SCIENTIFIC CITIZEN

Snowdrops, Galanthus elwesii

              “At the National Arboretum, the white petals of snowdrops—normally an early spring flower—have unfurled. In Maine’s Acadia National Park, lakes still have patches of open water instead of being frozen solid. And in Donna Izlar’s back yard in downtown Atlanta, the apricot tree has started blooming.” 

            So starts “Mild weather redefines winter landscape,” an article by Juliet Eilperin and Darryl Fears published in the December 30, 2011 issue of the Washington Post.  They quote Scott Aker, head horticulturist at the National Arboretum, as saying, “It’s a weird kind of fall blending right into spring.” Chief of NOAA’s Climate Monitoring Branch Deke Arndt (what is “Deke” short for?) points out that what started out as a mild autumn has “become ‘dramatically’ warmer” across the whole northern tier of the U.S. “Just 19.6 percent of the continental United States is covered with snow, according to the latest snow analysis by NOAA, compared with 50.3 percent this time last year,” Eilperin and Fears report.
 

My apricot is blooming, too

            Well, huh. So far this season, southeastern North Carolina’s weather has returned to blessed “normalcy”—which is to say daytime temps mostly in the 50s and 60s, nighttimes in the 40s and upper 30s—after a couple years of ferociously bitter winters. At the same time, the National Weather Service’s once-a-decade recalculation of 30-year “normal” (average! See “Wind and Weather,” Aug. 17) daily temperatures for December has cranked down a degree or two for Wilmington.  And I still recall my favorite meteorologist of all time, George Elliott, saying that although global temperatures may have eked up a degree or so in the last century, those along the southeast coast of the United States haven’t budged an iota.

       
             What does it all mean? No one really knows. Cutting through all the hyperbole, yes, the climate’s changing. But that’s nothing new.

            For gardeners, however, the current climate ruckus is an opportunity. As people engaged with nature, we watch the subtle changes our plants undergo through the seasons, making mental notes as to whether something came up earlier or later than last year, or bloomed for a longer or shorter time, or hung on to its leaves into January instead of dropping them in December. Some of us write these things down in grubby little notebooks we carry with us wherever we go. The formal name for this activity is phenological observation. Since we all do it, we might as well forward our findings to someone who cares. The Internet makes it easy for all us dirt-monkeys to reinvent ourselves as scientists.

            This is a Really Big Deal for liberal-arts types (like me) who thought science far beyond their (my) ken.                                        

           

            To reiterate (see “For the Birds,” Feb. 2), phenology is the study of phenophases, life-cycle events like emergence, first leaf, first flower, seed set, etc. (Animals have phenophases too—diet, foraging habits and ranges, timing and sizes of litters, migrations, denning and nesting habits, and such; but I’m more interested in plants. They stay put, which makes observing easier.)  Phenologic information helps in tracking global climate-change trends as well as the monitoring of drought and wildfire risks and the health of ecosystems, and identifying and mapping invasive species, infectious diseases and pests. The task is enormous, especially given recent budget-slashing at universities and labs, but all of us can help by kicking in our two cents.

            Have I piqued any interest in all you history, English, poli-sci, psychology, economics and philosophy majors who grew up to make gardens? You—yes, YOU—can add vital information to databases focused on understanding climatological and demographic changes in the natural world, all without ever leaving your yard. By taking part, you could become a bona fide scientist.

            Following are three scientific endeavors to which I add my bit.

(The house finch is on the left)

The Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC). Being held this year from Friday, February 17 through Monday, February 20, GBBC seeks to provide a continent-wide snapshot of just which birds are where and in what numbers. Participation requirements are fluid: the minimum is a single 15-minute stint of feeder-watching over the four-day period. Conducted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada, the family-friendly Count welcomes data from everyone: if you’ve got a bird-feeder in your yard, keep it filled that weekend and record who shows up. For more information about rules, data submission and bird-identification help, go to GBBC’s website at www.birdsource.org/gbbc.

My maypop (Passiflora incarnata) in September

                The USA National Phenology Network (NPN). A collaborative effort between federal agencies, environmental networks, universities and the public, NPN monitors the impact of climate change on plants and animals in the U.S. through compilation of geographically diverse phenophase observations from regular joes like us. Participants choose one or more plants or animals for which to record and submit phenologic data. NPN’s Nature’s Notebook datasheet makes recording and submitting observations easy. The official website at www.usanpn.org tells you all you need to know to get started.

Sneaky Passiflora fruits in November

                  2011 was the second year I’ve observed the native maypop, Passiflora incarnata, mainly because several call my back yard home. Trust me, convenience encourages regular participation. This year, I began recording data on April 13, noting the first leaves on my two specimens. Blooming started two months later and continued into October. The first fruit appeared around September 12^th (I haven’t caught the sneaky beggars developing yet—they just appear, full-size). I submitted my penultimate observation—the 82^nd—Saturday morning, reporting the dry and crunchy leaves left by last week’s two consecutive hard freezes.

                  If I can do it, you can do it.

The Fitzgerald sunflower patch in July

               The Great Sunflower Project. Here’s a chance to pay attention to who's flitting around your garden. Did you know every third bite of food you take owes its existence to a pollinator? The Project’s mission is to create a map of which bees live where. Given the current uncertain future of European honeybees in the U.S., native pollinators like bumblebees, carpenter bees and wasps are attracting more attention. To ensure standardized results, participants plant and monitor ‘Lemon Queen’ sunflowers. (“Bee” sure to use the annual species, please, not the perennial.) Two or three times a week, take your datasheet, pencil and camera out to the sunflower patch, and settle in to observe any apians who visit during a 10- to 15-minute span. The Project’s website at www.greatsunflower.org helps you identify some of the more common native pollinators, and offers a great deal of information about phenology in general.

Sweat bees (Halictus poeyi) on sunflower
(picture by Pam Phillips, from her blog
"Writing Every Day")

Hurricane Irene wrapped up my bee-counting activities this year when she flattened the sunflower patch. I was surprised that the most regular visitors to the Lemon Queens in my front yard were sweat bees, and a black wasp with attractive white rings around its abdomen that I haven’t yet identified. I must admit that I’m less assiduous about reporting pollinator encounters than passionflower phenophases: I need to adapt the data sheet to better reflect my methods, a to-do list item that’s still waiting to be ticked off. Maybe this winter...

Birds, bees and phenophases only hint at the variety of citizen science projects out there hungry for your input. Just google “citizen science projects”: there’s bound to be one that tickles your fancy. Then you can amaze all your liberal-arts friends by casually mentioning your new status as a scientist.

*****

Fungus gnat update: male fungus gnats’ posterior sections are rounded, not pointy-for-ease-of-ovipositing like the female pictured in last week’s post (“Thanatos and Fungus Gnats,” Dec. 31, 2011). I noticed the difference while brushing my teeth in the company of a selection of the curious creatures, and thought perhaps you’d like to know. Once you become a scientist, you’ll find you just can’t stop.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                            Kathy

WIND AND WEATHER

           You will no doubt be pleased to hear that the National Weather Service (NWS) has somewhat gleefully raised its ante in the annual “How many named storms/hurricanes/major hurricanes will develop in 2011?” sweepstakes. This yearly competition annoys me. Don’t know what the prize is. Bragging rights, perhaps? Proving to Bill Gray and the gang at Colorado State that people living in the Rockies know bugger-all about Atlantic cyclones?

Dr. Bill Gray and heir-apparent
Philip J. Klotzbach

            Safe in their mountain stronghold, the hurricane oracles at CSU have been uncharacteristically reticent about upgrading their own prognostications. The bombastic Dr. Gray and his lads have toned down their hubris levels considerably since the embarrassing failure to prophesy the many devastating storms of 2005, followed by years of apocalyptic predictions that served mainly to sink coastal dwellers into a morass of apathy via crisis overload.



The famous Cape Verdean
butterflies

           Be that as it may, the gavel-to-gavel coverage has begun of every butterfly wing-flutter on the Cape Verde Islands as we roll into the most active part of hurricane season.

The whole animus of weather prediction is fatally flawed, of course. Why? Because anyone who pays the slightest attention to what’s going on outside—you know, the weather—knows that what’s coming next is anybody’s guess. Modern meteorologists dislike this indisputable phenomenon. “But look at our computer models!” they wail, and point at monitors in the climate-controlled, windowless rooms they inhabit. (And what’s wrong with that picture?) They could achieve the same rate of forecasting success they currently enjoy by mumbling incantations over chicken entrails, rolling dice, or playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.



1989's Hurricane Hugo,
from space
(photo courtesy of NASA)

            But I digress. The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season has been satisfyingly active so far in one sense: we’ve racked up seven named storms. The boys in Fort Collins and Miami are salivating. Still, no hurricanes of any category under our belts, and no on-shore death and destruction, just the odd rainy day in the Caribbean and on Bermuda.  That said, it seems to me the entire divination exercise is ancillary. By virtue of being ocean-dependent for development, tropical cyclones always give lots of warning before impacting land: 2005’s Katrina was in the news for weeks before she roared ashore as a Category 4 storm at New Orleans. The devastation that followed was a political failure, not a meteorological one. It’s not comparable in any sense to the tornadoes that flattened Joplin, Missouri this spring. The people there didn’t have days and days to prepare, like the inhabitants of New Orleans did. (Of course, New Orleans’ population is a brick short of a load anyway, building their city below sea-level. How stupid is that? The only places that kind of thinking works is in the Grand Canyon and Death Valley.)



One of my worst nightmares

             Tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, blizzards and floods all afford appreciably less in the way of lead time than hurricanes. In particular, tornadoes top the list of potential severe weather events that scare me silly. They’re freaky and capricious, flattening structures on one side of a street while leaving the other side untouched. They blow up out of nowhere and just as suddenly disappear, only to wreak havoc somewhere else. Or not. In terms of opportunities to prepare, hurricanes are a comparative stroll on the beach. So what’s the big deal with guessing how many will form between June 1 and November 30? What a waste of resources.

*****

I’m one of those people who talk back to the television. One of my pet peeves is the comparison of today’s temperatures or rainfall with the “normal” for that day. “It’s average, you dolt,” I growl, “not ‘normal.’”

Turns out, while semantically correct, I’m technically wrong about that. (And, although I haven’t apologized, I have stopped correcting the TV screen every evening.) Once a decade, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collates daily temperatures and rainfall for the most recent 30 years, which it then averages before publishing the results as the “normal” for that decade. Words matter to me: not so much to the NWS. I continue to say “normal” in reference to temperature and rainfall with a slight sneer, which translates to using quotation marks in print.

We are currently undergoing the decadal re-evaluation of climate “normals.” If you regularly check the NWS almanac website, you’ll have noticed the “normal” values have been missing since the first of August. NOAA processes millions of pieces of weather information collected daily from thousands of sites nationwide through their super-computers to churn out the new numbers.  Here are some graphics depicting the changes from “normal” for 1971-2000 to the new “normals” for 1981 to 2010.

(Locals, rejoice! Next year I begin my own number-crunching project to reveal the ten-year “normals” for Oak Island! Watch this space!)

The ’70s were an unusually cool decade, statistically speaking. (I thought myself pretty cool in those days as well.) Turns out the years 2001 to 2010 were the warmest on record—but keep in mind that record-keeping only began in 1874, a mere fraction of the briefest blink in geologic time. Calculating the new “normals” by tossing out the ’70s and adding the aughts resulted, unsurprisingly, in warmer “normal” temperatures. “For the United States as a whole,” says Jennifer Freeman in a ClimateWatch magazine article, “it was not daytime highs… but overnight lows… that rose the most compared with the 1970s.”  This statement is borne out by my anecdotal local observations since 2002.



Chicken Little and friend react
to the latest climate "normals"

            Do the new “normals” offer irrefutable evidence of global warming? Hard to say, really. A mere 137 years of systematic record-keeping don’t supply enough data to draw reasonable conclusions. I’m old enough to remember the doomsters moaning about an imminent Ice Age during those “unusually” chilly summers of 40 years ago. Is the climate changing? Of course it is. It always does. Just the fact that our best weather minds seem fixated on a range of “normal” anything on this tiny volatile rock spinning in the inconceivable vortex of space and time sounds more like Chicken Little’s “The sky is falling!” than any preordained cosmic truth.

What the new “normals” do offer is a guideline for day-to-day choices in our gardens. It’s why I participate in phenologic observation projects like the Great Sunflower Project and National Phenology Network’s Nature’s Notebook program. Change is eternal. We have the option either to embrace it or waste our lives mourning what might have been (whether it might actually ever “have been” or not).

On a practical note, I recommend avoiding plants labeled AHS cold-hardiness Zone 8 and lower for long-term survival in southeastern North Carolina. They might require chilling periods greater than we experience.

*****

A funny story about weather instruments, and then I’m done for today. One Christmas, Tim got me a very nice digital weather station from a reputable instruments company. We set it up, wiring the hygrometer, rain sensor and anemometer to the base unit. Despite my hard-core technophobia, I enjoyed the novelty of taking weather observations from inside the house. For a while. Six months later, lightning struck four houses north of us. By the time the reaction hit our house, it still had enough oomph not only  to fuse all our ground-fault interrupter circuits but to blow out the weather receiver as well. Tim called the reputable instruments company and told them what happened. Their service rep politely informed him that their warranties do not apply to instruments out in the weather. “But it’s a weather instrument,” Tim explained. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, and that was that.

My off-the-grid
weather data-collection
instrumentation

            Now I use a mechanical barometer and a Radio Shack el-cheapo minimum/maximum thermometer. When it starts acting funky, we just go buy a new one. Wind and Weather catalog supplied a professional-grade hundredth-inch rain gauge, which we hung on the outdoor shower. Our front door conveniently faces due west, the bedroom window east; the ocean is 800 yards to the south, the Intracoastal Waterway 800 yards to the north. With a working knowledge of the Beaufort scale, I estimate wind direction and speed by looking at the trees and the clouds. Low tech, sure, but it doesn’t belly-up in thunderstorms.

            Thanks for dropping by. And keep your weather eye out.

                                                                                    Kathy

MARCH WRAP-UP

            I can’t believe it’s almost April already. Where do all those fleeting minutes disappear to when we’re not watching?

            Am delighted to report we finally got some significant rainfall after two weeks of none. I actually ran the drip irrigation and the spray zone on the south side of the house a couple of times last week, something I am loath to do now that Oak Island charges twice as much for water  to exit the house as it does to enter. (But we do have one top-o’-the-line sewer system. If only we could afford it…)



Captivating violas spill out
of a terracotta pot



            Temperatures did one of their early-spring reality-check nosedives this weekend. NOAA issued freeze warnings for tonight for inland areas, reminding us it ain’t over locally until the last-frost lady sings on April 9. Oak Island hasn’t dipped below 32°F since February 13 this year, but the evergreen memory of the Great Easter Freeze of April 8, 2007 remains. Bad season for strawberry farmers, and for flowering shrubs and trees, was 2007.

            We need occasional slaps in the face like that from Mother Nature to remind us we’re not really in charge here. It’s like the spoiled-brat mentality of the people who build enormous beach-front vacation homes on tony Figure Eight and Bald Head Islands, an incredibly stupid move when one considers that barrier islands are, by definition, unstable. Now that the ocean is exerting her inexorable power, the rich feel all the taxpayers of the state should be happy to help finance terminal groins to protect their investments. I have two things to say to them, and to the legislators that live in their pockets:



Ajuga reptans 'Caitlin's Giant'
starts blooming in late March
in southeastern NC



1. Terminal groins don’t work. Talk to any Virginia Beach resident about the one at Rudy Inlet. Look at the never-ending dredging of Oregon Inlet on the Outer Banks.

2.  You aren’t ever going to stop the ocean from doing what she wants to do, no matter how hard you try. Money can’t fix disregard for nature. Ask the Japanese, who thought constructing nuclear power plants on fault lines would be okay. (Are you listening, California?)

            Okay, that’s it for today’s political rant. I’m feeling my oats, having had the self-same letter to the editor published in both local papers this month. (The StarNews even left in my description of our town attorney as “gormless,” probably because the children working the copy-edit desk didn’t know what it means.)



Against all odds,
the Christmas poinsettia clings
to life on the screened porch



            Onward to wrapping up the month in the garden.

HOUSEPLANT UPDATE # 5

            Ratty-looking poinsettia moved to porch, where it seems happier. One out of four cyclamen (the white-bloomer) bit the dust, the rest are good: the pink-with-purple-eye specimen still has flowers! The papayas persevere despite their relocation to the Kitchen of Death, but we all eagerly anticipate the day they move outside, along with their sidekick, the tape-worm fern. The Solanum pseudocapsicum appears to be reveling in its escape from the confines of the house. The Ledebouria, Hemigraphis, dahlia, penta and verbena all look dead, but I’ve been fooled before. I won’t consign them to the compost pile just yet.



Baby pea plants stretch
toward their trellis



VEGETABLE GARDEN UPDATE # 2

            Trellised the peas, which responded by reaching out tentative tendrils toward the mesh. Tim and I bought the rest of the materials for the two new raised beds, and wait only for the rain to stop before erecting them. I continue to put off thinning the beets, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, Nigella damascena (love-in-a-mist) and poppies-for-seed sown as a lark. To rationalize my uncharacteristic timidity in regard to this chore, I’ve told myself I’m waiting for really big true leaves to emerge.   

           

            Fine Gardening magazine’s June issue (don’t ask me why June came out already. I just take what arrives in the mailbox) has an interesting article on thinking outside the cage regarding tomato staking. Southern California's Scott Daigre makes some interesting suggestions involving concrete reinforcing wire and hog fencing that I plan to try.

            Four blueberry plants arrived (in excellent shape, by the way) from Gardens Alive! The two ‘Ka-Bluey’ came in four-inch pots and the pair of bare-rooted ‘Elizabeth’ I potted up into three-gallon pots immediately. I was so impressed, I immediately ordered another ‘Elizabeth’ and two ‘O’Neal’ blueberries and a ‘Ouachita’ (pronounced WATCH-ee-taw) blackberry. Where am I going to put them? I don’t know.

Seedlings survive on their
piano-based light table

SEED STARTING



            The seedlings on the piano continue to progress, albeit slowly. Two more black-eyed susan vines germinated, and two more pots of strawberries. None of the six Passiflora seeds that I saved sprouted, nor three of the hollyhocks, nor the other three black-eyed susan vines. (Planted three each from this year’s Renee’s Garden and last year’s Ferry-Morse seeds: one Renee and two Ferry-Morse germinated. Wonder what that means?) Lost two hollyhocks to stem breakage. So 40 out of 54 of the indoor pots sprouted. Not bad, considering my track record.



The cats are gonna love this crop!



Heartened by my indoor successes, I sowed another batch, to be left outside on the potting table, on St. Patrick’s Day. Planted 15 pots of edibles, three pots each of ‘Ambrosia Hybrid’ cantaloupe; ‘Hale’s Best Jumbo’ muskmelon (an heirloom variety); ‘Tendergreen’  cukes; ‘Sumter’ cuke (“organic” seeds, whatever that means); and ‘Snack Seed’ sunflowers. Also tried my hand at starting flowers—six pots ‘Summer Romance’ alyssum; five more ‘Indian Spring’ hollyhock; and four pots ‘Spitfire’ climbing nasturtium. Also sowed a 16" diameter bulb pan with cat grass.

Covered the lot with the wire shelves of my mini-greenhouse to deter critters.

As of today, all the sunflowers and ‘Tendergreen’ cukes have sprouted, along with all six pots of alyssum, two hollyhocks, two nasturtiums and the cat grass. It’s my best seed showing ever.



Weed-free, Kowed and kelped,
my new bed awaits further developments



NEW BED PROGRESS

            Finished weeding and clearing around the edge on the 13^th; got the whole thing Kowed-and-kelped on the 17^th. T and I have assembled all the materials for installing drip irrigation, which is the next step. After that, all that remains is to build an arbor (out of hog fencing, as per Scott Daigre?), design and plant. I’m already wishing I’d made it bigger.



Check out Kathy's latest article
in Carolina Gardener, and learn
creative ways to stake tomatoes
from Fine Gardening



IN OTHER NEWS, BRIEFLY



            The April issue of Carolina Gardener, the one containing my article on sustainable fertilization choices, arrived in the mail last week. Keep an eye out for it at your local garden center and at Borders bookstores.

*****

            “Winter Weeds” edged out “Stuffing Stockings” as the most popular post last week. And about time, too.

*****

            Here’s what’s bloomed in my yard this month:

·         BULBS: Muscari aucheri, M. latifolium, M. armeniacum; Tulipa clusiana, T. turkestanica, T. sylvestris; Chionodoxa forbesii ‘Pink Giant’; Ipheion uniflorum ‘Jessie,’ ‘Wisley Blue,’ ‘Rolf Fiedler,’ and pink-blooming ‘Charlotte Bishop’; the early daffs have passed, but the later ones, like split-corona ‘Tripartite’ and  orange-cupped ‘Kedron’ are still blooming.

These variegated wallflowers
(Erysimum linifolia 'Variegata')
have been flowering for a month



·         PERENNIALS:  Erysimum linifolia ‘Variegata’ (variegated wallflower); Ajuga repens ‘Caitlin’s Giant.’

·         TREES: Crabapple Malus sargentii; Southern crabapple Malus angustifolius is budded.

·         ANNUALS:  The violas are glorious. The delphiniums my grower-friend Christine supplied me with are budding (yes, delphinium is considered an annual in hot-summer zones).

                                                   *****



Delphiniums getting ready to bloom



Since comments from y’all are still few and far between, last weekend Tim installed a site meter to bolster my morale. It has a really neat world-map feature that shows me where people click on from. The biggest surprise was a reader from Tokyo, who maybe found “Taking Time” of interest. Most consistently present so far is the person in Mountain View, California, to whom I proffer my heart-felt gratitude. Most mysterious is the no-known-name place in the middle of the country (the ID box just says “United States,” which I already knew: I am no slouch at geography, thanks to my 10^th and 11^th grade teacher, Mr. Crippen)—west of Memphis, east of the Rockies. Please consider leaving a comment revealing your dot’s name. You can do it anonymously, if you’re scared or whatever.

Regardless, oh, Silent Ones, thanks for dropping by. See you next time.

                                                                                    Kathy

P.S.—By the way, Chuck, thank you for the kind words. My warmest regards to you and Miss Maggie.