Dandelions, Sunflowers And My Yard

A few of my dandelions. It is a cloudy day and they are not fully open yet.

I’ve been thinking about putting an ad on Craigslist. It will say, “Free Dandelions — You Pick.” I have thousands of dandelions on my 4 acres of yard. They come up every year and I don’t have to do anything to make them grow. In fact, they are just about impossible to kill. I have pretty much made peace with them and just accept them. They are kind of nice, especially when they are in tight bunches. I ran across an interesting website called the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP). They have an article about dandelions and their benefits, including the fact that the long roots of the dandelion help to aerate the soil.

I don’t use fertilizer or pesticides on my lawn. I use some pesticides for cracks around the parking lot and on some concrete walkways, but that is all. I think I will even stop doing that and use vinegar. Vinegar will kill dandelions, but it will also kill the grass around it if you use it on your lawn.

The official name of the common dandelion is Taraxacum officinale. The United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service has an awesome Plants Database with a lot of pictures of dandelions in their various stages.

On the other hand, the things I want to grow I have to plant and water. My brother came over today to plant some sunflower seeds for me. I was fairly successful last year and grew a half a dozen large sunflowers that looked wonderful. I am trying to grow more this year. My brother grew some seeds indoors to get them started and he planted them today. He also started a few pumpkins and watermelon for me and planted them. He has a green thumb. I don’t. I can mow the lawn. That’s about it.

One of my sunflowers from last year.

I do enjoy all of the different plants that grow around my property. I’m less than 100 yards from the Hudson River. A small stream crosses my property and lots of things grow near it. I also have an old pond about 50 feet in diameter. It doesn’t have water in it anymore, but it does have lots of plants, small trees and other things growing in it. I wrote briefly about the skunk cabbage in a previous post. There are also some beautiful yellow flowers that grow across the street in a very wet, swamp type environment. When they bloom they are as beautiful as any flowers you will find. I have not identified them yet. When I do, I will update this post.

The Connecticut Botanical Society also has an excellent web site. This is the first place I go when I am trying to identify a plant or flower that I find.

Here are a few flowers that I have identified on my property using the website of the Connecticut Botanical Society: Pokeweed, Turtlehead and New York Aster.

When I find a plant and I don’t know what it is, I look it up on the CT website. I then copy the link into a simple text file that I created along with some identifying information. The next time I forget what the plant or flower is, it makes it easier to find. Going forward, I am also going to take a picture of the plant with my digital camera and put the name of that file in the text file also.

The Hudson River Dredging Project

Lock 5 on the Hudson River just north of Schuylerville

General Electric is about to begin one of the largest environmental cleanups in the history of the United States. Beginning in May, GE is going to dredge the Hudson River in Fort Edward, New York to cleanup PCBs in the river bottom. Eventually, 40 miles of the river will be dredged from Hudson Falls south to Troy, NY.  I live in Washington County, New York, just across the river from Schuylerville. I am 13 miles south of where the dredging will begin.

There are half a dozen “hot spots” where dredging will occur within a short distance of my house. They won’t be touched until Phase 2. The area around Fort Edward will be dredged this year in Phase 1. There will then be a review process of what was completed. Phase 2 dredging should continue in the spring of 2010. It could take 5 years before all of the dredging is completed.

It still amazes me that GE dumped the PCBs into the river in the first place. A lot of smart people work for GE. I read somewhere that the GE research center in Niskayuna, New York (near Schenectady), has more Phds. than anywhere else in the world. Someone at GE should have known that discharging this stuff into the Hudson River was a very bad idea, even in the 1940s. If not the 40s, than at least the 1960s.  I don’t care if it was legal or illegal. I don’t care if they had a permit or they didn’t have a permit. It was stupid and irresponsible and they should have known better.

Common sense should tell you that you shouldn’t dump this stuff into the river. Now they have to spend millions of dollars to clean it up. It would have been much smarter to either say that we shouldn’t manufacture this stuff in the first place because it is too dangerous or we have to figure out a safe way to dispose of it before we start making it.

GE started dumping polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River in the 1940s and continued to do so until 1977. I  was trying to find out why GE eventually stopped dumping PCB’s in 1977 when I ran across this 2001 article by Charlie Cray called, Toxics on the Hudson: The Saga of GE, PCBs and the Hudson River. GE stopped discharging PCBs into the river  because they were banned by federal law. The United States Congress banned the manufacture of PCB’s in 1976 when they passed the The Toxic Substances Control Act.

PCBs  are bad for you. They are the reason that you can’t eat fish from the Hudson. You can catch fish in the Hudson, but you must release them right away.

The Environmental Protection Agency has an entire section of its website devoted to Hudson River PCBs.

GE has a website with all kinds of detailed information about the project, Hudsondredging.com

The Hudson River is beautiful in this area. It should be as clean as it looks. What do you think?

Schuylerville School Superintendent

Schuylerville School Sign

It’s ridiculous that the Schuylerville School system pays its superintendent $169,487 per year plus $71,537 in benefits. It’s a small district with 1,862 students. It has one elementary school and one junior-senior high school. I hope that whoever negotiates the salary and benefits for the new superintendent thinks long and hard about the taxpayers in the Village of Schuylerville, Village of Victory, Town of Saratoga, Town of Easton, Town of Greenwich and the Town of Northumberland who have to pay the bills. I wonder how many taxpayers in the area actually know how much the superintendent is paid?

A Daily Gazette newspaper article on March 26, 2009, said that the outgoing superintendent, Leon Reed, “was listed as having  the largest compensation package of any public school superintendent in a survey of 91 school districts in an 11-county area, according to a Business Review report in September.” You can read the entire Daily Gazette article here.

You can go to the University of the State of New York’s State Education Department website (NYSED) and compare salaries of school superintendents across the state. It’s too bad the report doesn’t tell you the size of the school district.

Read an article by the chairman of the NYS Commission on Property Tax Relief, Thomas Suozzi. This article originally appeared in the Saratogian in January. It’s called, “Streamline Education Through Consolidation.”  It recommends consolidating the administration of small districts with less than 1000 students.  It’s well worth reading and it will take you less than ten minutes.

The actual report that the article references says: “Require consolidation of school districts with fewer than 1,000 students and grant the Commissioner of Education discretionary authority to order consolidation of school districts with fewer than 2,000 pupils to achieve economies of scale and to increase educational opportunities through expanded course offerings.”

It’s your money. Take some time and read the report by the New York State Commission on Property Tax Relief. It explains in detail the 32 recommendations mentioned in Thomas Suozzi’s article above.

You can also read an earlier post that I wrote called, “Why Are Property Taxes in New York So High?”

The times, they are a changin’. There must be a more cost efficient way to give our children an excellent education.

I would like to know what you think. Leave a comment or send me an email.