Real Roses

I've never exactly been a huge fan of roses. There have always been plenty of other flowers that I think are far preferable. For that matter, growing most roses in northern Wisconsin is kind of a fool's errand anyway...the winter tends to kill them frequently. I'm also not a huge fan of florist roses. They are so conceited and impressed with themselves, while at the same time being rather undistinctive. On the other hand, one of the Master Gardeners brought in a big luscious bouquet of roses for the office. They are gorgeous! Most of them are actually David Austin Roses. I've decided these are roses I can live with.

Then Friday night the other Hort agent and his wife hosted an open house of his late mother-in-law's rose garden. She was a Rosarian, and had over 200 different roses in her yard. So we went out and I played with the macro setting on my camera. Most of her roses were tea roses, although she did have some nice shrub and climbing roses as well. Enjoy the pictures!

Chemicals

How interesting people are. And what a contrast it makes for my day. We have been getting a lot of questions during the past couple weeks about spray schedules for fruit trees. Most people are having one of two problems: they have peach leaf curl (a fungal disease) on their peach trees, or they have had "wormy" fruit in the past and want to prevent it this year. Both of these are recurring problems for fruit trees, whether home orchards or commercial, and getting good quality fruit requires treatment/prevention of the pests.

We have a multi-page publication that discusses home fruit pest control in depth, which we use as a reference and send out frequently. The publication covers both conventional and organic pesticides. What makes it interesting is that sometimes we have people come in who have absolutely no fear or concern about chemicals. We had one man this afternoon who was so upset about no longer having access to certain more harsh chemicals that he wanted to get a pesticide applicators license so that he could buy and use them.

(Certain chemicals that are available for homeowner use are sometimes removed from the market and become "Restricted Use," meaning that only those who have passed a written test and are certified applicators can purchase and use them. This is usually done because it is found that the active ingredient is a possible carcinogen, has effects on reproductive systems, or has widespread negative effects on birds or aquatic life. Not bad reasoning, you probably agree...)

Anyway, this particular man was very upset about not being able to use these restricted pesticides on his tomatoes and other plants. I have no evidence, but I have a feeling that this man is not going to follow the labels when they say what plants they may be safely used on if something he used to spray is no longer on the list. Ugh. I'm not afraid of chemicals like this, but you have to have a healthy respect for them and follow the labels.

Then we get the people who come in asking for an organic control for their pest problems. And there's nothing wrong with that. It is perfectly fine to prefer to use fewer synthetic chemicals. However, what these people want is a way to prevent all fungal and insect problems without using any chemicals. I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but "Organic" produce does not mean that it is pesticide-free. It doesn't even mean that it is synthetic chemical free. A lot of the organic allowed pesticides are actually synthetic formulations of naturally occurring compounds, which is why they are allowable under organic production systems.

Anyway, needless to say, the people that don't want to use chemicals really just don't want to spray anything at all. They are less than pleased that there is no way to protect their fruit without spraying, and take a lot of convincing.

I guess the second type of person is the one I prefer, because their choices are much less harmful in the long run...except possibly to the fruit tree that may be over-stressed by the myriad of diseases and insects that it must combat. The first type of person really cannot be convinced, even with education, that they should be more judicious in their use of chemicals. The second type of person is usually open to education about the products, they just have some misunderstandings about chemicals and what the proper role of pesticides should be.

I have to be honest that I don't particularly like spraying pesticides, but it does depend on what chemical I'm using. It helps me when I know what my active ingredient is, what the mode of action is, and what side-effects, if any, there are. Unfortunately, it's kind of a challenge to get the average homeowner to the point where they understand those things.

Unread Books

Below is a list of the 100 or so books most often marked as "unread" on Library Thing. How many of them have you read?

BLUE: Books I've read
GOLD: Books I've read as school assignments
GREEN: Books I will likely read in the future
RED: Books I started to read, but never finished

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
Emma
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
Angels and Demons
1984
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Herb Day, Movies, and Other Thoughts

Herb Day
Herb day is over, thank goodness! It was actually kind of fun, but it was still a rather long day. The worst thing was that it was still really windy, and rather chilly. But the crowd was good and all the vendors said they had a good day. I spent most of the day running back and forth getting speakers situated and announcing upcoming seminars in various locations. I gave a talk at 10:30 about growing herbs in containers. I had a good number of people, so that was nice. It's always helpful when you feel like people are interested in your topic and are learning something. By the time we got everything torn down and put away at 3:30, I was TIRED.


I am Legend
We rented and watched the recent Will Smith movie, I am Legend this weekend. It was supposed to be good, and the premise seemed intriguing. Unfortunately, we concluded that it is just an extremely bizarre movie with a plot that left a lot to be desired. My take on it was that there wasn't enough happy ending to make up for the overall strangeness of it. Will Smith did a great job acting, but the movie was still not that great...

27 Dresses
The far better movie rental this weekend was 27 Dresses, which was my choice for my birthday. Hey, it's my birthday, so I might as well take advantage of it and make Steven watch a chick flick, right? While it was a rather fluffy movie, it was well written, well directed, and well acted. Definitely not highly thought-provoking, but very entertaining. It was semi-predictable, as most romantic comedies are. However, there were a few twists that made it more realistic than average. The best part was when Jane (Katherine Heigl) tried on all 27 of her bridesmaid dresses. Oh yeah...definitely got some good ideas for the wedding from that...

Wedding Planning
We haven't been doing a whole lot on that front, although I'm still working on getting addresses and such for save-the-date cards. We are mostly waiting for Steven's spring semester to be over and for me to be done with training next week. Theoretically, there will then be more time available to work on all manner of planning details.

Busybusybusybusybu...you get the idea

It's been crazy here...as evidenced by the lack of posting. Last weekend was a quick jaunt to a wedding of one of Steven's cousins. Then I came back in time to hit the ground running with several appointments on Monday, and then the EARTH workshop on Tuesday.

The EARTH workshop was...an adventure...EARTH stands for Environmental Awareness Researchers for Tomorrow's Habitat. Don't ask me how they came up with that program. Anyway, it's an environmental science grant program that is in middle schools here in several counties in Kansas. One day every spring we host a whole bunch of them and have a bunch of 25 minutes sessions abut soil, water, and other environmental topics. Yeehaw! I am so not cut out for dealing with middle schoolers on a regular basis.

Today and tomorrow are a little slower, and then Friday is set up for Herb Day on Saturday. Then all day Saturday I'll be working Herb Day. Nice birthday present, huh? Then next week I'll be in Manhattan for yet another training. At least it's the final training!

Quote of the Day

"We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it."

- Madeleine L'Engle

Air Ferns

Steven has an air fern. He's had it for at least 3 years, and he's quite proud of the fact that it is still green...in other words, that he has been able to keep a plant alive for longer than a few months. I vaguely recall a couple other people in the dorm having air ferns.

Well, last night the subject came up yet again, and I made the final determination to learn what an air fern actually is and is not. A quick Google search turned up the fact that air ferns are actually Sertularia argentea...I would give you the entire scientific classification from Kingdom down to Species, but I know you would just stop reading. Anyway, the telling part comes first.

Kingdom: Animalia

Wait....Animalia?!? This is NOT a PLANT! Ah hah! I am vindicated!

As per Wikipedia: Air fern is the name given to a product that is in fact composed of a species of marine animal called Sertularia argentea. These so-called "ferns" are dead and dried colonies of hydrozoans, colonies of marine hydroids. Hydroids are related to corals and jellyfish.

So don't hold your breath waiting for it to grow!

Oh Yeah...I'm Definitely a Nut!

You Are a Cashew

You are laid back, friendly, and easy going. Compared to most people, you have a very mild temperament. You blend in well. You're often the last person to get noticed. But whenever you're gone, people seem to notice right away!

What Nut Are You?

I'm not sure I actually fit this description, but I like cashews, so it works!

Web Safari: Millennials

There have been all kinds of articles and such about my generation, as we are beginning to move into the workforce and everyone is trying to "figure us out" so to speak.

The first link is a look at what millennials mean for the workforce. It is a quite balanced article - it covers the positives that are unique and the differences that don't fit us easily into the modern workplace of the Boomers and Xers.

The next link is a look from the political side. Apparently a majority of millennials fit into the "progressive" mentality. My personal experience is that millennials are less willing to fit themselves into the Republican-Democrat boxes that have been prominent for the past several decades. Millennials also appear to be much much more interested and involved in politics than recent generations. It will be interesting to see what happens as we all mature and settle down with families.

A comparison of Generation X and Millennials.

A look at some of the factors and events that shaped/are shaping Millennials.

A blog devoted to issues relating to Millennials.

A NY Times article that discusses methods of communication and spreading news. A lot of what they say is true...people my age find information exactly the way I did here...you get a link from a friend via email or blog, you share what you read by blogging or emailing about it. I was thinking about the characteristics of my generation recently, as I have been considering ways to reach out to younger audiences for my job. So I went to Google and searched for articles relating to millennials. Then I skimmed through, found other links, etc. And now I'm sharing them with you!

Perspectives from Ghana

Stacia, a former RA from Anders at ISU, is with the Peace Corps in Ghana right now. She has some really interesting pictures and blog posts at her site.

One of her blog posts is her reflections at the 9-month mark in Ghana. Here are some thought-provoking quotes from it:

In America we often here of all the problems that exist in Ghana... poverty, corruption, abuse, gender inequality, lack of water, disease. We seem to think that it exists but can’t be as bad as they want us to believe. We also believe that it’s fixable. But living here for the past 9 months has given me a new perspective.

The corruption is pervasive, the gender inequality is improving in the urban areas, and poverty/water development is in progress. The Ghanaians may be poor, but compared to other countries in Africa, they are doing quite well. The truth is that they’re lives are incredibly difficult, and they don’t have any of the luxuries that we have in America and even small things that we take for granted are beyond their imagination. But they are doing just fine. Most families scrape by with enough food and water to survive. They used to be comfortable with having enough, but now the Western mentality has crept into the minds of the people and suddenly having enough isn’t enough. They want to have more. As much as possible, and they will do unthinkable things to get there.

It will take time, probably a lot of time to change things in Ghana and in Africa, and I truly believe now that development is going to take a lot more than money. Throwing money at a problem won’t do a thing, and the government workers will probably take a chunk of it to line their own pockets in the process. However, step by step, child by child, things can change. Education is at the heart of this change. My job is at the heart of this change. For the majority of teachers in Ghana, teaching is simply the transfer of information. My main goal here isn’t to teach computers. But by teaching computers I hope to transfer real life skills.

I would encourage you to go read all of what she has written and look at the pictures. Eye-opening! The line I put in bold type above is what really stuck out to me. We are so used to...saturated in a culture that says it's okay to always strive for more and more. This mentality doesn't have any less ugly results here, but we are so used to them - so conditioned to accept them as okay - that we don't even notice.