Our unseasonably hot spring has turned into unseasonably hot summer. What a year for the mainline water pipe that controls irrigation to a third of the garden beds, all surrounding borders and other areas beyond the Medicinal Herb Garden, to break. And it’s not going to be fixed any time soon. Why? I couldn’t tell you. I’ve learned not to ask questions about budget priorities at a large institution. I just take care of the garden, come hell or high water, or in this case, drought and heat. For a couple weeks, I watered by hand with a watering wand and it took a very long time. When certain soils get too dry, they become hydrophobic, meaning they repel rather than absorb water. Watering wands put out a lot of volume and that overwhelmed the ability of the soil to soak it up. Oh, the frustration!
So I turned to sprinklers. They use up almost as much time because they need to be repositioned often. But they soak the soil more gradually than the watering wands and that means no more runoff. They also soak the gravel and everything else in the area and waste a lot of water through evaporation. Oh well…
It’s not the best sprinkler for garden beds but it will do in an emergency and this is a year of sustained emergency.
This overhead sprinkler, like the kind we used to run through as children, works quite well but it needs to be moved a lot to cover the vast area that is without irrigation this year. I’ll do what I must to keep the plants alive.
Last week, someone passing through the garden mentioned that there were thousands of bees massing along the Burke-Gilman Trail, close to the greenhouse. That got my attention so off I ran to investigate. Bees! This is what I saw.
Honey bee (Apis mellifera) swarm on the artichoke plants (Cynara scolymus) near the southeast corner of the greenhouse.
I called our resident entomologist and beekeeping instructor, Evan Sugden. Luckily he answered his phone and agreed to come right over. I didn’t get a chance to see him wave his magic wand, but he somehow coaxed the bees into this bee box. Good work, Evan.
New home for the honeybees.
Bees slowly settling into their new space. Once they had set up house, Evan moved them to the bee village where the rest of the bee boxes are placed. Protected from extreme weather by nearby woods and surrounded by a wide variety of flowering plants, the bee boxes are in an excellent spot but will have to move soon to make room for construction of a new building. Hopefully, their new home, wherever it is, will be as well situated. Good luck, bees.
During the warm, dry days of summer, many birds take dust baths, presumably to clean their feathers and remove parasites. I often find smooth, rounded, shallow indentations in the garden beds where there is bare ground. I used to wonder what mysterious force acted upon the soil to create these strange circles of various sizes. Hmmm… And then one day I saw this behavior.
A Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) had to do a little work to get to the dry soil beneath the forest litter. I’ve seen lots of different birds take dust baths in the garden, but most often jays, robins and crows. Sometimes the indentation is etched deeply enough that the bird appears as though it’s been flattened by a steamroller or has arisen from the netherworld and is assessing the situation before disappearing again below the surface, like a whale coming up for air and a view of the sky.
I’d rather bathe in water than dust but to each his own. Wherever the sprinkler is watering there are birds taking water baths and drinking. Maybe that’s their reward after taking a dust bath. Speaking of birds, look who wandered into the woods north of section D today.
Fledgling great blue heron (Ardea herodias) that wandered into the woods after failing to get back to the nest on its maiden voyage. Some concerned citizens who work on campus were looking on when I took this photograph. We agreed to give it our best shot to see if there’s a sanctuary that will accept this beautiful bird. Otherwise, the raccoons will be getting a fresh meal soon. The heron rookery, under which the bird stands, seems to be thriving this year after the herons nearly deserted the area last year.
The flowers are opening from the bottom to the top of the inflorescence on this glorious Agave xylonacantha outside the west end of the Botany Greenhouse. It’s listing to the south so I had to lie on the ground to get its picture. Please stop by to see it if you get the chance.
Agave xylonacantha, a native of Mexico, flowering between the greenhouse and Kincaid Hall. The inflorescence is about 18 feet long.
It’s blazing hot and humid from yesterday morning’s brief thundershower. The ground is parched, fires are starting on the east side of the state and even on the Olympic Peninsula, in the rain forest of the Queets River Valley. More than a million acres of Alaska are burning with hundreds of forest fires as I write. It’s going to be a long summer.
keep near the water
sage words from the desert lands
whisper on the wind
See you in the garden.