A Visit with Dr. Darrel Apps, and Of Course, Daylilies

High summer is here, and in Wild Rose, as strange as is may seem that the name of the village is not Daylily, that means looking at, thinking about, talking about, and evaluating daylilies.  Last night, I fell asleep thinking about daylilies.  I would bet that is the situation for my neighbor, Dr. Darrel Apps, too.

Dr. Apps, has retired to my village, but the use of the word "retired" is probably not correct.  He has simply changed his venue.  His daylily breeding program is moving along faster now than it probably ever has.  

So Which Daylilies Did I Select?

My photo of a photo taken by Dr. Darrel Apps of 'North Wind Dancer' (Schaben, 2001).  All the pictures of daylilies in this post are pictures of a picture taken by Dr. Apps, unless otherwise noted.

There were quite a few "Goings-on" in my neck of the Central Wisconsin "New North" this weekend.  For area gardeners, we have had a couple pretty cold "cover up your coleus and clip your basil" sort of cold nights; not the "Run, run-- collect all the cukes and tomatoes" sort.  We also had the opportunity to select from some truly superior sorts of modern daylilies from the hybridizer, Dr. Darrel Apps, who as a member of the local Kiwanis, donated daylilies to their fund raiser held in conjunction with the Classic Car Show Pancake Breakfast.

With 70 different selections, the choice was difficult.  That pale yellow spider on the far right was not among my selections, but would have been a nice addition to my long border. (My photo.)

Dr. Darrel Apps, daylily hybridizer and Kiwanis member.  (My photo.)

So what did I select?

Looking for Something to Do This Weekend? Come to Wild Rose, WI!

Calling all gardeners, weekend road-trippers, and classic car buffs!  This weekend it is time to combine all three!

As I primarily blog about gardening, I'll start there.  Dr. Darrel Apps, the famed daylily hybridizer, my neighbor, and local Kiwanis member is donated 70 different selections of daylilies to a Kiwanis fundraiser held on Saturday (9/21/13) morning 7:30 to 10:30 at the Lions' Building just south of Wild Rose on State Highway 22.  These daylilies are "modern" daylilies (he uses this phrase here locally, because when the locals think daylilies, they almost invariably think "ditch lilies", (a name Dr. Apps abhors).

The one thing a daylily breeder never has enough of is space.  He is cleaning out his plot of everything of which the results was similar to an already patented  cultivar, dividing out cultivars he uses for breeding and grow like gangbusters and are eating up his breeding plot's real estate, or plants he just doesn't need at this point in his breeding program.  These are the same sorts of flower sold in the White Flower Farms breeders collections of daylilies.  And, actually, a lot of those sold in the White Flower Farms catalog when Dr. Apps was at Bridgeton, NJ were his.  Now, he is here in Wild Rose.  They will be sold mostly as two fan divisions, starting at $3, going up to $10 for things like divisions of breeders' plants which would normally sell for hundreds of dollars.

I've got my eye on a few fans of this dark one!

The fans will all be labeled with color, height, and other growing information, and a name if it has one.  If you buy an unnamed one you can name it in your garden yourself!

Next, there is the Classic Car Show and Cruise.  I have lots of details on the home page of the village's website.  It's on Friday Night, and starts at the Wild Rose Elementary School, winds up on Main Street, where it is followed by a free street dance and live music.  Our Main Street is lined with over 50 scarecrow exhibits this year.  These are incredible and nearly worth the drive in themselves.

This is followed by a Saturday full of  fun: the free car show, pancake breakfast, activities for the kids... Lots to do.  If pancakes didn't fill you up, have lunch at one of our restaurants on Main Street and walk it off chatting with the scarecrows.  (We'll never tell!)

And, if you need a quiet moment to contemplate nature, take a stroll around our Mill Pond on our Boardwalk, or hop in the car and take the six mile trip over to Covered Bridge Road and the Springwater Volunteer Covered Bridge.

It's definitely worth a road trip!  Everyone here hopes to see you around!

'Tis the Season! Daylilies, Like Christmas in July!

Unknown daylily in my long border, probably bought out of someone's yard years ago as a fan dug then and there.

Daylily Strawberry Candy

Daylily Mary Todd, always one of the first to bloom, given to me as a garden-warming gift from dear friend Sheila Mukite.

Unnamed seedling bought out of an IL breeder program

Photo: Courtesy Dr. Darrel Apps; an unreleased seedling from his breeding program, a diploid rebloomer.  Yes, I'm sure it's really those colors, and he has two even more scrumptious than that.  (Retired, my butt!)

Everyday around here is like opening a new Christmas present!  Between the daylilies blooming in my yard and the chance viewing of some of hybridizer Dr. Apps' across the way!

Enjoy!

A Conversation with Dr. Darrel Apps

Single-handedly, Dr. Darrel Apps is trying to drag the county's gardeners to the fountain of knowledge. He is hosting a series of six classes on perennials. I messed up. I left it to the next to the last day before attempting to sign up. Now this is the updated version of the classes he previously taught at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. This series was well publicized (for our county!).

I thought there would be about 9 people sign up for the course. I hesitated because I couldn't make it to every class and finally decided I would attend the ones I could and go from there.

When I stopped in to sign up, I found enrollment to be closed, but that Dr. Apps was actually getting the room set up and I could speak directly to him. He greeted me warmly and said he felt 20 participants would have exceeded his expectations. I expressed my reticence to sign up early because I couldn't make every one of the classes. He was a bit down that I hadn't managed to sign up, and then told me the class would have 50 participants! Fifty!

Wow.

I'll say it again. Wow.

His and my gardens are both on this summer's Master Gardeners' Garden Walk. This fact he no doubt is sharing with his class, which I am sure will spur more interest in the walk. (Will this double or triple the attendance of the walk? Eek!)


My view of Dr. Darrel Apps' home. I live across the street.


These are some of Darrel's favorite dayliles growing in his home garden.


A borrowed view of the neighborhood from the garden of Dr. Apps.

Since he last taught this course the hybridizers and plant hunters of the gardening world have exponentially added to the plant selection available to the home gardeners. The list reads like a who's who (or a what's what?) of the plant world: the Knock Out Rose series, Endless Summer Series of hydrangeas, a colorful palette of heucheras thanks to Terra Nova Nurseries, probably a thousand more daylilies and hosta, some incredible astilbes, and this is just the perennials. We won't even talk annuals like Wave petunias, coleus, and Diamond Frost euphorbia, Dragonwing Begonias and the like.

He has confided to me in the past that when he first taught the course there were about 50 perennials used in most home gardens, a mere fifty.

The biggest difficulty he has had in updating his class lies in the use of DNA and protein sampling to re-sort whole genus, species, and even families of the plant world. The nomenclature of plants that we all know as one thing is changing.

Now my Latin is hesitant at best, but typically I can follow the conversation using the exacting Latin nomenclature for the small group of zone 4 plants on which Dr. Apps and I might converse. In the course of updating his perennial classes he shared that many perennials have been moved into entirely foreign-to-my-ear-sounding horticultural families.

I have started seeing this trend,making it harder to search for seed or plants on the internet. I am also seeing a real lag on the adoption of the new nomenclature of plants.

Darrel also expressed concern over whether these molecular scientists busy resorting the plant world can actually know the plants they are reclassifying. If these horticulturalists are so into the chemistry, can they really know the plants?

I again lament missing what will be, no doubt, an interesting foray into herbaceous perennials and the plant world at a master's level.

But to quote Shakespeare and paraphrase Dr. Darrel Apps, "Is a rose by any other name still a rose?"

Busy Saturday in Review: Opportunities

Yesterday, I happened to be in Wausau, Wisconsin, had an extra hour to spend and thought I might spend that at the Leigh Yawley Woodson Sculpture Garden. What could be better? Sculpture AND a garden!

Woe to me though, my hour was from 11 o'clock to noon and the Woodson does not open until 12. I was left to peer through the gates and fencing. Even worse for you, I forgot my camera. These pictures are all from a trip shortly after I got my first digital 5 1/2 years ago.

Opportunity missed.

For me, the iconic image of a horse done originally in tree roots and then cast in bronze is the Woodson. If I had had my camera I could have done a better job of capturing its spirit. Birds, however, are the Woodson's bread and butter as the core of the Leigh Yawley Woodson is birds in art.

The bones of the sculpture garden remain much the same in either April or high summer. This garden is all about the sculpture. Unlike my visit five years ago, the main entrance area boasts a large sculpture of whooping cranes (or maybe they are mallards for all I know, in bronze, identification of ducks unlike plant is a bit dicey). Its size and visibility from the parking lot across the street its makes the statement on arrival. However, the brooding eagle watching over the sidewalk to what is actually the front entrance to the art museum, is probably what the staff at the Woodson feel is the Woodson.

To the left of the entrance is what is labeled a secret garden with sculpture of a pair of herons in what I believe is the Woodson garden's only water feature. This hidden garden could easily be incorporated into any back yard, which is what makes it very special.

Although if you google for images of the museum you will get quite a few pictures of the sculpture displayed with grasses, this year that was not true. I saw one sculpture of some ducks with sapphire grass, but that was about it. Most of the garden is herbaceous plants of the shrub, tree and vine sort, with just a couple large pots, and not any bedded annuals. The secret garden was well-planted with a collection of drought-tolerant shade lovers.

I could not help but walk away thinking how wonderfully improved the display of the sculpture would have been by incorporating native plants native plants into this mix.

Opportunity lost.

The rest of the day was spent at the family garden. My sister-in-law and I picked sweet corn, basil, and green peppers to freeze. With Baby Gardener and the Twins in tow, preserving goes slowly when it goes at all.

At 6 PM, I decide it is necessary I switch gears and water in the daylily 11-214. This is a discarded cross done by my neighbor out of hemerocallis altissima x 'Oh Joy, Oh Rapture' (APPS). He was hoping for offspring with closely held flowers of something in a peach or orange. Instead, something very similar to the parent, with about 25-30 buds on a stalk.

Its destination? The compost pile at his family's farm.

So I am touring his breeding plot and we are looking at what is interesting out of his 2010 crosses and we come to 11-214. The flower form is very nice in form and color. With the length of the stalk, it screams to me cut flower. In Korea, daylilies as cut flowers are all the rage. Not so in the United States. With a bloom that lasts but a day, it's a non-starter. I think this attitude should change. With branching stalks of 25-30 buds lined up to bloom, day after day, I don't see a downside. Okay, now the bloom is 2 inches to the left and we need to groom that arrangement, actually looking at it! Horror!

I stand there studying it. I'm thinking cut flower bouquets in farm markets. Darrel is reading my mind. He offers it to me.

I gasp.

"But you can't sell the plant," he cautions. Yeah, this I know. He doesn't even like to have his plants passed around that he discards. And in case you haven't guessed his discards are often nicer than 95% of what the typical gardener has blooming in their yards.

I say, "I'll even dig it out!"

"Okay."

So the other day I dug out all the plants grown from cross 11-214. I took and cut them back and planted them in two 30' rows a foot apart down the center of the orchard area in the family garden, and labeled their row tag with 11-214 and their parent cross info.

Opportunity taken.

So I am finished watering in these daylilies now destined for a brighter future and am crossing the road back to my brother's house. I have a road crossing ritual, because of the twins and their love of the garden which is across a road.

"Look left,
Look right.
No cars in sight!
Cross quickly!"

We repeat this little rhyme, looking each time we cross. My attempt to get them to stop rather than darting to look for that one car that may someday come.

Today, I am alone, yet I still (habit) repeat our little rhyme, actually turning my head each way to look as I have modeled for the Twins.

"Look left,
Look right.
What! Hot air balloon in sight!
And its like right above the road!"

Cool!

I trot off to search for the Twins because this is so cool. Eventually, I find them and they are entranced.

"See it!" they scream!

So my sister-in-law, the Twins, and I hop into the car to chase down the balloon which has now moved out of sight down the road. Baby Gardener and my brother being left behind.

As we come up to Shenington (a unincorporated twist in the road with its sole mercantile establishment being a bar), I see a different hot air balloon on the ground in the large manicured grounds. The owner of the bar had yelled out as he and his patron watched the balloon float at tree top level, "Land, and we'll buy you a drink!"

So they did. Everyone in the area, not just the Twins and us, are enraptured by the hot air ballon sitting so unexpectedly on the ground. The balloon has quickly gathered maybe 60 people, a lot of them under 10 to see it so close up.

At one point, one of the helium heaters ignites. Making a loud and startling whoosh noise. The Timid Twin asks as we walk closer, "Will it be loud?" He is frightened a bit seeing something unfamiliar so close by.

Soon the ground team shows up and after a few minutes they take over the elaborate and well orchestrated team work of collapsing and stowing the balloon.

After the helium has been wrung from the nylon and the balloon is lying snaked out on the lawn, the Elusive Dream Ballooning balloonists allow the small children to touch its silky ripstop nylon. Even the Timid Twin reaches out.

Touch it, touch it.

Opportunity taken.

This is not the first time I have seen a hot air balloon so close. Before Beautiful Girl became Sister-in-law, she and my brother were hanging out at my dad's dairy farm one day. Suddenly, I see the cows stampede. Crap! What's frightening the cows?

Only citified Beautiful Girl and I were around, I yell to her, "We need to see what has the cows so spooked before they bust through the fences and end up in the next county!"

We jump in my truck and drive down to the pasture on a field road and into the recently cut hay field. Cow chasing alone is no fun. Hopefully, I can get Beautiful Girl to jump up and down and wave her hands at the appropriate times.

At this point, we hear and see what has caused the cows to go nuts.

"WHOOSH!" A hot air balloon igniter blasts. "WHOOSH!" Again. When you are not expecting it, the sound is startling. The balloon is bobbling just a few feet above our heads.

"Can we land?? they call out.

"Sure, just stay out of the corn and don't put it in the cow pasture. You're scaring the cows," I holler up.

So they land. Their tracking team eventually finds them and they resolve their problem. We are talking to them the whole while. They are sorry they scared the cows. They say they usually don't fly so low.

They ask, "Do yo want to go up?" Beautiful Girl and I exchange a glance. Do we want to?

"YES!" we answer in chorus.

Opportunity taken.

So we get into the basket. They seem so small on the ground, not so when inside. We are looking up into the balloon, talking a mile a minute. I happen to look out and wow!

We are like 30' above the ground. Neither of us felt a thing. No bobbly motion as we took off or launched. Nothing. Suddenly, we are 30 feet in the air.

"Whoa! Down!"

We both ask in unison.

Up. Down. Complete opposites with like nothing in between. It was unnerving.

It was like being IN the sky. I can understand the allure.

My parents and my brother show up and lots of talk about ballooning, the ins and outs ensue. No one else has the courage to go UP, even for a moment, when offered the opportunity.

Yesterday, now Sister-in-Law says she'd like to have a hot air balloon. Yeah, I would, too, I admit. I think I could make the balloon, I say. They're make of that ripstop nylon, a heavier weight probably than say a windbreaker. I consider it a bit, the technical aspects of the balloon's construction.

After a minute, I look over at her, watching her boys watch the balloon and its team.

"How many times do you think they go over the seams to reinforce them?"

"Oh, that's a GOOD question," she laughs. "After you make it, you can test it first!"

I think of that one neighbor of mine made an ultralight out of a lawnmower back in the 70s...

Unusual Plants from the Garden of Dr. Darrel Apps

Sometimes when I see something so fantastical, so extraordinary that it is completely beyond my comprehension, I imagine what people might have thought when first seeing a rhinoceros or a coelacanth. This feeling doesn't happen often for me in gardens, but every so often, yeah, it does.

I had just spent and hour looking over the daylilies in the breeding program of Dr. Darrel Apps when he calls on the phone and tells me I simply must come over and take a look at his clivia. It has five blooming stalks. This one is an orange one. Darrel has a yellow clivia and an orange clivia of enormous proportions.

I accused Marilyn and Darrel of spoofing me with fake flowers and had to rub several of the stems and blooms between my fingers just to be sure.

Equally amazing was this trumpet vine. I believe this is the first bloom I have seen, although Darrel said it had bloomed last year. I stopped talking in mid-sentence to check out this one. Dr. Apps told me it is truly hardy to zone 6 and growing here doesn't do it justice, but he couldn't help himself and had to bring it from NJ when he moved home to WI.

He told me there is a selected cultivar name 'Morning Sun'. I can only imagine what this vine would look like covered in these blooms that look nothing like the campsis radicans grown almost invasively here. Other than the leaf structure and color, they seem to have nothing in common.

Darrel can never say too many good things about the calamagrostis Karl Foerster. He tells me their are, in his opinion, just about five really good grasses for the upper tier of the United States. This is one. He also really likes the panicum 'Dewey Blues'. 'Elijah Blue' the blue fescue is another he feels is good. He hasn't mentioned the others, but my choices would be the carex 'Ice Dance' and the miscanthus purpurea - purple flame grass. I also like the panicum 'Heavy Metal' because of its uniform seed heads. He grows northern sea oats in his yard for winter flower arrangemens, so a good bet he prefers that one over my preference for the miscanthus.

A couple daylilies from Dr. Apps' breeding program. I asked him their name. He would be miffed that I've forgotten, but they are too pretty to exclude.

Dr. Apps, daylily hybridizer and promoter, has often told me that gardeners that only grow daylilies are "boring", that they limit themselves and are missing out on the really vast experience of gardening.

Dr. Apps is not one of those people.

The Heat Is On and Daylilies

In the front of my house next to my Red Jade weeping crab apple, I have a triangular bed filled with daylilies. These dayliles are a pale ivory yellow, they have "chicken fat edging", "diamond dusting", patterned and green throats. Some are almost black, so deep the purple or red of their coloring. I also have my entire hellstrip filled with a daylilies, a daylily looking very much like a cross of Hyperion and Mary Todd. They are a pumpkin gold, with nice branching, large blooms, that last about 36-48 hours, versus 18-36 and are sterile and therefore self-cleaning. For the time period this daylily naturally hybridized, I believe the early 1980s, it would have been highly exceptional.

Not any more.

(The daylilies here are some of Apps' patented crosses named after children, employees, grandchildren, nieces and nephews.)

If you were to learn a retired world class daylily hybridizer lives in my village, you would drive around town and when all my daylilies are in bloom, you might assume the daylily hybrider resides there.

And you would be wrong, one hundred and eighty degrees wrong. The real daylily hybridizer lives across the street, with nary a daylily in sight.

And this heat must be driving him absolutely crazy!

Dr. Darrel Apps is my across the street neighbor. Before his shrub hedge became established, I could see the beautiful deep rose and diamond dusted 'Rosy Returns' daylilies under his picture window. I could see the yet unnamed pale yellow daylily that is the first and last to bloom in a pantheon of incredible daylilies. It is the daylily which will give the new highly-touted 'Going Bananas', an "improvement" over 'Happy Returns', a run for its money, and leave the Bananas a pale mud slick in its rear view.

When the daylilies are in bloom, it is hybridizing season. My neighbor lives for this time of year. He can hardly contain himself, nor drag himself from his gardens. Long-suffering wife Marilyn often visits one of her daughters during the crazy daylily days of summer.

With this heat, with temperatures of 80 degrees even in the early morning, the seeds do not form. His crosses will not take. I think it has been over 95 degrees here for over ten days with no end in sight; almost from the first daylily bloom.

His frustration must know almost no bounds.

Now that summer school is complete, I will begin what I think of as my Masters Class with daylily hybridizer Dr. Darrel Apps. Each year I become more familiar with the ins and outs of daylily hybridizing. He has kindly shared his stories of other breeders, his opinion of their work, the marketability of particular traits, the fickleness of daylily gardeners. He has shared his appreciation for retailers who carry his promoted brand, the 'Happily Ever Appster Dayliles' (TM).

More than anything else he has given me a sense of his journey to develop something new and possibly never seen in a daylily, a species with tens of thousands of named and patented cultivars. The passage of time, it has taken from the first Stella re-bloomer to the array of beautiful pastels on the market today.

He may be retired, but making hundreds of crosses and growing on 1,800 to 2,100 daylily seedlings each year tells me he is still working on that masterwork, that all of his past success is merely the highly decorative setting for what will be a masterwork.

And I, I think I have an idea what it might look like.

You will adore it.

Making Light of Garden Chores and the Last Frost Date: The One Thing You Must Do in Your Garden

A few pictures from the 2011 Garden Walk at Dr. Darrel Apps' Wisconsin garden.




You can have a nice garden or you can obsess. Last year, you may remember, my across the street neighbor, Dr. Darrel Apps, was planning to show his garden as part of the Kiwanis' Random Acts of Culture Show. From the minute the snow cleared in late May he was a whirling dervish of gardening activity.

It wore me out just watching.

His garden, when the time came was just perfect. He asked me to help docent his garden. It was a blast.

This year with my Handsome Son's graduation, it's my turn. Of course, my yard has to be ready about the time Darrel was actually able to get out in his to begin.

So, as neighboring gardeners are want to do, Dr. Apps has walked through my garden with me, and I through his, discussing for the most part perennial weed control and the crazy weather we have had. It seems the weather people will throw out a freeze warning at the drop of a hat. I had frost on my car yesterday morning and again this morning. But frost and FROST are two different things.

My mother and father, always full of doom and gloom (my father had a cousin who verbally recounted to him her memories of the "Year Without a Summer"), call me on a regular basis to tell me the temperature is going to get down to 24 degrees Fahrenheit (or some other abysmal number).

I'm a bit more pragmatic. I know that the tender-looking flowers already in bloom make their own sort of internal anti-freeze. I know most apple and fruit trees freezing is not freezing, but a temperature somewhat lower. And although I have my cactus and several other xeric plants out on my deck that are zone 8 to 10, it is not only freezing temperatures but how long the temperature stays that low. Also, the ground has been fairly warm for quite a while now. So the air warms up pretty quickly when the sun comes up.

Freezing just doesn't stay freezing for very long.

So when I come home from an appointment and see Darrel out with his new camera taking a picture of his beautiful bush covered with creamy sprays of flowers at the corner of his cafe latte painted garage, I can't resist.

"What are you taking pictures of that UGLY shrub for?" I holler out my car window. "You missed it! It was so much prettier two days ago," I add another gardener lament.

"I'm trying out my new camera, I can't get it to focus," he says.

Sure enough, new camera with cool lenses and all the bells and whistles. I wonder how he got Marilyn to release the purse strings long enough for his to persuade her to allow him its purchase. Then it comes to me. It, the camera, is not a plant. She has a harder time with him buying plants.

"So, is it going to freeze again?" he asks with a twinkle in his eye. "There is no global warming, you know," he adds with a laugh.

"Oh, it might touch 29 or 30 a couple times, if it is clear around the full moon, but nothing serious. The ground is just too warm, I reply.

And so it has happened, the Dreaded Darrel Time Suck, as my son calls it. We can't resist talking gardening to each other. I'm sure Marilyn has a word for it, too. For the outside world time travels on at a regular pace. When gardeners get together time slows down. It seems as if mere minutes have passed. I'm pretty sure I made him late for supper by the time we had toured each others' gardens and he had shown me what all (among which are the likes of 2,300 new daylily crosses) he has growing in his grow room under artificial lights.

He remarks I have a fairly good start on getting my yard ready for the party.

Our garden styles are dramatically different, so this is a big kudos. He's an old school IPM and chemical guy, where I'm always attempting to make sense of the latest organic trend. Two gardeners with the same appreciation trying to get to garden nirvana on two very different paths. Ours are the "two paths that diverged in the woods" of Robert Frost fame.

Instead of bagging most of my yard waste, that which is weed free gets spread on my alley border bed. If it is primarily pine needles onto my blueberry beds it goes. All that stuff I shred to prevent identity theft goes under (most of the time) a layer of pine needles.

He looks at my beds filled with yard waste.

"I might spread a thin layer of cypress mulch on top for the party," I concede.

"Oh, it looks okay as it is," he replies. Then he drops his three little words of wisdom, "Clean bed lines."

He is so right.

If I were to give any gardener advice, It would be the same. Good clean crisp bed lines clearly marking nice green weed-free grass (I hand dig my dandelions, as does the 80-year-old organic gardener next door to Darrel!) and garden beds is key to having a beautiful garden. I have this long curvaceous bed line running almost the length of my yard. When I clean up this bed line it is sheer beauty to behold.

So for all the things I can not fix in my garden quickly and easily this is one thing I can and will do. I will have clean bed lines. You might find a weed or two among my flowers, or some sickly looking artichokes, but you won't remember them. It will be the overall presentation of the garden you will remember. That comes down to clean bed lines framed by a lush grass path.


My garden on the same day as Dr. Apps' 2011 Garden Walk.

January Cold

Amaryllis blooming in the sunny window of my neighbor, Dr. Darrel Apps. He has a basement grow room where he is probably preparing to up-pot approximately 2,000 daylily seedlings from his hybridizing efforts of the last summer.


My indoor plant captives are telling me the days are getting longer. It hit a very severe minus 21 on the thermometer the other night, though. Yet, about a week ago we had a balmy 55. If nothing, central Wisconsin is a land of extremes, from politics to weather.

Just the other day, Bing brought me a picture of emperor penguins to my homepage. Who doesn't like penguins? Penguins are happiness that waddles. After my happy feet moment, I noticed the backdrop of those penquins included trees of some sort with grey green leaves.

Well, the picture was taken on South George Island, which lies south of the Antartica Circumference. I think that is fancy talk for Antarctic Circle. The picture made me hunt for more information, particularly on their weather. They are currently having high summer there in the South Sandwich Islands where the record balmy summer day is 74 degrees, but tends to hover around 50 and can get down to just above freezing (36 degrees)for their minimums.

What really grabbed my attention was the trivia regarding winter weather to which I am totally relating in these moments. The typical range of winter weather is about 23 degrees to 36 degrees.

Okay, what's with that? When I check winter hardiness of plants for central Wisconsin, they need to withstand temperatures down to NEGATIVE 30, or maybe worse!

According to what I read about this penguin island, there are no residents there. There are a few British researchers and military types (this being part of the area where Argentina and the UK fought it out in the Falkland Islands War in the 1980s), but that's it.

You don't see too many functioning greenhouses here in central Wisconsin in January. Even with a 10-15 degree bump a greenhouse provides, it is just too cold at night and the days are just too short. Almost any growing space needs supplemental light. Dr. Apps has his basement space. I have two light racks in a spare space in my bedroom loft. While Darrel is pricking out daylily seedlings, I will just now start thinking about planting some petunia or lisianthus seedlings and maybe a flat of microgreens or basil.

That last freeze date is still over three months away.

I will stratify some seeds and pour over vegetable seed catalogues, but that is it. A small pot of 50 germinated petunia seedlings becomes two flats (400 square inches) of growing space or seven percent of my total space for indoor growing.

Until May, I'm here in central Wisconsin counting the waxing minutes of sunlight and thinking about penguins.