This call design is also heavily influenced by the Acadian traditional cigar style duck call typified by Louisiana call maker Loylley Allemond. Jason now lives in the New Orleans area so the Lousiana influence seemed appropriate. This call has a body of Aromatic Red Cedar wood saved from a tree that grew on Jason’s Great Grandfather’s homestead. The nibs are from heart pine salvaged from window sashes of the old homestead house. The call is reinforced with a hidden CPVC insert for strength.

I am also making selections toward a line of blue Princess Japanese Morning Glories. One of my thoughts in developing the various Princess lines is to lean more toward creating initial building blocks for future more pleasing selections for the garden than creating immediate end results. Think of it as a wide base, with different plants, all sharing the princess characteristic, but having other isolated characteristics which may be later combined in different ways to produce stunning results. The idea here is to create a palette of qualities from which to choose. This effort towards the blue princess is along these lines. I’ve selected candidates that have leaves with yellow and green coloring, heart shape or normal shape, as well as dragonfly (dg) influence. This year should be telling if my initial selections are along the right path.

The picture above is of my first choice for this line. It has the diminutive growth of the princess, clear blue colored flowers of small size, and a rather unique shaped yellow leaf. I have other selections which I’ll show on a separate page.

The above picture is of my current selection in the first of the large flowered Princess line under development. This plant has a nice compact stature, variegated green leaves and beautiful relatively large (104mm – 4 in.) pink ruffled flowers with an evenly blended white center. As a reference, flowers in the standard Princess lines are 60-65mm or 2.5 inches in size.

Chinese Tallow, also known as Popcorn tree, grows locally and is quite abundant. The wood is a beautiful creamy white when turned green, before it is dry, but the wood interior turns this darker color when dried in thicker blank form. It is a nice wood to turn, is very fine grained and finishes well.

I’ve created a page for additional pictures of this call here.

I was able to salvage a few Jalapeño peppers before clean up begins and decided to dry them instead of making more hot sauce or chopping and freezing them. When dried, I was entranced by their beauty and took them outside for a few photos. The sun playing with their translucence was quite nice.

I’ve shared pictures on a couple related forums, here and here. You can see the feedback received.

It was  2009 before I grew them again and was very pleased with the various colors revealed.  Even though the colors were superb, the flower form was rather boring actually.  About this same time I became interested in the potential and mechanics of hybridizing zinnias.  The Giant State Fair zinnias are tetraploid so the challenges  and opportunities are magnified.  Tetraploid genetics offer greater recombination possibilities, but because of this, also create complex challenges in developing true breeding strains. 

This year I wanted to find tetraploid zinnias with  flower forms different from the Giant State Fair descendents I’ve grown..  The only option I found was in the Burpee Big Tetra strain.  I planted a row along side the grow out of seed saved last year from the Giant State Fairs, hoping to have new sources of pollen.  I have not been disappointed.  I’ve created a gallery showing each of the flowers in the row.