Raising a ClearSpan in mushroom season

Oct15

Recently a variety of mushrooms have taken advantage of the cool, damp mornings and plentiful rain to burst into the autumn sun. We decided to add outdoor storage to the Bluecircle and ordered a 20’x28′ fabric-covered ClearSpan “garage” early last month. From the catalogue its white fabric made it look a little like a giant mushroom, so the timing looked good. We began with a bed of crushed concrete, added a base of treated lumber, watered the whole thing down and waited for the delivery truck.

Construction lesson #1: The 3′ x 8′ coffin-shaped box of steel tubes that make the building frame weighed just a little less than the capacity of the Bluecircle tractor’s pallet forks – so far so good. However, the box and its pallet were loaded lengthwise on the truck – only its 3′ dimension could be manipulated from the rear of the truck and there was no room to turn it sideways to pick it up. With the driver anxious to keep his lunch date we gingerly pulled and slid the box onto a short stack of empty pallets behind the truck and he drove away. A practical, but noisy solution.

Construction lesson #2: No matter how many times you look through the 20-page assembly “guide” you are still going to mistake some hardware for something that looks like it, but just doesn’t fit. My reliable friend and neighbor George was my partner on this assembly job and between us and our wrenches we fit and re-fit until the right parts were in the appropriate places.

Rear wall of the garage with anchor legs in place

Construction lesson #3: Significant storm winds sweep over Paw Paw Lake so we decided to attach hinged steel feet to the base of the building rafters. This results in a very solid build, but the design of the mounting feet raises the entire building more than an inch off the ground. The end rafters of the garage are joined by a steel pipe that spans the entrance, and this “lift” meant a cement threshold had to be added to the design to allow equipment to drive into the building.

Construction lesson #4: Alignment of the large roll-up door was critical to the installation of the front wall covering and challenging to accomplish. Better instructions might have helped, and a temporary brace at the peak should be used even though not mentioned in the instructions. Adjustable mounting hardware for the vertical steel tubes that align with the door edges could have saved a lot of time.

So watering the crushed concrete and cool Fall mornings didn’t let this building “mushroom up”. It has already weathered its first thunderstorms and a lunar eclipse. Next up, lake effect snow!

Five-Star afternoon on Paw Paw Lake

Sep15

Michigan inland lakes are glowingly described by Realtors as “all-sports lakes”. But on July and August afternoons the choppy waves criss-crossed by racing ski boats makes them fit for little else until sundown – or even later if a Sheriff’s patrol is absent. The intrepid kayaker risks being swamped, fishing is folly, and swimmers are banished to shallow coves. Only the broad platforms of pontoon boaters can cruise with some comfort unless they too are equipped to pull guests on wake boards or tubes. Perhaps our lakes should be called “motorsports unlimited lakes”.

Jet skies at sunset on Paw Paw Lake

Sailing Stars

To be fair, the year is more than two months long. A more balanced use of Paw Paw Lake begins in September, and the Paw Paw Lake Yacht Club recently sailed its fleet of five Star class sailboats. There is more fishing from small boats. Even the remaining ski boats have slowed – perhaps to enjoy the changing season.

Flies you see and stings you flee

Sep6

Late summer – the nightly serenade of the cicadas and the daytime buzzing of cicada-killer wasps. A vocal cricket has taken up residence in the studio, and a new colony of yellow jacket warriors has an underground bunker beneath a struggling grape vine. I found these nasty defenders – or rather they found me – armed only with a string trimmer with shorts and a T for “body armor”. As I scurried away from multiple stingers I left a hat, sunglasses, then the trimmer in my wake. Must have looked like (a large clumsy) Peter Rabbit leaving the McGregar garden. The tall weeds in this row will have to stand undisturbed till cold weather comes.

A relatively unusual fly found its way to our deck yesterday. According to Buggide.net (http://bugguide.net/bgimage/recent/28001) this is a Peacock fly, Callopistromyia annulipes, about 10 mm in length. It comes from a family of flies known as the “Picture-winged flies” . Besides displaying its wings in the peacock mode it can rotate and fold them on its back, looking more like a regular fly but far less interesting.

Peacock fly on the deck rail

Green and gold in the Bluecircle garden

Aug24

Potato flowers on a summer afternoon

This year the garden moved up the hill in hope of more sandy loam and less clay. The early vegetables spinach and broccoli were mediocre but snap peas and bush beans grew well, as did onions, green peppers and tomatoes.

Neighbors Bob and George invested their sweat and coin in several rows of potatoes. They have flourished, with an abundance of blossoms and only one attach of the dread Colorado potato beetle. The bright “alarm” orange of the beetle’s larvae made them easy to spot and fortunately no one had an opportunity to see any of the full-grown beetles – at least not this year. The speck of white insecticide on the bug’s back was very effective.

Attack mode, potato beetle larva

A surprise came from the “Summer jackpot hybrid zucchini ” seeds from Gurney’s Seed and Nursery. Besides the dark green, pale green and deep gold varieties of zucchini that grew on well-behaved bushy plants, an unusual vining squash threatened to take over a corner of the garden. It produced dozens of 4-6″ pale yellow fruits striped in gold. The inside was pale green and buttery-sweet when steamed. It will take until next year to find if we can regularly grow these attractive squash, but it would be hard to pass them off as zucchini!

The vining “Bluecircle hybrid” squash

Planting completing, mowing ongoing

Jun10

A class of 2014 baby poplar

The end of May and the last of this year’s hybrid poplars, pines and oaks finally made it into their assigned spaces. Competing priorities this year included staying ahead of rapidly growing grasses throughout the Bluecircle, thanks to regular rains, and a new garden plot. Another project, new oak flooring in the kitchen addition, came from “sustainable Appalachian forests”. It’s premature to claim success with oaks, but at least some of our tiny red oak seedlings survived the onslaught of hungry rodents under our now-departed snows.

Tree flags keep the tiny trees mostly safe from mowers and sprayers.

Frigid waves of ice and sand

Feb27

St. Joseph Lighthouse

Few beachwalkers leave prints in the icy sand this season, but steady westerlies sculpt mountains of accumulated lake ice into frigid, static waves on the Lake Michigan shore just west of the Bluecircle. South of St. Joseph the ice shelf is narrow, but to the north it stretches to the horizon. The wind has stacked the shelf ice, then partnered with February sun, a transient thaw and blowing sand to create a unique landscape at the foot of the dunes. Most years this scene soon would be melted, but current forcasts for at least another week of subnormal temperatures mean it will persist and evolve.

Snow tracks in the woods and on the lake

Feb17

The warming February sun has been unable to stay ahead of daily bursts of lake effect snow. Conditions for cross-country skiing have been excellent both on the edges of the Bluecircle and at the nearby Sarett Nature Center. Although most of the Center trails are less than a mile long they loop together through a pine stand, several meadows, and above the Paw Paw River east of Coloma. Showshoe trails are separate from the groomed ski trails.

Pine Tree Loop, Sarett Nature Center

Paw Paw Lake is used by a few skiers, often taking advantage of snowmobile tracks to provide a path through the drifts. Today’s changing weather featured a fleeting “cloud rainbow” probably produced by the icy winds aloft.

Knee deep in the big snowy

Feb12

O.K. Sophie, you’re not a red fox and still a puppy so we’ll let you keep all the Snow-Frisbee prey you can find, bury in the icy white, re-find and gnaw until edgeless. Snow flies as she pounces into the drifts, excavates all the way to frozen turf and frolics in the powdery depths. Proudly she carries this prey home from her walk half-hoping that tonight’s snowfall will hide it once again.

Winter shadows

Feb12

Four o’clock sun across the lake remains cold to the skin, but warms and softens the glint of still more lake effect powder. When airy flakes fall without wind they drape the landscape and blur the fox’s footprints. They hide the broken remains of successful hunts – feathers scattered from a daylight hawk’s raid and a pair of naked rabbit shins from the red fox’s feast. The ghostly evidence will soon emerge from a cemetery of melting drifts and blend quickly into the browns and fresh greens of promised Spring.

Seeing when not looking

Feb4

Wandering eyes, not looking down the road to the Monday morning workplace – a new way to begin the week after many years. This morning the snowbanks basked in the crisp sunshine while the tallest treetops glittered with frozen fog that had not reached the ground. Starkly white against the windless winter sky they awaited inevitable warming that would spoil the moment. Today there were no Jays in the sumac, but in the Conservancy a woodpecker was already drumming for its breakfast.

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