OT: HUMOR: Some general comments

Patrick, that is a wonderful story! 
 
Just out of (botanical) curiosity, did you key the thistle out?  Was it by chance the invasive "Scotch Thistle?" (Though what thistle might have to do with the world's finest whiskey beats me!)
 
My wife tells me there are patches of an enormous, tough thistle in North Dakota, and I have seen it also in Washington state--eight feet tall or so.
 
In Idaho, at least in the years I lived there, the big thistle was what we called "Bull Thistle," --but what that had to do with cattle breeding I can't imagine.  Pen a cow up with one of those and she'd break the fence down and run like hell.  (I'm retired clergy, so I have a degree on my wall that says I can use that word--'tain't no cuss word--it's a post-humus condition).
 
I, too, am wondering....if that black thistle tea is *that* good on tomatoes, what would it do for irises?  Make an SDB stand up and do the hootchi-kootchi?
 
Bill, your comments about Riverview--and the many others posted last night and this morning--were wonderful.
 
As to Tony wearing a back brace--been there, done that, 'tain't no fun!  I went eighteen months on a "ruptured" disk (Lumbar 4/5)--it felt like being whup across the beltline with a baseball bat.  The incredible relief I felt when that "Lamnectomy" was over and I came to in the Recovery Room back around 1965--my immediate reaction was to holler out loud--"It's GONE!"  The pain was gone.
 
The photos of Riverview's fields show absolutely not a single weed--perfectly straight rows marching off to the far side, variety after variety in glorious health.  I think, from what I saw in the photos, is that they reset every two, if not three, years instead of annually.
 
From my own brief experience as a commercial grower--back before the back problem began and the brace's stays making my ribs so sore I could hardly stand the blasted corset--I found out that annual resets make larger, much better looking shipping rhizomes--but a lot more expensive to ship too--because they were the "rutabega" type as Linda Mann fondly calls them.
 
One comment too, Bill, about the part of Oregon you mention.  On the inside (eastward) of the Cascades the land drops down to about 4000' foot elevations and stays that way all the way across the state except for a few mountains--until the driver gets past Burns.  Then the highway goes up a thousand feet or so, then comes down over the next fifty miles to the Snake River basin (Treasure Valley) at about 2000' elevations.  The Oregon hard nubbins came from the 4000' foot-type country--I'm assuming Prineville--whereas Riverside is at about 2300 to 2400 foot elevation--the Idaho "Banana Belt." 
 
It is fruit country where the topography allows good air drainage--there are grown some of the world's finest wine grapes, apples, pears (some), freestone peaches (a lot), Japanese plums and so on.  Irises--and the fruit--get "friz" now and again, but the better growers keep on (literally) "truckin'."
 
The flatter bottom lands are mostly in sugar beets, potatoes, onions, flower seeds, seed corn (more grown in Canyon County, ID, than in Iowa!) and such crops.  You'll note there are several commercial iris ventures including Sand Hollow, Riverview, Stanley's, Winslow's and others.
 
Neil Mogensen  been all over, but now in z 7, western NC mountains

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