Heating Season

In 2012, we started our first fire on October 12th. It was a cold, wet day—the start of our last heating season. This year, while I was in Oregon, VSO pulled the trigger on September 26th—starting this heating season two weeks early. She is, admittedly, cold blooded, and is typically wearing a sweater while I'm sweating through my T-shirt, but there was some justification for her early start. Southern Utah saw a three day run of overnight temps in the high 20s/low 30s. The afternoons have been warm and sunny, but it takes a while for the sun to do its work. As a result, the morning temperatures in the house are generally in the 50s. While that sounds adequate to me, I can understand that not everyone has Swedish blood.

Lodgepole Pine Surprise

I thought I knew most of what there was to know about lodgepole pine. It is an early seral species that grows in the Rocky Mountains in dense stands of straight stems. Hence the name "lodgepole." We are, however, working this week along the Oregon coast. And, much to my surprise, there is lodgepole pine growing right down along the beach. These lodgepole do not, however, have straight stems. They are twisted by the wind coming off the ocean and tend to be stunted and bushy. Hence, noted one of my colleagues, the scientific name "Pinus contorta." Very interesting. The common name makes it sound like the tree is tall and straight, while the scientific name makes it sound like the tree is bent and twisted. Now I know why: It depends on where you find it.

Beetle Traps

As a favor to an entomologist acquaintance of ours, a colleague and I recently agreed to try trapping a few specimens of western pine beetle in the mountains near Beaver, Utah. I went out there yesterday to set up the traps. You can see one in the picture above—a series of black funnels with a white cup on the bottom. The trap itself wasn't too complicated, but the bait confused me. Actually, the bait was ready to go, and all I needed to do was install it, but I did too much thinking and ended up spilling the bait all over myself. Because beetles are baited with a pheromone, I was thinking that I probably smelled pretty good to female beetles for the rest of the day. (It is nice to have something going for you.) On the other hand, screwing up the bait may mean that our traps remain empty. Of course, the area that we selected for beetle trapping had only a single beetle-killed tree, so I'm not sure the beetle population would have been high enough to fill our cup anyway. We'll give it a week and see what happens.

Rain Forest Living

When Rural Ways went to bed last night, it was raining. It rained all night. When we got up this morning, the trees were dripping, there was standing water in the yard, and the sky was full of heavy clouds. Today's forecast is for more rain. None of this would be noteworthy in Costa Rica, but this is southern Utah. Moreover, this has been going on for much longer than 24 hours. In the past month there have been parts of Iron County, where we live, that have received more than five inches of rain. In fact, over the last two weeks, Parowan has reached a level of precipitation that is more than 300% of "normal" for this time of year (pictured). It is nice to be out of the drought, but I can't keep up with the weeds.

Grape Harvest

In the past I've speculated about what it would take to make a batch of jam from the Oregon grape (Mahonia repens). In my experience, it generally produces about three or four fruits per stem, and the labor of collecting enough material to feed ourselves has seemed overly expensive. Until now. This week, I was walking around in Indian Creek and I noticed that the ground was covered with Oregon grape. Not only that, but every stem had a cluster of fruit like you'd see at Safeway—fifty to a clump. I'm tempted to send the girls out there to collect a couple of full buckets. They say it takes only about three pounds of the fruit to make a batch of jam. (Of course, the "grapes" are so sour that each batch also calls for about five cups of sugar.)