My hummingbird feeder is full and not one bird is here. No ants either which is good. Maybe the little birds are busy with the flowers in the yard.
I have some gladioli’s in bloom now and more about to. The pentas is doing well. My bottlebrush bush has one big red blossom and the gardenia by the back door is loaded with flowers which smell wonderful when the door is open. The bush is really growing and beginning to take over my back steps.
Some time ago this same Gardenia in the same place grew so big it covered the back steps so I dug it up and planted it in another place with, I thought, more room and maybe more sun. The bush sort of went into neutral - didn’t grow, no flowers. So I planted it in another place with much the same results. Nothing. I gave up and put the bush, (what was left) back in the original place by the back door and steps and the plant is growing wildly. This time I guess I’ll just trim off the branches which are obscuring the steps and leave the rest alone. Odd, isn’t it, how a plant can behave so differently in just a few different places.
Other than quick conversations and observations at the Belle River boat landing, I didn’t realize just how poor this crawfish season was/ is. Now I’ve learned that most of the crawfish caught comes from ponds mostly over your way, west of us here, because you have rice ponds which become crawfish ponds. Here it’s sugar cane, not rice and while I believe a ground crop of nitrogen rich plants is soybeans maybe is planted in empty cane fields in some places here - it’s not rice.
It’s said the low water accounts for the lack of crawfish in the spillway. We certainly did have low water - really low. Maybe that’s a good thing. Fishing crawfish practically year round has got to affect the habits of crawfish so maybe a poor year like this one will help the mudbugs rejuvenate a little. Kind of a cyclic thing.
Yoga tonight and tomorrow morning. We’re having a fairly steady group each class but every now and then someone new comes. A couple from Arizona have joined us twice a week. Two girls walking the trail came in last week and asked if they could join us and I said sure. Then when leaving one day a woman walking her dog stopped me and asked if she (minus the dog) could come to the next class. Again, no problem.
I’ve just been reading an article written by Dean Wilson of the Atcdhafalaya Basinkeepeers organization in which he shared information from Dr. Ivor Von Heerden, the scientist who studies marine issues, et al. Dr. Ivor said that all the structures and features that the ACE and government have built since the flood of l927 were now ineffective and if we have another flood like that one, we would be in big trouble. Apparently, many of these structures have been neglected, mismanaged, and ill used since their inception. I personally have read a book by James McPhee called Control of Nature in which McPhee traveled down the Mississippi,observed the control structure at Simmesport in l973 and saw himself how the structure almost collapsed. This article seems to suggest that few efforts have been made to rectify things.
It’s an interesting if very unsettling view of the spillway and I hope the dire predictions are wrong, but I suspect they are not. Maybe that’s why I just got a letter from the Dept. of the Army reminding me that I live in an area which could be legally flooded and there was nothing I could do about it. Kind of a holdharmless thing.
Teche News’ Lower St. Martin correspondent, Linda Cooke, can be emailed at lindacooke1939@
