Spring, Sprang, Sprung

Posted on 2021-05-18 by Hecate

Whatever it is that spring does to the soul, it’s doing it bigtime this year. And even though I owe you a long overdue Post, full of facts and tips and musings (insight is accidental), all I feel capable of is an ode to joy.

Image of coronavirus as white ball with red spikes, with horizontal label across the center reading "CORONAVIRUS"

The “life” form we’re heartily sick of
Photo by Sergio Santos, Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0

We’ve all spent a year-and-change fearing and fleeing from tiny white balls spiked with evil red points. And we’re not quite done yet. So, when I pulled into my driveway after two weeks away, bracketed by three airports and four flights populated by too many people who think masks are best worn below the nose, all I wanted was to collapse.

But what greeted me was a vision of spring sprayed across the front yard. Blast of awe! The colors popping atop green stems and dangling from branches, white and crimson and lazuli and dawn-pink and apricot and bright butter yellow (your choice, forsythia or dandelions; the bees love both), packed a powerful thrill.

a flourish of pink cherry blossoms, seen from below against a bright blue sky

Nothing like a cherry blossom sky!

I can’t quite pinpoint whether it was the sort of thrill that shivers your spine up to your heartstrings when a just-born baby belts out its first yell, or the kind that seizes your ribcage when you find you’re still breathing after dodging a bullet. Maybe a combination.

New life

Haven’t we all had our senses sharpened by the past year-plus of collective traumas? I know it’s not just me. The New York Times reports New Yorkers’ raptures over tulips they swear are more profuse, more aburst with color this year. I’m not saying that New Yorkers are the essence of blasé, but when you live in the second most exciting city in the world (yes, Paris wins), it probably takes a lot to excite you. After all, weren’t they the ones who invented the word meh?

Several lemony-yellow magnolia blossoms at end of a branch, with dark greenish-black background

Lemon magnolias in bloom
Photo: canva.com

They’re noticing what I’m noticing: there is beauty riotous around us.

Around me. Minutely: with the bumblebee’s lurch-landing on a spray of cherry blossoms; with the unfurling of the impossibly deep-purple tulips, every petal edged as though nature had shaped it with heavenly pinking shears. Or on larger scale, on the lemon magnolia that last year emitted one piteous flower, but this year bedecked itself top-to-bottom in a creamy yellow riposte to the buttery flaunt of forsythia across the lawn.

Forsythia bush in full yellow bloom, with a bit of cloudy sky visible behind it at upper left; in the background on the right, portions of green lawn, serviceberrry tree covered in white blossoms and a weeping cherry covered in pink blossoms

Forsooth, forsythia.

Name it. Tame it?

And even with the weeds—especially with the weeds! They flower so fast and so furious, they must know the fate I have in store for them. My first task in the spring garden is not to plant; it’s to weed, because I know from experience that the weeds will win if I ignore them.

I’ve been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which makes me think that I should know those weeds’ names. So I ordered Dickinson and Royer’s Weeds of North America. I will not go to the extent of asking the weeds’ permission, but I can at least call their names as I root them out.

Plantain, its green rosettes of leaves easy to identify. I should, in fact, ask its permission for the rooting out, because it’s edible and medicinal, and adds zest to a salad. I should treat it with considerable respect, and maybe even eat it.

A large dandelion plant with five bright yellow blossoms and a few buds, growing out of a brick walk against a cement stoop

Dandy, these dandelions!

And dandelions! Read up on these and you’d think we should be cultivating them–except who needs to, when they grow themselves just about anywhere, thank you very much.

Then there are Johnny jump-ups, from the violet family. The Weeds guide tells me they hail from Europe and Asia, and have “escape[d] from cultivation.” I picture the getaway: the moment the cottage door shut out the evening, the Johnnies hiked up their leafy emerald pantaloons and hightailed it into the nearby meadow, flowery faces alight with laughter. They are still laughing. Especially at me, in hilarious popups all over the lawn.

Johnny jump-ups in profuse bloom with purple, lavender and yellow flowers above green foliage, growing between and alongside flagstones at edge of a garden

Johnny jump-ups jump up anywhere.
Photo by Patrick Standish,
Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0

Others? It will take some scrounging to find their names. The tiny ground-hugging creepers with their fairy-blue blossoms. The low-leafed lurkers between the bricks of the walk, throwing up flower stalks like periscopes. I can see their whites blooming where an eye might peer out.

I could invent names for them myself, for now. That might add to the number of popular names they acquired before Linnaeus came around and pasted Latin on them.

All in good time

Portion of mulched garden bed with small tree trunk in center and leaves of perennial flowers in background; in foreground, a half-weeded section of bed with clean mulch to left of trunk and a spread of weeds to its right; gardening tools, gardening stool and gloves in foreground

The job that somehow never seems done

Did I say ode to joy? It may not be joy for the weeds, but for the garden as a whole, it’s a happy tradeoff. The crabapple trees nod their pink-festooned branches, tapping thanks at my hat as I remove the blue-blooming creepers besetting their roots. The new leaves of a resurging aster emerge into view as I dig out the dense carpet that had settled around it; by the next day the aster seems to have doubled in size. The prostrate larch exudes relief as I advance on those periscoped legions that had been greedily eyeing it, and resumes its inching progress toward bed’s edge.

two raised garden beds at right angles to each other; the only visible vegetation a couple of rows of leaves of garlic plants, the rest still bare soil or mulch

The tasks ahead…

Granted, I’m cultivating for decoration at this point; the veggies will come later, as will their weeds. But the big thrill is that things are growing. They are coming back. Life is recovering and taking over again. The grasses that will become July hay burgeon in the meadow. The trees at the woods’ fringe are shaking diaphanous scarves in shades of green. Male robins patrol their territories, while mockingbirds flirt shamelessly with each other; we all know what comes next there.

Me, I’m just trimming a bit to help point a few flowers in a particular direction on one infinitesimal patch of planet Earth. Outside doing my thing while everyone else does theirs.

The inner weeds…

Then comes a rainy day that drives me indoors, and starts me to wondering. We’ve all been so sequestered and shuttered for the past year. That has allowed some underground development—sinking new roots, inching into new territories we might never have explored had we continued ranging out in the open. But maybe, as we begin re-emerging, we—I—need to consider anew what to cultivate in the precious, precarious life that remains.

In order to give it light and nourishment, to bring it to bloom, what might have to be trimmed away? What should I be weeding out in my own life?

Name it; tame it. That’s going to take a good many rainy days to figure out.

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 flowers do you most look forward to, in your own garden or others’, when spring arrive? What do you think makes them so appealing to you?
  2. How many of the weeds who frequent your garden and your lawn can you name? Which ones do you try hardest to get rid of, and which ones do you pretty much let go?
  3. Do you think this spring was especially powerful for you?

If you’re commenting for the first time with 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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Getting seedy

Posted on 2021-03-03 by Hecate

Magical thinking

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about magic. Partly this was precipitated by a recent indoor cleaning frenzy. (The garden is not the only place I’m inconstant.) You know the state that can get you into, right? With everything moved askew or turned upside-down, vacuum cleaner attachments strewn around and the right one hiding when you need it, dusters losing the battle against the cobwebs…. Around then is when I start thinking of the Harry Potter series, and Mrs. Weasley waving her wand to set the wooden spoons stirring and everything whisking to where it belongs. Yeah, I could use a little Accio this and Wingardium leviosa that, come the reckoning with dust bunnies and worse.

Fortunately, no waxy yellow buildup. At least on the floors.

Old painting of Cinderella in kitchen with fairy godmother turning pumpkin and mice into carriage and horses

William Henry Margetson (1861-1940), ‘Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother’
by sofi01 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

But the other thing that has me pondering magic is realizing that for all the wondrous powers of wizards and fairy godmothers and such, they always had to start with something. Before you can conjure up the carriage, you need the pumpkin. And look at all the ingredients old Voldemort had to get assembled before he could rematerialize himself!

What does any of this have to do with gardening? Two things, really.

First, I’m still hoping for the day when somebody discovers the magical indoor equivalent of the outdoor no-cleanup, no-dig, leave-it-lie approach. Or maybe I have: I discovered that if you leave it lie indoors, things will grow in it. Indoors, however, you don’t necessarily want that to happen. Call me rigid, but that’s my reaction to what I unearthed.

close-up of sprout arching out of ground, with seed still attached at its end

Magic! Seed sprouting in soil
Getty Images Signature via canva.com

Second, I do consider gardening a kind of magic. But it has to start with something. Quite a few somethings, actually, but most of them were already outside under the February snow just waiting for the starting whistle. One crucial something, though, relies on me to act, and, I realized as February shazammed into March, act fast.

That something is seeds.

The clock ticketh

You may recall that a couple or three posts back, I said it was way too soon to order seeds. I continued blissfully to think that. Somehow, I had myself convinced that April is when I need to think actively about gardening again. Real gardening, rather than pretend, planned, or theoretical gardening, that is. Those, I think about all the time.

Closeup of many icicles hanging on an andromeda bush, with snow beneath.

It’s still winter, isn’t it?

Outside was snow and occasionally sleet and lots of lovely icicles, and temperatures dipping well below frostbite level. So I was still safe, right?

After all, I had vowed to approach the veggie/herb garden more systematically this year, which meant that (so I told myself) I should wait until all the seed catalogs had arrived (on March 3, still waiting for some) and then attack them in one swoop to see what I should order. Go about it in businesslike fashion.

The thought plickens

Covers of several books on no-dig gardening, foodscaping, vegetable gardening, and a naturalist's notebook

So many books, so little time….

First, I wanted to educate myself, so’s to make all the right decisions. That meant ordering books and signing up for webinars outlining special approaches: ecological gardening, no-dig, foodscaping, yada yada.

Do you have any idea how many gardening books get published every year? Neither do I, but I am afraid that my groaning bookshelves would never hold a tenth of them, even if pocketbook permitted.

Then there were the webinars: eco-gardening, bark, pecans. No, I’m not planning to grow any new bark, or pecans. Those were free events. How could a geek like me resist? If the Master Gardener certification training had been open for applications, I probably would have signed up for that too–but it wasn’t. Which left time, or so I thought, to…

Go to seed

a box containing seed packets sorted according to planting dates, with a few seed packets to the right of the box

Seed sorting, no bells or whistles

Yep. I sorted all the seeds left over from previous years. This is always a good idea, although maybe last fall would have been the best idea. But here they were, handily tossed into one box. I first sorted according to planting dates. If you want an easy way to figure out what to plant when, indoors or out, Margaret Roach’s website gives you an online calculator that generates the planting table according to your last-frost date.

Note: don’t throw out your old seeds until you check to see whether they may still be viable! Did you know some veggie seeds can stay good for five to as many as ten years? (Handy simple table for reference here.) Not all of them, though. Onion seeds are at the low end: toss them after the year’s up, or possibly (if they’re organic) use them in cooking. Waste not want not, no?

A number of my brassicas (aka broccoli, kale, etc.) and beans and peas should still be good to go. Even carrots, although they hark back to 2019, so maybe a tad iffy. Unfortunately, some of my bounteous supply of seeds with short viabilities dated back to 2014 and 2015.

No sooner had I sorted than in came the latest gardening newsletters, whispering that there might be a rush-to-garden again this year. So even though I did not yet have a plan (as in planting blueprint) or a list carefully sketched out and winnowed (which professionals say you really must do before you start buying), I jumped upon hearing the warning whispers. After colliding with last year’s shortage of canning jars, I’m leery of all shortages and figured maybe I should buy first and think later.

The supply dwindleth!

ten seed packets of various vegetables from High Mowing Organic Seeds and three packets from Ox and Robin

Impulse buying, for garden geeks

Now, I’d like to tell you that I had at least some system in doing this, but that would be fibbing.

The first purchases: pure impulse. Out of curiosity, I checked under the “Seeds” heading when ordering online for a grocery pickup from my local farm store. They had such luscious looking veggie seeds from High Mowing and Ox & Robin, and it is after all Year of the Ox (happy lunar new year, a little late). How could I resist? Besides, I was getting a 15% discount.

Looking just at these new acquisitions, I realized that everything wouldn’t fit in my garden. Not in the two new 4X8 raised beds, even if I follow foodscaping suggestions and plunk the kale and arugula out in the tree-shrub-perennial beds.

Here is where friends come in handy. I fired an e-mail off to my gardening buddy across the road, telling her not to buy any new seeds before checking with me.

six green lined index cards with handwritten list and notes for vegetables and herbs; backgrounded by a red-orange-green plaid mat

Desiderata or pipe dream?

Then I contemplated an old list of desiderata in the veggie and herbs department. So much still missing from my inventory! What about asparagus and skinny beans and golden beets and carrots and cauliflower? And that only got me through the C’s.

Out of not quite idle curiosity, I checked some seed company websites. Yikes. Johnny’s Selected Seeds was only open for home-gardener orders two days this week, reserving the rest for farms and commercial growers. Several sites showed Out of Stock for more than half the varieties of some vegetables; others had some seeds on back order. Clearly, delay could be fatal.

Screenshot of portion of web page at groworganic.com, showing three types of onion sets sold out

All. Sold. Out.

Embarrassing riches…

Peril lurked in every foray; that much was obvious from the dozens of items I marked in just one of the seed catalogs sitting on my coffee table. Nevertheless, I persisted. I set some rules for myself: do it online to avoid browsing up more yearnings; order no seeds for anything ordinary, anything easily/cheaply obtainable in organic form from grocery or farm store. Except do get parsley and dill, because the black swallowtail caterpillars love to feast on those. Best to order only one variety of each vegetable, or at most two. Well, maybe three, but not many threesomes. No, stick to two. Bush beans and pole beans are different vegetables, not varieties.

If you believe that, there’s a bridge for sale too.

Millennium asparagus (plants). Greensleeves dill. Cylindra beets. Yellowstone carrots. Maxibel haricot vert. Stuttgarter onion sets. Pink beauty radish. Perilla green ao shiso. Blue kuri squash. Toma verde tomatillo. I swooned.

Reader, I ordered twenty-seven of the suckers.

I thought I might go back in and cancel some, but one company almost immediately e-mailed me saying the stuff was packed and ready to ship. That, I concluded, was a message from the cosmos. And I do not mean cosmos the flower.

Photo of a British backyard vegetable garden with profusion of plants in wood-bordered beds, hedges along the left and small trees in background, with houses beyond

A girl can dream
“The Vegetable Garden” by Shelley & Dave is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

So off went another message to my gardening neighbor, telling her really not to order anything, except for tomatoes and eggplant and peppers. I may end up supplying the entire neighborhood with seeds. But if not, there’s that viability table telling me that everything but the parsnip seeds and onion sets will keep till next year, by which time I will most assuredly (do I hear snickers?) have a Plan.

I just remembered: I didn’t order artichokes! Maybe next year.

Of seeds and shortages

Maybe I went overboard on the seeds because of my anxiety over trying to get an appointment for a Covid-19 vaccination. Until my cohort was called, I didn’t think about it at all, and was content to be kept waiting till April or even May.

But then the state of Massachusetts declared it had opened eligibility to my age group (now you know just how wizened I probably am). I resisted the urge to stampede with everyone else, and thereby missed the first-day spectacle of the nearly immediate crash of the state’s vax-scheduling website. But shortly after that, as conversations among friends and fellow Zoom-workshop attendees percolated with did-you-get-it can-you-find-an-appointment try-here well-then-try-there maybe-next-week, I decided–purely as a matter of scientific inquiry, of course–to try getting an appointment.

A word-frequency distribution graphic with COVID-19 centered in red, and associated words surrounding it in shades of gray font, sized according to frequency of occurrence

“Covid-19”
by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I won’t bore you with the rabbit holes I fell into. If you’re in Massachusetts, either you’ve already experienced them or you’re going to. If you’re not in Massachusetts, I don’t want to set you to gloating and then feeling guilty for your schadenfreude. Suffice to say: I tried seven or maybe it was eight separate appointment-scheduling sites, from whole-state down to very local. And from approx. Feb. 18, when they announced the second-rung geezers stampede, until last night, I got nowhere.

So seed-seeking might have siphoned off the residue of anxiety that yoga couldn’t cope with. It was either that or binge-eat chocolate chip cookies. It makes me feel a bit hamsterish, except that “hamster” might be too high in the evolutionary ladder for this sentiment. More like crazed reptile-brain directly wired to a laptop.

Intermittently during that frenzy of attempts, I kept reminding myself how lucky I am. Over half a million people in this country have died of this disease, many of them because of government mismanagement or worse, or because too many believed the disinformation spread by people who should have known better. I lost one dear friend and worried about others who were infected, but thousands have lost far more than that. I had the luxury of being able to hole up and have things brought by lovely friends or delivery angels. I didn’t have to homeschool children or serve as a solo caregiver. The pandemic did not fundamentally affect my livelihood.

So I don’t feel that I have a right to the anxiety. But is there anyone among us, after this insane year, who isn’t plagued by anxiety, even if untouched by objective harm? I hope, if you’re looking for vaccination, that you can get it soon, and that it helps relieve some of the stress. And that you and your loved ones can stay healthy until we get past this.

I am happy to report that I now seem to have a vaccination appointment that requires only a 10-day wait and a 70-mile drive (each way). I can afford the wait, and I am able to drive. As I said, lucky.

close-up photo of several lavender crocus blossoms not quite open, above dark green spikes of foliage; unfocused background of more such crocuses; in the foreground a couple of dark brown fallen leaves

Crocus
by Infomastern is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Meanwhile, spring approacheth, and maybe for many of us the prospect of being back out in the garden helps restore some measure of stability and hope, whether or not we got all the seeds we wanted. I contemplate the arrival of 27 packets of seed, asparagus roots&crowns, and onion sets, along with the seed-starting paraphernalia (grow-lights! warming mat! cowpots!) that I ordered in between seed frenzies.

Next post maybe I’ll regale you with my adventures in first-time indoor farming.

And now, your turn:

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’s your approach to planning your spring planting? When do you start, how do you do the planning, and do you already have everything you’ll need?
  2. Have you tried foodscaping (planting food plants in among shrubs and flowers)? What worked or didn’t work, and what recommendations would you make?
  3. If you gardened last year, do you think you’ll do as much this year, or more, or less? Or will you do something differently, whether in a major or a minor way? Reasons?
  4. Any good ideas for sharing extra seeds or seedlings?
  5. How have you been coping with pandemic stress?

If you’re commenting for the first time with 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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For the birds

Posted on 2021-02-02 by Hecate

With feathers

Are you feeling like hope is back? I suppose it was there all along, but until noon on Jan. 20, it didn’t seem to be sticking its neck up very high.

Photo shows the top part of an index card listing dates beside seed company names and notations on actions taken or not; underneath are the labels on index dividers listing various categories of tasks

Proof of organization. Not constant.

Now we can get back to wondering when those seed catalogs ordered in December will arrive. According to my records (this time, for a change, I really did keep a record, and there’s the photo to prove it!) … as I was saying, according to my records, I ordered a slew of them in early/mid December. As I started writing this, only Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalog had arrived, and overwhelmed me. Drowning in possibilities.

Pages of vegetable seeds: 140. Pages of flowers: 37. Herbs: 14.

Mind you, that’s not the number of varieties. That’s the number of pages. Even allowing for all the photos and tables and sidebars with cultivation tips, I figure it averages five to eight varieties per page.

Montage of seed catalog covers: Johnny's Selected Seeds, High Mowing Organic Seeds, NESeed Growers Catalog, Hudson Valley Seed, shown atop a woodgrain background

And they keep on growing…

And then another three catalogs cascaded in. How’s a gal to choose?

By sidestepping! I started reading about birds. Not, mind you, with any great strategy in mind. I still don’t have my grow-lights setup figured out, and going through that first seed catalog, I knew it would take eons to figure out what I’d actually plant under the grow lights should I even get around to them.

But I needed to get something up for the blog before you give up on me, and I was wondering whether there’s anything going on outside that you might want to hear about, and I thought: BIRDS! Who doesn’t love them and want more of them around? (Okay, except when you just planted corn.)

So I looked into birds. That’s when it got interesting. Like a train wreck is interesting.

But hang on, because I also found some inspiration.

The ticking clock

A red-tailed hawk sitting on the crossbar of a telephone pole, against a gray sky

Red-tailed hawk surveys the landscape, or the photographer
© 2020 by Vilmarie S-R

Do you delight in seeing the pair of bald eagles nesting near your usual route home, or stop to watch when you spot a mama killdeer stilting across the lawn with her babies bumbling behind her? Or do you run for the binoculars to see who’s hopping around in the winterberry bush? Do you fill those birdfeeders with seed and suet and the birdbaths with water? If so, you are one of the people who has been paying some attention. Did you know that not only our springs but also summers, falls, and winters threaten to grow more silent year by year?

The experts have been sounding the alarm for decades now. It’s getting ever more urgent.

Bald facts:

  • North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds out of the total bird population since 1970. That’s about one in four birds.
  • Even as sedate a source as the US Fish & Wildlife Service lists 99 species of birds in the US and its possessions as either endangered (“in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range”) or threatened (“likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future”).
  • Now, as I am writing this, the Audubon Society warns that 389 species out of 604 face extinction in North America thanks to human impact on the environment—climate change especially, but not exclusively.

Rough arithmetic: 2/3 of our bird species may be gone in a few decades or less, if we don’t act fast.

Can we save them?

You may recall the sad fate of the passenger pigeon, a bird whose flocks once filled the skies, but which, thanks to rapacious hunting, now exists only in taxidermy cases.

That’s one species; a few others have already gone extinct. Some species have been rescued—for now, at least.

A line of whooping cranes flying behind an ultralight aircraft (heading from left to right of photo frame), against a misty background of wooded hills fading from very dark gray at bottom to light orangey-gray at top

“Whooping Crane Ultralight Migration” by USFWS Headquarters is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The whooping crane, for example, spells a success story of sorts. In 1941, this species, one of only two crane species in North America, teetered at the edge of extinction. The cranes were down to around 15 to 30 birds, from an original population of over 10,000. Huge recovery efforts, including captive breeding and training the birds to head north for breeding in the wild (by leading them there via ultralight airplane), have brought the population back up to over 800. Think of that. Sixty years of effort for 800 birds.

Economics alone would tell us that species-by-species, full-court-press conservation efforts like that are impracticable. Catching the attention of the public sometimes requires dramatizing the plight of some poster-child species (polar bear, whooping crane, black rhino, lowland gorilla), but in fact, these are but the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. They represent a far deeper problem: the downward spiral of ecosystem deterioration, in which the fate of every species intertwines with that of many, if not all, others.

That is a very big problem, and ultimately calls for big solutions. Over the long term, we can advocate for better environmental policies (and the funding to make them happen) and donate to conservation and environmental organizations.

In the short term, though, I am happy to tell you, we can start in our own back (and front, and side) yards.

How?

I started by musing about how there seems to be more bird life in my spring-summer-fall garden than there used to be, now that I have more small trees and various sizes of shrubs out there. But why? Is it because I (more accurately, my plants) have been offering birds a wider range of nesting options? Better cover? Bird feeders? Birdhouses? How important is it that I try more deliberately to provide more bird habitat?

Front cover of Nature's Best Hope, by Douglas W. Tallamy, shot from side perspective showing numerous orange and pink flags marking pages

Proof that I’ve been reading!

Grabbing onto that last question first: pretty doggone important. Being both geek and gardener, I started digging. It was ridiculously easy to find the important facts.

I have to admit they astonished me. As I read, I found that I’d been looking at my garden all the wrong way. The eureka moment in my education came from a book I recommended a few posts back, Nature’s Best Hope, by Douglas Tallamy. It already sat on my shelf, but I hadn’t gotten far into it except to see what he said about garden cleanup. Now, on my bird quest, I delved deeper. And quickly realized that if I want more birds around, I need to think more like a bird. (Note: many of the facts that follow are gleaned from Prof. Tallamy’s book.)

Thought for food

A cardinal's nest amidst dark red foliage; nest is made of interlaced twigs, and contains 3 eggs, cream-colored with reddish-brown speckles

Cardinal’s nest with promises of future action
© 2020 by Vilmarie S-R

Picture this. Birds build their nests to raise a clutch of young. Thanks to the now omnipresent web cam, you’ve probably seen a parent bird arriving back at home sweet home to be greeted by two, three, four or more screeching babies with mouths agape, beaks jabbing towards mama or papa. They’re no sooner fed than they start squealing for more.

Three squares a day plus snacks will never do for these little darlings. Thirty to forty meals per nestling daily seems more the norm.

I recall that my mother found it oppressive getting dinner on the table once a day for nine people, and she didn’t have to run outside to forage for every crumb we ate. A weekly trip to the supermarket sufficed.

Bird parents have a far more grueling job: fly out, find food, grab it, fly home with it, pick the most insistent mouth and cram the food in. Fly out, find food… Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Anywhere from 150 to over 500 times per day. Not per pair; per parent. Mama bird seems to do the heaviest lifting. One researcher clocked her doing twice as much as papa.

Which goes to show, birds are only human.

Given this burden, birds have the sense to place their nests close to abundant food sources. No birdbrains here; they do the math instinctively and calculate the energy expenditures exquisitely. They want the food within about a 150-foot radius.

The long view down a supermarket aisle with a floor checkerboarded in pink and white squares; displaying shelves full of boxes and bottles, and several shelves full of candies at right foreground; at the back of the photo is a large sign for Pharmacy

Not for the birds: “Supermarket – WP_20130720_002”
by Nicola since 1972 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I imagine my local mockingbird couple sitting in their sugar-maple nest watching me pull the Subaru out of the driveway to disappear for an hour before coming back with food in bags and boxes. They must shake their heads. What a humanbrain!

But what is that bird food? Here was my shocker: it’s not in the bird feeder, or the seeds they peck up from the ground. Oh sure, when they’re not feeding nestlings, the chickadees and nuthatches and jays and sparrows may congregate at the feeder. But for the babies, they need nice, juicy, soft, squishy caterpillars. Hundreds per day.

So if you want to bring in the birds, plant for caterpillars.

The very hungry caterpillar

At this point I felt a tectonic plate of lifelong assumptions creak and groan and start to slide away. Because—wait a minute, isn’t gardening at least half about fending off pests?What (Thumper and Bambi and Tamerlane-the-woodchuck aside) could be more of a pest than the caterpillar that chomps its way up one side and down the other of the delicate helpless leaves of your oakleaf lettuce and your chard, that shears off the tender bud-heads of your broccolini, or gouges big holes out of the magnolia leaves? The tomato hornworm that horns in on the tomatoes?

All these years, I’ve plotted to keep caterpillars out of the veggie patch. Prized the perennials and shrubs that don’t attract pests. Ripped out weeds to create neatly manicured beds. It turns out I’ve been making my mini world less appealing to birds because it was less appealing to their tiny juicy prey.

Now granted, I have planned to put in more milkweed to feed those picky-eater monarchs. And after the thrill of finding a hefty black swallowtail caterpillar in the parsley and a couple more amidst the dill, I have been aiming to scatter those herbs all through the sunny spots in various beds. But that was merely to keep the most decorative butterflies going.

A large black-swallowtail caterpillar in center of photo, bright chartreuse with black bands spotted with bright yellow, poised vertically on a parsley stalk. with leaves of parsley above and below it and to its left, and some grayish-beige straw in the unfocused background to the right

A very hungry black swallowtail caterpillar eating my parsley

From a bird’s perspective, not much help. The monarch caterpillars concentrate a cardiac toxin from milkweed precisely in order to deter hungry birds. And frankly, having seen the swallowtail caterpillar up close, I think it a bit alarming as meal material.

Where the appealing caterpillars truly flourish is on the native flora that evolved alongside the native fauna. Often, introduced plants, especially those that originated far, far away, serve as food for only a handful of species, sometimes even only one or none. Native plants, on the other hand, may host dozens or even hundreds of different species of hungry insects. Bird heaven. Smorgasbord for the nestlings. Yum.

Planning: for the birds

So if I want my little domain to function better as an ecosystem, I need to rethink my planting choices, and go for the caterpillars. Granted, I’ll do my best to protect the two raised beds designated for food plants (human-food plants), but for the other beds, I will be choosing any new plants with a thought to going native.

Which takes some care. As Tallamy points out, “native” for flora means not specific to a region like, say, the northeastern US, but specific even at a level as local as a county. Fortunately, his research assistant Kimberley Shropshire put together a database that the National Wildlife Federation has turned into a Native Plant Finder. You can use that site to search for the yummiest plants for the caterpillars local to your own zipcode.

screenshot of front page of website https://www.nwf.org/NativePlantFinder, with a header photo, unfocused, depicting clusters of bright pink flowers and bright green stems and foliage; under the header (labeled Native Plant Finder [BETA]), a heading for Native Plants (By Zip Code), a subheading "Flowers and grasses," under which are boxes for goldenrod, strawberry, sunflower, and deer vetch; two of them have photos showing the flowers, and all show how many species of butterflies and moths feed on the plant

The Native Plant Finder

I gave this a spin, and it reassured me. Turns out that a lot of what I’ve already planted is native, and others that I’ve been considering landed on my list. The nifty thing is that the database also tells you approximately how many different species’ caterpillars might want to feed on each species of plant, and the list is organized by the number of feeding species, with the most numerous first. From this I conclude that if I want to plant strawberries, I’d better include lots of extras for the bugs. Because it’s for the birds!

Not that my little 1/3 acre is going to change the world. But early February is a good time to start thinking. If we all stop to consider why we’re doing what we’re doing in our own patches and educate ourselves about the implications, we might make our spring garden plans a bit differently. Maybe we’ll be able to help arrest the decline and then, gradually, roll it back.

And I can’t help thinking that the birds we will see are a glorious indication of how we’re doing at restoring the environment as a whole.

Where to start learning more?

I’m not going to say a lot more here, because there’s already plenty for you to digest. Just a little on where you might want to start, to find out how big the problem is for our birds, and what you can do.

  • The Audubon Society offers a Bird and Climate Visualizer. Audubon offers specific suggestions about what you can do, and you can also contact your local Audubon chapter by using the Audubon Near You page.
  • The North American Bird Conservation Initiative combines the efforts of government agencies, nonprofits, and others working on bird conservation; its 2019 State of the Birds report is well worth a look, although I do wish it provided a lot more detail, especially on what we can do at the state and local level.
  • If you’d like to start thinking a little more like those smart birds, take a look at the gorgeous new book by David Allen Sibley, What It’s Like to Be a Bird. This seems to be selling like hotcakes, so maybe I’m not the only one to stumble on the program of planning for the birds.

That’s probably enough for now, and the post really must go up—before you get too far into your garden planning for 2021. Stay tuned for more resource leads in future posts.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (house)

If you’ve been watching, you know that Punxsutawney Phil (Tamerlane-the-woodchuck’s distant cousin) has predicted six more weeks of winter, as of yesterday. I was appalled to see the poor sleepy creature being terrified by the yelling crowd, but I have to say that for western Massachusetts, six weeks is way optimistic. Fine with me; I am in no hurry for Tamerlane to make his reappearance. The crowd is welcome to come here and yell him out of town when he does.

The paperwhites and the amaryllis have bloomed. Did you want pix? Maybe I’ll post them next time, if you insist.

Either the peppermint oil installations are working, or the mice have gotten extremely clever, avoiding all the mousetraps and leaving no droppings. If you’re using the peppermint oil method, though, remember to refresh your little containers about every four weeks.

And now, your turn:

Please post your comments below. (If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment will appear under 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. How good do you think your garden and yard are, from a bird’s perspective?

2.  Do you have any ideas about what you will do in the coming year to attract more birds?

3. Whether you’re tending a garden or not, what do you think you can do to improve birds’ survival chances? Anything you’re already doing that you’d like to share with us?

If you’re commenting for the first time with 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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New Year’s (ir)resolutions

Posted on 2021-01-02 by Hecate

And now for something totally…

Not all surprises are nice surprises. Case in point: 2020.

I’d bet a case of homemade chutney (different flavors) that last year did not turn out the way you expected. Or planned. Or wanted. Or hoped for. Or liked very much.

Maybe you got some of that, but it sure came mixed with a lot of you-know-what, right? My friend Lorna did a painting last year that about summed it up for me:

abstract painting, predominantly dark reds, greens, and black with beige-gray background towards left; lightening towards the right into pinks and blues, then blues and white with small splashes of dark green and black at upper right corner

“Heavy Heart, Sweet Blossoms”
40 X 50″ oil on canvas, March 2020
© Lorna Ritz, lornaritz.com

In the midst of the year from hell’s lower reaches, in which just about everyone lost something precious—mobility, jobs, close contact, sense of security, peace of mind, and worst of all, loved ones—there were still a few sweet blossoms. Possibly more of the literal ones than usual, since so many people turned to their gardens to get through.

But after the past nine months of cascading whack-a-mole disasters, are you making new year’s resolutions this year? My main resolution is not to make them.

Here’s why:

What scares me about resolutions is what my brain gets up to behind my back. Here I am, just noodling along, or even sleeping, and that sneaky lump of gray matter between my ears is plotting to undermine me.

Closeup photo of stoneware or enameled cast-iron bowl containing cooked spinach, with tablespoon and fork nudged against the spinach

“Creamed Garlic Spinach – Bistro Vue” by avlxyz
licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

That is most evident every year when Resolution time rolls round. You know the drill: this year I will eat my spinach, tighten my triceps, get rid of the belly bulge, pull the weeds before they get three feet high and two feet wide. The first three resolutions bite the dust by February. If the last one doesn’t, it’s only because the weeds are biding their time till May.

I used to berate myself for my lack of willpower. If I could just beef up my determination, truly commit to my goals, Just Say No to the refrigerator and Yes to the free weights, we’d be home happy.

But it turns out it’s not all about willpower; it’s that my brain has other ideas. I know because I’ve been reading up on this, something I thought was just more procrastination (another thing I resolve every year to stop and then keep putting it off). This time, though, procrastination paid off: the reading has brought me some eureka moments.

I discovered that my brain is not the only one getting in the way of resolutions. If you’ve dipped into any of the essays in newspapers, magazines, websites, whatever, over the past 10 days or so, and gotten past the alarm calls about assaults on democracy coming from high places, you have probably encountered numerous mentions of resolutions for the new year. Possibly one in ten of those may divulge the dismal statistics about the failure rates of such resolutions.

"street" signs, one atop the other, with white lettering on green background. On top: "Success Ln" pointing to the right; underneath, "Failure Dr" pointing to the left; a small bit of the top of a gray pole supports them; all seen against pure cyan background

“Crossroads: Success or Failure” by ccPixs.com
licensed under CC BY 2.0

If you want to guarantee yourself a 50% chance of failure in the next year, start a small business. If you want an even higher probability of failure, make a resolution.

For business failures, you can blame economics. For resolution failures, we get to blame the workings of the human brain.

I find this ironic. I grew to adulthood convinced the brain was a reasoning organ. You know, the kind that sets priorities, susses out the situation, and figures out the shortest route between point A (where you are now) and point B (where you want to be). The kind of machine underlying notions of utilitarianism. The gearing that drives homo oeconomicus.

The philosopher-economist Amartya Sen once quipped that purely economic man is a social moron. But even if humans aren’t social morons, they often deceive themselves when they scan the situation and plot their routes. Why? Because we all continually fall prey to the cognitive biases that our brains invariably dish up.

But… gardens?

Wait a minute, you may be saying. This is supposed to be a gardening blog!

Museum display case of two woodchucks (taxiderm'd specimens), one on all fours and one standing upright

Tamerlane’s Québecois forechucks

Well, I’ll give you a garden-variety example. You remember Tamerlane, my friendly local eat-everything-in-sight woodchuck? He’s in for that long winter’s nap right now. Around late March or early April he’ll be coming out, hungry as a groundhog and chomping from the first ring of spring’s starting bell. For all I know, he may be a she, in which case there could be ten little Tamerlanes, even hungrier, eyeing my tiny tender lettuces and winsome fronds of carrot tops, nothing but merciless pillage in their twisted rodent minds.

I find myself waking too many wee-hours mornings alternating between twin anxieties. One, what the T-rumperlane and his hordes are up to in DC and around the country. And two, what kind of fence I can put up to keep Tamerlane and tribe out of the new raised beds and still keep my own access to them reasonably easy.

These anxieties are hardly commensurate, I hasten to say. One could have a huge impact on the welfare of the entire world. The other will affect only 64 square feet of veggie patch and maybe a begonia here and there. I’ve already done everything I can possibly do—my individual mite among millions’—to help forestall the global disaster. I’m not complaining about that anxiety; I think nonstop worry is the sensible and rational reaction to those repugnant shenanigans.

For the woodchucks, there is something I can do. However, not until at least late March. It is now early January and I’ve been worriting on this since December. Why am I losing sleep for 90 days or so while I can do absolutely nothing, when I know I can do something about it once the ground thaws out?

graphic representation of human brain seen from above, drawn with heavy black lines; splashes of primary paints on the right hemisphere; molecular diagrams and scientific equations underlying the left hemisphere

That trickster at the top of your neck
Brain: Image by ElisaRiva from Pixabay

Are you muttering “neurotic!”? Maybe so, but it happens that my throes may be explained by a common cognitive bias, one of those little tricks our brains love to play on us when we’re not on guard. It’s known to experimental economists as the Zeigarnik Effect. This is the handy label for the brain’s tendency to keep nagging us about things we haven’t yet done, instead of congratulating us for the impressive list of things we’ve already done.

When you look at it that way, what are New Year’s resolutions but a tool of self-torture, a meta to-do nag list? Not just things you haven’t done but things you haven’t changed, but should—and in fact should have changed last year when you failed to…. You get the idea.

Okay, though, maybe there are things you want to change that you really should change. Who doesn’t have some of those? How do you go about that without a) driving yourself nuts and/or b) marching once more into the maw of failure?

Habit your way

Here, there’s a growing body of work about habits and how to change them. You might have seen Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. Or, more recently, psychologist Wendy Wood’s book Good Habits, Bad Habits. As Jerome Groopman’s review in the New Yorker summarized part of that book’s findings, “the path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors.”

Two white metal grocery shelving racks with four shelves each, all filled with packages of junk food

“Junk Food Heaven” by mynameisharsha
licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

This I can dig, if you’ll pardon the garden pun. Rather than seeking a supervitamin for my willpower, I’m best advised to take the easy way out by making sure I design an easy way out. It’s easier not to buy food that’s bad for me than not to eat the food I bought that’s bad for me. You know, the kind that starts calling your name the instant you take it out of the bag and that makes eyes at you every time you open the cabinet where it sits right up front, having somehow mysteriously shouldered its way there so as to block your view of the Irish rolled oatmeal and organic Thompson raisins.

Nope, you’re better off just arranging your environment to make the distractions deflecting you from your goal less prevalent and less visible. Leave the bad food at the grocery store. Admittedly a bit easier these pandemic days, when you have to wonder whether it’s really worth the risk of dying next week to go in and nab those Pr*ngles today.

So for this year in the garden, I will make just one resolution: I’m resolving to make things easier for myself. As luck would have it, I can even feel virtuous about that. My latest issue of Dave’s Garden newsletter proposed four new-year garden resolutions, the first two of which feature doing less: leave it a bit messy, and use less water. I’m signing on for that! (There are details, but I’ll worry about those after spring thaws us out.)

A woodland path along the left side of photo, with the right four-fifths of the frame filled with tree trunks under which the ground is covered with low green-leaved plants sporting small white and yellow flowers

“The primrose path” by Phil Gayton
licensed under CC BY 2.0

Eventually, I may even arrive at the nirvana of no-till gardening. For the next growing season, though, there will be work. Fortunately, I have a few months in which to think about how to do less of and fewer of the things I haven’t done, and then design my primrose path to the work still required.

If only I could think of an effortless way to distract Tamerlane from his goal, But I’m afraid the woodchuck brain has its own powerful Zeigarnik effect: never minding what he’s already eaten, always fixating on what to devour next.

And now, your turn:

Please post your comments below. (If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment will appear under their posts.) I try to reply to every comment, but you should 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. Have you made any gardening resolutions in past years that you managed to stick to? Tell us your secret!
  2. Do you have any tips for forming better habits? Tell us about a good habit you’re especially proud of forming, whether in the garden or out of it.
  3. Any garden-related topics you’d like to see me tackle in 2021?

If you’re commenting for the first time with a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After you’ve had one approved comment using that address, your next one 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 (hecatefoley 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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Your holiday grab-bag

Posted on 2020-12-18 by Hecate

Seized with some kind of spirit

Am I the only one who gets kind of taken over by the holidays?

I doubt it. In fact, I suspect you didn’t even realize that it’s been 11 days since my last post. Right? Because you’ve been busy:

  1. making latkes,
  2. panic-buying presents online or in person,
  3. standing in line (socially distanced, of course) at the post office, or
  4. indulging in the emotions that may be attacking you in this weirdest of holiday seasons, while we hover wondering just how high the pandemic spike is gonna go before Joe steps in and/or when our turn for the vaccine will roll round.

    syringe with an aquamarine neck, inserted into top of vial containing clear fluid; white background

    When will we get it?
    “Syringe and Vaccine” by NIAID is licensed under CC BY 2.0

With respect to 4. above, I suspect it will be April or May before I can get the jab. (I like that Britlish term better than the Amerlish “shot.” It’s honest about what’s being done to you, and risks no confusion with tequila or handguns.) And I’m placing no bets on the pandemic spike, except to hole up again. That’s a fair bit easier this time, since curbside pickup and home deliveries are far better organized by now. As for my toilet paper supply, I’m good till April or May.

Of 2022.

So there’s nothing to do but focus on the indoor gardening, or maybe shovel snow, which I’ve now done for two days running. And to think about what to put into the blog.

The result: today you get a bit of snow, a bit of garden, and for dessert, a medley of weird garden- or nature-related news that has recently arrived in my mailbox.

Snow jobs

Snowy scene with a large red barn and smaller red outbuilding to the right of it; bare-branched trees in mid-distance before the buildings

Some things look so good in snow!

First up: the snow! the snow! Did you get some? If you are anywhere north of DC and east of Ohio, you probably did, this past Wednesday-into-Thursday. My sympathies to the folks who got snow followed by sleet and ice. Not nice.

But here in western Mass. it was all powdery stuff because it was (and still is) also c-o-l-d. Not so cold that you can’t go out and shovel the foot of white flakes off the deck, which is what I did yesterday morning after shoveling a little path down the driveway just in case somebody (possibly even me) sent me a package.

Snowy scene with snowshovel in foreground, half-buried in snowbank but showing black handle and top part of red scoop; some bare-branched trees and evergreens beyond, and a white house with red shutters at the back

Kicks just keep getting harder to find.

Is it perverse to enjoy shoveling snow? I love it, if it’s not the wet heavy stuff. You get to admire how neatly you scour the pavement or the decking, while reflecting on how many calories per minute you are burning. Lots of them, undoubtedly. When I get back into the house and stomp off the snow that clung to boots and gaiters (I finally got to use my gaiters!), peel off all the insulating layers and shake my hair loose after its confinement in hat, I celebrate those calories by allowing myself an extra cookie.

Actually, if I’m going to tell you the whole truth: more than one extra cookie. That’s as whole a truth as you’re going to get.

I will, however, admit that atoning for those cookies figured large in my decision to go back out this morning to trim another inch or so of snow off the driveway (fallen after the plow scraped out the major stuff).

Photo ops

Closeup, from above, of dried-out sedum flower heads and a few stems barely protruding above snow, and with snow topping the flowerheads

All you can see of the sedum now!

Snow here changes more than the landscape. The fluffy stuff soaks up sounds. Every car going past on the road sounded like hybrids in stealth mode. Even the wind, which I could see whipping around by the swirls of snow it kicked up, did its business with nary a whoosh or whistle. It felt like the whole world had gone under the Cone of Silence. Blessedly.

Because then I could focus on watching things—fresh-snowfall things—going on around me. While clearing the deck yesterday morning, I got to watch neighbors pulling offspring along in sleds, and to see the kids sledding on a slight incline over at the farm. This morning, people on cross-country skis decoratively ranged the roadway down to the woods, and then back up it.

My apologies that I can’t share a photo of any of that with you. For once I was so rapt just watching that it never occurred to me to snap a pic. There are times when I feel like I’m living in the middle of a slo-mo animated holiday card.

Don’t be jealous. We’re supposed to get rain on Dec. 24. These little joys are fleeting. All the more reason to treasure them while they last. Hope you find some to treasure too!

A propos of which

The gardening has moved indoors.

And I have progress to report.

Indoors, a tall narrow pot containing an amaryllis bulb, with one spike of stem about 8 inches high, and about an inch of leaves and stem coming out of the bulb; in background, a snow-covered deck with railings visible, and beyond it some tall evergreens on the left, wooded hills and blue sky with scattered white clouds in distance

The amaryllis, getting there

The amaryllis “Flamenco Queen” is growing like blazes. As the garden store clerk assured me while I was trying to figure out which bulb to buy, this whacking big one will reward me with at least two flower stalks. One is well up already (compare this picture with the one in the previous post), and another stalk has already started emerging. Now that you don’t have the sasanqua camellia in Charleston to look forward to, you can eagerly anticipate my update photos on the amaryllis flowers’ progress. They will arrive sooner than your vaccine dose.

a metal shelf unit in front of a floor-to-ceiling window; four shelves, with three plants on the top shelf, one plant and a small object on the second shelf down, third shelf empty and two small kitchen appliances, one with red cover and one with black, on the bottom shelf

Big plans afoot

And I did create a space for plants at the window. The first of two metal shelf units is up. The basil and rosemary have already taken up digs there. A friend gave me some narcissus bulbs for forcing, and I unearthed an unused planter in the garage. (As I recall, I bought it 2-3 years ago for forcing dwarf irises, which I never got around to.) I bunged the bulbs in with some pebbles to hold them up and in, and watered them. These, too, will be flowers in the future.

Right about when I’ll be starting to feel a desperate need for some.

More in the works

A second shelf unit still has to go up. I have grandiose plans for installing grow lights, starting herbs and greens from seed—making my own tiny farm at the edge of the living room.

That will be in the nature of a science experiment. Will the seeds I never got around to planting this past year, or was it the year before, still be viable?

The suspense should enliven the rest of December, and the first part of January, while we wait to find out whether a president really can pardon himself. If we’re still in suspense (about the seeds) come February, I fear the answer will be no.

By then, the seed catalogs I’ve ordered should start arriving. Year-round gardening, I call it.

Meanwhile, I’ve amassed a small stash of strange tidings to share with you.

Weirdness roundup rodeo: Beyond white

First up: Pantone has announced its “color of the year” for 2021 and it is <<<drumroll>>> two colors! Pantone 17-5104 Ultimate Gray (seems more suitable for 2020, not?) and Pantone 13-0647 Illuminating (a mellow yellow, of the sort you might see in a healthy egg yolk). The combination, according to Pantone, represents the “message of happiness supported by fortitude.”

Yeah, we could use some of that.

You may wonder, though, what this has to do with gardening. I’ll tell you: one of my valued long-distance plant suppliers dispatched, with lightning speed, an email featuring things I could order from them to hit that palette. Three plants ogling my wallet produce blazingly buttery yellow flowers, while two wormwoods and one brunnera sport silvery foliage. The Queen of Hearts brunnera has me tempted, but maybe by spring I’ll have beaten the urge.

Isn’t it nice to know that you don’t need paint to make a palette? Picasso, meet Gertrude Jekyll.

Weirdness roundup rodeo: Forced stunts

In case that wasn’t weird enough for you, how about boozing up your forced narcissus?

Closeup photograph showing three paperwhite narcissus flowers in full bloom with several dark yellow stamens showing inside the central cup of each

What we hope for when we force those bulbs
“Narcissus” by ceasol is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

One thing always bugs me about forcing those lovely flowers in water. The stems get longer and looonger and loooooonnnnngggerrrrrr. By the time the blooms appear, the things are so top-heavy they all flop-heavy over. Unless I stick in bamboo chopsticks or twigs (if I can find any; depends on snow levels) and tie everything up with twine. This makes the babies look like a bunch of clueless debutantes trying group BDSM for the first time.

Why didn’t it occur to me to do an internet search? The solution to any problem lives on the Net (barring, perhaps, a crazy national debt or an insane pandemic or a complete network takeover by Russian state hackers—all of course totally hypothetical).

Leggy paperwhites? No problem!

Here’s what I found, but this only works for growing them in water, not in potting soil. Nor do I guarantee that it will work beyond paperwhites, but we gardeners live to experiment, right?

Once the roots have sprouted in water and you see an inch or two of green shoots, pour out the water and replace it with a solution of 4 to 6 percent alcohol. This supposedly restrains their growth to a half or a third of normal height, but the flowers come out full size. Replenish the properly balanced solution as needed.

A metal planter containing several narcissus bulbs with inch-high green shoots, and behind the planter, bottles of tequila, scotch and gin

Indoor gardening is fun again!

You can use ordinary rubbing alcohol, but that’s hard to find in insane-pandemic times. Luckily, the debutantes are not choosy. They will take tequila. They will take scotch, or vodka, or any other hard liquor. Just keep the wine and beer to yourself. Since those two tipples are contraindicated due to sugar content, I’d suggest also steering clear of Cointreau and Kahlua and Harvey’s Bristol Cream and other sweet nips.

The full instructions are here. Read carefully; arithmetic matters. I’d say measure booze and water separately. That way, if you happen to splash a smidgin too much scotch into your measuring cup, you can always sip it till you get the amount right. Who knows, it could take several tries. (Do not sip if using rubbing alcohol.)

Booze. Not just for people any more!

Weirdness roundup rodeo: Shit happens

For our final item from the Weird hopper, we find a report scatological.

Featuring: everybody’s favorite lovable cuddly black-and-white animal, the panda. Come cold weather, pandas living in China’s mountain wilderness kept turning up brown-and-black. They’d been rolling around in horse manure (thoughtfully dropped by the horses that roam the Qinling Mountains) and smearing more of the stuff on with their paws, for good measure.

scattering of horse manure on ground

Smells like…
“5-13-07 043” by markyweiss is licensed under CC BY 2.0

If you hang out with dogs on walks, you’re familiar with the putrid result of such rolling. Be glad your dog doesn’t have the right kind of paws for smearing extra.

We wonder every time it happens why dogs do this. We’re told it’s because the more ghastly the odor, the better they love it. But more rigorous scientific research might be called for on the canine side. Read on!

After ten years spent keeping an eye on pandas and experimenting on mice, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the pinnacle of Chinese hard-sciences firepower, discovered the possible reason why pandas roll around in horseshit. Chemical compounds in the manure seem to short-circuit cold-sensing proteins in the pandas’ cells. They may not get warmer, but they feel like they do.

May I say I personally am glad that back in the early Anthropocene, Glgh and Irbza opted for fur coats and fire rather than taking the manure route. Otherwise, think what we’d all have been doing after that heavy snow this week.

Poop. Not just for compost any more!

And now, your turn:

Please post your comments below. I try to answer every comment, but you should 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’s your favorite part of post-snowstorm days?
  2. Will you join me in the great narcissus stunting experiment? Booze or rubbing alcohol?
  3. What kinds of topics do you think I should tackle in 2021?

If you’re commenting for the first time with a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After you’ve had one approved comment using that address, your next one 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.

I also hereby announce 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’ll offer a few choices when the time comes. So please, keep your antennae up for choice tidbits, and send them on!

Wishing you safe and happy holidays, creating some memories you might want to hang onto after this year from hell is over.

P.S. I’m going to take some time off for the holidays myself, so the next post probably won’t be till just before New Year’s Day.

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