Lake Como for scale.Here is a scene coming very soon to most of the Twin Cities. The Emerald ash borer has been discovered in Saint Paul. In fact, these are the actual trees on Long Avenue in the Hampdem Park neighborhood where the pest was found. The trees die. It is expected that eventually a large percentage of the ash trees in the city will succumb.
This is a problem for us, we have two ash trees, one in the front yard and one in the back. The one in the front is not critical to our enjoyment of the house although it does provide important shade in mid-afternoon. The one in the back is the primary shade tree for the deck. It appears that we will be finding out how critical that one is but again we have the giant cottonwood and the weed maple back there so we will not be completely devoid of shade. We may not be damaged as severely as I feel but almost for sure we are going to get an opportunity to investigate which species of maples we like the most for replacement trees.The other place where this hurts us is that the Emily tree, the tree that during the summer after Emily was born we planted in the front yard of the house where we were then living, is also a green ash. TOPWLH knows the people living in that house now and we keep track of the tree. It is now a stately mature tree. It will be a shame if the borers gets that tree.
Our turnaround point today was Desnoyer Park. I was leaning against the softball backstop having a banana when I noticed that the radio tower down hill towards the river appeared to be sprouting directly out of a tree top. I tried to get a picture.
I call it "Radio Tree Europe".Interesting business at the Giro today when the riders declined to race. The riders decided that the course was too dangerous and they rode slowly in protest. The first six laps of a ten lap race around Milano were run at an average speed of only about 32 or 33 kmph. There were several instances on our ride today, most of them downhill, when TOPWLH and I were going fast enough to keep up with that pace.
Eventually race organizers prevailed upon the racers to actually race and the last three or so laps were turned at a more respectable 50+ kmph.
There is a Wikipedia page that lists doping cases in cycling. Current race leader Danilo di Luca gets the following mention in the 2007 section of that page:
"Danilo Di Luca of Italy was revealed to have had unspecified low hormone levels in urine tests during the 2007 Giro d'Italia. Italian authorities investigated whether this was a natural consequence of racing at a high level for three weeks, or some kind of masking agent. On 28 September, Di Luca withdrew from the UCI Road World Championships calling his treatment "a scandal" after he had been accused of doping allegations. Di Luca was leading the 2007 UCI ProTour when he was suspended from the competition before the final race, the Giro di Lombardia."
Yup, this race looks clean.
3 comments:
Yes, those Emerald ash borers are going to be a problem. The whole block on the boulevard where I live was planted in ash trees back in the 70's or 80's after the elm trees were wiped out by Dutch elm disease. There is also oak wilt on the loose in these parts. The morale is: don't plant trees with three letter names. TT
There are a lot of ashes here -- we've had the borer problem for two or three years now. There are hundreds of thousands of dead trees in Michigan, I've heard. You can see lots of dying trees along Lakeshore, for example. So far, the big ash next to our garage has escaped --- 'so far' being the operative words. Good luck.
Oh no, not the Emily tree! That would be too sad! I hope it makes it... We should make sure the McGowans are on top of it, if there is anything to do to prevent it.
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