How to Build a Tripod Pole Bean Fence

by Maggie Montgomery

Pole beans are fascinating. They are delicious and indeterminate and have long tentacles. Indeterminate plants produce beans all year, unlike bush beans that produce just one main crop. Pole beans also mature later than bush varieties and for that reason don’t always produce well in northern Minnesota. They need scaffolding to support their vines, which can grow to 10 feet or more! Nevertheless, they are fun to experiment with in the garden, and this year I built a pretty nifty scaffold for our Kentucky Wonders.

This scaffold consists of three tripods made of popple (aspen) saplings and two top poles. I tied each tripod as shown, and stood it up. Standing up a tripod correctly is a little tricky. The outer two poles have to form a Vee to hold the third pole in the crotch for stability. Don’t force the tripod into formation too hard, or you’ll break a pole and have to re-tie the whole thing with a new post (voice of experience). The idea is for the Vee to hold the third stick rather than letting any pole hang by the ropes.

An upright pole attached to the middle tripod provides a center post to tie to. I used scavenged twine from hay bales to create the net and tie the tripods together. Someone said a bean scaffold is a garden sculpture! It sure is kind of neat to look at, and should get better as the beans grow.

The photo above was taken on July 4th. The beans are just coming up. The sprinkler somehow edged its way into the picture too (maybe because it also is a tripod)!

Spread the Word Before the Word Spreads You!!!

by Doug MacRostie

The 5th Annual 91.7 KAXE Mississippi River Festival is going to be AWESOME this year - July 18th, at the KAXE Amphitheater, featuring MN bands. Everyone is getting SO excited, even the Grand Rapids Herald-Review contacted KAXE for info about the Mississippi River Festival for the cover of "Scene & Screen" in this Sunday's paper! So I did a quick write-up about the event & it seems only fair if I tell them the word to spread, I should tell you too...here you go, please help get the word out:

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Dear GR Herald-Review,

Hi! This is Doug from KAXE; I host Centerstage MN, our program featuring the talents of MN musicians Thursday nights at 6. I helped line-up the bands for the 5th Annual 91.7 KAXE Mississippi River Festival on July 18th under The Rotary Tent at KAXE's Amphitheater. It's going to be an exciting afternoon/evening of great music ranging from traditional folk to the new sound of rock.

This year we're featuring all Minnesota Musicians and things kick off at 1pm with Hans Blix and the Weapons Inspectors from Brainerd, a 6-piece acoustic string band playing a mix of bluegrass, old-time and Irish fiddle tunes.

Then we have the inventive roots music of The Hobo Nephews of Uncle Frank from Holyoke. Fronted by brothers Ian and Teague Alexy, The Hobo Nephews have established a foundation of roots, blues and folk music they build on and take in new exciting directions.

Next is the high energy trio Clawthroat, fronted by Joseph Downing from Grand Rapids. They play a new breed of folk-rock with catchy melodies, flying drums and music that will get you moving.

We rock out the evening with Sick of Sarah from Minneapolis. Their bass player Jamie Holm is from Clearbrook and these 5 ladies play an edgy form of pop-rock with beautiful melodies and harmonies, rockin' hooks, and a little bit of attitude.

Again, I am very excited to have so much amazing young Minnesota talent coming to the 5th Annual 91.7 KAXE Mississippi River Festival this year. It's great living in a state with such fine musical history that continues to this day; this is one more way for us to celebrate and perpetuate that tradition right on the north bank of the Mississippi River in downtown Grand Rapids.

To see these 4 excellent bands is just $25, students 19 and under are $15. KAXE members get a $10 discount, 12 and under are free. Tickets can be ordered online at www.KAXE.org, or by calling 218-326-1234. This community event is made possible with the generous support of Hawkinson Redi-Mix and U-Care. Food & Beverage will be provided by Kiwanis at the event.

Have a great day and thanks so much for covering this event, we REALLY appreciate it!!!
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So, anything you can do to help spread the word is greatly appreciated! If you happen to know of any newspapers in Northern MN, ask them to take this info and do a cover story too!!!

Rock on and SEE YOU THERE!!!!!!!

Good Luck Sweatshirt

On the first day of King fishing season on the Kenai river, Jane Matthies-Holtan landed this 148 lbs monster (or was it 48 lbs?). Keith, her husband who took the picture (and Heidi's older brother), talked with Scott about how his salmon fishing-guide season has been on the Morning Show, click here to listen! Looks like things are going pretty good.

Volunteer Run Library in Pequot Lakes!

Pequot lakes is a small town in Minnesota, population 1956. It's a little over 20 miles north of Brainerd. You'll notice it because of the bobber water tower right in the middle of town. Another thing you should know about Pequot Lakes is their cool library. It's a volunteer library, run by 30 volunteers. There are over 1800 card holders in the library, and they average 50 patrons a day!

They are in the process of change at the Pequot Lakes library! Soon they'll be moving to a new location and this weekend, to raise money for this move, they are holding a book sale.

It'll take place Friday July 3rd from 7:30-4pm and Sunday July 5th from 7:30am-3pm. They are located in the Pequot Lakes city hall at 4638 County Rd. 11. (It's the big white house with the pillars!)

Chuck Marohn on The Coleman-Franken Recount

On the air we’ve discussed the Coleman/Franken recount process on many occasions. Those conversations include frequent suggestions that we develop a different process for elections, adopting a new approach like an “instant runoff” or “top-two runoff” to determine the victor. My contention has been that neither of those approaches would have helped us avoid the current dilemma, which is that the election was too close for us to determine a winner.

Before Franken supporters start hurling curses my way, understand that I am not questioning the legitimacy of his victory. This is our system and, going through the process we have established, he won. The same goes for George Bush in Florida in 2000. In both instances, the elections were too close to call and recognizing that would have allowed us to pursue a clearer result.

What I am talking about is math. This may matter to me more because of my days in engineering school, where they drilled the concept of “significant digits” into my head. The idea of “significant digits” goes something like this:

A road lane is 12 feet wide. If we have two lanes, that makes the surface 24 feet wide. It is not, as our calculators like to tell us, 24.000 feet wide. In other words, our ability to measure in that instance is in feet, not the thousandths of a foot.

If we wanted to measure the distance between my home north of Brainerd and the KAXE studio in Grand Rapids, we might get out a map and count the miles as listed in red. That would be around 80 miles. We could also go to Google Maps, which says it is 81.6 miles. We could get a surveyor to run a loop between our locations, and if they were extremely meticulous they might be able to say that it is 81.57 miles. We could get a highly accurate laser measuring device and that might be able to tell us the distance is 81.57234 miles.

Our method of counting ballots is somewhere between Google Maps and our meticulous surveyor in terms of precision. That is actually quite impressive for a human endeavor involving literally hundreds of unpaid volunteers. And it is a good system. In nearly every election held, this method works very well. I would not change it today, largely because the extremely high cost to achieve laser-measuring precision would be unjustified in nearly every instance. Why would we spend billions on a laser measuring the distance to Grand Rapids when Google Maps will get us the precision we need at no cost?

Consider that the final official count was 1,212,206 for Coleman and 1,212,431 for Franken, a difference of 225 votes. That is a difference of 0.0093%. We all saw how people marked their ballots in crazy ways, ballots were (I believe innocently) misplaced, recounts varied from original counts, etc…. Understand that if we did a third count, we would get a different number. That number would be 1,212,xxx, with the xxx being where our precision fails us.

So what do we do about elections like Coleman/Franken 2008, where the result is too close to accurately measure? We simply rerun them. We agree ahead of time that our system has limitations, we have a reasonable degree of accuracy that we can have confidence in, we establish that degree of accuracy in a bipartisan way prior to the election and, if the election results wind up to be too close to call, the remedy will be a do-over.

With that approach, we would have saved ourselves seven months, millions of dollars and we would not have the acrimony we have today, where partisans bristle over the legitimacy of one outcome or another. To me, that is not only Minnesota Nice, it is Minnesota Smart.

Chuck Marohn is the President of The Community Growth Institute in Brainerd a regular commentator on KAXE's Morning Show

You Gotta Have Faith...Boblett

by Doug MacRostie

It's a pretty good deal, hosting a MN music program; not only do I have access to some excellent tunes, but the creators of the music come and join me in studio from time to time. This Thursday night at 6 on Centerstage MN I'll be joined in-studio by singer/songwriter Faith Boblett from Outing. Just out of High School, Faith has a beautiful voice and she'll bring her guitar along for some live music! She is in a continuous process of writing music, releasing new material to her fans by posting home-recorded videos of new songs on her YouTube channel. I'm really excited to have Faith on and hear her sing in person, and I'll try to get inside the head of an 18 year old songwriter.

I'll also be talking with Janiva Magness, a Blues and R&B singer with a rich and soulful voice that can lead an audience from deep sorrow to overwhelming joy. Originally from Detroit, she spent much of her youth in the Twin Cities area after both her parents commited suicide (there is a lot of tragedy in her past, you can read more about it here - she definitely has the "street-cred" to sing the blues...). While in MN, she got to spend some time in the great blues clubs of the era, which is when she hitchhicked across Minneapolis to see Otis Rush, an experience that opened her eyes to being a singer and performer. Janiva now has 7 full length albums to her credit and at the Blues Music Awards last month she recieved both Contemporary Blues Female Artist of the Year & B.B. King Entertainer of the Year awards. Janiva is also National Spokesperson for Casey Family Programs, promoting National Foster Care Month, and I'm honored to have her on the show.

I'll be playing some new music from Russ Brown, a singer/songwriter out of Minneapolis who just released his debut CD "The Fugitive Peace," and Marcy Playground's new CD "Leaving Wonderland...in a Fit of Rage," another excellent release from the New York/Minneapolis trio.

Last week my guest was Jason Edmonds of The Magic Castles, a highly creative and wonderfully unique psych-pop band out of Minneapolis. I had Jason back on the show to talk about their excellent new sophomore release "Dreams of Dreams of Dreams;" you can hear our conversation and some of the tunes by clicking here. It's like Jason said, "I've taken so much from the art community [in MN]...all my life I feel like I've been surrounded by awesome artist and I had a real desire to give back to that pool of art in a meaningful way and it's a real blessing to be able to do it w the Magic Castles."

Centerstage MN is Thursday evening's at 6, streaming live online at www.KAXE.org; or 91.7 Grand Rapids, 89.9 Brainerd and 105.3 Bemidji. All interviews are archived at www.KAXE.org and the show is rebroadcast Sunday mornings at 6.

Hibbing Community College's Theater Program at Risk!