Christmas Ornament House

On the weekend of June 10-11, I attended some of the Marquette Waterside Festival, which is held at a narrow park along Lake Monona. Scheduled for Saturday were mainly international or ethnic music acts. These especially interested me because I like both kinds, but I preferred hearing the sitar act that was scheduled. Food and beer vendors help fund these neighborhood festivals, and some organizations set up booths, such as on protecting WI riverways, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and WORT (the community radio station). What most attracted my attention were UW astrobiologists, with microscopes to look at tiny meteorite particles that they explain you can find at home. They also handed out cards on life forms that live in extreme conditions on Earth.

One of the nearby houses has a tree with year-long Christmas ornaments. When I first saw this, I asked the owner about the weather breaking the ornaments, but she said the main problem was squirrels knocking down the balls and even chewing them, especially red balls. Below is a 3D photo of one of the ornaments.

In-house training/Stuff on my garden plot: Cincinnati Market Radishes
Since my last posting on here, I've been busy wrapping up the end of the semester and then taking training classes through Madison Area Technical College. At the Tech Academy, I learned how to run the Telepresence classroom that I'll use for one section this fall, and at the week-long Learning Academy, I took a class on educational evaluation as part of the certification requirements for WI technical college instructors. At these classes, I especially like meeting teachers from other departments/programs and picking up teaching ideas from them.

Cincinnati Market Radishes

In my plot at the Sheboygan Community Garden, I'm trying a less common radish called Cincinnati Market, which is dark red and long like a typical carrot. According to the Seed Savers Exchange catalog description, the length can be about 6 inches; however, mine tend to be shorter--about three to five inches. Mine also taste a little hotter or spicier than typical radishes rather than mild. That could be because of our warm spell earlier this month. I actually don't like radishes that much unless they're really mild. [In the future I'll say more about other less common things I'm growing.]

Last Saturday at the Dane County Farmers' Market, I came across a vendor selling radishes that looked similar, but she called them by a Japanese name. So I decided to do some research and found that old seed catalogs scanned into Google books often listed Cincinnati Market radish along with many other long radishes.



Diameter about one cm and under, but some

are around one inch (2.5 cm) in the top part. 

Some sources say that another name for Cincinnati Market radish was Glass Radish because of brittleness. Mine aren't anywhere near brittle--in fact,I don't understand how a radish could be brittle like glass. [See this entry in Maule's Seed Catalog (1902), which says that they're hard to distinguish from Long Scarlet radishes.]

One of the best sources of info on this I've found so far are books on gardening by Adolph Kruhm published around WW I.  In his Home Vegetable Gardening from A to Z, Kruhm (1918) discusses in relatively great detail when to grow various kinds of radishes. According to him, the White Icicle radish could "be considered the greatest all-around general purpose radish in cultivation"(p. 194), so I might try them. [Kruhm's introduction starts with this claim: "April 15, 1917, will go down as one of the most momentous days in American history. quite apart from the fact that it marked our entrance into the World War" (p. v). His Home Vegetable Gardening (1914), maybe an earlier version of the A to Z book, gives less detailed advice but has a table of contents with links.]
Added on June 18: