Solar Clothes Drying

Homemade clothespin holder

Multi-purpose clothesline - hummer feeders also!

Hang clothes inside out for faster drying and less fading.

I don't know about you, but I grew up hanging clothes outdoors (or indoors in the basement on rainy days) to dry.  My grandmothers also did it.  Nowadays it seems few city folk do that.  It's a shame wasting all that free solar energy.  Plus there is nothing quite so sweet-smelling as solar dried bed sheets to sink into after a long day.  I've seen all sorts of wonderful birds flying overhead while hanging clothes.  Our forebears were environmentalists without realizing it.  Now we live in a culture of what I call pseudo-environmentalism or selective environmentalism:  Prius-driving folks who live in subdivisions with covenants prohibiting something as unsightly as an outdoor clothesline.  One has to be practical with one's environmentalism.  Thankfully I married a man with my same priorities in that department who has taught me numerous new tricks regarding solar drying.  Several of those tricks are depicted in the photos above.  Others are below:

• Check the weather beforehand.  Hang on a day with 20% or less rain chance.  Check the hourly forecast since the daily forecast usually has a higher chance of rain.  Check the radar.
• You can hang in the winter.
• Windy sunny days with less humidity dry clothes faster.  Duh.
• Turn clothes wrong side out.  Jeans dry faster (thanks, hubby) and colors don't fade.
• If you are low on clothespins, double up or share from one item to the next.
• Wipe the clothesline off with a wet paper towel chased by a clean one before hanging, especially whites.
• If you leave clothes outdoors on the line in the rain all day, the wooden clothespins turn dark.  Don't use them later on white or light-colored clothes because they will stain the clothes dark.
• You can make a clothespin holder for free using a gallon plastic milk jug... after you finish drinking the milk. You cut a hole in the side and put a repurposed clothes hanger wire through the top and presto, you have a practical albeit unattractive but free clothespin holder.  You may have to rebend the wire a bit to keep it from blowing off the line on windy days.  Again, thanks, hubby!
• You can dry clothes AND increase indoor non-basement humidity by putting your clothes on drying racks in front of upstairs heat vents in the winter.  Once again, thanks, hubby!
• Clotheslines can be used for other purposes, such as hanging plants, hummingbird feeders (both plastic and fuschia hanging baskets), or winter bird feeders.
• Regarding the latter above, squirrels are not able (at least in my experience) to access bird feeders hung from clotheslines if the feeders are propped by clothesline poles and held in place by clothespins.  However, if the clothesline is too close to a tree branch, squirrels will sit on the branch and neatly nip the clothesline in two in order to access the feeders.  So, that is why our white dogwood tree no longer hangs over the clothesline and is thus lopsided.
• Make sure your neighbor is not burning trash or yard waste before you hang clothes.
• Pokeweed in bird poop washes out of clothes.

Happy hanging!

P.S.  Yes, I DO use the clothes dryer for some items like nice soft bath towels, much to hubby's chagrin.  For one thing, it's a much faster cleanup when you accidentally leave a kleenix in a jeans pocket.  It was a definite patience-building exercise discovering a washed kleenix in hundreds of pieces in hubby's clothes.  He doesn't want his clothes put in the dryer, so I did a lot of hand picking that morning.  But a good memory test for next time.  And my policy is - if I find loose change in his pockets, sometimes it becomes mine....if it's a penny or dime, but not if it's the whole pocketful.

Pipevine

Pipevine, so named because its blooms resemble the shape of a Meerschaum  pipe, was commonly grown before the days of air conditioning.  Its beautiful heart-shaped leaves (like those of a morning glory) densely covered arbors, under which ladies in long skirts sipped lemonade in welcome shade on stifling hot summer days.

I grow it because it is one of only two caterpillar foodplants in Illinois for the lovely pipevine swallowtail.  The native pipevine is Aristolochia tomentosa, or woolly pipevine.  The other larval foodplant is snakeroot, A. serpenteria.  I have grown both species, though more successful with the former.  I see the latter species more commonly in southern Illinois, and the former species scattered throughout the state, usually in dry shady areas.  However, pipevine will do just fine in full sun also.  It's a twiner and will twine around a chain link fence or anything else similar.  If left to its own devices, it can climb to the top of a large tree.

I had one plant that covered the crown of a mature crab apple, smothering it in time.  I was torn between leaving the vine in place to provide caterpillar and bird nesting habitat or cutting it to save the tree.  However, the tree had lived a long productive life. When the ice storm several years ago weighted down the tree, most of the branches broke and I had no choice but to cut the tree down.  Pipevine suckers up to 20' from the parent plant.  Suckers are easily controlled via mowing.  If you wait to mow, the new suckers will grow several inches, providing tender young leaves on which the female butterflies prefer to lay their orange eggs.  Every time I would mow, I would check the suckers and rescue eggs and caterpillars.  Now my husband does the mowing (YEEHAH!!), so I have to remember to check.

Pipevine is not that easy to find, nor is it commonly grown these days.  Those who are into native plants (i.e., IL Native Plant Society, http://www.ill-inps.org/) grow it.  If you grow pipevine, eventually the pipevine swallowtail butterfly may show up.  "Plant it and they will come."  I've done that with all 6 of our native swallowtail butterfly species:  planted their caterpillar foodplants and eventually I would see either caterpillars or butterflies of those species.

Here's another useful link about pipevine with a marvelous photo of a plant covering an arbor:
http://www.nababutterfly.com/pipevine.html

One thing I've wanted to do for decades is plant pipevine "nearby."  Hmm, it wasn't too hard with persimmons.....

P.S.  "Now for something completely different:"  I just saw a sulphur butterfly flying by on this late November day.  It's 57 degrees out!

Planting Persimmons

Yesterday I did something I've wanted to do for decades:  plant persimmon seeds.

For those of you who don't know, properly ripened native persimmons taste like brown sugar.  They can be made into the most delicious quick bread - served warm with butter - mmmm!  Incorporate some homegrown hazelnuts or native Illinois pecans and even better!  Or make persimmon chiffon pie with hickory nuts and you have a real delicacy.  Persimmons are worth the work involved.

But most people think of persimmons as those awful puckery fall fruits because of someone teasing them with a firm unripe fruit, or because of their ignorance.  A ripe persimmon is so soft and squishy it is about one click this side of fermented.

My grandmother made persimmon pudding as one of her annual Thanksgiving desserts after serving us fried quail shot by Grandad and the other men in the family.  Wow!  Nowadays wild quail are very rare.  Little did we realize what a treat we'd taken for granted.  My mother took on the persimmon tradition and I have followed.  I've been pulping persimmons and cooking with them for 30 years now.  I planted a few persimmon seeds in our yard around 8 years ago and one tree bore its first persimmon this year.

See the following link for more info:  http://www.dnr.illinois.gov/OI/Documents/Oct06Persimmons.pdf

But I digress.

Yesterday I planted seeds of the very best early pre-frost (rare and much sweeter than the normal post-frost-ripening) persimmons I've had.  I placed them "nearby" and hope if we are still around eight or so years from now to see some of the surviving trees bearing fruit.  It was so much fun choosing planting sites. The trees need full sun.  The seeds were placed near woods' edges so that their branches would overhang mowed areas, making fruit collection easy.  I chose open areas or areas that would soon be open, such as areas with dead trees, etc.  Persimmons are choice wildlife food and are especial favorites of deer, opposums, and raccoons.  I planted around 20 or 30 seeds, finishing at dusk.  I walked home viewing one of God's gorgeous sunsets.  Life is good.

Caterpillar Rescue

NOTE:  To those of you who don't know me personally, I've never grown up.  I stayed in "the bug phase" that started at age 5.  So, yes, I still raise caterpillars and totally love it.  They are one example of God's fine creation.

Yesterday when it was a rare late fall 80 degrees outside, I found a half grown pipevine swallowtail caterpillar on....the pipevine!  (In IL they eat only pipevine and Aristolochia serpenteria.)  Even after several frosts over the past several weeks, there remains one optimist (or fool) eating pipevine as if winter doesn't exist.  I'd hoped to rescue him yesterday, but could not find him in the dusk as the cold front roared in before the rain.  Today, however, I found him at our peak temperature of around 50ish.  Yes, he was a bit on the cold side, being a cold-blooded beastie.  So I brought him in, breathed hot germy Hall's cherry cough drop-breath on him, and got him set up in a gallon glass jar with some foodplant.  Hopefully he will mature and pupate and overwinter.  At least he has stopped crawling all over the jar and may be settling down to eat.  So far he's produced one piece of frass, always a good sign.

This species is my favorite species of swallowtail butterfly, because of its beauty and because of who introduced it to me:  my nature mentor Stella from southeastern IL.  She was an amazing lady, who got her BS in Botany in the 1920s, and taught nature to people of all ages thereafter.  Stella gave me my first pipevine start, and I've been growing it over 20 years.  My profile photo shows a pipevine swallowtail nectaring on the native cupplant in honor of Stella.

A couple days ago a flutter caught my eye in the back yard:  a freshly-emerged male pipevine swallowtail.  Its wings were so fresh they looked like velvet.  I gently caught him and tried to steer him towards the only nectar plants left, asters in the front yard.  He kept getting away and I didn't want him to use what little energy he had on that cool day in struggling, so I reluctantly released him.  They do not overwinter as butterflies, but instead as chrysalids.  So this butterfly was, in my viewpoint, a little gift from the Lord, since it will perish soon.  It epitomizes the brevity of life, but also the potential for beauty.

This is my first post in my first blog.  One main focus is to highlight God's creation.  This is the most gorgeous sunset I've ever seen.  My parents and I were driving in Florida and I shot the image through the car window.

Another focus is to encourage readers to make the most of their days here on earth, hence the name of the blog, with my favorite Scripture from the Bible:

"This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."  Psalm 118:24

My husband is the ultimate Energizer Bunny, running at full tilt from dawn to dusk.  But each morning he nurses a cup or two of coffee first thing, in the dark, by himself.  Often it's on the screened porch, sometimes watching the sunrise.  He gets his thoughts together, his focus for the day, turning his day over to the Lord for His purpose.  He has a good thing there.  Now I am trying to do it as often as possible.  Sometimes the day doesn't start that way, such as when we inadvertently step in kitty barf with our bare feet first thing, but hey, I needed to find it anyway - LOL!  :)