Custer Fair in a Year of Rain

June 15, 2019June 18, 2019 Mike Nowak

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(June 16, 2019) As we return to the Custer Fair, we ask, is it June? Or is it monsoon season? Or are we in the Amazon? No, not the online company! The rain forest! Sheesh! It’s hard to know when the rain is going to stop. This May, the U.S. broke the all time precipitation record for 12 consecutive months in the lower 48 states.

In Chicago, it wasn’t any better. We set a record for rainfall in the month of May with 8.25 inches. And there’s no end in sight. As I write this, it has been raining pretty much all day. We’re scheduled to be under a tent at the Custer Fair on Sunday morning, but it’s not a certainty. Such is the weather year of 2019.

Meteorologist Rick DiMaio will join us as always to tell us if we will have a summer at all. Yes, that’s hyperbole. Or is it?

Before then, however, Peggy and I welcome some guests and talk about some gardening and environmental issues. We start with Cultivate Urban Rainforest and Gallery. We discovered them last year after our broadcast from the Custer Fair. I liked the vibe of the place and bought an Asplenium antiquum ‘Leslie’ bird’s nest fern. It’s doing well, thank you very much.

In their own words,

Cultivate is a women-owned, independent plant shop and art gallery. Cultivate offers a unique atmosphere that brings art, music, and plant life together for an unforgettable event experience. Join us for a jazz show, art opening, artist talk, or poetry reading. Check our calendar for upcoming events.

Now they’ve opened a new online shop. It features the options of purchasing online and picking up in the store or having non-plant items delivered to your door.

Speaking of events, singer-songwriter Naomi Ashley and theatre artists David Kodeski and Edward Thomas-Herrera are featured in HAPPY TO SEE ME on June 22. It’s a summer garden of stories, songs, story-songs, and songs that tells stories.

If you just interested in taking care of your plants, Cultivate is presenting BYOB Terrarium Workshops on Sunday, June 23, and Sunday, July 21. BTW, the BYOB is for the wine, not the terrariums.

Louise Rosenberg, owner, plant and art curator for Cultivate, joins us this morning.

Next, we welcome Kayri Havens, Ph.D. back to the show. She last stopped by in July of 2018 to talk about her work at the Chicago Botanic Garden on Budburst. Specifically, it was the Nativars Research Project. Now she is a recipient of an award from The American Horticultural Society (AHS) as part of their 2019 Great American Gardeners Awards.

On June 21, she will receive the highest award of the AHS, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Award. It is given to an individual who has made significant lifetime contributions to at least three of the following horticultural fields: teaching, research, communications, plant exploration, administration, art, business, and leadership. AHS writes,

Tasked with establishing a plant conservation department when she joined CBG in 1997, she’s transformed it into an internationally recognized pro-gram that’s using a broad array of techniques to preserve endangered plants and plant communities from threats such as habitat loss and climate change.

Havens is also leading an effort to get more people involved in citizen science initiatives like Budburst that help scientists track changes to plant life cycles. At the same time, she’s helping mentor the next generation of plant conservation leaders by providing training each year to dozens of graduate students and hundreds of interns working in conservation and land management projects. She has published more than 75 peer-reviewed research papers and frequently travels the country giving presentations on plant conservation to audiences ranging from students to gardeners, land managers, and elected officials.

We know her as “Kay,” and we’re happy to have her on the show to offer our congratulations.

We will also talk about a few stories in the news this morning.

I recently received a newsletter from Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago Commissioner Debra Shore. It’s titled, Our Wet, Wet, Wet, Wet, Hot, Wet World. In it, Shore refers to our record rainfalls and notes that

From January through May 31, the Tunnel and Reservoir system captured 42.56 billion gallons of combined sewer overflows. Think about that: if that amount of water covered the surface area of Chicago, we’d be wading in 10.5” of stormwater mixed with sewage. Remarkably, given the record rains, there have been NO REVERSALS of CSOs to Lake Michigan since October 2017.

However, this article just came out from the Chicago Tribune under the headline, There’s a giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico — thanks in large part to pollution from Chicago. It features this information.

This year, historic rains and flooding in the Midwest have roiled farm fields and overwhelmed sewer systems, flushing a tremendous amount of nutrients into the Mississippi River and into the Gulf, spurring a remarkable amount of algae. While the agricultural runoff from farms — exempted under the Clean Water Act — is the main driver of the Gulf dead zone, Chicago’s sewage is the largest single source of phosphorus pollution.

The Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, which handles the waste of 2.3 million people in Chicago and the Cook County suburbs, is the biggest single source in the entire region and drains into the Mississippi River. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, agricultural sources in the watersheds of the Mississippi River basin contribute more than 70% of the nitrogen and phosphorus, versus about 9% to 12% from urban sources.

June 17-24 is Pollinator Week. Here’s how you can help. And here.

A pair of birds could possibly put the kibosh on a multi-million dollar music festival at Montrose Beach. It’s already happened at Sandy Hook in New Jersey.

Last but certainly not least, the world is going to heck in a handbag. A recent report by an Australian think tank called Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration is raising a stink by predicting, basically, that civilization could come to an end by 2050 because of climate change. You can read more about the controversy on Vox.

Sleep tight.