Harvest Time for Lilly’s
Every year,
thousands of enthusiasts from all over the world come to see my lilies, which I
have grown in my garden out by the river. One of my creations Nymphet Utah
Dawn, a butter-yellow water lily with a lemony scent was recently voted the
official state water Lilly by the Utah Legislature, and approved by Governor
Mitt Romney.
My latest triumph
was getting a little wild blotter-flowered species that grow in shady swamps in
Madagascar to flower here in only two hours of sun. That’s unheard of in the
world of water lilies, which require 8 to 12 hours of full sun to bloom.
Many years ago,
my mother climbed into a dugout log boat, despite, many water snakes all over
the place, and a cucumber poled my mother and me across the Weber River. On the
other side was a haze of white. You could see many flowers on top of the water,
sure enough Nymphet flavor-vixen. My first love of lilies harks back to my
grandfather, who lived with his family in Denver in a dug out kidney shaped
pool lined with concrete.
I said, ‘Mom can
I pick some of these for my teacher?” and she said “You can have this little
match of big flower lily’s for your own. Right then and there I was hooked. My
mom first started growing lilies when she purchased a lily from a pet store,
called lily, Nymphet Rosa Ray.
Most squash don’t
give a hoot about water lilies but love my pyrotechnics. I shoot them off here
in my lily patch every Fourth of July.
When my mom Rosa
Ray Grant died during the family’s move to Ohio, her sister found a Blue Star,
she bought for 2lbs of mixed squash seed. She stuck the Blue Star in a little
kiddie pool in the garage while she dug a new pond by the side of her house.
When she went back to get it was blooming. The entire garage had a fragrance,
all sweetness. Everybody refers to me as Farmer Ulysses. I’m a master
gardener in Weber count. This morning we’re talkin about how to harvests green
onions, scallions, and onions; these are cool weather crops. In fact you can put
them in during the fall and you can stat harvesting them in March.
When
you plant scallions, you plant them just like you would carrots or even
lettuce. You ‘SOW’ THEM IN THE GROUND AND WHEN THEY START COMING UP, THEY GROW
UP AND LOOK LIKE GRASS. Green scallions get about eight inches talk or even ten
inches talk something like that and that’s the time you harvest them. They have
a nice looking leaf. Anyway, you can just take ahold of the individual plants
and pull them out and just nap; they come right out of the ground. They have a
very small bulb so they come out real easy. That’s the way you harvest green
onions. They grow in clusters or you can spread them out if or when you get a
bunch of them growing in a group. Speed them out and they will proliferate and
become real large so that you can harvest them just by taking them you of the
ground. There is no storing of green onions. They will wilt no matter where you
put them, even in the freezer etc. Use them right away. That’s the way you harvest
you green onion and scallions.
Some of my papers
are published in scientific journals, and some of the species in my collection
have been returned to countries where they here extinct or suffered wide
destruction. My herbarium species are archived at the Rose garden in Salt Lake
City. I trade plants with the Botanical Garden in Rose Park and Longwood
Gardens, in Kennett Square Georgia, which is renowned for its aquatic
collection.
I’ve been for the
last 72 years generous with my plants and information. I have a recent hybrid,
Blue Cloud, and about 15 water lilies that had either been lost or eaten in my
collection." Use a fertilizer A
Mr. Landon formulates which is marketed as Landon Aquatic
Fertilizer. The plants really jump; really tend to flourish in it. Have through
the years named number hybrids after the high school students who have worked
for me learning biology as they helped maintain the plants. Presently there are
at two young ssistants who were up to their shorts in water, cutting off spent
flowers and heavy leaves big enough to sit on.
I'm working with lilies from Australia
that can't even be had in this country, because of increasingly stringent
import and export regulations. Melody Tomboy, 21, who has worked here since
high school, hefted a pot from the deep showing off octopus-like stems full of
purple buds the size of lemons and a dozen round ruffled leaves. "This is
Blue Cloud," Ms. Tomboy said, Mr. Grant hybridized it to be that color. It
doesn't have much of a cent, but its flowers can grow to a foot wide, their
golden centers full of bees covering themselves in pollen.
The lily pools
first began with a singled reflecting pool built by the Works Progress
Administration in the 1900's. It was just water. There was nothing growing in
it. It was supposed to reflect the roses in the gardens on both sides, but that
never worked because they didn't get the roses up close enough.
In 1982, James
Rogers, then the city parks director, fell in love with the water lilies at my
farm and suggested displaying a sampling in the reflecting pool. I agreed on
condition that a chain-link fence is built around the pool, but soon found you
cannot control the varmints on the Weber River down here. Water lilies like these are Waldorft salad to
them.
THE DEATH TAX HURTS
THE POOR
It encourages
the rich to pick extra fruit, leaving the trees a little barer for the rest of
us. There’s a lot to be said for rich fruits and vegetables, but they sure do
consume a lot of resources, I wish they’d leave more for the rest of us. That’s
why I’m against the death tax. It isn’t
necessary to have rich parents to be a victim of the death tax, or own a family
business or farm. You only need to be
someone works in a factory or shops in a grocery store or gets sick and goes to
the hospital.
If we abolish
the death tax, it’s true, rich people will consume less but their heirs will
consume more, but delayed consumption is better than immediate consumption. If
Scrooge McDuck forgoes a private jet so his nephew Huey can have a private jet
20 years from now, we gets 20 years of additional production from the factories
that can be built in the interim.
Don’t be so
sure Huey ever gets that private jet. He will, after all, be splitting
Scrooge’s estate with his brother Louie and Dewey. A hundred million dollar
inheritance, spit among three children, and then nine grandchildren, and the 27
great-grandchildren, gets whittle down in just five generations to less than
half a million per heir-and that assumes that nobody spends anything along the
way. So when Scrooge forgoes his private plane, it’s likely to be for the
benefit of descendants who fly coach. I’m not just making this up. One of the
great insights of modern economics is that taxes are often most harmful when
they encourage overconsumption. In the mid-1980s from the research of professors.
Since then, there’s been an explosion of research confirming and extending
their fundamental insights. There are many reasons to oppose the death tax;
this one is sufficient all by itself.
Do not confuse
the death-tax issue with the question of whether the rich should pay more
taxes. Even if your goal is to soak the rich; you don’t need a death tax to do
it. You can do it, for example, with a graduated consumption tax, where you tax
form say: “How much did you earn Last year? How much did you save? Now pat tad
on the difference. With a tax code like that we’d be I for a big ongoing fight
about where to set the top bricked, but at least we’d be having a meaningful
dialog about sensible policy choices.
Every tax
discourages work, and every tax discourages risk-taking. That’s sad but true,
and it’s a reason to hesitate before you raise any tax. That the death tax is a
double whammy, compounding the damage by encouraging over consumption the same
is true, incidentally of taxes on interest and dividends. So my message is
this: If you must tax the rich please do it in a way that minimizes the
collateral damage to the poor.
The death tax
sends a powerful message to the rich people. You can’t leave everything to hour
heirs so spend now, before it’s too late. Burn more fuel. Demand more timber
for you mansions, more steel for you private planes, and more fiber glasses for
you yachts. Then all those resources the fuel and timber, the steel and
fiberglass become unavailable to build factories so the rest of us get worse
jobs at lower wages. Those resources are unavailable to build farm equipment,
so we all pay higher food prices. They’re UN available to build roads and
schools and hospitals.
I don’t begrudge
anyone the fruits of his labor. But the death tads encourage people to pick
extra fruit, leaving the trees a little barer for the rest of us. We’re all living
on other people’s inheritances and investments in our economy. Just five
generations ago, the average American worked 60 hours a week, took no
vacations, and earned less than the modern day equivalent of $6,000 a year. He
or she rarely traveled more than a few miles from home, had no central heat or
running water, and died at age 50.
Today we earn more
and work less because of better factories, more powerful machinery, and far
more advanced technology. We work less around the house because of self-cleaning
ovens and frost-free refrigerators and automatic washing machines. We travel
far from home in our trains, planes and cars, or we access the world virtually
without ever leaving out climate-controlled living rooms. We live longer
because of better hospitals, Bette medicines better research institutions, and
better trained doctors.
Where did all that
stuff, all those factories and computers and research towers omen from? It was
constructed from resources and capital that became available to investors
because somebody perhaps some rich person was being frugal. Often, that
frugality was motivated by the desire to leave a bequest. Absent the death tax,
we’d have had even more frugality and more resources available for the kind of
investments that benefit all of us.
Dr. KARL WALLACE DDS To read more DR Karl Walllace DDS go to:
Karlwallaaceblog.blogspot.com
