Otherly Utterings

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Back in the fall I bought potted plants called ornamental kale and ornamental cabbage from Lowe's. The plants grew ferociously during the winter. I only had to take them inside a few of the coldest nights. Along toward spring they started blossoming and now they're starting to bear seed.

I've never paid much attention to how these plants go to seed before. I've seen it happen in the gardens my parental family had when I was a kid, but it wasn't as noticeable as having them close at hand out on my deck and in the green house. I kept the ornamental cabbage plant in the green house part of the time because I was too lazy to move it back over here.

The fact that these plants put out seed pods surprised me. One of the kale plants was purple all through it's growing season, and the seed pods from it are purple too. I plan to watch the process all the way through, and harvest some of the seeds for to plant this fall. Presently, only the pods themselves seem to have emerged. I see a couple of what probably is seeds by the nodes that are showing up on the outside of them.

I sprouted some of the oily sunflower seeds I bought to feed the birds when it gets icy in the winter. Sunflower seeds need to be hulled before they're sprouted for food, but these were bird food and the hull is still on them. I threw some out near my compost pile for the birds, but apparently they went down into some cracks and the birds missed them. Now, I got sunflower plants growing like crazy out there. I might plant some more just to see if they'll mature. I don't know why they wouldn't.

The sunflower seeds I soaked to germinate them sprouted okay, but the black hulls were difficult to remove, so I used the same containers and potting soil we use to grow wheatgrass for juicing to put the germinated sunflower seeds in to see if they'd take root. They did, and I used scissors to snip off the green sprouts once they had developed two leaves. According to an article I read on it, if the sunflower sprouts are left to grow more than two leaves they begin to taste bitter. I let some of them go, and sure enough they did taste more bitter. They don't taste all that good to me when they ideally have two leaves.

I was watching a travel show hosted by this interesting Scottish guy who travels all over the northern tip of Canada and Alaska this morning. As travel shows go it was an interesting one because it wasn't about the dead stuff left laying around by dead creatures, including humans. I don't appear to be all that nostalgic about the early remains of civilizations and traditions like they celebrate in Europe.

Oddly, or maybe not, the thing about the show that interested me was when the guy got to the end of his journey in Vancouver, Canada. He ended it at a place called Friendly Bay. As he was walking along the Pacific Coast beach at Friendly bay I saw a bunch of seaweed laying abundantly on the shoreline.

I need an abundant supply of seaweed and kelp to make fertilizer out of. Some of you may recall that I made a trip to the Atlantic Ocean beaches near the house to see if I could find some seaweed, and got nothing. There has to be a big offshore storm for it to wash ashore.

When I saw the seaweed on the Pacific Coast up at Vancouver in that TV documentary, it reminded me of having lived, or rather home-ported, in San Diego, California for four years during my first hitch in the US Navy. When I went to the beaches there they always seemed littered with seaweed. Even to the point of it being somewhat of a nuisance.

I grew up mostly on the coastal plains of North Carolina. We never lived more than 50-60 miles from the ocean, and went there for one reason or the other year around. I've been to most every kind of beach in the continental U.S. on both the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines. Even Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. They're very different places with very different conditions that are natural to both coasts.

The Pacific Ocean drops off like a rock. Many of the beaches in California can be over a thousand feet deep just a couple of hundred meters off-shore, but the beaches I grew up loving near here might extend out for miles and miles before the depth of the water gets to be a hundred feet deep because of the Transatlantic Shelf that reaches out to the Gulf Stream.

Seaweed must like deep water, but that's not the only reason it piles up on the west coast, and needs a big storm to wash it ashore on the east coast. The other big reason is the existence of the Westerlies. The Westerlies are the wind currents that extend from the west coast to the east coast. Like when you watch the weather reports. The weather systems that affect the eastern U.S. always get here from somewhere out west. That's because of the Earth's rotation that causes the wind to blow like that in the northern hemisphere.

The Westerlies blow the storms ashore on the Pacific Coast, and with the exception of the hurricanes, they blow the storms eastwardly out into the Atlantic Ocean. Thats why there is a constant supply of seaweed on the Pacific coast, and only an intermittent supply of seaweed on the Atlantic Coast. When I win the lottery, I'm moving.
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