We planted onions and potatoes almost on time this year — it wasn’t quite St. Patrick’s Day as is the general rule of green thumb for this region, but it was shortly thereafter. The tomato and pepper plant starts that we bought have been in the ground for already a month now, which is actually a little early for us, but I knew I better go ahead and get them purchased and planted when I was thinking about them or it wouldn’t happen in such a timely fashion.
Rows of other vegetables have also been planted at relatively decent times. The weather, especially in the mornings, has been so welcoming, and these days I always need an excuse to go outside with my outdoors-living toddler, so I’m pleasantly surprised at how well I’ve gotten things in the ground.
And they are growing! The rains we had last month were incredibly helpful for all planted things — and voluntary things, like a thousand weeds — and the beet tops are big enough to wave in the breeze, the potatoes are expanding into bushes, the okra and corn have sprouted and begun their journey upward.
But we’re still a long ways from harvest. I walk out to the garden plot almost every day, and you know, there’s not always a lot of change. The cucumber vines are just a couple leaves and a stem, and some of those silly pepper plants look like they’ve barely grown an inch since we got them rooted in dirt. Anticipation, however, is part of the joy of gardening, and to be fair, it makes sense that it would take time to go from a teensy seed to a full plant.
The one vegetable that ignores that logic is of course the one vegetable I consistently forget to check. We buried our asparagus crowns here at least six years ago now; we didn’t even live on the farmstead yet, but we knew we were headed here eventually and we needed our asparagus. Asparagus needs forethought, as crowns take three years to come to maturity and readiness to harvest — but then can live and produce there for 10, 15, even 30 years! Since we didn’t really know how things would be changing in the interim but we needed the asparagus to have a long-term home, we stuck it in an out-of-the-way location next to an old pig pen’s concrete slab.
The good news is, it’s definitely out of the way, and so far shows no signs of needing to be removed from its present location. The bad news is, it’s definitely out of the way…as in, out of sight, out of mind. Not only is the asparagus not in the garden plot, but it’s actually inside the chicken run. It’s not far away by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to duck under the peach tree, twist open the wire holding the fence shut, step around any curious hens and through all the brush, and then finally get to the asparagus patch. See, it’s sooo hard.
All that to say, the asparagus spears tend to grow much faster than I tend to check them. I’m always delighted when I find lithe spears ready to pick, and I know they grow fast, yet somehow I’m still always shocked at how many are turning the patch into a frondy forest. But sometimes it works out, and we eventually collect enough not-woody-as-trees asparagus spears. I like to store them in a jar of water in the fridge to stay fresh until I cook them.
And then we enjoy them while we wait in anticipation for the slower things in the garden.
Asparagus & Chicken Pasta Primavera
Asparagus grows so quickly, it seems appropriate to have a quick one-dish meal in which to celebrate it. We never get many spears at a time, especially towards the end of season like this, but that’s fine because this pasta is very flexible to however much asparagus you have.
Prep tips: “primavera” means spring, so feel free to play with it by adding whatever spring veg you like. My basil plants were only big enough to yield me 6 leaves, so we had to fortify the fresh basil with some dried.
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 yellow onion, diced
½ pound asparagus (or more, or less), cut in 1” pieces
1 red bell pepper, thinly sliced
½ cup cream
2 cups cooked chunked chicken
2 ounces sharp white cheddar, shredded
fresh basil, thinly sliced
salt, pepper, red pepper flakes
Cook pasta, reserving a splash of the cooking water. Meanwhile, heat oil in a large skillet, and saute onion until translucent. Add in asparagus and red pepper, and cook under tender-crisp, sprinkling with salt along the way. Reduce heat to low; stir in cream and chicken, and heat to a simmer. Remove from heat and stir in cooked pasta, cheese, and basil; season to taste.
Lovina’s Amish Kitchen
Lovina Eitcher,
Old Order Amish
Cook, Wife &
Mother of Eight
To mark Lovina’s 52nd birthday on May 22, each of her children have contributed these short reflections in her honor. We’re sharing the first half of them today, and will share the second half next week.
Elizabeth, 28
There are many stories I could write about my mom. I’ll try to keep it short.
As a school-age child, I remember coming home from school eager to tell Mom all about my day. I’m sure at times those silly school stories were a bit boring for her, but she listened with open ears.
I remember helping Mom mow lawn. We would both use a self-propelled walk behind lawnmower. I enjoyed it! I have always liked mowing lawns, so I didn’t consider it “work.” I remember laughing, trying to keep up with Mom.
When age “sweet 16” came for me, I was overly excited. As most young Amish girls are at that age, I was filled with anticipation about the next step in life. After Tim would bring me home from Saturday evenings at the youth center, or from Sunday night singings (as we call it), wedding dinners, etc., I loved to tell Mom the stories of my evening.
Mom and I (and my siblings) have become best of friends over the years of us growing up. As we continue to move on with our lives, Mom is there with us each step of the way. She always has advice and love to give us, and I know she prays for us always.
Now, being the mother of four children, I realize the love, patience, and many prayers it takes to raise a child. My mom is a strong woman! She conquered many challenges that came her way—not just in motherhood, but in life itself. She is a true inspiration and a wonderful loving mom/grandma!
Mom, I hope you have a wonderful 52nd birthday! We love you!
Susan, 27
To this day I still ask Mom how to do some of the canning or sewing, and I’m married with children. Moms never stop being a mom. She was a good teacher if we listened. Some of us could be a little hard-headed…like me when she tried to teach me how to sew. Now I wish I would have listened. There are a lot of memories with Mom. One memory I have is when Mom sang with all of us girls. She taught us how to sing praise to God. I also recall waking up in the morning and hearing Mom singing in the kitchen while preparing breakfast. The house would smell like bacon. I would lay there just listening to Mom. I love to hear her sing.
Happy 52nd birthday, Mom. May God bless you. Love you.
Verena, 25
Monday, May 22 is my mom’s birthday, so I had all my siblings write a story they remember with her or just write something in honor of her birthday.
I have many, many stories I could write down, but I would never get done. I want to thank my mom for being my biggest support—she is always there for me and the rest of her children. Which I know we all appreciate very much!
I remember the days that Mom would put all five of us girls’ hair up for us. Having our long hair combed would sometimes make us say “oww” from a tangle. Dad would always sit there and ask us, “What kind of bird are you?” Mom would tug at our hair a little and we’d say, “Oww” (Owl). Ha!
Mom used to play kickball with us when we were all younger. Every time it was her turn to kick the ball, I would run in the house and go upstairs and hide because I worried she’d hurt herself. I always looked up to her, and I still do, so I never liked to see mom hurt or do anything that could get her hurt. The reason I worried so much about her playing kickball was because she did get a blood clot when the ball hit one of her veins one of the times.
Living on my own is a good experience. I see how often I depended on my mom, and I still do. When I dealt with my brain injury, it was very scary to me, and I remember how Mom and my sister Susan were my biggest comforters.
I thank God every day for giving me such a great mom. I asked her what she wanted to do for her birthday and she said she had no plans, but she deserves to have a good birthday and every birthday should be celebrated. The plans as of right now are to gather at Dad and Mom’s on Monday night to have a birthday supper for her.
Happy 52nd birthday to Mom! I love you.
Lovina’s Amish Kitchen is written by Lovina Eicher, Old Order Amish writer, cook, wife, and mother of eight. Her newest cookbook, Amish Family Recipes, is available wherever books are sold. Readers can write to Eicher at Lovina’s Amish Kitchen, PO Box 234, Sturgis, MI 49091 (please include a self-addressed stamped envelope for a reply); or email [email protected] and your message will be passed on to her to read. She does not personally respond to emails.
The Keystone was built with extra safety measures, yet it split open under run-of-the-mill pressure levels that less rigorously designed pipelines regularly withstand.
Independent investigators paint a very different picture from what oil company TC Energy has said publicly about events that led to the Keystone pipeline’s biggest oil spill ever.
Their report says, for instance, that the company dug up the section of pipe nearly a decade before it burst because it knew the pipe had warped. Yet it reburied the spot without fixing it.
The consultants’ 240-page report also sheds light on how the Keystone — with its beefed up safety features that won it a special federal permit to operate at high stress levels — burst open in Kansas last year while operating under much less pressure than it was designed for.
It ruptured, in fact, under run-of-the-mill pressure that normal, less rigorously designed oil pipelines regularly withstand. Why?
Investigators found gaps in TC Energy’s standards and controls for how it designs bends in the pipeline and how it judges whether to repair warped pipes.
“Other (similarly designed bends in the Keystone) may also be susceptible,” they wrote. That includes more than 100 pipe fittings installed in 2010 that “could have similar (welding) imperfections.”
The investigators also found lapses in construction oversight and pointed to ways the Canadian company underestimated key risks that paved the way for more than 500,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil to spill onto a hillside and into a stream in Washington County in north-central Kansas.
TC Energy knew for a decade that the section of pipeline that eventually ruptured had warped from perfectly round to an oval shape. Yet the company didn’t look into how that had happened or what risks accompanied the deformities.
In fact, workers dug up the buried pipe in 2013 to check how much it had warped.
TC Energy then considered fixing the section, but opted to rebury it as it was.
Investigators concluded that was just one of the problems that combined to lead to the pipeline failure.
TC Energy said Monday it has “robust practices and policies” and that the spot that ruptured was up to code.
“We are confident in our ability to continue to safely deliver the energy North Americans rely on,” the company said in an email. “We will examine how we can further our overall safety and integrity.”
TC Energy says that it is running extra checks on its system and that it ran inspection tools through 300 miles of pipe in Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.
It is looking into other spots in the pipeline that investigators said could suffer similar problems.
“Thus far, we have not found any similarities,” the company said. “We anticipate this work to carry into 2024.”
The Keystone burst at an elbow, a spot where the 36-inch-wide pipeline took a 30-degree turn.
TC Energy had bought the elbow with an adjoining section of pipe on either end, pre-assembled and pre-welded.
Investigators see evidence that the fusion was not complete in some areas.
But this wasn’t the only trouble brewing.
The bend was shipped to Washington County, Kansas, and installed in 2010.
That’s when installers warped it during construction, most likely by subjecting it to too much weight — perhaps while burying it and compacting the soil around it.
They squeezed the round pipe into an oval and created a wrinkle in one of its adjoining sections.
TC Energy discovered the oval shape in 2012, when it became difficult to run cleaning and inspection tools through the pipeline. The warped pipe was a barrier.
So crews dug up the bend to see exactly how warped it was.
Then, instead of fixing it, TC Energy had the inspection contractor modify its tools to pass through the warped spot more easily.
But the warped pipeline piled onto an already imperfect weld job.
And so did engineering decisions, the investigators concluded. The specific way the bend’s design transitions from thicker walls at the elbow to thinner walls for the adjoining pipes on either end increased the stress on the welding seams.
Investigators say the welding work, though flawed, complied with codes. But, they say, that wasn’t enough for this kind of higher-stress scenario.
Under all this stress, one of the weld seams on the inside of the elbow pipe started to crack.
The pipeline held — at first. But over the years, the cyclical rise and fall of pressures and temperatures in the Keystone battered the weld further.
Dec. 7, 2022, brought the final straw in the form of an ordinary procedure at relatively low pressure levels.
Half an hour before the Keystone burst open, TC Energy slowed the oil flow from Nebraska through Kansas to Oklahoma as it prepared to bypass a pump station in Hope, Kansas, to run an inspection tool through the pipeline.
It bypassed the station at 8:59 p.m. Just two minutes later, as the flow of oil increased again, the warped elbow’s long-failing weld finally gave way.
Just 90 feet upslope from Mill Creek, a crack split open across the top of the pipeline, stretching nearly one-quarter of its circumference.
The pressure in the pipeline at the time was well below what the Keystone is designed to handle, and well below even the thresholds set for less rigorously designed pipelines.
Extra sticky crude oil erupted into the night air. Some rocketed over a steep slope and into cropland on the other side, but most of it poured into Mill Creek, coating it in diluted bitumen.
During a months-long cleanup, at times with 800 workers on site, crews isolated and bypassed four miles of the sullied creek and drained more than two miles of the most heavily polluted stretch to excavate the oil.
Diluted bitumen, often called dilbit, poses trickier cleanup problems than other crude oils when it spills into water because it gradually sinks below the surface.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said last week that Mill Creek has now passed visualinspections for oil. Work to restore the habitat and dispose of contaminated soil is ongoing.
The EPA praised cleanup crews for reaching this point in just five months.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment oversees lab testing of earth and water at the site. It didn’t respond to questions about whether lab work from the creek bed back up the visual inspections.
TC Energy expects to continue working at the site into this fall.
Could it happen again?
The investigators recommend that TC Energy check other bends that it installed with similar designs in case they’re gradually failing, too.
They also urge the company to check for warping.
The fact that TC Energy didn’t discover until 2012 that an elbow had become warped during installation in 2010 “points to lapses in construction oversight and control of construction quality processes,” they wrote.
They also questioned TC Energy’s decision not to run inspection tools through the pipe immediately after it was installed, which would likely have revealed the warping early enough to make the contractor who installed it redo the work at no extra cost.
The report indicates TC Energy identified at least four other warped elbows in Nebraska, Kansas or Oklahoma in 2021 while working to increase the pipeline’s flow rates.
It also says this stretch of the Keystone includes 108 other pre-assembled elbows dating to 2010 that came from the same manufacturer as the one that cracked open. Those joints, it says, could have the same incomplete welding fusion.
TC Energy and the federal government’s pipeline regulatory agency got the investigators’ report last month, but the document was only made public last week in response to federal open records requests.
The Canadian company put out its own summary of the independent findings last month.
Its summary doesn’t mention lapses in oversight, risk assessment and company standards. Nor does it explain that the company knew since 2012 that this section of pipe was warped and that investigators concluded that played a key role in the pipeline eventually splitting open.
TC Energy wrote that “a unique set of circumstances” caused the oil spill in Kansas.
But it also announced that it would investigate other spots on the Keystone with characteristics similar to the spill site and review design and construction practices.
The independent report by RSI Pipeline Solutions was commissioned by TC Energy under orders from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
That agency released the report with redactions imposed by the oil company.
Federal law allows companies to block the public from reading details that would reveal trade secrets to competitors, put people in danger or violate their privacy. TC Energy cited those reasons for its redactions.
It blacked out, for example, some of the manufacturers and contractors involved in producing and installing the specific section of pipeline that split open more than a decade later.
It also blacked out details of projects since 2016 aimed at increasing the flow of oil running through portions of the Keystone system that are redacted but that appear to include Kansas.
The night of the rupture.
The report reveals other details not previously disclosed by TC Energy, including a more detailed timeline of events.
The Keystone ruptured at about 9 p.m. on Dec. 7.
It triggered a leak alarm at 9:01 p.m., and over the next six minutes, pressure in the pipeline fell by one-fourth.
Emergency shutdown procedures started at 9:07 p.m.
In total, it took 19 minutes from the initial alarm to cut off oil flow to the 96-mile stretch of pipeline that lies between Hope, Kansas, and Steele City, Nebraska.
The spot where tar sands oil was spewing into rural north-central Kansas lay between those two pump stations.
The Kansas News Service has filed records requests for various documents related to the pipeline, the spill and how TC Energy handles ruptures of this nature.
The federal government has so far produced two records.
One shows stress levels in the pipeline at the time of the incident. The second is the consultant’s investigative report.
The Keystone’s design
In 2007, while planning to build the Keystone system, TransCanada (now TC Energy) received permission from U.S. pipeline regulators to eventually operate most of it at higher stress levels than typically allowed.
But that permit came in exchange for dozens of requirements that would make the massive pipeline system extra safe.
The Keystone had to feature extra rigorous design, inspections and oversight, from the very creation of its myriad pieces to the date of their installation and beyond.
The oil company had to “more closely inspect and monitor the Keystone Pipeline over its operational life” than other pipelines that don’t qualify to operate at its extra high stress levels, the independent investigators note.
The Keystone stretches from Alberta, Canada, to the Texas coast, and over to Illinois. It can transport more than 27 million gallons of oil daily.
TransCanada laid the nearly 300 miles of 3-foot-wide pipeline (with walls about half an inch thick) that run from Steele City, Nebraska to Cushing, Oklahoma in 2010. The oil started flowing a few months later.
TransCanada, or TC Energy, never actually operated the leg at the higher stress levels allowed in its federal permit.
Despite that, and fulfilling the federal requirements for better-than-ever safeguards on this leg, it burst.
SOMEWHERE IN CENTRAL Kansas. (KWCH) – If you’re looking to buy a peaceful home in “an undisclosed location in Central Kansas,” the Rolling Hills Missile Silo might be the place for you. Built in the 1960s, the silo is a quiet getaway nearly 200 feet underground.
Used at the height of the Cold War, the silo served as a shelter to withstand a nuclear blast and any type of natural disaster. Today, the owner says it could be renovated into a home. He says if you’re looking for peace and quiet, it could be the place for you.
“It’s super peaceful out here. You don’t hear anything but the birds. There’s no traffic. You might hear a cow moo once in a while. You really can’t see any neighbors, you can see 15 miles down the valley,” Rolling Hills Missile Silo Owner Paul Novitzke said. “At night, the stars are spectacular. It’s quit a neat place to be. The coyotes, you hear them. It’s a neat place to be.”
The asking price for the Rolling Hills Missile Silo is $1.3 million. The property is the second Kansas missile silo Novitzke has purchased, fixed up and put on the market. You can find further information on the missile silo here: https://www.rollinghillsmissilesilo.com/.
Enjoy two new exhibits, dome movies and a new live science show
WICHITA, Kansas — For the third year, Exploration Place is participating in the state’s Sunflower Summer program, which means Kansas families can visit for free.
Kansas families with kids in pre-K through 12th grade can download the Sunflower Summer app to receive free All-Access Passes for one visit funded through the Kansas state Department of Education to keep learning going over the summer. Sunflower Summer starts May 26 and runs through August 13. All-Access Passes include all
permanent exhibits, live science shows, unlimited dome theater movies plus Exploration Place’s new summer exhibits, Circus! Science Under the Big Top and Pixel Palace.
Circus! Science Under the Big Top is open May 26 – Sept. 4. The exhibit showcases the science behind the spectacle, and visitors will learn the tricks of the sword swallower, uncover the illusion of the flea circus and discover the psychology of common circus sounds. Circus includes two harnessed attractions, which are first come, first served.
The High Wire is a 9-foot-tall tightrope, and Elastic Acrobatics gives guests a taste of life as a trapeze artist through bungee cords and a trampoline.
Pixel Palace, open May 26 – Oct. 22, featured the advanced technology of motion sensors, touch screens and projection displays to create an immersive game room experiences.
Highlights include:
• Creature Creator: Color pictures of unicorns, dragons and fairies and then scan your artwork. Our software transforms your static image into a character in a fantasy world.
• Everbright: This wall – a modernized upgrade to the classic Lite-Brite design – consists of hundreds of dials that allow you to explore the full spectrum of color.
• Quantum Space: This motion-reactive wall teaches users about kinetic energy as they use their gestures and movements as brushstrokes to create a one-of-a-kind interactive gallery.
Visitors can also enjoy The Magic of Science, a new live science show that showcases the wonder of science through seemingly impossible experiments (run time 20 – 30 minutes). Additionally, two films are showing on rotation in The Dome. Sea Monsters takes audiences back to the Late Cretaceous, when the sea was dominated by giant marine reptiles (run time 40 minutes). Kansas: An Immersive Dome Experience presents the beauty and
wonder of the Sunflower State from the unique perspective of a drone (run time 25 minutes)
