THOMAS JEFFERSON, JUNEBERRIES AND BEARS

OLD GLORY, CIRCA 1812

JUNEBERRY ALMOST IN FULL BLOOM

NOTE THE REDDISH YOUNG LEAVES 

BEAR DAMAGE

LAST EVENING'S SUNSET

Monday, Memorial Day.   53degrees F, wind NE, calm at present.  the sky is mostly overcast with high gray clouds.  the barometer is trending down, at 30.13 in.  the humidity is 61%.  We will likely get some rain, which the gardens at least could use.
   We picked up our hanging baskets from Tetzner's Greenhouse yesterday, and they are now hung up on the porch and environs for Memorial Day.  In the past I have made up the baskets myself, but the spring has been so late that I thought they would never get done and three weeks ago I took my wire baskets to the greenhouse and they made them up according to our tastes and they got a good start inside.  It was so easy and  hardly more expensive than doing it myself that I probably will have them done again next year.  I also got my two tomato plants planted (all we need if I take good are of them) and planted some pansies as well.  So the yard and gardens are pretty well done except for planting a few more things. I was very much behind and in a stew about it but it all came together O.K.
   Thomas Jefferson famously said, "I may be an old man, but I am yet a young gardener."  I will paraphrase him with, "I may be an old man, but gardening doesn't make me feel any younger."  I am plenty stiff and sore from bending and stretching and pulling and lifting.  But it does give me a welcome appetite and thirst.
   The Amelanchier, AKA Juneberries, AKA shadblow(they bloom when the shad run up the eastern streams from the ocean ) and a lot of French colloquial names, are beginning to bloom.  The large one pictured is on 4th and Washington Ave. and is in full flower.  Most will flower in a few days.  Our tree-like Amelanchier are probably the species leavis, and the shrubby ones the species canadensis.  I say probably because there are at least a half-dozen species of Amelanchier native to Wisconsin, and most of them interbreed and hybridize.  They all bear a fruit that is a berry-like pome, usually with eight seeds.  The fruits are about the size of wild blueberries and ripen dark red to blue-black.  They are sweet and good to eat when ripe, but the birds usually get them before we do, also the squirrels and chipmunks.  And the bears, which will simply smash down limbs or a tree trunk to get the fruit.  I very much like planting Amelanchiers as small ornamental street trees, but only where there is enough traffic to deter the bruins.
 
And I’m proud to be an AmericanWhere at least I know I’m freeAnd I won't forget the men who diedWho gave that right to me

Read more: LEE GREENWOOD - PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN LYRICS