Jomegat's Weblog

I didn’t take any photos today, so I’m going to post one I took while I was in KY. This is a mimosa blossom:

These do not grow in New Hampshire, and I don’t recall ever having seen one when I lived in Virginia. But they do grow in Kentucky and in Arkansas.

Mimosa trees were one of my favorite “toys” when I was a kid. The branches form very low to the ground and angle out at 45 degrees or less. This makes it incredibly easy to climb, and I spent many hours in the branches of these wonderful trees.

When we lived in Arkansas (from when I was four until I turned eight), whenever Mom would come home from the grocery store with bananas, my brother Steve and I would each grab one and run to the nearest Mimosa so we could pretend we were monkeys.

The nearest mimosa was in Mr. Ham’s yard. He was a widower who lived in the house next door, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a finer man. Mom was worried we would break a branch, so she hollered for us to get out of his tree. Mr Ham heard this and hollered back at Mom, “If they break a branch, I’ll just saw it off! You let those boys play in my tree!” What a guy!

We moved away from Arkansas after four years, as Dad was transferred to Grand Forks, ND. We moved back to Arkansas again four years later, but Mr Ham had died while we were up north. He was as much my grandpa as my real grandpa’s were.

The leaves of the mimosa are bipinnate, and the little leaflets can be easily stripped off and turned into whatever a kid’s imagination calls for. Soup anyone?

The flowers are fantastic, and they smell great too. The one in the photograph was growing at Virginia’s Dad’s place, and as you might be able to tell, it really took me back. A great deal of my childhood revolved around the mimosa.

We set out for home this morning. As I was packing the car, I noticed a huge moth on the window of the room next to ours. I had to think twice before sticking a camera up to the window of a hotel room that someone else was checked into, but I figured the huge moth would serve as an adequate alibi.

I have made no attempt at an id yet. Here it is again from the side:

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a moth as fat and juicy looking as this one. I estimate the wing span at three inches, so its body was about the same diameter as my index finger.

We made good time, and made it all the way to Wythville, VA by about 6:00pm. We checked into a hotel, and told Beth about the giant pencil we knew was in town. I looked it up on the Internet, and saw that we were less than two miles from it (though there were no geocaches near it, which really surprised me). Beth and I got in the car and drove into town. We set up this shot:

Beth really liked the pencil. Here’s another perspective of it:

I almost wrote the caption as “20FT OIN” but that would not have made sense without an explanation. They are doing a bit of roadwork on the side roads surrounding I-81 in VA, and they warn truckers of this by noting the width of the roads on the signs. The first sign read “10FT OIN” all in one font. I didn’t get it at first, and was puzzling over its meaning. What is an oin? Maybe a letter fell of the sign? Loin doesn’t make any sense either, so it can’t be that. All of that flashed through my brain over the span of a couple hundred milliseconds before I realized that OIN was zero inches.

Duh…

The next two signs warned of an 11FT oin, and a 12FT oin. I guess the oins just get bigger and bigger the farther north one goes!

Today was our last day visiting in Kentucky. In the morning we will hit the road and begin the long journey home again. Here are a few shots I’ve taken over these past few days:

This is some sort of milkweed, but I don’t know the precise species. It could be swamp milkweed, but I’m not sure enough to make the call. I found it at the edge of a ditch near the hotel.

There was lots of this near the hotel too, and I have no idea what it might be. At first I thought it might be some sort of a mint, but the leaves were most definitely not minty smelling. I plucked one and held it against the sky to better capture its general form:

If anyone out there on the interwebs knows what it is, I’d love to hear it.

We spent our last evening at my parent’s house. Dad has a hummingbird feeder set up there, and he has reported that the hummingbirds have at times landed on him while he was refilling their feeder. I figured that if they were that unafraid of humans, I might as well try to take advantage of that.

I stood by the feeder for several minutes while these tiny little mosquitoes tried to carry me away. Seems the females were more brave than the males, as several of them buzzed me.

I eventually backed away a bit and used my camera’s crappy zoom. It did better than usual:

I usually reduce the size of the images I post here so I don’t have to wait five minutes for the photo to upload, and chew up all the bandwidth in the house. This one is not reduced at all though – just cropped. Same effect on the bandwidth though.

I really enjoyed spending time with Mom and Dad, so it’s kind of sad to be heading out in the morning. However, the temperature at my house is 59 degrees right now, and I am looking forward to that again.

Here’s another unknown plant blooming in Va’s aunt’s yard:

The common purslane (Portulaca oleracea) from yesterday is an edible plant. Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia:

At night its leaves trap carbon dioxide, which is converted into malic acid (the souring principle of apples), and in the day, the malic acid is converted into glucose. When harvested in the early morning, the leaves have 10 times the malic acid content as when harvested in the late afternoon, and thus have a significantly more tangy taste.

So naturally (and being confident of the id), I sampled it this morning with the intent of nibbling on a little more later in the day. The morning sample was tasty indeed, but I was not able to try it in the afternoon.

And of course, my Dad knew what it was. He said they would pick buckets of the stuff and feed it to the pigs. The pigs would eat all of that first, and as a result, they used to call it “pigweed.” Wikipedia lists “pigweed” as one of its common names, but pigweed is an epithet used for many other plants as well.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get a shot at eating some later-in-the-day purslane/pigweed/Portulaca oleracea.

Here’s a plant that I first found two years ago at the hotel we’re staying in right now. It’s still growing here, but I could not remember its name. I went through my photo tags and found that it is Buttonweed (Diodia virginiana). It reminds me a lot of bluets, but these are hairy, and they’re in bloom in mid-July.

While I was outside this morning (it was already in the 90’s at 7:00am), I spied this plant too. It is unknown to me:

I’ll try to figure it out when I get home. I’m pretty sure this is common purslane (Portulaca oleracea).

I also found some dock that had gone to seed:

Before it got too hot, we went to visit Va’s aunt. She had yet another unknown plant blooming in her yard:

I feel that I should know this one though. It seems very familiar.

They go all out for the employee of the month at this random McDonald’s.

Somewhere along the way we stopped and I spotted this unknown specimen.

The bloom was about a quarter inch across. I did not bring any of my field guides along, but I guess I could turn to the Internets for an ID. Maybe later, or maybe when I get home again.

We crossed into TN and stopped at their welcome center. They had a geocache hidden there, which I nabbed. I had also found caches in MD and WV, so I added three states to my caching tally yesterday (as did Beth). She was sure she already had a cache in all three states, but I assured her she did not.

At the rest area in Tennessee, Beth liked the giant guitar across the interstate. So I captured it as the background for this image:

We stopped for the night about 40 miles before Knoxville. We will make our way across I-40, stopping at an outlet mall along the way. I expect we’ll be in Dawson Springs, KY this evening sometime.

I got home from the ACSDR conference yesterday afternoon, and this morning I set out again – this time with Va, David, and Beth. We’re headed for Kentucky to visit family. Jonathan stayed home so he could work, and he agreed to take care of Penny while he holds down the fort.

We stopped in Pine Grove, PA for the night. While I was at the front desk registering, Va noticed some rabbits in the parking lot. So naturally, I went over to take a picture or two.

This is not the same one Va had seen. When I approached that one it left the parking lot and went into the grass. I got a couple of shots of it, but they were slightly underexposed. Then I noticed another rabbit in the grass and took aim at it. This is one of those. Beth came out to look at them too, and she spotted two more that I missed.

Nice!

The seminar went well Friday, and I really felt I had nailed my presentation. The National ACS-DR people were there leading (they were the ones who tasked us to teach pieces of Friday’s session), and they had brought some models to show how to set up a collection center and a distribution center. Here’s the distribution center:

I thought that was a pretty good teaching tool. It’s much better than showing photos since it gives a better feel for the setup in three dimensions.

Tonight I’m in Stamford, CT attending an Adventist Community Services Convention. As one of the leader of the Northern New England Conference’s ACS-DR team, I’m attending training sessions on Disaster Response. I caught a ride with the other two leaders (Peter and Mark) this morning at a state liquor store on I-95 (I can think of no better use for a liquor store). Va dropped me off there around 8:30am. Peter and Mark showed up a little before 9:00, which was just inside their estimate of when they’d be there. It gave me time to find a geocache hidden there (which I still need to log).

We attended a “train the trainer” session today, and as part of that, we will be teaching part of the eight-hour Donations Operations course tomorrow. I was not expecting that, but I am comfortable with public speaking, and I know the material pretty well. I will still review it this evening though!

I am thinking about having the Pathfinders over to my house next month as part of our annual Honor’s Week so they can earn the Edible Wild Plants honor. Because I have been very careful to not turn my yard into a monoculture, I have a wide variety of edible wild plants available here. Many should be available for eating next month too.

One of my favorite edible wild plants is pepperweed (Lepidium virginicum). It does not grow on my property, though it is abundant in other places I frequent. So today I pulled one up near my office thinking I’d sow the seeds somewhere at my house and see what happens. When I pulled it up, the root came with it, so instead of scattering the seed, I just replanted it:

I don’t need this plant in order to teach the honor here, as there are plenty of other plants to choose from. But it is highly flavorful, so I’d like ot have it here.

For the honor, we need to prepare and consume:

• Three berries
• Three beverages
• Three salad plants
• Three potherbs (cooked greens)
• Two tubers

We need to prepare these items by boiling, frying, roasting, and baking. One of the plants has to be either milkweed or daylily, and since I have milkweed, but not daylily, milkweed gets the nod.

I plan to start with a short lecture covering the cardinal edibility rule (don’t eat anything unless you’ve positively identified it, and know what part of it is edible), and poisonous plants (with special attention given to poison ivy – which I do have here). The kids will be roaming around looking for plants, and I want them to know this stuff when they see it.

Then we will set out to do our field work, starting with a visit to the poison ivy patch. I think I will make up a couple of sheets with photos of the target plants and let the kids fan out to find them. They are also supposed to photograph the plants. Here’s what I plan to have them collect:

• Three wild berries: wintergreen, elderberry, and blackberry, and optionally, partridge berry, dewberry, and autumn olive.
• Three beverages: wintergreen, elderberry, sweetfern, and optionally aronia
• Three salad plants: wood sorrel, plantain, violets, and optionally pepperweed, sheep sorrel, and oxeye daisy. Actually, I haven’t seen any sheep sorrel or oxeye daisy here this year, so that depends on whether or not it shows up).
• Three greens: milkweed, dandelion, and white lettuce.
• Two Tubers: Carrot (Queen Anne’s lace), Indian cucumber root, and optionally evening primrose, and ground nut.

We will also collect hazelnuts (they are heavy this year, and they should be ripe by Honors Week). Then back inside to begin cooking stuff up.

We will roast the hazels, fry up some dandelion fritters (from the flower heads), boil the milkweed (in several changes of water), and bake a blackberry pie. That should cover the four cooking methods.

We also need to identify five edible trees and five edible shrubs. For this, I plan to use oak, cherry, beech, white pine, and maple trees, and wintergreen, blackberry, elderberry, hazel, and aronia shrubs.

All of this except the elderberry grows on my property, and the elderberry grows on my neighbor’s place. We’ll use that with permission, of course!

While the stuff is cooking (or while we are eating it), I will lecture a little more on some of the other requirements. That should wrap up the whole honor. I’m trying to decided if I want to do this during a weekday evening (when we will have three hours or so), or save it for Saturday afternoon (we don’t usually have an honor on Saturday during Honors Week).

While I was writing this, I was also finishing off the maple syrup I tapped last spring. I had previously boiled it down by about 15:1, and I needed to get that down to 30:1. I forgot that it was critical to keep a close eye on it in the last stages, and burned the whole batch. Actually, I guess I carmelized most of it. It tastes very much like Sugar Daddies (the candy), but the house smells more liked burned sugar. I added some water back into it to thin it up again, but unfortunately, I don’t think there is a way to unburn it. 😦