Tannersville, 2.40pm:
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Sunday, July 21, 2019
July party
Rains came on the 6th, then stopped long enough for us to have a nice party, with fireworks and the end.
Our swimming hole looks great:
Our swimming hole looks great:
Saturday, June 29, 2019
A few volunteers
Our CPOA grounds needed some TLC, and a few of us got to it.
Our new Adirondack chairs looked very nice:
There was, of course, a reward for hours of toil:
Our new Adirondack chairs looked very nice:
There was, of course, a reward for hours of toil:
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Spring 2019
After much rain and cool weather, Spring really did arrive. It is always gorgeous in Chichester.
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Japanese knotweed
It's everywhere, and keeps on growing. Tried to pull it out by its roots numerous times, but it is difficult. Also turns out to be pointless:
Oh, no, not knotweed Slate Science article dated 8 May 2019, by Henry Grabbar.
It’s been nearly four years since I bought hypodermic needles at a CVS, squatted in my backyard, and drew them full of glyphosate. I’d done my best to build a little garden in Brooklyn, only to see the ground begin to vanish beneath the fastest-growing plant I had ever seen. It sprouted in April with a pair of tiny, beet-red leaves between the flagstones, and poked up like asparagus through the mulch. By May the leaves were flat and green and bigger than my hands, and the stems as round as a silver dollar. My neighbor’s yard provided a preview of what was coming my way: a grove as thick as a cornfield, 10 feet high, from the windows to the lot line. I had to kill the knotweed. I tried a few different approaches: Yanking it out stalk by stalk was a sweaty, summer-long game of whack-a-mole—a thankless full-time job. Then a friend and I spent one long night digging a 10-by-4-foot trench, lining it with black contractor bags, and refilling it with dirt. It looked like we were trying to bury something, and in a way we were: the knotweed rhizomes—the plant’s creeping rootstalks—under our feet, searching for a ray of light.
I've been there, tried that.
Anyway, it didn’t work. Japanese knotweed has come a long way since Philipp Franz von Siebold, the doctor-in-residence for the Dutch at Nagasaki, brought it to the Utrecht plant fair in the Netherlands in the 1840s. The gold-medal shrub was prized for its “gracious flowers” and advertised as ornament, medicine, wind shelter, soil retainer, dune stabilizer, cattle feed, and insect pollinator. The stems could be dried to make matchsticks, or cut and cooked like rhubarb. It crested in the dog days of summer with tassels of tiny white buds. Oh, and it grew with “great vigor.”
Amen. Turns out even academic articles about that scourge have been published; to wit:
Optimising physiochemical control of invasive Japanese knotweed
Read at your own risk; bottom line: good luck.
How about this approach? Read it if you dare.
Potential of wild growing Japanese kntoweed (REYNOUTRIA JAPONICA) for briquette production
Oh, no, not knotweed Slate Science article dated 8 May 2019, by Henry Grabbar.
It’s been nearly four years since I bought hypodermic needles at a CVS, squatted in my backyard, and drew them full of glyphosate. I’d done my best to build a little garden in Brooklyn, only to see the ground begin to vanish beneath the fastest-growing plant I had ever seen. It sprouted in April with a pair of tiny, beet-red leaves between the flagstones, and poked up like asparagus through the mulch. By May the leaves were flat and green and bigger than my hands, and the stems as round as a silver dollar. My neighbor’s yard provided a preview of what was coming my way: a grove as thick as a cornfield, 10 feet high, from the windows to the lot line. I had to kill the knotweed. I tried a few different approaches: Yanking it out stalk by stalk was a sweaty, summer-long game of whack-a-mole—a thankless full-time job. Then a friend and I spent one long night digging a 10-by-4-foot trench, lining it with black contractor bags, and refilling it with dirt. It looked like we were trying to bury something, and in a way we were: the knotweed rhizomes—the plant’s creeping rootstalks—under our feet, searching for a ray of light.
I've been there, tried that.
Anyway, it didn’t work. Japanese knotweed has come a long way since Philipp Franz von Siebold, the doctor-in-residence for the Dutch at Nagasaki, brought it to the Utrecht plant fair in the Netherlands in the 1840s. The gold-medal shrub was prized for its “gracious flowers” and advertised as ornament, medicine, wind shelter, soil retainer, dune stabilizer, cattle feed, and insect pollinator. The stems could be dried to make matchsticks, or cut and cooked like rhubarb. It crested in the dog days of summer with tassels of tiny white buds. Oh, and it grew with “great vigor.”
Amen. Turns out even academic articles about that scourge have been published; to wit:
Optimising physiochemical control of invasive Japanese knotweed
Read at your own risk; bottom line: good luck.
How about this approach? Read it if you dare.
Potential of wild growing Japanese kntoweed (REYNOUTRIA JAPONICA) for briquette production
Sunday, May 5, 2019
Phoenicia Eagle
Visiting Phoenicia, on an early May day. This eagle had once stood outside Grand Central Station in Manhattan.
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