Where the Flood's Sandbags Went to Die

Yes, 20,000 sandbags saved Old Town Eureka's Central Avenue during the recent flood, and 2000 or so volunteers packed and stacked them, and were heroes enough to unstack them--but what happens to all those heavy wet bags when they aren't needed anymore? This. They were heaped 15 feet high and maybe 50 feet long, with an earth-moving machine scooping up bunches of them and dumping them into a dumpster--in the Eureka Community Center parking lot. I went there for a walk around its woods. It had never crossed my mind where sandbags might end up.

Is This the Truth?

Saw this window on the back of a pickup's cab and wondered whether its assertion was true.

Those who say doe meat tastes better reason that it's because it has less testosterone. Those arguing that doe and buck meat are indistinguishable say that flavor depends not on the gender but on the age, and especially how soon the deer is field-dressed and iced, and that deer done right should never have that gamey taste people complain about. If it tastes gamey, the hunter either wounded the deer or chased it so it got all stressed out, or its meat was not cooled quickly enough because (it was contemptuously said) the deer was dragged around all day as the hunter drove from friend to friend showing it off.

Of course every hunter prefers bucks just to say he or she took one down, but Missouri Conservation encourages people to harvest the antlerless also, limiting every firearms hunter to one buck per season. I don't hunt deer but I can see the sense in that.

Ripping Out Honeysuckles

There are three or four different kinds of invasive honeysuckles: Japanese, Amur, and others, and while not all honeysuckles are invasive tree killers, the tangled shrubbery you see along Missouri roadways and trainways, so thickly overgrown it can look almost like mist, about half the heights of the trees and and twining its way up, is the thing to root out. Yesterday I volunteered for Honeysuckle Removal Day at Bluebird Park. I'd never been there, but its name drew me, and I hate invasive honeysuckles too. Young people from colleges and prep schools were there en masse, and I worked with three young men who chopped, yanked and uprooted, while I pulled yards and yards of honeysuckle out of the grove of persimmon trees and put it at the curb for pickup. I honestly felt the trees thanking us. We cleared an area about the size of a living room, and after three hours we hadn't removed it all and there were some stalks (like the curved one on the left of the photo) too thick for anything but a chainsaw, but we had made a good start. Bluebird Park is a suburban park and I saw no bluebirds there, but I saw robins.

Tips from our leader: Remove honeysuckle shrubs by the roots if possible. When pulling their vines from the earth, pull out, not up. Cut the stalks as low on the trunks as you can, and the leader will come by and paint the stumps with Monsanto's Roundup, the only thing that kills 'em besides fire.