QUIET, PLEASE

            Quiet is a commodity hard to come by in this world. All around us, noise rules. Machines whine and snarl and whuff and clatter. Traffic thunders. Horns blare. Radios blast music and advertisements: the reverberating bass lines emanating from adjacent vehicles rattle my brain and make me fantasize about owning a loaded bazooka. There are fire sirens, police sirens, ambulance sirens, and—in neighborhoods like mine, within the fallout areas of nuclear power plants—“growler” sirens. Bells ring. Buzzers buzz. Tim’s computer constantly startles me when music plays or people talk. (I keep the sound turned off on my Hewlett-Packard.) Snippy GPS ladies tell us where to turn, and when. Announcements and annoying music fill the air in malls, airports, train stations, schools, restaurants, elevators.



The end of polite society as we knew it



            The modern obsession with cell phones troubles me too, especially the ones with obnoxious ringtones to summon their owner/slaves. The owner/slaves answer as if trained by Pavlov himself, no matter the venue and without consideration for anyone in their vicinities. What’s with this need to be in constant touch from distance at all times, while ignoring the person across the table? People blab the most intimate details of their lives to anyone with ears, in banks, theaters, stores, checkout lines, restaurants, classrooms, churches, playgrounds, parking lots and on sidewalks. Sure, you only get one side of the conversation, but even that’s ’way too much information.

.           Ubiquitous televisions babble at us unrelentingly, keeping us abreast of the doings of celebrities not celebrated for anything in particular, and telling us what to think about politics, the stock market, our health, our children and our houses’ decor. It seems everybody’s talking, all the time. Nobody’s saying much of substance, but maybe the number of words trumps meaning.

            I wouldn’t know. I try not to listen.   

            Chez Fitz, we consider television-watching the equal of Internet browsing as a time-sink. We don’t subscribe to cable or satellite. Tim refuses to pay $100 a month for an antenna, and I can think of better ways to waste my time. When we travel and have access to hotels’ cable TV, it always strikes me that the quality of the programming is inversely proportional to the number of channels available.


Can you feel your blood pressure rising?

            The Grinch may not win any personality contests, but I totally empathize with his dislike of those rollicking Christmas-morning Whos—“Oh, the noise, noise, noise, NOISE!”

            All this surround-sound isn’t good for us. “Scientific American Frontiers” on PBS (it was an hour well-spent) recently addressed the consequences of the chronic stress our lifestyles engender in an episode aptly titled “Worried Sick.” High hostility levels predispose many of us to cardio-vascular diseases and gastrointestinal woes. No wonder Rush Limbaugh is addicted to prescription pain-killers. Stress also impairs immune responses and healing of wounds.

What can we do to turn down the volume? Scheduling time to practice breath-focused meditation and yoga helps. So does going outside to play in the dirt. Gardeners know the therapeutic value of their avocation.



The peaceable kingdom, Kowed



Gardening is such a peaceful pursuit, so solitary, so quiet. Just you, your hand tools, earth and plants.  Sometimes I hum, or sing to myself, often the same bit of lyric over and over. But mostly I listen. Birds call. I love the cardinals: they say, “myrtlebeachmyrtlebeachmyrtle.” Or “prettyprettyprettypretty.” And who knew tiny titmice could produce such piercing screeches? Squirrels scream warnings about cats on the prowl or chatter and quarrel among themselves. Wind soughs through the pine tree branches. The metal trowel-blade clinks against the odd rock or buried concrete shard. The wheelbarrow’s axle complains about having to work on Sunday. Kids play on the next block, a dog barks somewhere. The occasional car whooshes past. And, if the wind’s from the south, I can hear the ocean whisper secrets to the beach.

            I come back inside, when I must, refreshed and renewed.

* * *



HRH Prince Charles,
sustainable farming advocate



            Spent some quality time around the yard on Sunday. Mixed up a 100-pound batch of Kow-and-kelp and spread most of it on the vegetable beds. It’s about time to set out potatoes and peas, onions and beets. I certainly want to be ahead of the temperature curve with the spuds. Last year it was mid-March before I got them planted, and lost them all to heat-induced bacterial soft rot.

I’m particularly anxious to grow some of my own food this year: the more I learn about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the less I trust that supermarket produce won’t hurt me. Sustainable-methods farmer HRH Prince Charles wrote, “Science has tried to assume a monopoly—or rather, a tyranny—over our understanding of the world around us… We are only now beginning to understand the disastrous results of this outlook.” The latest Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company catalog warns, “Each year we have a harder time getting [corn] seeds that test GMO-free. It is getting to the point where most heirloom corn varieties test positive for GMOs; even growers in remote areas are having problems with Monsanto’s GMO [Roundup Ready] corn.”

Frankenfoods are here, and there is no legal requirement they be labeled as such. That scares the hell out of me.



Grey Boy supervises progress
on the new bed



Also worked some more on my new bed, continuing to clear around the edge, and spreading the remainder of the poop mixture on the east end. It’s coming along nicely. Over on the south side of the house, I noticed the red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) has some swelling buds already.

I ordered seeds for Malabar spinach (Basella rubra), castor-bean plant (Ricinus communis) and the totally awesome lion’s tail (Leonotis leonurus) from Baker Creek in addition to all those packets from Renee’s Garden. Obviously, the it’s-almost-spring enthusiasm that’s grabbed me by the throat has no intention of slackening its grip. Which is as it should be.

Thanks for dropping by. No, really, I mean it: the blog passed the 1,000-pageview mark on Monday. It wouldn’t have happened without you.

                                                                         Kathy






Click at the arrow for newer posts

 A blast from the future: dateline 12 March 2011: Because Blogger has mysteriously stopped updating my new posts; and because this is the last post the cyber-forces-that-be officially recognize, I am here to state that, yes, there are newer posts, one arriving every four days. And here is how the technologically challenged (such as myself) can access them. Below the Comments section (still empty, by the way), you are given three clickable choices: Newer Posts, Home, and Older Posts. Click on "Newer" for the next chronological post; "Home" for the most recent post, and "Older" to go back in time to those exciting days of yester-month. My resident geek has taken a screen shot of the relevant area, edited for your, um, edification. Of course, you could always LEAVE A COMMENT if you're having trouble. I live in hope.

BREAKING GROUND

            Been an interesting week. And I mean that in a good way, not in the Chinese-curse sense of “May you live in interesting times, snark, snark.”

            Know that old saw about not being able to teach old dogs new tricks? It’s totally bogus, and I have proof—the queen of the neo-Luddites learned how to prepare cyber-slides for Power Point presentations. She not only understood the process, she enjoyed doing it. Yes, I mentioned this little accomplishment last post, but I’ve worked on it, and refined my technique since then. I whipped out two different sets of slides for the pair of clubs Tim and I had the privilege of addressing this week with an absolute minimum of angst and/or fury.



Power Point presentation # 1
(not shown due to technical difficulties)



            Those who have witnessed my tortured relationships with machines won’t believe things went so swimmingly.

            There was one tense moment when I somehow managed to lose everything—stupid Microsoft—just as the “Jeopardy!” theme music came up. My resident geek rushed in and hit the “restore” button (or something like that), saving the presentation and my half-hour with Alex Trebek. (Actually, it’s only 22 minutes with Alex: the other eight, relentlessly cheerful people try to sell me cars, prescription drugs, furniture, mufflers for the car and eggs. Does strident advertising sell anything to anyone?)

            Our first outing, on Wednesday morning, was the St. James Service Club. Unfortunately, their spanking-new Community Center hasn’t worked out all its bugs yet, especially where the electrics are concerned. So our inaugural Power Point presentation had to wait. No worries, Tim and I belong to the tiny minority of Americans who fear death more than public speaking. We get a little Donny-and-Marie shtick going on, and actually have a good time talking to groups. For St. James, we just followed the outline without the pictures.



Power Point presentation # 2,
a smashing success



            In Boiling Spring Lakes on Thursday, however, the Garden Club had the necessary technology up and running. Having big pictures to point at worked really great, I thought—kind of fun. Our computer-enhanced presentation was well-received. The amorphous disaster I feared never happened. Cool.

            Thursday afternoon, the rain stopped long enough for me to get outside for a few hours. (The alternative was a nap. Weather-enforced physical inactivity has been driving me nuts, so I opted for staying awake.)

           

Started out by sawing the four lowest limbs off the Japanese snowbell (Styrax japonicus) on the corner of our house, to keep them from beaning Tim when he mows. That’s our main tree-pruning criteria: if a branch whacks either of us in the head more than once or twice, it’s history. In the front yard, our Sargent’s crabapple and ‘Natchez’ crape will be receiving similar ministrations soon, too.  

After hauling the severed limbs to the lot next door, I dumped the dead stuff out of the last three summer pots along the sidewalk and moved them. I’ve envisioned a blueberry patch in that bed, to be planted in another five or six weeks. One thing I’ve learned about myself from vegetable gardening: if it’s out of sight, it’s likely to be out of mind as well. The potted cucumber vine by the front door and the lettuces and beans on the back deck got more attention than anything else I grew last year, pickleworms, army worms, and all. I shall capitalize on this knowledge.

Pots emptied and moved, I turned to the main event—marking out the new bed along the north side of our property.



The new bed,
viewed from the east

 Burdened with a succession of town governments with delusions of grandeur and led by flimflammers, Oak Island recently completed its top-of-the-line sewer system, so high-tech and complicated, rumor has it that ours is only the second like it in the world. (The first is alleged to be somewhere in Sweden.) This is lovely in theory. What the town fathers glossed over is that there’re only 8200 of us to cough up the requisite 150 million dollars. Can you spell “kick-back” and “overrun”? Long story short, hooking up to this Rube-doggle left Tim, me and our next-door neighbors, the Fraziers, with a 40-foot long and ten-foot wide sand pit. What better place for a lovely blended border of some of my experimental specimens—red buckeye (Aesculus pavia), sweetheart tree (Euscaphis japonicus), maybe seven sons tree (Heptacodium miconiodes)—this year’s Great Sunflower Project ‘Lemon Queens,’ vines like Malabar spinach and hyacinth bean, veggies and fruits?



The new bed,
viewed from the south



On Thursday afternoon, I broke ground. With my shovel, I drew an outline in the sand of a 24-by-seven-foot oblong running west from the houses toward the street. Finally satisfied with the shape, I dug out a little trench around the edges. Then I retired to the other side of our property to scrabble around in the pile of spare flagstones we’ve accumulated over the years, loading the wheelbarrow with likely candidates for a path through the bed between our yard and Fraziers. Once the stones were placed to my liking, I began cleaning up the edge, cutting roots, pulling out grass and weeds and the odd rock. By five o’clock, the knees of my overalls and my gloves were wet through, and the knees on my legs and my hands were thoroughly chilled—time to quit for the day.

I’m pleased by what I got done. I meant to be out there today, but was prevented by a kerfuffle with the town’s Water Department in the morning and, after lunch, the absolute necessity of cleaning our house before a representative from the Health Department shows up with a clipboard and a disapproving glare. Well, there’s tomorrow, complete with good forecast. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks for dropping by. Stay tuned.

                                                                         Kathy

SPRING PREP

            February means speaking gigs for me and Tim. This time of year, local Garden and Service and Women’s Clubs want us to tell their members how to get their gardens ready for spring, or how to fix problem areas. Up until this year, that meant many days of designing and creating posters to prop on Tim’s portable easel as visual aids to our presentations. We’ve never forgotten the stern injunction issued by one program chairman: “You have to have a handout,” she told us. “If you don’t have a handout, they get bored.”

           

            “!” we replied. “Okaaaay.”

            That was ’way before the days of Power Point. Which, neo-Luddite that I am, I resisted in my usual passive-aggressive manner… until now. Tim pulled up an online video how-to: we watched it. Twice. The perky female voice made slide production sound easy. She was, in fact, right about that. I spent four happy hours playing with pictures and polishing text-bites instead of working on the three pieces due to publishers in the near future. (No worries—except for today, it’s supposed to rain the rest of the week.)

            Tomorrow we take the show on the road. I’m anticipating disaster.

                  Be that as it may, I’m steeped in garden preparedness, and you shall benefit therefrom.



Fitzes' winter garden

            The winter garden presents opportunities unavailable the rest of the year. It is neutral, a study in dull greens, greys and browns, empty of distracting blooms and foliage. It makes the underlying structure of the space—what garden-design types dub “the bones”—apparent. In winter, we can see the garden. Now’s the time to think about what we really want from the space. Now’s the time to assess what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not.

            Drawing a map, more or less to scale, helps with visualization. First sketch in the features you’re absolutely stuck with—buildings, patios, other people’s walls and fences, massive boulders, mature trees. Add or delete (it’s only on paper at this point) slightly more negotiable aspects: lawn areas, hedges, your own fences, walkways, recently transplanted trees and shrubs. Embellish with other, readily moved, hardscapes—small boulders, decorative elements—keeping in mind too much extraneous stuff makes a space feel chaotic. Figure out where you most often see the space from inside the house, and arrange elements to optimize that view. Or perhaps you want to lure the viewer outside, to be in the garden, by enhancing a sense of mystery, of something hidden.

             Here are some sample sketches (remember you can click on the pictures to make them larger). Please note that the drawings don’t have to be pretty. You most likely won’t be publishing yours for all the world to see. I certainly would have taken more care if I’d known mine were going to be beamed across cyber-space.

Front-yard island

Fitzes' back garden

            Bare-bones maps provide an erasable foundation upon which to design the plantings. But that’s a topic for another day. We’re focusing on preparation here.

            In mild-winter climes, February is a great time to get the garden ready for whatever’s going to happen to it as spring plays out. The cool weather makes doing the work more pleasurable than if you put it off until later.

Here’s the plan:

1.   Tidy up the site: prune back ornamental grasses and out-of-control or unsightly woody elements, and take down dead herbaceous vegetation; remove disease-ridden foliage, stems and mulch to the curb, and trim the rest to readily compostable sizes and put it in your bin to cook. (Don’t have a bin? See “Compost Happens I & II” posts of January 16 and 20.)

2.  Feed the soil with a generous topdressing of composted organic material (home-grown or commercially obtained) and kelp meal or seaweed emulsion (for trace elements); and

3.      Refresh the mulch.

Collecting prep tools

            Assemble your tools in a convenient staging area. At my house, that would be the back deck for backyard campaigns and the head of the driveway for forays out front. You’ll need the following:

·    a leaf rake;

·  a hard rake (sometimes called a clam rake or landscape rake);

·    pruners and/or your Joyce Chens,  lops and a pruning saw;

·    a large receptacle for collecting debris;

·    large quantities of composted material;

·   sufficient kelp meal or seaweed emulsion for your square footage, per package directions;

·    a wheelbarrow for mixing and moving the topdressing stuff;

·    a trowel for stirring the kelp meal into the topdressing stuff;

·    a shovel to distribute the topdressing stuff; and

·  a garden claw to ruffle the topdressing stuff down through the mulch and to de-compact packed-down shredded mulches.

Composting cuttings



I also require an eight-foot-high ladder to reach some pruning spots. You may want to think about that, depending on your situation. It is just such a total drag to get into the swing of clean-up and have to stop to cadge a never-conveniently-located ladder.

            The worst part is buying and transporting bags of Black Kow (or wheelbarrow-loads of your own compost) around the site. My little yard requires about 25 50-pounders each spring. Much spousal grumbling traditionally accompanies this endeavor.



Soil-feeding materials

          Once pruning and trimming and disposal are done, it’s time to feed the soil. In the wheelbarrow, stir four cups of kelp meal into each 50 pounds of composted whatever. (February is too early to add fertilizer to the mix; but if you put this chore off until mid-March or later, it's okay to add 12 cups of Holly-Tone or other mostly non-synthetic formulation to each 50-pound batch.) Toss the mixture around by the shovelful, right on top of the mulch, aiming for 100% coverage.

           After attending to all beds, whip out your garden claw for another round. Ruffle the topdressing in to get it closer to the soil. The (horrible) alternative is to move the mulch to a tarp before spreading the compost mixture and then replace it. Another possibility is to work in sections, raking back the mulch from one area, tossing on the Kow mix, and putting the mulch back.

Personally, I’ll take ruffling over raking any day.

The evocatively named vomit fungus
 on shredded hardwood mulch

If your mulch of choice is shredded hardwood, you may have noticed that it tends to compact over time. Take advantage of already being on your knees with a claw to break up the surface, allowing air and water to flow through it more easily. An added bonus is the reduction of the likelihood of certain evil-looking and –smelling fungi erupting. And that, as Martha Stewart used to say before she was shipped off to prison for insider trading, is a really good thing.

            Once the ruffling and fluffing are done, move on to
refreshing the mulch. Here are renewal guidelines for the four types of mulches most prevalent in my neighborhood.

1.  Pine straw: a standard bale covers 40 square feet to three or four inches, which quickly mats down. Pine straw decomposes faster than other mulch choices, and should be refreshed at least twice a year.

2.  Pine bark nuggets: one two-cubic-foot bag will refresh a 15-square-foot area. Nuggets look good far longer than pine straw, weathering from a rich brown to silvery grey. And no, in case you were wondering, they do NOT attract termites.

3.  Shredded hardwoods: a two-cubic-foot bag refreshes 15 to 20 square feet. Although longer-lasting than pine straw, there is the little matter of compaction mentioned above. Please avoid using shredded cypress, as the trees are being over-harvested.

4.   Shredded leaves: the biggest advantage to mulching with leaves is that they are renewed on site constantly—for free! And there’s absolutely no packaging waste.

Don’t try to accomplish all this in one day, or even in a weekend, unless you’ve got a crew. Working alone, I usually take four or five two- to three-hour sessions to finish. Spring prep is just another example of why gardening doesn’t make a good avocation for people addicted to instant gratification.

Thanks for dropping by. Will let you know how the first two speaking engagements pan out next time.

                                                                                      Kathy

FOR THE BIRDS

            In his poem “Alec,” John Ciardi remembers learning about birds from his Uncle Alec (né Alessio). “’God,’ he would say// ‘sends birds, not calendars.’”

            Anybody with a backyard birdfeeder knows Uncle Alec is right.

Kathy's workspace

            Because my actual desk is buried under piles of papers and the printer and partially completed projects and the books I need close at hand when I’m writing, the kitchen table is where I work. (Tim says I tend to take over every flat surface in the house, except his studio, where my stuff only consumes about 30% of the available space. Maybe 40%, if you count the closet. It’s why we moved my desk to the kitchen in the first place—painters need room.) Anyway, when not consumed by throes of creativity at the kitchen table, I look out the faux French doors across the screened porch to the back garden. The formal dwarf yaupon and the out-of-control eleagnus hedges, the Confederate-jasmine-covered arbor and parts of a Leyland cypress, a southern crabapple (Malus angustifolius, in case you were wondering) and the ‘Muskogee’ crape myrtle dominate the view. Those plants, and the birds.

The view from Kathy's workspace

            Families of northern cardinals, northern mockingbirds, Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, brown thrashers, mourning doves and blue jays give our yard—and the blessedly undeveloped lots next door—as their permanent addresses. It’s not unusual to spot downy, hairy, red-bellied and red-headed woodpeckers. Sometimes a pileated drops in to sample the suet as well. In the winter, they are joined by transient dark-eyed juncos, red-breasted nuthatches, and the occasional flash of goldfinch and cedar waxwing. Our neighborhood is too built up for eastern bluebirds’ taste, but where the land is open, they’re there. On the beach, seagulls, sandpipers, willets, pelicans and cormorants take in stride the annual winter invasion of royal terns at Blue Water Point. In the salt marshes, several species of herons and egrets poke about for frogs, fish and fiddler crabs. Grackles hover in mobs in McDonald’s parking lot, begging for scraps, and killdeer cheat death by nesting in graveled driveways and roads.

           

Red-shouldered and red-tailed hawks, northern harriers and the occasional bald eagle and osprey survey the scene from atop utility poles or glide in lazy circles through Carolina blue skies. I know screech, great horned and barred owls live here too, although I’ve only seen barred ones. (Those sightings were traumatic for all concerned. In two separate mid-afternoon highway incidents during one horrible week in the fall of 2007, our truck was dive-bombed by barred owls: the truck emerged victorious both times.) Homely but useful turkey buzzards clean up carcasses left by cats and cars.

Tufted titmouse in the
'Muskogee' crape mrytle

Twice a day—once as we leave the island and again on our way back home—Tim and I look for “our” kingfisher on the electrical, phone and cable wires strung across the Intracoastal Waterway parallel to the Oak Island Bridge. He and the wife arrive when temperatures start to cool in the fall. We know it’s January when the white ibises show up to peck away on local golf courses, hard on the heels of visiting northward-bound robins. In early February, the red-wing blackbirds arrive in flocks of thousands, filling swampy places with chittering gossip about which backyards have the fullest feeders. In late February, the Carolina wrens and house finches come back from wherever they disappeared to in November. By mid-April, the kingfishers have flown north, leaving the summertime wires bereft.





Northern mockingbird
defending his berries
in the weeping yaupon holly



I catalogued all our local avian friends for you because North America’s Great Backyard Bird Count is being held this year from Friday, February 18 through Monday, February 21. The purpose is to provide a continent-wide snapshot of just which birds are where and in what numbers. Participation requirements are fluid: the minimum is a single 15-minute stint of feeder-watching over the four-day period. Conducted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada, the family-friendly Count welcomes data from everyone—no birding chops necessary.

If you’ve got a birdfeeder in your yard, keep it filled that weekend and record who shows up to eat. I figure I might as well join in: I already spend a lot of time staring out at the backyard.

For more information about rules, data submission and bird-identification help, go to GBBC’s website at www.birdsource.org/gbbc. 

           

                                            * * *

            When I mentioned to Tim I planned to write about phenology projects, he looked puzzled. “Isn’t that the study of head bumps?” he asked.

            No, phenology is the study of plant and animal life-cycle events—first leaf, first flower, seed set, and so on. Scientists use phenologic observations to track global climate-change trends; to monitor drought and wildfire risks and the health of ecosystems; and to identify and keep tabs on invasive species, infectious diseases and pests. The task is enormous, and they need our help.

            In 2010, I signed up to participate in two citizen-scientist endeavors. One worked out, the other didn’t. Thumbnail sketches of these public-supported phenology projects reveal how you can add to databases vital to understanding climatological changes so that we may learn to adapt to them… before it’s too late.

National Phenology Network
Nature's Notebook
data collection sheet

      The USA National Phenology Network. A collaboration between federal agencies, environmental networks, universities and the public, NPN monitors the impact of climate change on plants and animals in the U.S. through compilation of widespread phenophase observations. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to choose one or more plants or animals for which you record and submit phenologic data. I chose the native maypop, Passiflora incarnata, because I had three large specimens close to hand (regular participation is enhanced if you make things convenient for yourself). The NPN’s Nature’s Notebook datasheet makes recording and submitting observations easy. The official website at www.usanpn.org tells you all you need to know to get started.

The Great Sunflower Project
data collection sheet

      The Great Sunflower Project. Here’s a chance to pay attention to the pollinators flitting around your yard. The mission of the Project is to create a map of which bees live where in rural, urban and suburban areas of the U.S. With the future of European honeybees in North America in some doubt, native pollinators like bumblebees and carpenter bees have suddenly come into the limelight. Participants grow bee-magnet ‘Lemon Queen’ sunflowers from seeds. Why only ‘Lemon Queen’? To ensure standardized results, of course. (“Bee” sure to order the annual species, please, not the perennial. Although marketed as easy to grow, mine never quite took off. I shall try again this year.) Take your morning coffee, datasheet, pencil and camera out to the sunflower patch, and settle in to observe any apians who visit your flowers during 15 consecutive minutes. Repeat two to four times a week. (Hint: plant the sunflowers where you’ll be reminded they’re there. Some of us aren’t at the top of our games at morning-coffee time.) The website helps you identify some of the more common native pollinators, and offers a great deal of information about phenology in general. Learn more at www.greatsunflower.org.

If these activities whet your appetite for involvement in backyard citizen-scientist projects, there are scads of others. Consider this partial list: eBird; Firefly Watch; Foliage Network; Frog Watch; Grunion Greeters; Hummingbird Monitoring Network; Jelly Watch (jellyfish, not jelly jars); Monarch Larva Monitoring Project; Project Budburst; Project Feeder Watch. It’s heart-warming and good for the old self-esteem to add to the sum of human knowledge about the natural world. And best of all, you needn’t even leave your property to take part.

Oh, yeah—the study of head bumps is phrenology. With an “r.”

Thanks for dropping by. See you next time.
                                                        
                                                                   Kathy

JANUARY WRAP-UP

            Writing this blog is good for me—makes me do things I’d put off indefinitely if I didn’t have to report on my progress. It’s like when Tim and I agreed to put our garden on the Oak Island tour back in 2003 and then had only six weeks to whip the place into show-shape. It was a hell of a lot of work, attending to all the small but important details we’d let slip. Also reminds me of my house in upstate New York, where the light “switch” at the base of the cellar stairs was a live wire you hooked onto another wire to complete the circuit. After eight years of this shocking make-shift arrangement, we decided to sell the house and had a proper switch installed.

            Funny what you’ll live with if there’s no threat of strangers poking around.

            Anyway, I’ve made some strides since December, and hope it doesn’t matter they all took place since last Thursday.

I ordered composter brackets for a second bin. They weren’t at Gardeners Supply, however, but at Lee Valley Tools’ catalog. The price rose 30% between 2009 and 2011—from $60 to $90—but I sort of promised I’d do something about rendering my lovely if unorthodox compost useable. I told Tim I’ll pay for them with the proceeds from my burgeoning writing career. He rolled his eyes and, resignation dripping from every syllable, said, “Like Min and her savings account?” (That’s a funny story, about our friend Min. By the time she married Jim in 1956, she’d salted away $8000. Whenever Jim balked at buying something or other she couldn’t live without, she’d snap, “I’ll take it out of my savings account, okay?” During their 53 years together, she spent that same $8000 about 30 times. By the time Tim and I got to know them, that account was both a legend and a family joke. Now it’s our family joke, too. Min died in July of 2009. I miss her every day.)

Got outside and started cleaning up. Sunday was a beautiful day, exactly what late January is supposed to feel like—temps in the upper 50s, mostly sunny, light breeze out of the west. I pulled the sere remains of the annual may-pop (Passiflora incarnata) off the outdoor shower wall, snipping carefully with my Joyce Chens, to protect the netting the tendrils latch onto and to make the debris small enough to compost readily. (To the compost Nazis: at last a respectable load of browns has entered the pile and was turned in. I hope you’re all very happy.)

 

Look, Ma!
No dead plants!



Once the shower wall and potting-table top were dead-plant-free, I moved on to the vegetable patch. The first picture in “Tis the Season for Excuses,” posted December 27, shows what I saw upon rounding the northwest corner of the dwarf yaupon hedge. Attacked the tattered evidence of last season’s hopes, not bothering to be careful: the 25-gallon-potful of these leavings ended up on the curb, hopefully forestalling any resurgence of lurking latent pathogens or, PDIC help us, pickleworm larvae. Then I disassembled the deeply ugly trellises I’d cobbled together from yards of pink surveyors tape and pieces of the PVC seed-starting table Tim built me some years back. (Why the shelves were available for conversion is a story for another February or March day.) Finished up by dumping the soil from the melon and potato pots onto the vacant lot next door—it’s biodegradable, y’all—and trimming up the 38 cold-hurt Lamium maculatum ‘White Nancy’ my grower-friend Christine gave me.

            Doesn’t sound like much, but those chores plus the regular Sunday bird-feeding, compost-turning and walkabout took three hours. By 4:30, my butt frozen from sitting on the concrete driveway while spiffing up the lamiums, I was ready to come in for some cocoa, a shower, dinner, face-time with the computer, and the third installment of PBS’ “Masterpiece: Downton Abbey.” Anyway, it’s a start. Kathy-the-ant shifted some grains. (Kathy-the-ant? See the post cited above.)



The garden as blank canvas

            Moving right along, starting plants from seeds requires a tremendous leap of faith for me. If the poor things have to stay indoors too long past germination, they’re almost certain to fall victim to damping off, drowning (mostly the same thing), insufficient quantity and quality of light, failure to get pricked out and/or moved to larger pots in a timely fashion, or active neglect bred of frustration with the lank, moldy things. My luck (and the plants’) improves with direct sowing, but that often makes for vegetables that don't mature to fruit-set, and flowers that never reach bloom-stage. Nonetheless, last Thursday I ordered 17 packets of seeds from Renee’s Garden—five vegetables, 11 flowers, and a grass mix for the cats, in fond hopes they’ll stop tearing at the Cordyline and the clumping bamboo on the back porch. These will swell the ranks of the two dozen envelopes of embryonic veg left over from last year. 



A cyclamen bouquet

             A quick aside: One of the beauties of Mel Bartholomew’s square-foot gardening technique is that you sow only the number of seeds as the number of plants wanted, instead of scattering a whole packet and subsequently thinning the sprouts. This feature, along with failures distributed into several small pockets rather than a single generalized one, sold me on Mel’s method. I don’t like destroying possibly viable seedlings. It’s funny, really, that I should feel this way. I can yank out a shrub that’s underperforming and fling it to the curb without a second thought. In fact, my favorite gardening quote of all time is English gardening eminence Christopher Lloyd’s bon mot, “Deaths can be imposed as well as waited for.” But I balk at arbitrarily giving some sprouts the thumbs-up and others the thumbs-down, like some ancient caesar.





Solanum pseudocapsicum
releafs and blooms



           Since I qualify as a staunchly average gardener in terms of the amount of time and effort I’m willing to expend on any given endeavor, I figure you might benefit from the occasional eureka moments I experience, and from the guaranteed disasters my adventures in growing from seeds will engender. Oh, come on, you love it when a self-styled “expert” falls on her face. I know I do.

            In mid-January, on our most recent visit to her greenhouses, my aforementioned friend Christine gave Tim and me four beautifully blooming Cyclamen coum, florists’ cyclamen. They make a gladsome sight on the piano, along with the miracle poinsettia and the tapeworm fern. I’m following C’s watering instructions to the letter, hoping for a second batch of odds-beaters.



The Christmas Miracle
poinsettia boldly goes
into February







In other houseplant news, the papayas continue to hum along. They recently got doused with very dilute coffee, alleged to proffer some benefit. I’ve also taken to dumping the leaves from my nightly cup of green tea onto the pots’ dirt. I read somewhere (but where?) something positive comes of this practice, but damned if I can remember what. (If I ever unearth the clipping, I’ll fill you in.) The Solanum pseudocapsicum is releafing, if spottily. It even sports a few blossoms, an overwintering first. The Cordyline terminalis, Pentas ‘Stars and Stripes’ and the verbena continue to hold their own. All good wishes fervently appreciated by all of us.

Soon after the “Making Connections” post of January 19, the clip at left appeared in the Wilmington paper about the better-late-than-never comeuppance of the man who introduced hog CAFOs to North Carolina. And Tim sent me a link to the jaunty jingle, “Monsanto Rag,” which I share with you here. Two little day-brighteners to waft you into February.

Thanks for dropping by, and especially for giving me added impetus to do the things I ought to be doing anyway. See you next time.

                        Kathy