Return After a Long Absence

Return After a Long Absence
Dear readers: My sincerest apologies for my long absence. My present employment occupied more time than I had anticipated, so my writing was the first to suffer. The second casualty was my vegetable and herb garden at the farm. Fortunately, I salvaged just enough time to maintain my experimental garden in the front yard along with the small orchard I am building at the farm.
It was brought to my attention that a reader from Lethbridge had questions regarding hazelnuts. I am growing both the beaked hazelnut (Corylus cornuta) as well as the European filbert (Corylus avellana). Both overwinter well here. The beaked hazelnuts grow wild in the poplar forest here, and as far north as Grand Prairie and Fort McMurray. They are browsed by moose, who are mostly interested in the tender young growth at the top, so the bushes often have an appearance of having been shorn off at the top. The young twigs frequently have a brick-like pattern etched into the bark, and the doubly dentate leaves are somewhat fuzzy and are a couple of shades lighter in color than the alders that may be growing next to them. In the early spring, before the leaves unfold, the male catkins distribute their pollen via the wind, and it usually takes the whole growing season for the female flowers to develop into nuts. It is difficult to collect them in the wild because the squirrels are usually faster than I am at monitoring their palatability.
The beaked hazelnuts in my garden are four years old, and the European hazelnuts are three years old. Despite this difference, the European hazelnuts are a few inches taller. I suspect that this is because the European filberts came from domesticated stock and were selected for their larger size. I hope this answers any questions.
Bird-wise, I am happy to report that the redpolls are back at our feeders. It has been an exceptional seed year for the native white spruce trees, and I think they may have drawn the little guys to our area. Before Christmas I had a couple of sightings of snow buntings on the highway between Drayton Valley and Leduc. The downy woodpeckers at our peanut and peanut butter feeders are becoming steady customers, and our heated pet dish of liquid water is becoming more and more popular all the time.
Always experimenting, I had cross pollinated two different colors of Christmas cactus in November 2006. By November 2007 the fruits had fully matured to a firm texture and a startlingly bright magenta pink color. I harvested these fruits, and they came off fairly easily, which was not the case when they were still developing. When I got them home from my sister’s office, I sliced them open to find the one of the seeds had started sprouting in the fruit. I took the seeds from that one fruit and spread them on a moistened paper towel, folded the towel in half, and laid it inside a clean empty glass salsa jar which I laid on its side in front of the window. I had it positioned so that the bottom of the paper towel barely touched the water standing in the jar, and the seeds were higher up. The paper towel then wicked the water up to the seeds and kept them evenly moist. Today I opened up the towel to find the majority of the seeds had sprouted, so I transferred them to a sheet of clean moist toilet paper in a clean jar. My thinking is that the toilet paper might be easier for the young cacti to break through. I also mixed up an extremely weak fertilizer solution and gave them a drink. Hopefully some will survive my rough handling. Well, that’s all for now.