Radio?

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When I told Spunk the exciting news about Felder Rushing asking permission to play Spunk’s song, Dumpsta-Spunk Meowing at the Half Moon, for the “cheesy tune of the week” section on his radio program called The Gestalt Gardener that airs on NPR on Friday and Saturday mornings each week, Spunk just gave me his look of (see above) “Felder??? Radio??? NPR??? Cheesy??? What the catnip are you talking about?” I forgot that Spunk is a Cyber kitty whose main reference to the airwaves is WiFi and Kitty ESP. After I explained that “cheesy” is like “cool”, and that Felder Rushing has a “cool”, but not “cheesy”, website/blog called Felder Rushing’s Blog: Gardening Wisdom and Whimsy, and that he gives “unique keynote lectures, workshops, and informal garden talks, coast to coast, for Master Gardeners (national, regional, and state levels), garden clubs, horticulture societies, botanic gardens, universities, library groups, banquets, and even ‘spouse entertainment’ events at various non-gardening conventions.”, Spunk was much more impressed, but he still doesn’t get the parts about radio and cheesy.

Felder learned about my blog from Susan Rushton.  Susan and I have followed each other’s blogs for a long time. Susan does fantastic photos of the most interesting flowers and gardens. Susan’s blog is Susan Rushton: Celebrating gardens, nature, photography and a creative life.

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Peony
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Dianthus

Terrapene ornata

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I found this Western Ornate Box Turtle lying and the road where he would have been smashed by a driver not paying attention. I stopped in the middle of the road, jumped out of the car, grabbed him and brought him home. I took a couple of photos of him on our counter before I let him go on our property under the giant Dr. Huey.

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Dr. Huey

The Grim Weeder

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The Grim Weeder with his new weed whacker.

I’ve been whacking weeds by hand for many years. You can see when I made a super weed whacker at https://photos.tandlphotos.com/blog/2016/8/whacky. But now I’ve developed “golf elbow”, which is quite painful, from all the years of manual weed whacking. About a month ago or so I bought a STIHL FSA 90R commercial grade battery powered weed whacker. We have very tough weeds and I knew I needed a commercial weed whacker to do the job. The FSA 90R came with 0.95 inch diameter orange string (shown below), and the first “tough” weed I tried to whack with it broke the string. The tough weed simply laughed at me. “Hahahahaha! You with your wimpy, weakling whacker can’t touch me!” I took the head apart, got more string out and tried whacking some weeny weeds, which it worked pretty well on. Over the past month, I’ve been whacking weeny weeds, which we have lots of, while the tough weeds laughed at me. I finally ran out of the orange string.

I did a bit of research and found the Oregon 22-895 Magnum Gatorline .095 inch trimmer line was highly rated as really touch line for really tough weeds. 22-895 Magnum Gatorline is square, which somehow makes more resistant to breaking.  I found the best deal was a large spool with 600 feet of of line. I loaded my spool with the 22-895 Magnum Gatorline, and went out and whacked that sassy tough weed that’s been laughing at me for the past month. I’m happy to report, the weed is not laughing any longer, because the weed and all its buddies are no more. The 22-895 Magnum Gatorline ripped through them like they were butter.

Today I set out whacking all the weeds out of the irrigation ditches. The FSA 90R with the 22-895 Magnum Gatorline and I had to work really hard, but after six hours and 4 recharges on the battery, I got the ditches whacked and weed free.

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Orange and square gatorline.
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600 feet of square gatorline

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Trimmer head
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Great clouds built up in the afternoon.
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Portion of irrigation ditch before weed whacking.
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Same portion of irrigation ditch after weed whacking.