What makes a plant (Ob)noxious?

I've often heard it said that the definition of a weed is any plant growing out of place, or where it is not welcome. In that sense a dandeilion is NOT a weed if you want it for the edible parts or the pretty flowers. Clearly, people think different things when they think of Dandeilions / "Dandy Lions"

So you could say it's all a matter of perspective. A rose would be a weed if you don't happen to like roses.

However, SOME plants it seems have been deemed to be too nasty to tolerate, no matter how pretty they are or how much some individual might appreciate them...such as my now long gone "policeman's helmet". So I got to wondering, what makes a plant deemed to be dangerous enough to the local environment that it is no longer a matter of private opinion, but gets legislated as "Noxious" with state regulations demanding it be eradicated?

This is what the Idaho's Noxious Weed Pagee says:

What is a noxious weed?

Noxious weeds are plant species that have been designated "noxious" by law. The word "noxious" simply means deleterious, and all listed weeds are deleterious by definition. There are hundreds of weed species in Idaho; in 1977, 35 were designated noxious by Idaho law. [As of 2009, there are 57 noxious weed species.] The Idaho Department of Agriculture uses the following criteria for designation of a noxious weed:

It must be present in but not native to Idaho;
It must be potentially more harmful than beneficial to Idaho;
Eradication must be economically physically feasible;
The potential adverse impact of the weed must exceed the cost of control.

So there you have it. I admit, I was tempted to keep my plant and just not say anything when I discovered its bad rep. After all, it was pretty well controlled in its own little corner of my private back yard. After all, it didn't seem obnoxious to me. (I really do like the term "obnoxious weeds" better no matter what the official law calls them.)

But as corny as it may sound, for me it was a matter of integrity. I do not want to be a person who is sneaky about breaking laws. Even though I saw very little risk, eliminating the plant seemed like the right thing to do.

I will admit I HAVE done some things against the rules. I have fed ducks in a pond clearly marked DO NOT FEED THE DUCKS. I have driven faster than the posted speeding limit. I have unbuckled my seat belt before the plan had fully arrived at the gate. (oh horrors!) But for the most part, I really do try to be an honest, law abiding citizen. In most matters, I don't think it is right for me to pick and choose which rules are comfortable or convenient to follow and to ignore those that I don't happen to like. I think there is a time and place for civil disobedience, but that's for a different post.

For now I just knew I would not appreciate my sweet plant knowing it was kept surreptitiously. So out it went. Still, I will I'll miss it some. Cest la vie.

FOUND IT - but not good news

Anyone who has read this blog much knows that I've been on a quest to identify all the many plants in my yard ever since moving to Boise. I've been blessed with a place that is just full of all sorts of lovely specimen plants that were brought in by a previous owner. I also have been given starts of many new things from various garden pals I've come to know here. It has become something of an obsession for me.

I've got MOST of the things growing in my yard figured out now and have assembled quite an impressive list.
Here are the plants in my FRONT YARD
and here are the plants in my BACK YARD

Cool, eh?

There was one in particular, however, that has really had me stumped.

It grew in abundance along the fence on the west side of my back yard. It had TALL hollow stalks (many over 6 ft), very shallow roots, and white flowers on top. The plant looked like this:

I have gone through MANY different garden books looking for this. I took plant samples to knowledgeable people at a couple different nurseries. I had both serious private gardeners and professional landscapers come to my house to look at them. NO ONE seemed able to identify what the heck this thing was.

I FINALLY found out the name of my mystery plant. It's called "Policeman's Helmet" also known as Himalayan Balsam.

Great! Right? Well...er, not so much.

Guess where I finally found it?

In my book of Idaho Noxious Weeds.

Yeah, unfortunately, even though this has been sold as an ornamental in some places, here is is considered nasty.

So out it had to come:

I made sure my neighbor who had some growing on her side of the fence pulled hers all up too.

I was pretty bummed about it at first, but I finally decided I didn't really mind. Now I simply have more room for collecting different colors of hollyhocks

.

Pointy Mountains

I took this photo this morning at Little Redfish Lake in the Sawtooth mountains.
Seriously,the picture does not do it justice. It was so breathtakingly beautiful it made me weep with joy. This is hands down one of the most magnificent places I've ever been. Spent a very relaxed, peaceful time exploring / hiking and then a leisurely drive home through gorgeous canyons.

I'd pinch myself, but if I AM dreaming, I don't want to wake up.

Galena Yurt Camping

My beloved and I are spending a relaxing weekend in the mountains. Larry is taking a fly-fishing class and I'm enjoying some geocaching, hiking, reading and just getting away. We are in the Sawtooth Mountains and enjoying every minute of it.

We are camping in a Yurt about 20 miles north of Ketchum. Yurts are really quite cozy - even comes with a skylight!

The place has all the rustic appeal of wilderness camping with a bit more convenience...no tent to set up or equipment to haul. Just bring food, sleeping bag and a change of clothes and you are good to go.

It's actually pretty nice to be sleeping on a cushioned platform rather than the rocky ground. This is what I call baby bear camping. Not too hard. Not too soft. JUST RIGHT.

The propane camp stove works great - we brought fresh squash from our garden and some kielbasa sausage....YUM!

Of course, camping means high class facilities.

Regardless of what Freud may have theorized,this is the ONLY time I get penis envy.

To make reservations to stay in a Yurt, contact the nice people at Galena Lodge:
http://www.galenalodge.com/

Shoshone Falls

Thursday after I got off work my beloved and I went to the Twin Falls temple. The Boise temple is now closed for major renovations and will remain so for about a year. So until it reopens, we'll be making regular trips to Twin Falls, about a two hour drive. Quite different from our regular Sabbath worship in our local chapel, temple attendance is something that is deeply important to me.

After our time at the temple we took a drive over to Shoshone Falls. Always a nice view, they are looking particularly spectacular right now because we have has so much rain and snow this spring, so the water is running very high.

I'm looking forward to several trips there in the coming months. We are planning to do some day hikes and picnics in the park and Larry wants to try fishing on the lake up above the falls.

Idaho has so much to offer. This really is a pretty corner of the world.

Why I Love Boise

I spent some time walking around Downtown Boise last evening. The more time I spend here, the more I absolutely love this town.

More than a few people have asked me why I chose to move here. There were a lot of reasons. Here are my top 10 reasons for loving living where I do now, in no particular order:

1. Climate
Boise gets four distinct seasons, each with their own loveliness and annoyances. I like that. Also while it does get up to 100 degrees or a bit higher in the summer, there is very little humidity. (Having spent a week in Michigan recently I was reminded what a blessing that is!) Also while it we get some snow and freezing temperatures in the winter, it's not ever really freeze-your-boogers cold (again, thinking back to the 10 years I spent living near Kalamazoo).

2. Safety
First, relating to the climate - this is not a place that is at high risk for dangerous weather events. While NO PLACE on earth can guarantee that bad stuff won't happen, Boise is not known for earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, mudslides, major flooding or any other natural disaster that can be catastrophic.

Beyond the safety of the skies and waters, the crime rate in Boise is relatively low. It means a lot to me to be able to go walking alone along the city streets and encounter strangers who smile at me, knowing that as long as I use reasonably good judgment I am going to be safe.

3. Size
Boise is my Baby-Bear Town. It's not too big. It's not too little. It's JUST RIGHT.
As the county seat of Ada County, it is the most populated city in the state, with a little over 205 thousand people in the city itself and more like 616,500 in the general metropolitan area (according to Wikipedia which I would NEVER accept as a source in my academic classes, but for this silly little blog is plenty good enough...)

I'm done with living in "quaint" podunk towns of 1,000 people where you have to travel to get to any sort of meaningful resources. But by the same token I have no desire to live in a huge city like Phoenix or Seattle. Portland is nice, and would probably be a close second choice for me if I didn't live here, but with 2,260,000 people in the greater metropolitan area there it's just to big for me.

Boise still has a feel of connection among the people who live here that sometimes gets lost in urban areas. People are friendly. The place is big enough that you don't have everyone trying to know your business but small enough that folks genuinely seem to care about their community and be willing to work together to keep it nice.

4. Resources & Services
Related to size, in a city of this size we have lots of good infrastructure and resources - health care, education, retail, restaurants, etc. We have a great parks system, a decent zoo, and lots of things to do from free concerts in the park to farmers market. You name it, just about anything a person might want access too can be found right here. Also I appreciate being in a place that has decent services like curb side recycling, community composting and the like. I do wish there was better public transportation, but overall I'm pretty happy with what is available to me here.

5. Navigation
Boise is VERY easy to get around in. Whether I want to stay on back roads or jump on the connector and take the freeway, getting from point A to point B is pretty comfortable without any ugly bumper to bumper angst. (Of course Eagle Road is the exception - that's something to be avoided as much as possible! But other than that, most travel is lickety split.)

6. TREES!
Boise is known as the "City of Trees". With good reason. For a community carved out of the desert of the Intermountain West, we have a phenomenal number of truly beautiful trees.
Add to that the Boise River that runs through town and the well maintained greenbelt for hiking, biking, etc it's just a downright PRETTY place to live.

7. Mountains & Wild Places
While I love living in a town with stores, schools, hospitals and good services, I also like it very much that within 20-30 minutes I can be up in the mountains or out on some trail where I can connect with nature. Larry has been finding several different places for fishing and we go out on hikes reasonably often in places so pretty they just plain make my heart sing.

8. LDS Temple
As an active member of the LDS faith, it is a wonderful blessing to have a temple so close. Unfortunately our temple just closed for major renovations and will remain so for about a year. So for the immediate future we'll visit the temple in Twin Falls - a couple hours away. Long term, however, we have our temple here which is 15 minutes from our house, and a second one is planned to be built in nearby Meridian. After living lots of places where we had to drive from 3-8 hours, this is huge for us.

9. Affordable Housing
No matter how wonderful a community may be, it would do me no good if I could not afford to live there. The flip side of the economy bust has been the radical drop in house prices. For those trying to sell a place, that's not good news. But for those trying to get into a home in Boise right now there are some amazing deals.

10. Family
The one critical thing that Boise offered us that no other place on the planet would have is BOTH my beloved and I have a sibling close by. After spending most my adult life living in towns far from any sort of family connection, it has been a tremendous blessing to spend time with my brother and his wife and to visit Larry's sister during her frequent trips here. (She lives just a couple hours away but comes here once or twice a month to visit her daughter and grand kids in Meridian.)

While it has been an absolute delight over the past year to have closer family connection, it also gives us both a deeper sense of security as we approach our old age to know that if anything happened to either one of us, the other would have a support system close by.

I could go on and on. There is so much I like about living in Boise, Idaho. It took me over 50 years to get here. But now that I'm here, I couldn't possibly feel more at home.

Bird Watch

Yesterday afternoon my beloved and I spent some time on Lake Lowell, which is a 14.5 square mile reservoir with 28 miles of shoreline five miles southwest of Nampa, ID. The fish were not biting, but we didn't really care. We enjoyed simply boating around the lake, watching the beauty of the sky, seeing different birds, and spending some time together.

One of the birds we saw in abundance were many Western Grebes They are interesting to watch because they will be swimming along on top of the water in groups, much like a flock of ducks, but then all of a sudden they disappear completely as they dive down below to go fishing for minnows. Ducks will stick their heads down to nibble fish, but you can still see their feet and butts in the air. Not Grebes. They go deeper and stay down longer. So as we drifted along in the boat it was fun to watch them popping up and down as they hunted their dinner.

As we went exploring around the shore we saw a duck box along the shore which makes me think there are probably wood ducks there too, although I didn't see any yesterday. Wood ducks are one of my favorite water birds. Their colors are so pretty. We used to get them in our backyard all the time when we lived in Malaga on the shore of Lake Cortez.

I also saw a bird building a big nest up on a platform that might have been an osprey, but we were not close enough to be sure. There are 18 different birds that nest on platforms, so there is no way to be certain. Next time I'll take binoculars. I'd love to have my camera along for the ride, but didn't want to risk getting it wet.

I did see a comorant recently and was a bit surprised as I did not know they lived in this area. Also on one of my walks I saw a big fat chucker in a neighbor's yard.

Little by little I am learning to recognize more of the birds of the region. Of course with hundreds of species there are out there, I still have a long way to go.

Boise to Bogus

When I got off work this evening my beloved and I took a drive up Bogus Basin road. Boise sits at about 2,870 feet and after a very twisty drive up the switchbacks through the Boise National Forest we got up to a little over 6,000 feet at the base of the ski area. We took a nice hike in the pine trees and enjoyed some great views of the city coming back down, even though it was a bit hazy.

One of the things I absolutely love about living in Boise is that I am within 15 minutes of every convenience or resource I could possibly want, yet within 20-30 miles I can be in wilderness.



Along the way we found the trail head to the hike we took with my siblings and some friends a few years ago when we were all gathered here for a family wedding. I always remembered the hike fondly, but since I didn't live here then I was totally out of my element in how we got to it so I really didn't know where it was we went. Now that I know how to get there again I suspect we'll go back, probably take Morgan the Wonder Dog for a bit of an adventure.



Whether we are in the mountains or down by the river, there is no doubt about it. Idaho is a very special place I'm glad to call home.

Walking the Greenbelt

As we often do on Saturday mornings, my beloved and I took the dog for a walk along the greenbelt, enjoying views of the Boise River and gorgeous gardens of the the lovely homes along the way. These are just a few of the shots I took today.

Teton Mountains

I had some free time today so I drove around gawking at gorgeous mountains and cool old barns. Nice way to spend a day. I'm really looking forward to coming back here in August when Larry and I come up together for the bluegrass festival.

Only in Idaho

A few images from the day....


Spud on a Truck - Driggs, ID


"The Spud" Drive in - Driggs, ID



The Teton Mountains

Name that bird

After posting my piece about preparing for the hummingbirds I got to thinking about all the OTHER birds I enjoy watching in my yard. One of the reasons I was so adamant about buying a place that had mature trees was because I just plain like them. But just as importantly, I wanted a place that would provide habitat for my feathered friends.

I don't always know the names of the birds that I see come through here, I just know when I think they are pretty. I'm not all that knowledgeable about birding. But then, I didn't know the names of half the flowers and bushes when we got here. Little by little I've learned to identify most of them. So why not do the same thing with the birds?

I've decided I am going to set up some links on my side bar with references to the birds of Idaho and then I will track the ones that I can identify (both in my yard and when I'm out on walks along the greenbelt.)

One of my sweetest memories of my paternal grandmother, Jane Pendley, is of going for walks with her on the ranch in Oak Creek, AZ, which is now Slide Rock State Park. While she didn't have all that much formal education, that woman was SMART. She knew the names of every plant on the property - even the weeds. She knew the animals. She knew the birds. Having grown up in Oak Creek Canyon from the time she was about seven when she came out on the train with her mother from Oklahoma, Jane knew the land and all its flora and fauna like the back of her hand.

I doubt I'll ever be as knowledgeable of a naturalist as my grandmother was. I live too much in the modern word of media, technology and other interests to make that a live long study the way she did. Still, I am motivated by the words of Edward Everett Hale who said: "I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do."

So I'm going to start learning about the birds of Idaho. I'll check out some library books and get out my binoculars. I'll do some clicking around on the net at places like:
Idaho Birds.Net
Birding.Com
Regional Reports
Digital Atlas of Idaho Birds
Birds of Idaho Field Checklist
Idaho Bird Inventory and Survey

I will admit that last one rather baffles me. Every page is stamped "Review Draft - NOT for distribution" but there it is on the Internet for all to see. What's up with that??

Anyway, I have lots to learn. What birds can I expect to see in this neck of the woods? What do their calls sound like? What is their preferred habitat? What are their migration patterns?

Some people would say WHO CARES? For me though, it feels like embarking on an adventure.

Happy Anniversary Idaho!

I just touched the one year mark of my move to Idaho. Hard to believe that much time has passed. I'm feeling pretty good about the transition to Boise. I love the climate, the people, the surrounding scenery. I'm enjoying exploring the local music scene and learning about various fun places to hang out.

After many corporate moves that kept shifting us to where ever my beloved's job told us we needed to be to suit their fickle company fancy, this is the first time in 30 years we were able to mindfully CHOOSE where we wanted to be. We took a mason jar ring and named it to be a 50 mile radius, then listed about 10 different factors we wanted within that space for our quality of life. We kept shifting our circle all over the western USA, considering several other places before landing here. However, after giving it lots of thought, Boise had all 10 things that were important to us. So, once we made our minds up that this was the place we just kept poking at it till we were able to find the job and the house to make the plan real. One year later I have absolutely no regrets about putting down roots here. I plan to burrow in deep. No more tumbleweed moving from place to place for me. I may not always live in my current house, but if I have anything to say about it, BOISE will stay my home.

I've finally found a place where I feel at peace, I feel connected. I generally believe that happiness and contentment come a lot more from INSIDE a person than whatever their external circumstances may be. Still, being in a place that FITS is a blessing indeed.

Sharing gardens

This evening Victoria from "Our Life in Idaho" came by to visit my garden and get some starts of a few things I had to share. I'm pretty sure the hellebore and the delphinium she took should thrive well under her care. I hold out less hope for the Nandina/Heavenly Bamboo I gave her. It was looking VERY puny in my yard as it was planted in a spot where it was almost completely shaded and didn't have much water. If she can save it, GREAT. IF not, oh well, we tried.

The nice thing about making new friends through the blogosphere is we had a chance to "get to know" each other before we ever met through reading one another's postings. Because of that I had no sense at all of meeting a "new" person or a the awkwardness of entertaining a stranger. I was meeting Victoria, who shares her life with Kim and some chickens known affectionately as "the girls". I knew some of her challenges and interests. I knew who her favorite authors are. From our email contact I knew what sort of work she does. So inviting her over to dig up some plants that needed a new home and take a walk through my garden paths just seemed perfectly natural.

I will look forward to pictures of those plants if they take hold, and no hard feelings if they don't. Either way, I look forward to sharing more garden visits in the future. By the way - give my best regards to Jelly Bean, and good luck with the squirrels.

Boise in the spring time

I happened to have the day off today (a RARE occasion during the week) so my beloved and I took Morgan the wonder dog for a nice long walk along the green belt. I already knew I loved being in Boise, but today was an absolute stunning day.


Boise is known as the "City of Trees" with good reason. There are so many gorgeous trees, and this time of year when the naked sticks are clothing themselves in new leaves is pretty amazing.



The Boise River is running really high between the spring rains and the snow melt off which reminds me all over again why I will NEVER live by a river...



This is no where near flood stage, but it is high enough to show that rivers are living creatures that can jump their banks and go where they please.

I feel really blessed to live in a place that has so many great places to go hiking, many of which are within just a few minutes of where I live. What I like about Boise is that it is big enough to have some terrific resources, yet close enough to mountains, waters, and wilderness to offer the quality of life factors that I value. So this time of year I split my discretionary time between working out in my back yard tending to the flowers or heading out to some spot along the 22 miles of tree lined pathways and parks near me to walk the dog. Either way it feels good to be surrounded by beauty. So if I'm sporadic about adding new blog posts, you'll know why. I'm not spending a lot of time at home in front of the computer. Morgan and I are out on the trail.