Pond Creek, Oklahoma
For some reason, Pond Creek, Oklahoma popped into my head. It is just east of the "dry-line" that extends roughly from Austin, USSR to Brandon, Manitoba.
Pond Creek is thirty miles east of where the Medicine Lodge river joins the Salt Fork Arkansas river and and 14 miles west of where Pond Creek merges with the SFA river. I am just guessing here, but I suspect there is pretty good cat fish in those rivers.
Housing is inexpensive running from $75/sq-ft to $150/sq-ft. Property is not cheap if you consider the rainfall and potential for a string of drought years. But it is also not hugely expensive, either.
Summers are hot with daily highs average in the mid-90s (F) in July and August. Tornadoes happen.
Winters are mild with daily average highs of 50 in Dec, Jan and Feb with lows in the mid-to-upper 20s. Averages are deceiving; blizzards come suddenly and have brutal wind-chills. No big cities are nearby (Wichita is 90 miles by road). Ground water is abundant and population densities in Grant County, Oklahoma of about 4 per square-mile.
Honorable mention to Ponca City, Oklahoma and Kay County. It is a little larger and a little more accessible than Pond Creek. It is on the main branch of the Arkansas river and offers serious catfishing opportunities below the Kaw dam. Kaw dam pond is about 26 square-miles in surface area. Population density (humans) is about 40 per square mile for the county.
Bee-swarms
Sprite gave Mrs ERJ a call. She has "issues" with bee stings. She was not able to enter her garage because of a sudden explosion in the population of stinging insects.
Based on history, she assumed they were yellow-jackets.
Mrs ERJ was in Charlotte. She called me. I went over to check out the situation and to move Sprite's truck out of the garage so she could make her appointments.
It was a swarm of honey bees.
In general, swarms of honey bees are not very aggressive. They have no "brood" or honey comb to protect. But Sprite cannot afford to take any chances.
I moved her truck out of her garage and we debated the plusses and minuses of her closing the garage door.
Bees that swarm this time of year at this latitude have zero chance of surviving the winter. There is not enough time for them to make comb and store enough honey and pollen, even though the goldenrod bloom is very productive.
Somewhere nearby, there is a hive that is running out of room and it split. If a fella could figure out where that was, it would be worth his time to put a few "trap hives" out next spring, even if they were simple top-bar affairs with no bottoms.
Grafting "found" seedlings
My friend Lucky sent me an email with a picture of a pear seedling that was growing in a fence-row.
I share Lucky's gift from him-to-me, a picture of a "Bradford" seedling that he grafted this spring:
The fork is somewhere between belt-buckle height and four feet above the ground and the stem is 1.5" in diameter. The graft pushed an easy 10 feet of growth in one summer.
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| Power wires. Red leaved "bushes" are Pyrus calleryana seedlings, aka "Bradford" pears. South side of M-43 just east of I-96 in Eaton County, Michigan. Google Street view. |
Fence-rows and beneath power-lines are great places to find seedlings that can be grafted. Contrary to popular belief, "Bradford" flowering pear and crabapple seedlings make fine root-stocks. Birds eat the berries and plant the seeds with a dollop of fertilizer when they take-flight from power lines or the top wire of a fence.
It is unfortunate that the sites that are best for growing fruit are also most desirable for up-scale building sites. Fruit-growers find themselves priced out of the market and forced to grow trees on sites that are less-than-optimal.
Given the fact that P. calleryana (and hybrids) fruit can be swept up off the pavement by the cubic-yard and the economical Phytophthora screening protocols developed by Herb S. Aldwinckle at Cornell, it wouldn't be hard to identify gifted specimens with resistance to diseases common to wet soils.
A girl has to stay safe
I had Quicksilver practice blowing a whistle. Photos were taken and shared with her mother.
I promised to send QS home with her new toy safety tool.
For some reason, parents are sometimes slow to develop their children's musical talents. I guess that means it is up to the grandparents.
Might be worth a call to the local beekeeper. If he (or she) can put the swarm in a hive and keep it alive by feeding it through the winter it might be worth it for next year. Free bees are no joke. A nuke (starter colony of bees - just the bees, no equipment) can run a couple of hundred dollars. Swarm capture is how I have expanded my little apiary here in southern Oklahoma. Only real issue is you are not sure about the genetics of a swarm capture. We have Africanized bees in our area. My capture hives are more aggressive than the hives I have purchased or split. Probably have some Africanized bee genetics in the mix. Good producers, more hearty, but just a little hot to handle. Takes a little more TLC.
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere that three generations of "gentle" queens (like Italians) are required to dampen down the hot Africanized bees.
DeleteI have no basis for validating, although in-the-wild Darwinian selection will favor the Africanized hives.
Just north of Ponca you got Arkansas City. Got family there. Not fond of the town, but you have good fishing in the Arkansas River and the Walnut River. Picked a ton of sand plums along the Walnut with my cousins. Sand burrs are horrible in places along the Arkansas.
ReplyDeleteThe advantage of places like Arkansas City is that it is not the first place somebody from NYC or Orange County, Ca will think of as a bugging-out location. Yet, they are respectable places, especially if you have family connections or other sources of credibility and of local conditions. Not something that can be said, in general, of locations 200 miles west of the dry-line or with inaccessible ground-water.
DeleteArk City isn't a bad place. I just prefer to be out in the woods.
ReplyDeleteHoney bees decided to nest under the siding of my garage. Beekeeper cut them out and it was $1500 to repair the garage. Not a fan of honey bees anymore.
ReplyDelete