Day trips: Great Falls, Maryland and Sky Meadows, VA.
Sky Meadows is one of our under-appreciated Virginia State Parks. The main hike at Sky Meadows (above) is a seemingly-easy half-mile walk up a hillside meadow with nice views. It’s only a half-mile to the top, but that’s at a constant 18% grade.
We (pant) took many (pant) pauses to (pant) admire the view. On a clear day (e.g., without forest fire smoke), you can see the tall buildings at Reston, VA, roughly 50 miles away.
Roses are red, boysenberries are purple.
My little patch of berries is doing well. Black raspberries have peaked. Blackberries (above) are doing OK. Currants and gooseberries are about done. Wineberries are still to come.
My boysenberries are now ripening. Three years ago I put in a few boysenberry plants. I did this for the novelty, as I can’t recall ever having seen boysenberries for sale in this area (Virginia). Now, having grown some, I understand why. Technically, they are cane fruits. In some climates, they may in fact produce stout canes. But in my yard, they are low, creeping, sprawling plants. They are hard to grow, in that it’s all-but-impossible to weed around them. They’re a pain to pick, as the berries are borne just a few inches off the ground.
A ripe boysenberry looks like a purple blackberry, as shown above. When less than totally and fully ripe, boysenberries and blackberries taste about the same to me. But fully ripe, each berry yields a few seconds of its own distinct flavor. Boysenberries are different from blackberries, but I would not say that a fully-ripe boysenberry is better than a fully-ripe blackberry. And blackberries are vastly easier to grow, in my climate.
In both cases, once the fruit is fully ripe, it’s very soft and won’t travel. Near as I can tell, the only way to taste a fully-ripe blackberry is to grow it. And around here, the only way to taste a fresh boysenberry, at all, is to grow it.
Bike rehab success.
I must have made the right choices in rehabbing my wife’s BikeE recumbent bike (Post #1978 and earlier). This, because she was gadding about town, on that bike, for a couple of hours today. There’s the bike, on the W&OD trail this morning.
My sole useful advice was to mind her coccyx, in the sense that a long bike ride on a recumbent can leave you with a sore butt, particularly if you haven’t done any riding in a while.
This bike rehab project remains unfinished. I managed to get the bike into ride-able condition, but I have been unable to get the three-speed rear hub and other bearings serviced. My local bike shop took on the task, then declined to work on the bike due to a damaged shock mount. (Apparently my 15-year-old repair of that mount left them unimpressed.)
This is the problem with riding what is, in effect, an antique. I need to find another bike shop in my area that can rebuild a Sachs 3×7 rear hub. That’s a bit of a trick, given that every part for those has been out of production for a couple of decades.
Poor garlic yield
This year marks my fourth attempt at growing garlic in my back yard garden. This year I bought seed garlic (i.e., big heads with big cloves) from a local grower, made sure the soil had adequate nutrients including sulfur, and generally I Did What They Told Me To Do. Including planting after our nominal first frost date in the fall.
Once again, my dreams of growing garlic heads the size of my fist are unrealized. In fact, this is shaping up to be my fourth failure at growing garlic. As with my prior attempts, my heads of garlic are tiny. About half of my garlic is still in the ground, but it’s clear that most or all of my garlic heads will be on order of 1.5″ diameter or so. Almost but not quite unusable.
At this point, I’ve tried using different garlic varieties, planting times, backyard locations, and soil amendments and fertilizers. But I always get the same result.
I suspect that I just don’t have enough sunlight to grow full-sized garlic. My garlic bed gets about 5 hours of direct sunlight a day. Growing guides variously recommend “at least six hours”, and in some cases, eight-to-ten hours of direct sunlight per day. Garlic doesn’t have a whole lot of leaf area, and as a consequence, I’m guessing it really needs more direct sunlight than is available in my back yard.
Plant propagation: Snip-and-dip success, air layering fail.
Seven weeks ago, I started to propagate some schip (skip) laurels by two methods: Air-layering, and snip-and-dip (Post #1967).
The snip-and-dip plants are thriving, as shown above. Seven weeks ago, these were green branch tips that I snipped off, dipped in rooting hormone, stuck in wet potting soil, then kept moist and out of direct sunlight. These cuttings are obviously thriving.
Air layering skip laurels, by contrast, has been a total dud (above). The internet told me I’d have a big ball of roots at the end of that cutting after just four weeks. After four weeks, I had nothing. After seven weeks, there are some little bumps on the bark that might, eventually, become roots. My guess is that for a schip (skip) laurel, I’d have to tend to that air-layered branch all summer to have any hope of having a root ball form. Snip-and-dip is a lot easier and in this case a lot more effective.
Sketchy no more.
The scene on the left is a particularly sketchy bit of sidewalk in my neighborhood, as of March 2024 (Post #1950). The scene on the right is the same stretch of sidewalk, now. Presumably, in the interim, the Town of Vienna Department of Public Works has been at work.
That was good to see, given that the Town, in Its infinite wisdom, has decided to tear up my street next year. This, due to free money from Covid.
The plan is to bury the roadside swales that have been there for half a century, widen the street, and almost manage to convert it into just another cookie-cutter suburban street. The point of which is to provide “a sidewalk” on my street. In this case, for reasons only apparent to DPW, the sidewalk will cross the street mid-block. Thus, when they are done, anyone wishing to walk down my block, on the sidewalk, will be required to cross the street in front of my house.
My bet is that nobody is going to use the sidewalk beyond that ridiculous crossing. Other than the geezers in the 100+ bed assisted living facility that the town permitted at the end of the block.
Which, although nobody will admit it, is why this one-block-long sidewalk has to cross the street mid-block. Because it’s not for residents on the block to use, it’s for benefit of the commercial establishment at the end of the block. (The sidewalk crosses the street in order to attach to the sidewalk directly adjacent to the assisted living facility).
But hey, if somebody else is paying for it, and you are in a use-it-or-lose-it situation, the more money it wastes, the better.
Anyway, kudos to the Town for putting the this particularly run-down bit of local sidewalk back into good repair.
I am not looking forward to next year’s makeover of my street. But the Town owns the right-of-way, and they can do pretty much whatever they damn well please with it. Which, apparently, is pretty much the Town’s view of the issue, as well.
Cultivating my first deadly toxic plant.
To the casual observer, that looks like a bunch of un-ripe cherry tomatoes. Those are actually potato fruit, what you get if you allow your potatoes to flower. These are quite toxic due to their high solanine content.
124 Courthouse Road SW. 
1002 Hillcrest Drive SW (~$22K). 
Cabin Road SE – Branch Road to Glyndon Street. 
