No More Rows!

Almost too pretty to cut.

Small as it is, my home vegetable garden has always seemed like work, as opposed to the rest of my garden, which is my place to play. Thanks to my lettuce, I believe I have discovered why. 

I allowed a couple of lettuce plants to develop flowering stalks last summer, that is, to “go to seed.” As a result, my lettuce germinated very early in spring. The comet-shaped drifts of reds and greens were so beautiful and so robust that I didn’t have the heart to regiment them. I seeded a tail onto the comet, so as to extend the season, and tucked in four broccoli hybrids—two each of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Happy Rich’—where the lettuce stopped. A cover crop of vetch and winter rye grew tall in much of the rest of the garden, but in the spot where it was sparse I sowed a sprinkling of arugula seeds and arranged three Toscano kale plants. 

Lettuce planted in fall had a big head start!

Yesterday after the rain I pulled the rye out, cutting the green from the roots, and sprinkled another drift of lettuce seeds. When the rye breaks down a bit I will fork the residue into the soil. And the time will be right for tomatoes, supported by colorful spiral stakes, and placed to please. As they grow tall they will shade the greens. I will position a handful of pepper plants and two or three skinny towers of pole beans in some aesthetic, as yet undetermined, pattern. I picture orange and yellow nasturtiums scrambling among them. 

Rye is severed. Soon there will be tomatoes!

I feel liberated. From rows. This is, after all, the way I garden. What makes gardening play is the not knowing what, exactly, is going to happen when I go outside with my bucket, pruners, and cobrahead weeder.  Not knowing what, exactly, my next move will be. If larkspur is looking lush and overabundant I will gravitate in its direction, and thin the crowd. Midway into the task I may notice foxglove seedlings that can be relocated to complete a picture that lives in my head, or coreopsis plants that need a little love. I cultivate the soil around the clumps of emerging perennials, mentally placing the gomphrena and asclepias seedlings I will plant when the weather warms in the next week or two. I weigh different spots for the cutleaf lilac my son is propagating for me. Invariably I will set my pruners somewhere in the grass, or on a rock, or in a pot—hidden from sight. So I retrace my labyrinthian trail, in the process discovering a clematis that needs gentle guidance as it climbs, or a hydrangea that needs artful shaping.

 

Plans—in the garden, that is—are made to be changed. Gardens are meant to be played in. “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation,” wrote Plato. The same, I believe, is true of nature. 

So yes I can be undisciplined in the vegetable garden. Yes I can abandon the restraint imposed by rows.  

My lettuce has given me permission.

Dutchman's Breeches, still in flower!

It is April 23rd. Teeny while flags fly inches above the soil; clumps of dissected leaves cling effortlessly to the steep east-facing slopes of the Delaware River basin. The Dutchman’s Breeches occupy spaces too hazardous even for garlic mustard. They share space with mosses, last year’s fern fronds, and leaves of dogtooth violet. Skinny chestnut oaks and teenage seedlings of callery pears perch on the rocks above, leaning over the road I travel at precarious 10 percent angles. Root tips probe the cracks of the rocks, thickening, and exploring the depths of the crevices, holding the ever-increasing mass of the leaning towers in place. One day an ice storm will load them up with too many pounds of frozen weight for the clamps to hold. Rocks will pull free; towers will tumble. Still the Breeches will return to greet the spring bumblebees, their reason for being. They will widen their area of occupation, they will fly their flags.

Why do I find this harbinger so inspiring?  Maybe it demonstrates that to be tough, we need not be showy. To survive we need not be pugilistic. We just need to find our space and our time, and quietly exert the force within us. We need only discover our niche and fly our perky white flags. When the time is right the buzz will intensify. Pollination will happen.

Aphid Math

Ahhh Spring. It’s that time of year when the greenhouse gardener’s thoughts and dreams turn to … aphids. 

Specifically, to how to make them go away. 

Based on my research, the spring aphids that are congregating on my radish leaves and broccoli seedlings are probably green peach aphids, even though they are not green. Whitney Cranshaw states in Garden Insects of North America that this aphid is “one of the most commonly damaging aphids of greenhouse crops.” I have questions about Cranshaw’s syntax (What do you think? Should “commonly” modify “damaging,” or should “common” modify “damaging insects”) but none at all regarding his entomological prowess. I will accept that my brown aphids are really green. If Whitney C. says so.

Note the ghosts of aphids past.

I got very excited seeing ghostly, leggy forms scattered among the plump marauders. The lacewing eggs I scattered two months ago must be hatching (!), I thought, and tiny lacewings are sucking the sweet life out of the plant suckers. But no. Between birth and adulthood, which takes all of 8 days, the aphids molt four times. The white forms are the skins they’ve shed along the way.

The thing about aphids is, if you miss them early on, your crop is doomed, your ship has sunk. Embryos start forming in their grandmother, making it possible for an adult female to give birth to as many as a dozen live nymphs a day. (1) Count it up: that’s 84 a week. From a single aphid. Meanwhile all those babies are shedding and maturing and, by the end of the week, having live babies of their own. I will leave it to the mathematician to calculate a sum total after a month of unchecked reproduction, should you miss that initial batch of a dozen or so aphids. 

Trust me: It is a big, big number.

And this is why, when the box of 4500 Asian ladybugs (Hippodamia convergens) arrived at my door late Friday afternoon, I rushed right over to the greenhouses to release them. No, these are not the same Asian ladybugs that enter your house in winter and crawl around on your windows and walls, in case you were wondering. Those are Harmonia axyridis. They look very similar, but they’re not the same. According to Whitney C. 

Prey is multitudinous. And conveniently slow!

I watered the greenhouses well, and tenderly situated my new allies in protected places. I nestled them among the carrot foliage and gave them shelter beneath broad leaves of chard, I gently shook a few out of the bag to populate the weeds along the greenhouse edges and rested others in the dried remains of last fall’s nasturtium vines. The next day, Easter Sunday, was cloudy and rainy—perfect for rest and recuperation after a 2-day journey from Arizona, cramped 281 (give or take a few) per cubic inch. 

 

On Monday (I am making an assumption here) they reveled in the bounty. What ladybug would not be thrilled to come upon a batch of tender, newly hatched, sap-sucking insects. What ladybug would not get right to work consuming their quota of about 22 aphids a day. After all—and this is a fact—unless she eats aphids, she will not lay sticky bunches of yellow eggs that, in a little over a month, will become hungry larvae. A built-in mechanism causes the developing eggs to be reabsorbed into her body unless there is a proper food supply about.(1) How civilized. 

But, assuming that aphids abound (which they do, in an April greenhouse that has been kept above freezing all winter), what happens next is a thrilling thought to one who wakes up to dreams of hoards of hungry sucking beasts destroying crops of baby bok choy: When the ladybug larva emerges from the yellow egg and encounters an aphid, it bites a hole in the body and sucks out the contents. Then it pumps the liquid back into the body and sucks it out several times to effectively mix the innards of their victim with digestive juices.(2) The mere thought makes my sleep more restful. 

Grey cabbage aphids like the cool weather of fall.

As a gardener, it’s difficult not to think in terms of the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s easy to presume that one is winning the game, that ladybugs will solve the problem (and my, aren’t we clever). The truth, however, is far more intricate. The grey cabbage aphids of fall are still hanging about in small clumps here and there, waiting. Waiting for the tides to turn, waiting for the savoy cabbage to make an appearance, so that they can take instant advantage of its protective crinkles and give almost immediate birth to practically countless young who will keep the cycle alive. I will refrain from planting brassicas in certain problem areas in spring. I will put distance between the consumer and its favorite food. It may work. It may not.

As savvy as I think I am with my ladybugs and my strategic planting plan, my means are primitive in comparison to those of the tiny aphid, whose hollow stylus, thinner than a human hair, both pierces and sucks; who comes equipped with exudation tubes that drip sweet honeydew so rich in sugars that ants will protect the exuders so as to keep the tap flowing; whose generation time can be a mere 10 days, which allows them to adapt and evolve as circumstances change. Who does not give birth unless there is an adequate food supply. Who (unlike us, who must eat carrots and yams) can produce its own carotenoids! (3)

"Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled," said poet, writer, and moralist  Samuel Johnson. I disagree. The mighty aphid is deserving of respect. 

Awe, even.

(1) http://online.sfsu.edu/bholzman/courses/Fall99Projects/ladybug.htm

(2) http://faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/identify/ladybird.htm

(3) http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116842 

The Value of a Hoe

A funny thing happened on facebook recently. Generally, my online personality is reticent; I rarely make a peep. But I was so proud of myself for repairing my washing machine that I wanted to shout it to the world. My exact phrasing was: 

“Guess what I did today? Replaced the drainage pump on my 25-year-old Maytag (all by myself, with a little phone coaching from Jeff Schultz of Schultz Electric on Rt100/29). Go Maytag!” 

Thirty-five (that’s 20%!) of my “friends” had something to say about the comment.

This blew my mind.

To what do I owe the ability and fortitude that allowed me to pull off this amazing feat? Well … (blush) at this time I’d like to thank my father, who made me stick with a task until I got it done, and my partner, who gives me unending and outrageously extravagant emotional support, and the ladies of my book club, who offer me the very best of bragging arenas. And Maytag and Jeff Schultz and my internet provider and god and my country and the angels above. And my agent … wait, I don’t have an agent.

Oh, and my garden. Most of all, my garden. Why my garden, you ask?

Grasshoppers jumped from Cowpea cover crop to tomatoes. How convenient!

If you are a gardener, you probably don’t need to ask. 

Cabbage aphids require cunning. Strategy.

It is my garden that challenges me with problem after problem, day after day. My garden has taught me that the answers are never simple, and they are never the same as they were last time. It has taught me perseverance, creativity, confidence. What do you do when grasshoppers take little bites out of all of your beautiful tomatoes? You try your hardest to think like a grasshopper, and make the situation a little less pleasant for the hopping marauding tribe. You cut down the immediate weeds where they like to perch. What about when dense colonies of cabbage aphids cover the stalks of your kale? You blast them with a sharp spray of water. You squish them with your fingers. You bring in the ladybugs. 

Ladybugs in the greenhouse. Yes!

You make a plan for next year’s garden, and site the kale in a distant plot of land. You do all of the above. 

Vermin? Follow the trails of their destruction to the holes from whence they emerge. Drop in a few mothballs. Or you get a dog. Or a very secure fence set 8 inches into the soil. Or you acquire a trap, and prop it open for a couple of days until the groundhog is deceived into comfortably waddling in and out of the metal mesh cage, and then … GOTCHA! Then you come up with a plan to transport it 10 miles in your car and release it (surreptitiously, sneakily, when no one’s watching) where you think, you hope, it won’t eat someone else’s garden. And if it does, well, it’s not your garden. You gotta be tough. 

You gotta be smart.

Groundhog trails lead to groundhog holes.

Tomatoes come with a complicated collection of conundrums. How do you keep them upright late in the season when the vines are weighed down with fruits and green? How can you spot a tomato hornworm before it strips half the plant? Is there a way to keep last year’s fungal spores from splashing up onto this year’s foliage? And what do you do about the stinkbugs that stipple your perfect fruits with sunken lesions that look bad and taste awful? Each problem calls for diagnostic skills and intricate solutions far more elaborate than those required in taking a pump out and put a new one in.

The pump. Not so hard to replace. Really.

Even so, it felt great to be discussing the ins and outs of soapy water with Jeff Schultz—talkin’ pumps and hoses and belts. I’ve never felt the power of having a gun in my hand (and never plan to) but I wonder: might my feeling of triumphant power on fixing my machine (which, by the way, is still functioning) be similar? Might the feat of a successful vegetable garden make us less likely to seek power in one of the destructive means that are all too common in our society? 

These are things I will never know. One thing I do know is this: we thrive on feelings of power. Our emotional health depends on sensing that we are in control. The garden helps us to achieve this status. In fact, there is empirical evidence that this is true. Dr. Jill Litt of the University of Colorado has determined that “community gardeners (and in some instances home gardeners) had statistically higher ratings of all psychological, social and health measures, after adjusting for age, educational attainment and neighborhood socioeconomic status.” (1)

So there you go. I have no illusions that I’ll convince others that, based on studies, and life experience, gardening is one of the pursuits that makes life worth living. 

Still, it’s true. 

I know, and my Maytag knows.

(1) http://artsandsciences.colorado.edu/magazine/2011/08/gardens-improve-personal-and-neighborhood-health-team-finds/

The Trash Theory

“Does the world seem dirtier?” a fellow garden blogger asked. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Man was referring to the plastic bottles and candy wrappers that litter the roadsides, and are especially evident when the world is colored in beiges and browns. Yes. The world seems dirtier. It may indeed be dirtier. There is implied blame. People are inconsiderate. They are so uncaring, we think, as we shake our heads reprovingly at their garbage. It is never our garbage.

There are some universal truths at work here. First there is the nostalgia filter: When-I-was-Young-the-Roadsides-were-Always-Spotless. We are absolutely sure of this, fifty years (plus or minus a handful) later. If this were a group conversation I might break in right about now with another nostalgic tidbit about how, as children, we would collect bottles from the roadsides and wash them in the gas station bathroom and then redeem them for pennies apiece—a story that would be intended to show that the roadsides were indeed litter-free (thanks to us) but in fact testifies to the opposite. Without organized soccer leagues, we had time for such entrepreneurial exploits (unlike today’s children ... or is that my nostalgia filter talking?) but the fact remains that the sheer poundage of glass that we would sneak into the restroom made it worth our while to do so. Even at pennies apiece. The roadsides were, it seems, far from litter-free.

But in defense of people, at least when it comes to in-your-face littering, I offer a universal theory of change. I call it “The Trash Theory.” It could just as easily be named “The Kleenex Theory” or the “Band-Aid Theory,” and it has, in fact, a given name: “Punctuated equilibrium” was coined by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in 1972.

It goes like this:

Suburbia carries on, predictably and neatly, day-by-day, the sweet smell of grass clippings clinging to the Saturday morning air, roadsides green with garlic mustard and goldenrod. On Thursday evenings residents place their trashcans by the curb. 

And then it happens. 

A Thursday night storm blows limbs from trees … and upends just a small percentage of the curbed cans. Maybe yours is among them. By morning, Wegmans carryout containers and empty Pure Life Purified Water bottles are caught up in the tall stems of roadside goldenrod. Not along your property, but along those Adopt-A-Highway sections where organizations take on the feel-good job of cleaning up the trash of other people—inconsiderate type people—so the world can be a neater nicer place.

The universality of this dynamic is undeniable. We putter along, happy for a time, until a ferocious wind, or rhinovirus, or hangnail, or social revolution causes a sudden upset in some previously stable system. Tectonic plates slip. Updrafts and downdrafts create a feedback loop. Before we know it the world is a different place. The Kleenex box that sat nearly untouched for months is empty.

In “The Beak of the Finch” Jonathan Weiner told the story of how a weather disaster can affect the birds’ food supply, and so the very physiology of finches can change in a single generation! His tale is a hard, compressed truth of nature that involves catastrophic loss of life in a species where a generational length is a fraction of ours. It is also a very scary universal reality.

“Does the world seem dirtier?” If this seems true, we might blame climate change and the more frequent gusts it is said to trigger. It’s much simpler, of course, to picture careless teens dropping empty cigarettes packs from car windows. We can do something about that—launch a public relations campaign, or post notices of stiff fines along the highways. We can call the public to action to fix the obvious mess. Predicting and preventing are a whole different matter.

But enough of dire predictions. 

Rhubarb tip, poised for exponential growth

Today, March 20^th, is the vernal equinox! At 7:02 a.m. (here in the northeast U.S.) the sun crossed the celestial equator. We are on our way to a positive feedback loop, as plants are stimulated out of dormancy by extravagant sunlight. Before we know it the world will be a different place, lush, green, bounteous.

Hang onto your hat. The season begins.

Pay attention. Treasure the experience. Enjoy the ride.

The more we value and understand the nature of nature, the more we will be capable of comprehending the big picture. We need to understand the big picture.

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” Henry David Thoreau.

Spring. Boing!

You have to look closely, gently jostle aside a few leaves. It is happening.

Spring. 

Energy, tense and coiled.

Helleborus bud

The discarded bottles and scraps of plastic stand out discordantly in the fawny beiges of late winter. But it is happening, cell by cell, buds expanding, their waxy protective scales ready to fold back and reveal … spring. 

Boing!

Mountain laurel in early March

Sedums wear intense colors. Mosses are greener, succulents getting plumper by the day. Moss phlox is becoming itself again. Beneath last year’s dried and tired hydrangea clusters, buds are evident on opposite sides of stems.

Moss phlox

Promises, promises.

Spring keeps us on edge. Waiting, watching.

It makes us all a little more alive. It makes us want to prepare to celebrate … life.

It helps us, a little, to forgive death.

Sedum 'Angelina'

The Beet Germination

Note the hole. Note the position of the hole.

At first I wasn’t sure what was happening to my beet seeds. After planting and planting again I had only a handful of seedlings to show for it. Were the seeds carried away by ants? Ruined by humidity? Eaten by rodents? But then mouse-sized holes with no evident bottoms opened up, coincidentally, in my beet bed. A more obvious clue was the chewed open ‘Merlin’ beet seed package in the plastic box with the cracked top. That together with the empty seed shells that littered the box’s bottom and the ground around the scene, plus the scattered mouse droppings, clinched it. Sure enough, according to A. Phillip Draycott’s Sugar Beet, “Using its sense of smell, the field mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) is able to detect the exact location of ungerminated beet seeds at a depth of at least 3 cm. shortly after they have been sown.” How very clever of them.

Beet seeds are encased in a hard shell. Mice take the seeds, and leave the shell.

Compared to mice, we are woefully deficient in the olfactory department. Mice have approximately 1,300 olfactory receptor genes, of which some 1,100 are functional, whereas we have only about 350 functional genes out of 1000.  (Shepherd, 2004)

But wait. It turns out that, even if 80% of its apparatus is removed, a mouse is still an accurate smeller. Our 350 genes should be at least equal to a mouse at 20% sniffing capacity. But smell, it appears, is not as cut-and-dried as the gene count makes it appear; it is tied to evolution. We (having lifted our noses up from the dirt … mostly) are attuned to the aromas of garlic roasted in butter, bread baking, and apple pies crusting with cinnamony lusciousness. A mouse’s specialty is, apparently, beet seeds.

As regular readers may remember, I have a trio of young cats that are being raised, ostensibly, to patrol the area. They are named, appropriately, after hurricanes: Sandy, Irene, and Ivan. But, as readers may also recall, these lovelies would be more likely to compound the problem than solve it if I were to allow them to blow through greenhouse number 2 (where I grow, among other things, delicate microgreens) which I will not, at least until they settle down into a hunting, sleeping, pooping outdoors routine rather than the one they practice now: racing after each other at top speed, taking naps in my tatsoi, and ignoring my attempts to “litter train” them by inserting their cat turds anywhere they please.

Hurricane Irene

By the way, a cat's olfactory membrane, at about 14 sq. cm., is about four times the size of ours, so they have us beat in the smell sense as well. For comparison, the human olfactory membrane is a mere 4 sq. cm. But a mouse will smell a cat long before a cat will smell a mouse. (A sudden inspiration has just occurred to me, but more on that later)

Ever since I cracked the case of the pilfered seeds, I have refrained from planting beets in the catless greenhouse. But, complicating the problem is an ancillary predicament: carrots are unsuitable for that greenhouse also, due to the nasturtiums (you remember, the nasturtiums that harbor the whiteflies?), so carrots get priority in the catted space. Therefore, I am determined to find a way to get beet seeds to survive the mice until they germinate.

The long and the short of it is, I planted beets today—my third try since the number of daylight hours topped the magic 10. I planted 3 rows of 2 varieties of beet. On top of the bed I placed 5 mousetraps of 2 types. One is a standard, wooden, snap your finger off type, the other a newfangled white-shark-jaws-of-death plastic affair. Consider it a mousetrap trial, for the mice will surely rush to the scene. There is no doubt in my mind that they go to sleep after a hard night of plundering my beds dreaming of the next rich cache of beet seeds that I will so kindly provide for them. I can hardly wait until tomorrow to see if I, with my deficient sense of smell and my hard-hearted gardener’s sensibility, have prevailed in game of cat, mouse, and beet. Will they prefer the smell of cheddar, or the alluring perfume of beet seed? Soon, I will know.

And if my bed still comes up empty, I have a clever back up plan that might work. Would a mouse be deceived by its own olfactory prowess if I were to strategically transplant clumps lifted from a lightly used litter box?

It's a little scary to find oneself thinking like a mouse.