Falling Behind

Posted on 2021-10-19 by Hecate

Every year before this one, fall has come like a kind of reprieve. All those tasks still undone turn moot. Weeds keel over and expire of their own accord. Way too late to plant more veggies; sigh of relief there. The rodent marauders have done pretty much all the visible damage they can manage, and I happily leave the overweening hosta to them.

But not this year.

Mixed signals

My memory tells me that by late September, we’re supposed to have had our first frost. Yes, I know memory could play trickster. But I think the plants, too, were all expecting the frost, and don’t quite know what to do with the extra time this year. They seem like the householder halfway out the door getting ready to lock up, suddenly realizing that the lights and the iron and the TV are still on, and the washing machine has somehow stuck between the wash and rinse cycles.

Muted colors this fall

Halfway out. Some of the hardwoods finally gave up on waiting for frost and decided to strut their fall colors regardless. The trees that wear yellow in autumn have decked themselves out spectacularly. Driving back-country roads on sunny days during the past week has felt like a slide through tunnels of incandescent butter.

The red and orange crowd, though, haven’t kept pace.

My poor old ailing granny sugar maple ordinarily ramps up from tangerine to cherry red in late September. This year she started dropping her leaves in October without the formality of fall colors at all, unless you count brown.

tiny bright red crabapples (looking like berries) on a dark gray-brown branch; indistinct green background

Crabapples, on the other hand, are putting on a gala fruit display this year!

The veggies have shown confusion, too. The late peas and beans continued producing into last week, but well before that the pods seemed resigned to losing their race against the shriveling, from ground on up, of their parent plants. Except for the snow pea plants, which apparently thought all along that their job was to grow as high as possible and skip the pods. Topping six feet, and a grand total of six pods.

They’re improvising…

…different responses to what they must all sense: the shrinking days. They just can’t figure out what to do when daylight and temperatures fail to correlate as usual. So they wing it.

four tiny red lettuce seedlings spaced to grow in a dark gray-brown bed; at the top of the photo, the edge of a chicken wire crop coop slghtly obscures a couple more lettuce seedlings and a few leaves of a small chard plant.

Can you spot the lettuce? (Hint: it’s red)

Me too. About 10 days ago I planted ten lettuce seedlings, just to see what happens, if we don’t get frost till November—not such a bizarre supposition, judging by our ten-day forecast. (Thus far, approximately nada has happened in the lettuce patch.)

So this year it’s a different kind of reprieve: extra time to do things that I’d ordinarily have given up on. I’m still not sure I want that kind of reprieve. I’d like to be able to look out the window and say to myself, Wait till April. After six straight months of nonstop gardening, haven’t I earned a rest?

Apparently not.

Mind you, I know full well that I bring this on myself. It was not my evil twin who decided it was a good idea to order all those pollinator-pleasing native-flower seeds. Those call for cold stratification in pots, outdoors in a screen-protected frame, which I have to build before the snow is under rather than on top of it.

Why did I opt not only to plant garlic again, but to add shallots to the mix as well? Both require late-fall planting.

section of garden plot showing just-planted elderberry sapling and a smaller shrub; in background an assortment of buckets in green, red, and lavender, and a large bag of topsoil on grass which extends into the background

One mission accomplished

And somebody—maybe that was my evil twin—ordered not only a stripling elderberry bush-to-be, but also an aronia. For several days both sat on my deck, waving importunately at me. There was space for the elderberry, so I finally got it into its home last week.

I looked up the aronia. It grows to 12 by 12 feet!

That had to be the evil twin’s doing.

Seeking the cure

Meanwhile, I’m feeling a bit like that ailing maple tree, wanting to drop it all without going through the standard steps. I make gardening schedules but don’t stick to them. Try to cram too much into an afternoon, and end up getting none of it done.

This has me wondering whether there’s a climate-change psychodiagnosis to match the Covid-19 pandemic one. You know, the discovery that many of us haven’t been exactly depressed or anxious or manic or catatonic for the past 19 months, but languishing.

How many of us manage to languish with grace and panache?
“Languish” by mengzi13 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For climate change, when the weather gets weirdly out of sync with the seasons, I propose a diagnosis of wilt. Or maybe wilt-not, as in do the weather what it wilt, I wilt not do what I ought.

Is there an antidote for the wilt-nots? Thus far, I’ve found only one. It consists in tricking myself. In mid-afternoon (which seems to arrive around lunchtime these days), I put on the gardening boots just to take a tiny stroll outside. Once I get out there, the garden does its magic.

Possibilities

Chaotic and disorderly magic, perhaps. I go outside with no fixed purpose. Picking the last three beans can segué into transplanting those lettuce seedlings, which can incite some harvesting of lemongrass or sage, followed by weeding the clover out of the lowbush blueberry patch.

That trick got me out to put that elderberry into its new digs last week, just before heading out of town for a two-day break in my regimen of procrastination.

Maybe this week I’ll manage to trick myself into ripping out the useless landscaping cloth (hosting a bumper crop of weeds), in order to relocate the Japanese forest grass hakonechloa. And that will naturally transition to spreading a lot of the mulch that’s encumbered the driveway for two months.

Oops. Three months.

Michelle Obama, in olive green and on the right, and an unidentified child in blue jacket and dark watch cap on the left; both kneeling in front of a wood-edged garden bed with M.O. demonstrating planting a lettuce seedling; indistinct background with mostly bare trees and bushes and a partly sunny blue sky; yellowish green tinge of a bush in the background suggests early spring.

“White House Kitchen Garden Planting (NHQ201604050007)” by NASA HQ PHOTO 
licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

With luck I can keep busy enough to stop fretting about when I’ll be able to get a Moderna booster for my J&J vaccine. Or whether we’ll see yet another pandemic spike in the winter.  And when or even whether the global supply chain will mend itself. With even more luck, Mitch McConnell will take to poring over seed catalogs (let’s all send him one!) and realize he has a lot in common with Michelle Obama.

That’s the lovely thing about gardens. Hope springs eternal, if you just get down and dirty.

Your turn:

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the “newsletter” if you want notices of future posts. And whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. (If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment appears after their posts.) I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Here are a few questions to get you started, but go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

  1. Is fall lasting longer in your garden this year? If so, are you doing anything more, or anything differently, compared to “normal” years?
  2. If you’re one of the many millions who turned to or intensified your gardening during the pandemic, do you think you’ll keep at it when (I won’t say if) the plague has receded? How do you think you’ll adjust your efforts once the outside world’s distractions aren’t life-threatening?
  3. What topics would you like to see me tackle while we’re hunkered down for winter in the coming months?

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment using that address, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you don’t need to include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

For extra fun: can you identify the fruits pictured below?

Mystery fruit A

Mystery fruit B

Mystery fruit C

Give it a try; you can put your answer/s into a reply below. You can look for the answers (along with photo credits) in the next blog post. If you want to provide a link to a source for your answer, you can do so, but you should know that in order to prevent spamming by nasties, the blog is set up to allow only one link per reply.

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The Department of You Think You’ve Got Problems

Posted on 2021-09-13 by Hecate

Every once in a while, I learn something that puts my problems into perspective.

This is not to say that I’ve bought into my mother’s pocket wisdom, based largely on her impoverished childhood. Whenever one of us kids was inclined to complain about some minor irritant—somebody picking on you at school, a smashed bike we couldn’t afford to replace, a parental prohibition on having any fun with friends on Good Friday—her invariable response, unless actual blood was spurting, was: “no matter how bad off you are, there’s always someone worse.” (I know that’s not grammatical, but that’s what she said.)

Don’t get me wrong; I am well aware that there are degrees of bad. There’s too much rain in one week, for example, and there’s the Greenland ice cap melting. There’s a very dry July, and there’s the Dixie fire and then the Caldor fire.

Best intentions

I’d been planning on treating you to a blog post about all the little things that were actually going right in my garden. Maybe I’ll slip in a few of those a bit further along here. But I have to admit I have been getting the tiniest bit grumpy because not everything has gone right.

My chickenwire crop coops (try saying that ten times in a row, fast!) have kept out the bunnies, but not the cabbage white butterflies. Twice now, within a week, I’ve found one of those fluttering inside one of the coops, trying to get out. Either they’re smart enough to figure out how to get in but too dumb to find an exit, or they’re hatching inside. In any case, I released them and now watch anxiously for signs of caterpillar devastation on my Pink Beauty radishes. None appeared, but something attacked the roots of the arugula in the same coop. Sayonara, last night’s salad.

And I delayed just a little too long before harvesting my beauteous basil. Five flourishing bushes of the stuff. When I finally went out with my knife, I found them all full of downy mildew. So, down the oubliette with those.

Bean plants in foreground, growing upwards supported by strings stretched horizontally attached to vertical wooden stakes. Right hand stakes for 3 rows of beans are visible. In background, other plants, chickenwire crop coops visible, with some lawn off to the right and trees in background, revealing a small splotch of blue sky.

When bush beans go pole…

There can even be too much of a good thing, like the bush beans that weren’t. Bush, that is. I thought maybe I misread the package, but I just dug it out again.  There’s the name on the label: Maxibel Haricot Vert Bush Bean. Two weeks ago, I had to sacrifice a half dozen of my 5-foot plant stakes to improvise a support system for bushies that seem to think they’re pole beans.

But at least they have started to form the skinny little haricots.

That, however, is not the perspective I got.

Detour

For that, I take you halfway round the globe and invoke the experience of my friend R.

R has lived in Bali for many years now. I’ve visited that amazing island a couple of times, and let me tell you, when people talk about tropical paradises, they are not exaggerating. Things grow fast, in profusion, with wild abandon. Everywhere. Rain is regular, and so is sunshine. Okay, maybe it’s kind of hot and humid, but hey, tomatoes and eggplants and peppers love that.

Thick Balinese jungly growth, with vines climbing up tall trees, and some large-leafed plants in foreground that look like vastly overgrown versions of house plants; dominant color is green in shades ranging from bright medium to shadowy dark green

“House” plants in original habitat

So do all sorts of plants that we here in the “temperate” (speaking of averages) northeastern US consider houseplants. But oh my, outdoors in Bali, they grow so big they’d never fit in your house. Unless you are blessed with cathedral ceilings and seven thousand square feet of unencumbered floor space.

R recently consulted me about what plants might be suitable for sprucing up his indoor open-air patio (aka living room and dining room). He thought Monstera deliciosa would be easy (and Monstera can sure live up to its name in Bali!). But he leaned towards some kind of Heliconia. We went back and forth a bit, and I suggested that he might want a combination that would fill out more lushly than the more narrowly vertical Heliconia.

Paradise, but for…

He replied that it’s not a good idea to “let things get too jungly,” citing experience.

There used to be two or three big vines of [a] climbing plant…. [I]t had morphed into huge, tree-like vines that climbed to the ceiling in two locations, some very big leaves, actually somewhat attractive.

Sounded pretty cool to me, all right, but he continued:

The problems is that when things get too jungly here, one can find that one has created a wonderful habitat for snakes.

His next sentence mentioned cobras and kraits.

He was not just dramatizing the issue. I did some research.

Bright green viper coiled on top of a branch; branch is bare, brown, and about twice the thickness of the viper's body. Viper's tail has a strip of red; the top of the head is a slightly deeper green than the body, which verges on chartreuse

White-lipped Island Pit Viper, Trimeresurus insularis
by Bernard Dupont
licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Bali is home to six species of poisonous land snakes: the spitting cobra, the king cobra, the blue krait, the banded krait, the Asian coral snake, and the island pit viper (which hangs out in trees and shrubs during the day). For a couple of these, no anti-venom is available. You might survive a bite from one of those, if they get you onto a ventilator fast enough, and keep you on it for a week.

Not that R had seen any of these interlopers in his living space yet, but he sure got me thinking. Especially after I ran across the photo of the seventh and highly venomous reptile, the banded sea krait. Normally they stay in the water, but they do come on land to lay their eggs. This particular specimen had its portrait taken after being found in a villa in the lovely little seaside town of Sanur.

Near where R happens to live.

Why invite trouble? Plant the Heliconia!

A patch of Heliconia pendula, with straight upright stems and large leaves somewhat like banana leaves, but flopped over, and strings of yellow-tipped red bracts hanging below the leaves, nearly to the ground

Heliconia pendula, by wallygrom
licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Next time I’m out shaking my head over the cabbage whites’ damage or muttering unprintables as I struggle to establish yet another tier of support for those boisterous beans, I’ll hear my mother’s voice saying, “no matter how bad off you are…”

Good news?

So, the good news is, I can reach in to harvest those haricots without worrying that my hand will come out with a krait attached to my wrist. This, believe me, is a great comfort. So much so that I barely notice the large spiders staring warily at me from atop the bean leaves.

Other things are going fairly well too. My main attention in recent weeks has been on the veggie garden. I was late putting much into it this summer, so most of the raised beds stayed pretty bare until late July. But I’m here to tell you: there’s a lot you can put into the ground in late July or early August, and still get a respectable crop.

Two French breakfast radishes and a handful's worth of thin haricot green beans, on either side of a 12-inch wooden ruler, showing that the beans are about 6 inches long and the radishes about two inches. The radishes are vaguely cylindrical in shape, with deep pink tops (here, inverted to bottom of the picture) and a small strip of white towards the root end.The aforementioned beans look likely to overwhelm me with their output. The arugula (the ones the mysterious root marauder hasn’t gotten to) and the lettuce are chugging along nicely, and bid fair to overwhelm me alongside the beans. The peas (peas!!! in September!!!) have started flowering and I cherish hopes of getting a few. Not too many, because: the beans. The radishes have yielded numerous pink globes and a few French breakfast pink-and-whites. (Never mind that half of them look more like a dog’s dinner; they taste just fine.)

Shiso has been spicing up my salads, and the cilantro is looking close to ready. The chard is rampant. And I just put some kale starts in a couple weeks ago; I’ll report back about those. Not sure yet whether I’ll get much out of the carrots, but the green tops sure look pretty. Thinking I should plant a lot of them as borders for the flowerbeds next spring.

Speaking of which, my sister was here for about 10 days and heroically weeded those beds, thus leaving me with more time for fussing over the veggies. Meanwhile her dog, by snuffling eagerly around the burrow apparently taken over by a wascally wabbit from Tamerlane-the-woodchuck, struck such terror into its resident that I have seen nary a rodent since. He is aptly named: Boo.

Your turn:

If you haven’t already done so, remember to sign up for the “newsletter” if you want notices of future posts. And whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. (If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment will appear after their posts.) I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Here are a few questions to get you started, but go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

  1. Did you do any late-season planting this year, and/or do you usually do so? If veggies, which ones do best for you? If flowers, please let us all know what manages to flower before the frosts hit!
  2. Or, if you’re already packing your garden in for the year, what are you looking forward to, to replace your work out in the garden?
  3. What’s the worst garden disaster you’ve experienced this year, and on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being meh, and 10 being a banded sea krait), how bad would you say it was?

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment using that address, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you don’t need to include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

Thanks for reading! (And P.S.: that’s a monarch butterfly’s caterpillar pictured at the top of the page, taking a rest from chomping its way through my one surviving Asclepias tuberosa.)

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To Do Or Not To Do

Posted on 2021-07-30 by Hecate

Inconstancy

In case you’re wondering why I call this blog “Inconstant Gardener,” let me give you an example.

A screenshot of the top part of Charlie Nardozzi's Late July Newsletter, with a title panel in white font (on green background) reading "Gardening with Charlie Nardozzi" and an inset headshot of Charlie in blue shirt and wearing a panama-style hat. List of subjects under the Late July Newsletter line includes Tough Russian Sage, Plum Crazy, Bountiful Basil and Controlling Tomato Hornworms. Under that list is the top of a photo of a cucumber handing from its vine, surrounded by backlit leaves.

Gardening with Charlie Nardozzi

Last October, as I was starting up this blog, I searched for good blogs or newsletters on gardening. You know, so I would have some models, and some sense of what wasn’t being covered in gardening blogs. One of the newsletters I subscribed to was Charlie Nardozzi’s (you can sign up at https://www.gardeningwithcharlie.com), guaranteed to plop into my emailbox once every ten days, labeled by month and segment. “Charlie’s Early February Newsletter,” “Charlie’s Mid February Newsletter,” and so on.

And on and on. It’s like when I subscribed to the daily and Sunday New York Times, on paper. I felt obliged to read from the first-page headlines right on to the final section (although I did allow myself to skip Sports). The pile of not-yet-completely-read papers rose higher and higher, and then I had to start a second pile, and… yeah, you can imagine.

Well, I did okay with the fall and winter issues of Charlie’s Newsletters. The fall ones mostly talked about harvest and cleanup. Since my raised beds only got raised in October, I had no harvest to worry about. I reveled in Charlie’s wisdom on cleanup—mostly: leave it lie!—and immediately put it into practice by doing nothing.

So far, so good

Then during the winter, as the snow piled up and the winds howled, I got to read the previews of coming attractions. How-to’s on growing catmint, for example, or African violets (as if!). Or even, inventorying seeds left over from the previous year—an easy one for me: all of them!—and making a list of things to be done in the garden come spring.

Also an easy one. I excel at list-making. If you doubt that, I could show you the entire box of index cards containing to-do items, carefully categorized. House, garden, errands, calls, write, read, social media, fix, cook, tidy, office, and a fair number more. “Done” has its own category, just so I can reassure myself that I do occasionally get something done.

There are three cards in it.

The Hurrier I Go…

Closeup of card file box containing dividers labeled with garden categories: fruit & veg, perennials-sun, perennials-shade, annuals, shrubs, trees, plans/design, and three other dividers shaded so their headings are indecipherable; various colors of index cards can be seen ehind each divider.

Gardening with Inconstant Gardener

“Garden” got so big it now has its very own box, subcategorized to the nth degree.

And there’s Charlie’s newsletter, giving me plenty to put on the list. So much, in fact, that when spring sprang on us early this year and then we roared into summer, I fell a bit behind.

How behind? Let me put it this way. Charlie’s Late July Newsletter recently arrived. I’m still working on Late March. Now when they arrive, I file them in the Blogs/ Inconstant Gardener/ Materials folder and pray for December.

It’s not as though I haven’t been working out there. I have at latest count seven very full yard-waste bags of uprooted dandelions, plantains, Johnny jump-ups, crabgrass, and other assorted weeds whose names I still don’t know. (Because I’ve had no time to check them against the encyclopedic Weeds of North America.)

If you roamed my yard, you’d find two huge tarp-wrapped bundles stashed in odd spots. These are full of branches pruned (weeks ago!) from dogwoods, burning bush, Canadian hemlock, kolkwitzia, witch hazel that were contending too obstreperously with their neighbors.

And there’s garlic in one raised bed ready to harvest, which I planted in a big rush last November praying it wasn’t too late; and onions I planted in a big rush in April because it would be too late by the very next day.

Raised bed, seen longitudinally, with garlic plants ready for harvest in foreground, most of their leaves having turned brown. Behind them are basil and other plants flourishing (or not). To the left of the bed is a gravel path; in front, behind, and to the side of the bed is an area covered with straw mulch. On the right side of the photo is the top of a stone wall with a couple of herbs in pots on it, and beyond the wall, a stretch of green lawn.

Garlic, as good as at least ten mothers!

…The Behinder I Get

What else is in the raised beds? Welllll, there’s the rub. In late May I finally gave up on my seeds and got some herb and lettuce starts on sale at the garden store. Then about three weeks later when those looked about to give up the ghost if I didn’t do something, I bunged them in near the garlic and the onions.

But off the hook I am not.

Woman in white tank top and black running rights squatting in middle of a sandy/grassy path tying very long shoelaces on her right shoe.

Getting them jussssstttt right!
“Sporty woman tying shoelace on running shoes before practice” by wuestenigel, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Now, I know the importance of planning. You know, so I don’t do things in such a slapdash way that I end up not tying my shoelaces before beginning the race, so to speak.

I concentrate very hard on tying the shoelaces. The advantage: my shoes never fall off mid-stride. The disadvantage: the race is usually over before my shoelaces are finally tied properly.

A Woman, A Plan B

This late in the summer, I knew the time for planting early crops in the space left in those raised beds was long gone. But I took hope from the fact that I had plenty of room for late summer/ fall crops. As I ruminated over plans for those crops (inventorying seeds: all of them!), I stumbled upon a gorgeous multi-colored poster offered by Hudson Valley Seed Company. Late Season Planting Guide!

Colorful "Late Season Planting Guide" poster in graphic form with numbers running in countdown along top: 16, 14, 12, etc... to first frost, followed by 2 and 4 after first frost; to the left, sections are marked out for direct sowing outdoors or for starting in pots. Various vegetables and herbs (indicated with small pictures and names written in script) are represented in colored bars in the body of the graph, placed according to suitable planting times; areas in graph without bars are vividly illustrated with pictures of wildlife and fall tasks.

Late season planting guide for the planter who’s running late

Aha, thought I! This will guide me through the planning and planting. From what I could see of it in the online catalog, it looked so inviting. It depicted many delectables I could plant 16, 14, 12, 10 etc. days before first frost. Definitely a must-have. So I ordered it, well ahead of time: July 3. Even if it took a week to arrive, there was still plenty of lead time for the planting.

Are you already rolling on the floor laughing? Yes, it arrived, and only upon unscrolling it and reading the small print did I realize that those numbers up on top were not for days before first frost.

They were for weeks.

Plan C

Farewell, hopes of parsnips, winter or summer squash, cucumbers. No time for you!

This had its advantages: more room for the beans, beets, carrots, Asian greens, lettuce, calendula. Even peas! And the squash and cucumber seeds stay viable for a couple years at least.

rounded basket containing ziploc bags with dates showing inside each (week of July 11, week of July 18, etc.); in front of the bags is a green index card with vegetables listed after each "week of" date from July 11 through Aug. 22

Plan C

Disadvantage: RIP parsnips. They’re good for only one year, the finicky snips.

Now in acceleration mode, I divided all the seeds that still qualified for a try. They went into separate ziploc bags labeled “week of July 11,” “week of July 18,” “week of July 25,” etc. All the way to the week of Sept. 28, the likely zero hour (as in Zero Centigrade).

Then I decanted all the seeds in the first bag into separate little lidded plastic cups. (If you’re planting in a hurry, the last thing you need is to have all the seeds spill out of the paper envelope when you’re trying to fish out just one.) Stuck a little masking tape label on each lid, loaded them all into an aluminum pan, and sashayed out to the garden to get to work.

Seeds sorted into small individual plastic containers, labeled with a strip of masking tape across the lid of each: names (e.g., cylindra beet, summer savory, maxibel haricot), depth and spacing for planting, and where important, height of mature plant.

Ummmm, Plan D?

Whereupon I quickly realized that if I planted seeds for all the “Week of July 11” veggies, no room would remain for the Week of July 18, let alone the 25th. As for August, fuhgddaboutit.

Well, maybe not entirely. The garlic has to come out now, and the onions won’t be far behind, so there may be room for some kale and chard if I get the seedlings started indoors, which I am (according to the planting guide) supposed to do this week. Or was it last week?

Meanwhile, back at the wrench…

Keep in mind, we’re only talking about two 4’X8’ raised beds. A mere 64 square feet. My lot as a whole is a third of an acre, all burgeoning with weeds that did not fail to notice (unlike many of the recently planted perennials and shrubs) that we have been getting lots and lots of rain.

Photo taken from above, with small lilac bush on left, a few reddish-green leaves from an hibiscus plant to the right, and many many large vigorous weeds filling up the bed between them.

Weeds R Us

How much rain? One day, two and a half inches came down. For comparison’s sake: we got about two and a half inches of rain in all of June. In July, we got 11.92 inches.

Weed heaven.

Hence, on days when it hasn’t rained, I’ve been spending most of my time weeding and mulching like crazy. The veggies in the raised beds somehow have to be squeezed in between.

Pieces of a "crop coop" (chcken wire on frames of metal rods) still to be assembled, set on their sides against a table and still wrapped in plastic, with an instruction sheet protruding from below. All rest on a deck with brown wood-grain slats; only the black metal legs of the table are visible behind the pieces.

Assembly required. Natch!

And meanwhile, assembly work awaits me in the garage. The rotating compost bin that arrived (in pieces, natch) in June still sits patiently—no, let me amend that. It lurks in the garage, tapping its figurative feet and glowering balefully every time I venture in looking for an empty pot or a trowel or a trug for weeds.

Lately, though, that carton isn’t causing me quite so much guilt because three boxes containing Chicken Wire Crop Coops (also in pieces, natch) are now keeping it company. These, once put together, will protect my tender baby veggie plants from Tamerlane The Woodchuck and Thumper The Wascally Wabbit.

No doubt all of these would have been assembled much sooner if I had my work bench set up in the garage. That has sat (in pieces, natch) in the basement… for the past 8 years.

All Depends on Point of View

Photo shows a Greek handled vase depicting Hercules trying to subdue the Hydra, a monster growing more heads as each is cut off. Hydra in this case has 9 snake heads. Vase has light ochre background with decorations in black and dark ochre. In addition to Hercules and the hydra, the vase has a strip of stylized designs running along the bottom and the top of the vase. The handles are black, with petals of black radiating out from where they join the body of the vase.

“Heracles’ 2nd Labor: The Lernaean Hydra I”
by Egisto Sani
licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

How to do all that needs doing, when you’re only one person and every task done sprouts hydra heads?

Clearly, the obvious solutions will never happen. I will not become two, three, many persons (and I suspect if I did, the extras would set yet more goals and make things even worse). I will not change my basic approach to life and work. And I certainly will not suddenly become younger, more energetic, or able to leap tall buildings with a single bound (not a useful garden skill anyway).

So instead of tormenting myself, I’m going to have to change the way I look at the situation.

Here’s the way I’ve started thinking about the garden. I do this work because I love it. Not necessarily because I adore the results. Sure, I get a thrill out of the bursts of flowers in early spring, and the blast of hibiscus blooms in August. I enjoy harvesting my very own lettuce and chard and basil, and sharing them when they invariably exceed my capacity to use them up. If no rewards ever popped up, I might quit. But when I stop to think seriously about why I spend so much time, sweat, and money on the garden, two reasons come to the fore.

Philosopher in the Garden: 1

Closeup photo, from above, of bright yellow yarrow flowers with a bee, legs bright yellow with pollen, at the center. Some indistinct greenery shows in background.

Focus

First, every task I perform in the garden rewards me with a sense of focus while I am doing it.

I may start out removing the weeds to give the shrubs and flowers and veggies room to grow. But a very few minutes into the work, my attention rivets on the square inch or square foot that weed occupies. I notice the differences between the crabgrass roots’ expansive shallow clutch and the dandelions’ deep-plunging taproot. The way some weeds fight to maintain their hold while others surrender with deceptive ease (sheer trickery: they always come back so quickly).

Every coneflower or peony or blueberry bush or lettuce seed I plant represents a hope for future bounty. But while I’m placing them in the right spot at the right depth with the right nutrients added, my world consists of the earthworms squirming away from the site, the ants busy at their own focused tasks, the mama spider hurrying off with egg case bundled close, the texture of the soil, the way last year’s mulch is melting into earth, the match between the height of plant in pot and the depth I dig.

No matter how stressed I am when I step out to work in the garden, within five minutes this focus brings me calm and peace.

Philosopher in the Garden: 2

Second, the combination of happenstance and experiment serves up an ever-changing dose of nature’s reality, keeping me humble while poised on my toes.

Drought or too much rain or a hailstorm at the wrong time or a new marauder, fungal or four-footed or fluttering, may decimate the fruits of my efforts. I can experiment with ways to reduce the random disasters, like those crop coops or a better juxtaposition of plants or a liberal sprinkle of powdered cayenne.

A tiger swallowtail butterfly (yellow and black striped wings edged with bars of black outlining one strip of dark blue squares and one of orange-yellow squares, with a black "tail" at back of wings; body is light yellow with black stripes) perched on top of a bright magenta frond of butterfly-bush flowers. A bumblebee is busy at work on a frond above the butterfly's. Background is gray cement at bottom, white clapboard at top.

Astonished by joy

But ultimately, I cannot exercise total control.

On any given day I may be outraged at the chomps taken out of the heuchera or the lacework created out of what used to be a hibiscus leaf. But I may also stumble with delight upon the tiger swallowtail butterfly judiciously sampling every magenta frond of the butterfly bush, or the toad so blended into setting that I spot her only when she shifts position.

I could never in a million years have planned those.

Is There a Big Picture?

Joy is not on the to-do list. And yet, why else do we do so much that we do, if we aren’t hoping that some form of happiness will come from it?  (Not all of it. A stack of clean dishes does not thrill me, even though a stack of dirty ones makes my teeth hurt. Relief of pain is a good goal too!)

In this frazzled, crazy, productivity-is-all, doing-more-is-doing-better culture, it does make sense for me to pull back from the worm’s eye view of the to-do list and soar up to get the eagle’s eye view. Why do I need to do all these things, and why now? Do I actually need to do them, and even if so, are they really so urgent?

Sometimes life intrudes in ways that remind me of the importance of getting the eagle’s perspective more often. A very dear friend of mine died suddenly and unexpectedly just a week ago. I hadn’t talked with her in a while, and for much of the previous week I kept making mental notes to call her. But I put it off because there were urgent (so I thought) things on the to-do list. So I planted beans instead of making that phone call.

Believe me, the next time I think of calling a friend, I will do it right away. Beans I can get at the supermarket. Friends are not replaceable.

Your turn:

If you haven’t already done so, remember to sign up for the “newsletter” if you want notices of future posts. And whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. (If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment will appear after their posts.) I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Here are a few questions to get you started, but go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

  1. Do you ever manage to finish everything on your to-do list? If so, how do you do that??? If not, does it bother you, are you trying various approaches to deal with it, or do you figure it’s just the way things are?
  2. Is there any particular garden task that you feel you’re always behind on? Ahead on?
  3. If there’s a friend you’ve been thinking of calling, and you’ve been putting it off, make the call now! Then come back and tell us about it if you still have the time.

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment using that address, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you don’t need to include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

Thanks for reading!

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Home Sweet Home

Posted on 2021-07-10 by Hecate

Inconstant barbarian

I destroyed somebody’s home about a week back.

Actually, I probably do that a lot without even noticing it, and when I do realize that’s what I’m doing, I stop myself.

Like the day before the homewrecking, while I was watering the dwarf Norway spruce (“needs frequent watering unless you’ve been getting ample rain,” said the tag—or something to that effect). I’d already deliberately jet-hosed off the spider-mite webs lurking between branch tips. Those mites do a ton of damage to the poor little vertically challenged spruce. Then I spotted an expansive open-work web stretching the two feet between the spruce and its viburnum neighbor.

Still in cleaning mode, I was about to hose that away too, but hesitated.

Why spray it away? It’s not in my way. It may be in the flyway, for flies and mosquitoes and gnats and such. But—not that I mean to be judgmental—who needs them?

So I desisted, and received my reward. I spotted what I took at first for a curled-up brownish leaf lodged at the web-to-spruce intersection. It hung on to the branch in most un-leafy bouncy fashion.

I looked more closely, and spied a small tank of a spider, its huge boxy body supported by the kind of legs a Star Wars monster might stomp with. When I say huge, I’m thinking like a fly caught in web as Spidey hustles forth like Godzilla incarnate. Half an inch across at least, and all deadly menace. I would show you closeup photos, but you would not thank me if they gave you nightmares. Look here if you dare.

Full of surprises

A strange mess of slender gray/brown twigs, with some green coneflower leaves over and (a couple) under them, with the rim of a black plastic pot showing in lower right corner

The mysterious mess of sticks

My big surprise, though, was walking out onto my deck the fateful evening and finding, as I glanced at the four pots of coneflowers stashed in the rail planter awaiting their permanent homes, a strange intrusion. Masses of small sticks protruded that weren’t there in the morning.

Now wotthehell! I muttered. Weird things have been happening on that deck lately:

The gust that yanked the umbrella out of its stand and the surrounding table and launched it on an arc all the way to the garden’s edge. I didn’t see this happen, but deduced the arc from the fact that nothing in the straight line from launch point to landing got destroyed.

Or those flourishing Asclepias tuberosa (milkweed if we’re not talking fancy), all four of them set down tidy in their pots for the night atop a milk crate after bedtime watering. When I came out the next morning, I found skeletal remains: lost and half-gone leaves, and a few stalks also halfway gone. Ain’t no caterpillar did that!

Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly milkweed) in bloom, with clusters of bright orange flowers atop stems with foliage, alternating long thin pointed green leaves, against a background of brown mulch and gray cinderblocks

What the milkweed should look like

Four pots of Asclepias tuberosa after something munched them down by half; pots are light green plastic with black rims, a couple of them showing dark green script reading "Native plants." Pots are in a black plastic plant tray atop a glass table top, and parts of two lemongrass plants in smaller black pots can be seen nestled in two corners of the tray,

The milkweed, after the marauder got to them

But who else would have munched off most of the leaves and left half-bare stalks standing? Have I perhaps acquired a rabbit who toughly scoffs at milkweed toxins but dines daintily enough for Emily Post?

An investigation

So yes, like any gardener, I’m used to odd happenings. But these sticks ’midst the coneflowers were an anomaly of anomalies. They couldn’t have blown there at random. The coneflowers’ leaves massed so thickly they’d even made it hard for me to ensure that water got from the hose wand into their pots.

Bird's nest viewed from above, constructed of sticks and moss as described in accompanying text, with a few blurred green leaves showing at the four corners of the photo

Mystery solved

As I moved closer, I realized the sticks formed an interwoven structure. It wasn’t until I looked directly down at the plants from above that I realized the truth. Somebody of the avian persuasion had, in the course of one day, built a nest lodged tightly among the stalks and leaves. The stick edifice splayed out at the bottom, extending the underpinnings out among all four of the pots’ tops and the coneflowers’ understory. No wind would blow this nest away, unless the coneflowers, pots and all, took flight with it.

Closer to the center, the nest refined into fine intertwinings. At the very center, for the ultimate homey touch, the sticks spun into a bird-sized cup, carpeted with a soft, greeny-gold moss.

Moral calculus

Are you thinking, awwww, how sweet?

Not I. I faced a moral dilemma. To wit: If I leave the nest there, the coneflowers are goners. They need their homes in the ground soon. They might have a fighting chance if I keep watering them, but how could I spray cold water daily over a broody bird and her babies?

It came down to a choice between the bird’s nest, or the plants’ survival. I’d like to say I thought long and carefully, but I made the calculations fast. No eggs in the nest. It might have been built on spec—you know, Joe Robin builds a love nest to lure his maybe-lady to. But this year seems choc-a-bloc with these bird guys hopping about puffing their red chests out like there’s some MAGA rally in my yard. Maybe he has so much competition that he’ll never get lucky.

However, if he does get lucky, there might be eggs here soon.

Hell, if he can build a nest in a day, he can do it again. I’m proud to say that sticks are a dime a dozen (free, in fact) all over my yard. And there’s lots of moss handy too.

The coneflowers, on the other hand: seriously at risk.

Reader, I removed the sticks. And then I moved the coneflowers to a less bird-luring location.

A moral calculus?

An Eastern bluebird nest made of grasses interwound and containing three pale dusty-blue eggs, each about thumb size, as shown by the thumb on top of the nest at bottom of the photo

This would have stopped me cold!
“Eastern Bluebird nest” by SeabrookeLeckie.com
licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I could justify myself by noting that if even one teensy egg had sat in that cushy nest, I wouldn’t have hesitated a nanosecond. The nest would still be there. I’d be praying anxiously for coneflower survival, while mama bird shrieked every time I stepped on deck.

Or if I had known it for a bluebird’s nest, with or without eggs, I’d have left it and let the coneflowers take their chances.

But I don’t feel good about my decision. This was somebody’s home.

And when I stop to think about it, I recall that homes—for wild creatures and humans alike—have been disappearing at an increasingly rapid pace in recent years.

Some of that we can blame on climate change: the ominous rise of seawaters, the devastation wreaked by more frequent and more violent rampages by wind, water, and fire. Bangladesh could sit largely underwater in far too few years. California could go up in smoke, and Wyoming, you could be next. Ultimately, those disasters stem from over a century of human impact on the environment, not deliberate but as a side effect (an “externality,” as the economists phrase it) of increasingly breakneck industrialization and burning of fossil fuels.

In the shorter term, though, deliberate human action has caused massive habitat loss for thousands of species, sometimes including Homo not-so-sapiens. Many of us shuddered at the reports last year of the accelerated setting of fires Amazonia to clear land for farming or cattle grazing. (You can see a NASA report based on satellite images tracking the past two decades of Amazon forest destruction, with some vivid maps, here.) Here in the US, the destruction of natural (diverse) forests, meadows, and wetlands has augmented the effect of invasive species to put hundreds of our indigenous species of birds, reptiles and amphibians, fish, trees and other plants at risk of extinction.

There may not be a lot I can do about all of those problems day to day, but I can (and should) put more care into making my own garden into a better habitat for other species. You’ll be hearing more about those efforts in future posts. (Mice, ants, and earwigs, if you are listening: this does not mean I will stop trying to drive you out of the house!)

Homes for all?

While I tinker on my own home, the issue of human homes has been weighing on my mind. Having volunteered in the past at a local survival center, I am keenly aware that homelessness among those of our own species is scandalously prevalent.

The numbers aren’t hard to find, although I suspect they understate the problem. The federal government uses a standardized approach in tallying the homeless. Every year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development coordinates locally organized counts of people without homes who are in shelters on one January night. Every other year, those who are unsheltered get counted too.

In 2020, the official tally found 580,466 people homeless in this country, nearly a fifth of them children. Over 200 thousand people had no shelter. In January.

If the numbers are a bit hard to see in perspective, think of it this way. If you imagine you had a clear field, you could put all these men, women, and children in Miami (FL) or Raleigh (NC) or Omaha (NE). You’d still have more than a hundred thousand of them left over. You could put them in Atlanta (GA) or Sacramento (CA), but over sixty thousand still would have nowhere to go. If you put them all in Baltimore (MD) or Minneapolis (MN), there would be enough homes left for only a few thousand others. Those however are the 2020 numbers. By this year, the increased numbers might top even those cities off.

And this doesn’t begin to capture the predicament of the ten million Americans living on the brink: in poverty and spending more than half their income on housing, or doubled up, due to poverty, in housing with people with whom their relationships may be precarious.

Hitting close to home

The issue has become visceral for me in recent weeks.

My sister has been ill for some months now, with a stomach disorder that has plagued her since childhood. It gets dangerous when she is under severe stress. She needs calm, stability, and security. Her stress levels ramped sky-high, what with losing a large part of her medical insurance during the pandemic and butting heads with the work-from-home bureaucracies for months on end; struggling with dirt-level poverty, bills piling up, meds unaffordable, dog getting sick, car dying—you name it. The mounting stress had her so sick that she lost about 50 pounds in two months.

Just as she was beginning to regain some health and strength, the owners of the little house she’s been renting decided to sell the property it sits on—land, big house, little house, everything. Before she moved in a year and a half ago, she told the owners she needed a place where she could stay put for at least 3 to 5 years. Their response: We’d never sell this. The real estate market in the area has now gone stratospheric. They’ve been living 200 miles away and like it where they are now. So they’re selling.

At first they said they’d wait till next spring. Then they said they wanted her out by September. Then in mid-June they told her she had to be out by July 15.

She’s been packing all day and vomiting every night since, and often spends half the night doubled up in pain.

The owners have every right to sell my sister’s home. Or do they? Legally, yes. Morally? You tell me.

I had every right to remove that bird’s nest. Or did I? I’m not so sure.

And now, your turn:

Remember to sign up for the “newsletter” if you want notices of future posts, if you haven’t already done so. And whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. (If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment will appear after their posts.) I try to reply to every comment, but please feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Here are a few questions to get you started, but go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

  1. What have you tried in order to make your garden into a good home for more animals and plants?
  2. In your area, what are the biggest challenges to maintaining and expand habitats for native species?
  3. Do you know of any local community efforts to provide homes for those without any? Any ideas on the best ways to go about this?

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment using that address, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you don’t need to include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

 

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Exceeding Expectations

Posted on 2021-06-24 by Hecate

In a garden, as in life, we think we like predictability.

The sun will rise in the east in the morning and set in the west after making its daily arc across the sky. In summer, it will take its sweet time on that trip. Where you have planted bean seeds, it will not come up as okra or asparagus. If you apply dark rich compost at the right time and right place, your garden will be more fruitful. If you pull the weeds, the plants you want will have a better chance. The sun is a given, naturally, but the others depend on our efforts. Efforts that often yield wonderful rewards.

But other natural forces are not givens, and sometimes things happen that foil our efforts. The state of the weather notoriously preoccupies farmers and gardeners. A couple weeks ago I watched my farming neighbor cutting his hay and leaving it to dry where it fell. He came back a day or two later to do the baling and get it into the barn. If rain had fallen in the meantime, it would have washed out time, effort, and money.

If rain doesn’t fall for a long spell, especially during a heat wave, the farm’s other plantings need irrigation. I can gauge when it’s high time to water my garden by when its sprinkler system starts spraying across the rows. In the drought of 2016, when the town declared a watering ban, the farm could draw on its own pond for irrigation.

Irrigation sprinklers at work behind trees and shrubs in foreground; green hills visible in background

I, however, had to haul buckets of household water from washings and rinsings out to the plants that needed it most. Some of them nonetheless died, and the middle-aged birch and the gigantic grandma sugar maple on my lot have never quite recovered from that season of stress.

Charms of the unexpected

And yet, the unexpected in the garden can bring zings of delight. I’ve been savoring many of those. The weather brings some, as when the spring weather came in early March this year and the crocuses and daffodils and grape hyacinths billowed forth a month before I’d anticipated.

Tiny mushrooms with pale stalks and dark grey heads, growing profusely on top of strawSome garden surprises reward without direct effort. I get enchanting side benefits to watering, for example, as when my gaze lazies across the raised bed while I spray-bathe the young onions and my sight is snagged by a legion of tiny mushrooms that sprouted overnight from the straw mulch. Ephemerals that keel over as soon as the sun hits them.

Two stalks of yellow foxtail lilies in bloom against a white clapboard background; spiky green foliage spreads far below where the flower heads beginWhat else have I missed?

I nearly missed the eruption of two 5′ stalks brandishing giant bottle brushes made up of hundreds of small saffron flowers. I must have planted them, but can’t remember when. The yellow blast whacked me when I turned the corner of the house. They’d materialized while I neglected even to look at, much less weed, that particular bed for far too long. The thrill of seeing those fully grown, a reward for virtue postponed. But what if I’d delayed longer?

Now that I’ve figured out what they’re called (Eremurus bungei, nickname: foxtail lily) I’m already wondering what to plant to keep them company.

There are sur-prizes for timelier work. When I inch through the shrubs-and-trees bed uprooting invaders, I encounter another party crasher. A welcome one: a profusely blue-blossomed cornflower plant that somehow burst forth where no cornflower had gone before. Is it cheating if I count the garlic scapes that  emerged seemingly overnight and corkscrewed their ways around their parent stalks and each other? If I hadn’t wondered whether it was time to water the garlic again, I might never have noticed (or harvested) them.

Life’s little lagniappes

Closeup of garlic scapes (capped by swellings tapering into sharp tips) wound around each other and the garlic plants' stalks and leaves; straw mulch visible in background.

Garlic scapes in action

Don’t get me wrong. I have not turned into Petunia Pollyanna. I still worry about the bunnies and Tamerlane the Woodchuck eating that which should not be eaten (except by me, or in the case of the geraniums, at all). The growing paper-wasp nests that I find moored on the underside of the deck umbrella make me fret; I know I have to do something about those some cool early morning. And I keep finding weeds growing in the darnedest places.

Still, the garden delivers delightful daily reminders that I am not running a machine that processes inputs in some predetermined unerring way and spits out the exact predictable product. I think of the scientific discoveries that happened because somebody noticed something important when things didn’t go as expected. From one perspective, some mold messed up the staphylococcus culture Alexander Fleming had going at St. Mary’s Hospital. It could have been a botched experiment, but it turned out to give us penicillin.

Not that I’m equating cornflowers with the penicillium mold.

Blue-green Penicillium notatum mold growing in dark red beet juice, seen from above

Penicillium notatum mold
“Penicillium notatum on beetroot vinegar. June 1965” by Mary Gillham Archive Project; licensed under CC BY 2.0

violet-blue cornflowers seen from above, against a mass of chartreuse-green foliage

Cornflowers

I think of them more as something like the “comp” your friend the chef may have delivered to your table as a freebie in the middle of the meal you ordered, back before the Covid-19 surprise.

Surprise, surprise

For the people who keep coming up with new varieties of vegetables and flowers, some garden surprises may just be a penicillium equivalent. Unexpected hybridizations. Small sports on parent plants, brandishing a novel color or shape of leaf, a multi-hued or double-petaled flower while their siblings keep to the original monotone and single-petal theme. Dwarfs parented by giants. Prostrate forms abandoning their upright origins.

closeup of a bloom of Peony 'Charles Burgess,' a deep red-petaled flower with luscious center filled with gold-tipped red staminoides

Well, wouldn’t you love to come back as this?

It makes me hanker for reincarnation as a plant breeder. Unless I could come back as a Paeonia lactiflora ‘Charles Burgess’—which would be quite some surprise.

For now, though, as the days and years tick past, I’m finding that my body does for me what the garden often does and computer technology used to do: every time something goes wrong, I learn something new. One major learning opportunity came on the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

How I spent my holiday weekend

Rain was predicted, so no gardening. Instead, I planned to escape for a couple of days in the Big City. (Well, Boston. It’s the biggest we have in Massachusetts.) I went to sleep Friday night thinking of what I still needed to pack, and was rudely awakened in the wee hours by turmoil in the intestinal tract, which turned into bleeding. So my Saturday went into several hours in an emergency room, transitioned into an overnight hospital stay, and seguéd on Sunday into an unscheduled medical “procedure” (the kind I usually refer to as roto-rooting).

A bit scary, yes, but I learned a lot about intestines. I will spare you the details, except that I finally found out the meaning of the word ischemic. (P.S. I’m fine now, am leading a more virtuous culinary life, and may never endure such an episode again.) I’m still waiting to open the bill from the gastroenterologist to learn how much this particular learning experience cost. My guess is, more than a new shrub. More than a big new shrub.

But the great lesson from this episode is that I found out how wonderful my friends are. L, who lives nearby, dropped everything in the middle of a creative flow to drive me across the river to the emergency room. M, who has an M.D., coached me through understanding what was going on, came to see me after the procedure and whisked me away to stay with her family so they could keep an eye on me—which they did, most sweetly. Another M ran over there the next morning to visit and dispense additional cheer. S drove half an hour up to pick me up and another hour to get me home.

Home again, home again

When I arrived home I also found myself in possession of two massive containers: one of homemade chicken soup, the other of homemade harira. Both delicious, and relieving me for days of any need to cook. Numerous friends and my two sisters who knew the situation called and texted all that week to see how I was doing and ask whether I needed anything. What a gift!

I’m sending love and heartfelt thanks to you all. If pictures count, I’m saying it with flowers.

A swathe of spring flowers: purple Siberian irises in foreground, with a few taller light bearded irises and bright crimson poppies in background

Saying it with flowers: thank you, dear friends!

Speaking of flowers, and for that matter, of trees and shrubs and veggies and grasses and fruits: this year they feel so intensely like ongoing gifts. Like I’ve had a mental cataract operation and now see more intense colors with sparkling clarity. Did it take a pandemic to remind me how beautiful life is?

at lower right, a tiny light lime-green grasshopper crawling on brown bark mulch next to tiny dicot seedling the same color as the insect; bottom of bright fuchsia tube at upper left, and at upper right and very bottom of the photo some pieces of landscaping cloth are visible

What does the grasshopper do?

Whatever troubles might be going on in my own tiny world, nature is out there ready to heal. And by “nature,” I mean the plants and all their friends. The blazing-ruby-throated hummingbird I spotted last night humming through a row of nearly spent flowers. The earthworms that squirm towards cover when I pull a weed from over their heads (do they have heads? Must look it up!). The underground fungal networks that help feed the trees. Invisible microbes that break down the mulch into something edible-for-plants. Even the tiny lime-green grasshopper, less than an inch long, scuttling away from my digging knife’s path. I have no idea what help a grasshopper gives, but this one sure looked willing.

It takes a village. All, salutary reminders that I am not growing these plants. They’re growing with lots of help from their friends. I’m only one friend among many. It’s a lovely club to join.

And now, your turn:

Remember to sign up for the “newsletter” if you want notices of future posts, if you haven’t already done so. And whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. (If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment will appear after their posts.) I try to reply to every comment, but please feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Here are a few questions to get you started, but go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

  1. What do grasshoppers do?
  2. What’s the best surprise you’ve had lately in the garden? (Indoor gardens count too!)
  3. What lovely lesson have you learned from some mishap, in garden or out?

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment using that address, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you don’t need to include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

Remember I’m running a contest for 2021: the reader who sends me (kateriffoley at gmail dot com) the weirdest garden-related snippet of news or information between now and December 31, 2021, will win some kind of cool prize. Might be a hori hori: might be a gorgeous gardening book. I promise it won’t be a woodchuck. I’ll offer a few choices when the time comes. So please, keep your antennae up for choice tidbits, and send them on!

 

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