Tales from the Microbial Laboratory

a blueberry harvest

 

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Marie Curie

~~~~~

Tonight I harvested blueberries - that I will take with me tomorrow as I get back on I-95 and head to Virginia and my father's home.  There are problems - and all I can say is that I'm on a steep learning curve in this world of dementia.  These are things that I didn't ask to learn, would have loved avoiding learning - but life just doesn't work that way.  Balancing my own demanding life with this strange new world is a challenge - these are difficult times.

But blueberries help.

~~~~~ 

~a crinum road trip~

Here is the description for Crinum 'Parfait' on the Lushlife Nursery website:

"Lots of flower on each scape. Flowers are rich ruby pink in bud and on the outside of the bud, but they open to show off distintly striped petals. Unlike most striped crinum (which are white or pale pink with dark stripes) Parfait is rich pink, getting darker and more cherry lollipop pink toward the center of each petal. You get an almost ridged effect. Parfait is a great name, reflecting the colors AND the sugary sweet night time fragrance."

 

A Crinum with night time fragrance - sugary sweet night time fragrance - now how fun is that?

 

~~~~~

 

 

I got 'Parfait' last Saturday - on my second annual trek to Lushlife Crinum Nurseries at Beech Island, South Carolina.  My friend Jeff and I went - and this year we took the quickest route, not the meandering series of roads that we took on our first visit.  I-26 and then a short jog south on I-95, and then Highway 78 and another series of backroads until we arrived.  We were more focused this trip - we weren't stopping at every 'Jesus Saves' sign, we didn't stop for boiled peanuts - we weren't obsessed with flowers blooming along the roadside.  We were focused on getting to the crinums and the tomato sandwiches.

 

(Confession:  we did stop once, for gas and for M&Ms to go into the trail mix that Jeff made).

 

~~~~~

 

 
~Life-sized bronze statue of James Brown in Augusta, GA, from Wikipedia~ 

 

For those of you interested in a little history, here's something from Discover South Carolina:

One of the oldest settlements in South Carolina, Beech Island is a community located along the Savannah River in Aiken County. Beech Island began in the 1680s as Savano Town settlement, an important trade center and “jumping-off” point to the Western wilderness. European goods, arriving in Charleston, were sent to Savano Town via the Westobou River (Savannah River). In 1716 after a major Indian war erupted, Fort Moore was built to protect the mercantile trade and to guard the Western entrance of the colony. Beech Island developed into an agriculture community and in 1856 Gov. James Hammond and eleven other farmers founded the Beech Island Agricultural Club, now one of the oldest surviving such societies in South Carolina. Three miles southeast of Beech Island is Redcliffe Plantation State Historic Site, the former home of Hammond. Between Beech Island and Jackson on Silver Bluff Road near the Savannah River is Silver Bluff Plantation, a 3,100-acre wildlife and nature preserve.

What this description of Beech Island doesn't say is that this is where the Godfather of Soul and the man who owned the song 'Please, Please, Please', yep, you guessed it - James Brown - lived at the end of his life.

 

I wonder if James Brown had any crinums in his garden.  Does anyone know?  I'm not exactly seeing him as the gardening type. 

 

...worst case scenario...

 From xkcd, A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language.

tiger lilies

~~~~~
The tiger lilies transplanted from my Mom's Virginia garden into my own are flourishing - I've always thought that people run either hot or cold with tiger lilies, and for my mother, she ran cold - and was not at all fond of them.  She kept them in her garden because they were passed along to her from a friend - but during my visits she'd always ask me if I wanted some of her clump, saying that she'd be happy for me to take most of it with me.  As for me - I welcome the tall lilies, that in my garden are at least 6' tall and are bright and bold and seem oblivious to the unusually hot and uncomfortably dry June that we are having - that perserverance alone has me growing more and more fond of them each day.

~~~~~ 

summer miracles

~asian pears, Pyrus pyrifolia~

~~~~~

This afternoon when I got back from a quick trip to the lab, I went out to harvest the asian pears on the lower branches - those still within reach of my garden's determined produce consumer, Annabelle Lee.  The fruits are small - but I have two dozen or more on the tree - so tonight I sliced up a few, and combined them with a mild gouda for a wonderful treat.

There's something intrinsically gratifying about a fresh harvest - about planting a tree, about watching it grow, about watching it survive seasons of drought and excess rainfall, even about watching a crazy old pointer girl covet the fruits.  It's the simplicity of it all, the lack of complication - that makes a bowl of pears seem perfect, perhaps even a miracle, on a humid summer evening.

~~~~~

SUMMER KITCHEN, by Donald Hall

In June's high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine
And listened for the bobolink
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from fingertips.

"It's ready now. Come on," she said.
"You light the candle."
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle. 

~~~~~

~strange bedfellows~

~Haiku and Annabelle Lee~

I've been busy.  Doing things.  I've finally gotten around to transplanting all of last fall's propagatees into the garden, and I'm slowly transplanting daylilies and salvias from the now-shady areas to places in the garden with more sun.  I'm harvesting blueberries and cubanelles and the asian pears are ready, although they're tiny, and I'm fighting Annabelle Lee over them - she jumps up on the tree until one or two falls down, and then she runs around the garden with them for a bit before settling down and eating them up.  Yes - Annabelle is my garden's primary consumer.  Still putting the finishing touches on a small grant, have a revision of a manuscript to finish up - and I have two graduate student manuscripts to read through.  Last week was such a bust, with my crashed computer - so I'm planning on a better week.  I want to plant seeds - of zinnias and sunflowers and other annuals that will bring color to the August garden - and of green beans, that won't mind the heat.  I want to weed.  And prune.  I'd also like to get my act together - but I'm not sure that this is something one does when they're unemployed, working like crazy, and living in an Airstream.  Perhaps having one's act together is over-rated anyway.

an obscenity

 
Via Pharyngula, Photographer: Dave Martin/AP

"Delicate patterns in the sea breaking on Orange Beach, Alabama, more than 90 miles from the BP oil spill, cannot distract from the mess four to six inches deep on parts of the shore."

~~~~~ 

 

TGIF

 
~Handsome Stan, Annabelle Lee, and THE DAN~

~~~~~

It's a much better morning.

The new hard drive has been successfully installed in my computer, my files have been transferred from the old hard drive - and even better, Windows 7 is installed and Vista is, thankfully, out of my life.

Windows 7 is so much better than Vista.  There are no words.

~~~~~

I've had a rotten week.

Folks have been in the lab - taking measurements, making plans for the next occupant.  I spent three hours in line at the unemployment office (I need to write about this in more detail soon - bottomline, everyone needs to have this experience - it changes ones view of the world).  I've been battling crashed computers and vomiting Pointers (Annabelle Lee is all better now, thank you).

~~~~~

I'm glad it's Friday, not that it really matters all that much in my world.

I'm also glad that tomorrow is Saturday - which reminds me of a wonderful piece I read in the NYTimes recently - a piece written by Dominique Browning, former House & Garden Editor (she lost that position suddenly, and was thrown into the world of unemployment) and now a writer (check out Slow Love LIfe - it's wonderful) and gardener and much more: 

“Today is Saturday,” I said to myself one morning. I repeated this several times, trying to convince myself to get out of bed. Saturday is what I came to think of as one of the nice days, like Sunday — that is, when I considered days at all. “Today is Saturday. No one is working today, so you are no different from anyone else,” I would say out loud.

I also had to laugh at her obsession with eggs.  Been there - still doing that.

~~~~~

come on in

~looking through the front gate~

~~~~~

The bright leaves of Canna americanallis var. variegata 'Pretoria are just outside the gate, and today when I went to get the mail, I couldn't help but notice the contrast between the leaves of 'Pretoria' and the blue lacecaps of Hydrangea macrophylla 'Blaumeise'.  This is perhaps my favorite hydrangea - crazy large flowers that in my garden turn a gorgeous cobalt blue.

But this canna! Stunning, and I say that as someone who doesn't particularly like canna - although they have been coming out with pretty incredible ones for awhile now.  I have to get over my canna-as-the-insect-riddled-flower-in-the-middle-of-I-95 bias...

Other views of 'Pretoria':

cannas in black and white

Pretoria in bloom

~~~~~

I've missed poetry.

Since the lab's Poet Laureate, Katherine Williams, had to leave the lab during this time of lab warfare, I've missed the infusion of poetry into my weekly routine.  So tonight I went in search of poetry on my own (instead of whining about how it isn't fed to me on a plastic spoon) - and I found this beautiful poem, timely given my recent plea for something good to happen.  Yes - rest would be nice, wouldn't it?  Perhaps a day of rest - with rain - would be just perfect.  Is it too much to also ask for rain?

~~~~~

Miracles by Richard Jones (from The Correct Spelling & Exact Meaning, Copper Canyon Press)

I need to witness miracles today—
a river turned to blood,
water become wine,
a burning coal touching the prophet’s lips,
black ravens swooping down
to bring a starving man bread and meat,
a poor fisherman raising the dead!
I’ve heard theologians say
this is not the age of miracles,
but still, I’m easy to impress.
I don’t need to climb out of the boat
and walk on water; I’d just like
to put my head on the pillow
while the storm still rages, and rest.

It's always something, isn't it?

 

~another day, another harvest~

~~~~~

Thank goodness for the garden.

Sweet bell peppers, cubanelles, a tomato, and more red potatoes - all, except for the tomato, are roasting in my oven as I type this.  A little olive oil, a little lemon - some garlic.  All good.

~~~~~

The heat has been a bit overwhelming for the past few days - it's August heat, even bad August heat - not mid-June weather.  The quick, pop-up showers have all missed my little piece of land, and I've been trying to water so me in the evening, slowly making my way around the acre, stopping at plants that are more sensitive to the dryness.  It helps - but for the most part everything has stopped dead in it's track - no growth, no new flowers forming - instead, everything is just holding on, hoping for a break in the weather.

~~~~~

It's been a trying few days - on Friday evening I was downloading Windows updates, and on Saturday morning my computer wouldn't boot.  Fortunately at the lab there is a great IT group, and they've been troubleshooting the problem for me -- only to find no answer so far.  At first we thought it was a hard drive gone bad, but the diagnostics didn't validate this hypothesis.(Thankfully, everything was saved on my hard drive - except for several programs, including - bummer - photoshop).  Tomorrow we'll test the system with another hard drive (that we know works) to see if it wasn't about the hard drive after all.

So I'm in the middle of a proposal - and then my computer crashed.  Ugh.  I did get a loaner from work - and that is helping - but it's not a comfortable keyboard and of course I don't have all of my files.  I'm making do.

~~~~~

This morning, early, as I was working on the proposal - Annabelle Lee vomited.  I didn't think about it when she did it once (although she isn't a dog who regularly vomits at all) - but by the sixth time (along with her inability to keep water or even a small piece of food down) I began to worry.

So I took her to the vet - and the good news is that it doesn't seem like something obstructing her digestive tract - and our 'working hypothesis' is that she ate something toxic, most likely a skink - or something similar.  So she's had a shot of anti-nauseous meds, can't eat anything again until tomorrow (and then only a bit of ID at a time) and was given some subcutaneous fluids (I was worried about her dehydrating since she couldn't keep water down).

She seems good this evening - she's asleep but isn't lethargic and doesn't seem uncomfortable at all.

Silly skink eater.

~~~~~

It's always something, isn't it?

~~~~~

I need something good to happen.

~~~~~