our waters:

· 40% of America’s rivers and 46% of America’s lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life.

· The Mississippi River – which drains the lands of nearly 40% of the continental United Sates – carries an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of nitrogen pollution into the Gulf of Mexico each year. The resulting dead zone in the Gulf each summer is about the size of Massachusetts.

· 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, storm water, and industrial waste are discharged into US waters annually.

· Polluted drinking waters are a problem for about half of the world’s population. Each year there are about 250 million cases of water-based diseases, resulting in roughly 5 to 10 million deaths. Photo above: the Missouri River at Confluence Conservation Area north of St. Louis, August, 2008.


Now that I have spent this week thinking about water, I’m going to look at that flowing, clean, safe, abundant stream of water coming from my kitchen faucet with renewed admiration and respect. What can we do, what are we doing, to help preserve our nation’s rivers, lakes and seacoasts, and to clean up waters that have become polluted? To help less fortunate folks get access to clean and plentiful water? I realize I’m not doing nearly enough, and I will look for ways to do more. Photo: Ice closes the Mississippi River to barge traffic in January north of St. Louis.

Today is Blog Action Day, and the theme is WATER. Here is a link to the National Resources Defense Council web site, where you can find more information about how to clean up our rivers and other waters.

One final thing you can do is join me in signing a petition supporting the United Nations’ effort to bring clean, safe water to millions of people. Just click on the badge at the top of the right rail on this blog, and the widget will take you there. Photo at right: Mississippi River above flood stage at Cape Girardeau, MO.

Coming Tomorrow--Blog Action Day

It's a good thing I committed to writing a blog on Oct. 15 for Blog Action Day, since I've not been posting anything else lately. Sometimes I'm not sure what I've been doing...this afternoon I went up to my sewing room and the last time I had moved the daily quilt block calendar was Sept. 23. I guess that is the last day I worked on anything...and it showed. I dusted and decluttered and finished an Optional Block for Quilt Guild next week, even though I'll have to miss the meeting.

I have my draft of my Blog Action Day post started...need to find some photos. This year's theme is water, and I'm writing about bodies of water I have known and loved. So please come back tomorrow and feel free to share your own memories of a time when a local stream behind the house was clean enough to play in!