Why I Never (Well, Hardly Ever) Buy Mulch

Over the last twenty-five years a tide of mulch--some shredded, some chipped, some brown, some bright orange--has spread over America.  It makes the landscaping in people's gardens, around the parking lots of malls, and in front of filling stations look calm and controlled, like a room after the bed has been made.

I have bought mulch in my time--heavy, cumbersome bags of it--though never as much as I needed to achieve that well-bedded look.  Every spring, if I were dedicated to that look or if my house were within sight of critical suburban eyes,  I would buy another dozen bags to supplement the dwindling original layers of the stuff. 

But I don't.  Instead, I combine spring clean-up and mulching into a single effort. 

First I go around the garden collecting the dried-out remnants of last summer's plants:  the baptisia branches, the peony stems, the dried sedums, and the six-foot stalks of what is either a small sunflower or a Jerusalem artichoke.  I gather armfuls of the stuff and, instead of carting it into the woods, I pile it thickly along the back of the flower beds, having first pushed the remnants of the store-bought mulch to the front.  Then I stomp on the piles to break them up and so the wind won't blow them away.

This home-grown mulch is dun-colored and, at least to my countrified eyes, fairly innocuous.  It saves me not only money and gas but many trips into the woods, which is a good thing in this busy season.  And in a couple of weeks, when the baptisia and the peonies and the giant hostas and the pachysandra and the columbines all explode, you won't be able to see my home-grown mulch unless you look really, really closely. 

Fortunately my gardening friends and I, by unspoken compact, only look closely at what is admirable--that hardy lavender!  that budding rose bush!  Our friendship-trained eyes barely register the sprouting bishop's weed, the un-harvested dandelions, and that stack of old stalks laid on the ground at the back of the flower bed. 

Blinking away the undesirables, we look each other in the face and declare that what with the crazy weather, and the absence of bees, and those horrible invasive species this is the most challenging, impossible gardening year ever, and it will be a miracle if we can get a single plant to survive until the October frosts arrive.

I Go Ramping

Went into the woods yesterday, looking for ramps.  This spring has been so slow and weird that I had no idea whether the ramps would be up or not. 

Although the fields in Vermont are green now, the woods are still brown and bare.  Walking on last fall's carpet of leaves, I saw that only an occasional fern had poked through.  But then I went over a rise, looked to my left, and there it was, a whole regiment of ramps. 

That sudden sea of green in the midst of the dead brownness made me catch my breath.  I found a big fallen tree to serve as landmark--I've gotten lost in our woods before, so now I'm cautious when I walk off the path--and crunched my way to the ramps. Close up, ramps have that same  determined, optimistic look as other members of the lily family:  garlic, daffodils, hyacinths and amaryllis.  And they need a lot of optimism and determination, coming as they do before spring fully settles in.

I thrust my trowel into the wet ground and was immediately rewarded with a cloud of oniony-garlicky scent.  That lovely smell kept me going through the digging--as small as the bulbs are, they cling hard to the ground and aren't easy to pull up.  When the basket was half full, I called the dogs and headed home.

Tonight I will chop up the ramps, saute them in olive oil, and mix them into scrambled eggs.  And in the next few days I'll harvest more, and chop and saute and then freeze them for next winter, which I have never tried before.  But I'll have to hurry.  You never know with ramps--one day they're here and the next they've vanished.  Just like spring. 









(So sorry, everyone, to have had to turn word verification back on, but I was spending more time dealing with spam than writing posts.)

Fair Is Foul And Foul Is Fair

Spent the morning amidst the primal ooze at the bottom of the pond.  You've got to be madly in love with a pond to go through the spring cleaning it requires.  It's kind of like changing a baby's diapers:  foul, but you do it because the end result is fair.

In the pond's case, the fairness will happen in a couple of weeks, when the lily pads rise to the surface of the water. Then the frogs will migrate in from the woods and we'll have music as well as circus acts throughout the day.

But in the meantime, ugh!  Although my job is made more tolerable by a pair of gloves that my daughter gave me--thick rubber with a soft cotton lining, and they reach all the way up to my shoulders--mucking out the pond is utterly gross.

On pond-cleaning day my husband sets up a siphon with a hose, which sucks up the water very slowly.  Meanwhile, I kneel at the edge of the pond and with a racket-type contraption scoop up as much stinky gunk as I can reach.  Then I shake the gunk into a bucket and deposit it on the vegetable beds (waste not, want not).

Today's bottom-of-the-pond take consisted of a million leaves from the ash tree across the yard;  two dead fish;  about a thousand drowned earth worms and a couple of live ones (why hadn't they drowned?); the long, gelatinous remains of many water lily stems;  and five extremely wiggly salamanders--or one salamander that got scooped up five times.

The scooping usually goes on for three hours or so, by which time the siphon starts clogging up and I'm exhausted, my knees hurt from kneeling on stone,  and I figure that a 50%  water change should suffice to keep the pond ecology going for another year.

While the pond fills with nice clean water from the hose, I take another look at the vegetables with their side dressing of pond gunk and think about all that fairness-yielding foulness, all that death leading to new life. When you live close to the earth, after a while those fair/foul distinctions start to fade.  I picture how much good that black slime is doing to my broccoli, and the smell doesn't seem so bad.

 

Espalier

I was out planting chard this morning when out of the corner of my eye I saw a spray of white against the south wall of the house.  It was the little apricot tree that I espaliered last spring.  It had survived the winter and the rabbit depredations, and overnight it had burst into bloom.

I took a closer look and saw no insects other than a couple of ants that I'm sure were looking for a way to get into the kitchen.  It's been so chilly--in the 20s last night--that the bugs aren't out yet. But the little apricot tree was clearly ready for them, so I got my trusty watercolor brush and pretended I was a bee.  I did a pretty good job pollinating the indoor lemon tree a couple of months ago, so I'm hoping that my attentions with the watercolor brush will be rewarded.

Warm from the sun, raspy in the hand, sweet and spicy on the tongue:  apricots!

Fish Encore

Someone who knows me well once said that I cannot rest unless I have a certain quota of critters around me.  When I lost a cat long ago, I put a cage of breeding finches in the kitchen.  When we moved and the finches had to go, I got goats.  When my goat days were over I got another dog.  And now that I'm at an all time critter low for me--just two dogs and nine hens--I've developed this thing about fish.

There's the betta in the big glass vase next to the kitchen sink.  And there are the goldfish in the little pond just outside the back door.  But the goldfish are mysterious beings who prefer to hang out in the murky depths instead of swimming decoratively among the water lilies.

So I've been longing for some goldfish that I can talk to and get to know, and now I have a pair.  They live in the house in a tub originally intended for a small water garden.  These goldfish are the round-bodied type known as "fantails."  They look like a ping pong ball adorned with fins and a long swishy tail.  Which is why I have named them Ping and Pong. 

Pong is red and gold all over, and Ping is white with a big red splotch on his or her head.   Pong swimming around in the water looks a lot like Bisou when she runs on the grass, with her red and gold "feathers" waving in the wind and her long ears splaying out like fins.

When blizzards rage next winter, I will look into my little pond at Ping and Pong trailing their tails and flashing their scales and I will feel like I'm on a tiny Caribbean vacation.

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Tick Attack!

We are under siege by creatures the size of fly poop.  Like Agamemnon's army they surround our house on all sides, dropping down on us from the trees if we go into the woods and climbing up our pant legs if we venture into the field.  The only place where we are relatively safe is the yard, where the grass is still short.

2012 was a bad tick year, and we blamed it on the early spring.  There's been nothing early about this spring, and the winter was good and cold.  But the ticks just holed up in their deer fur duvets and now, like the rest of us, they want to be out doing stuff. 

Every time the dogs come back from a walk I check them over, but it's just a formality.  What chance do I have of finding a crawling fly speck in Wolfie's super-thick undercoat?  Bisou, whose hair though long is much sparser, should be easier, and sometimes I do catch one crawling around.  But I usually don't find them until the next day, with their heads deep into her skin, sucking away like tiny Draculas.

These are bad enough, but not as awful as the ones that drop to the floor like ripe olives, having had their fill of blood and transmitted their parasite du jour into my dogs.  Bisou has had Lyme for a couple of years, though fortunately you'd never know it from watching her.  Wolfie has anaplasmosis, another tick-borne illness, and despite three courses of antibiotics has never regained his stamina.  Most of the dogs I know have Lyme, and several of my human friends do as well.  New diseases carried by ticks are identified every year. 

Tomorrow my dogs are scheduled for their annual vet check-up.  She and I will have a depressing discussion about which insecticides do the most harm to the ticks and the least harm to the dog.  There are no good answers.  For decades I have held fleas at bay by sprinkling liberal amounts of garlic powder on the dog food, but there are no natural tick deterrents, and every few years ticks develop resistance to the latest manufactured toxins.

Fortunately, the tick offensive doesn't last all summer.  It will diminish in early summer, just as the black flies emerge.  Black flies show definite preferences for certain people, of whom I am one.  They leave me with bleeding, itchy welts around the back of my neck.  But they are little sweethearts, compared to ticks.

Happiness In Tragic Times

In northern latitudes, these early spring days bring on happiness as a physiological imperative.  There is birdsong in the air, and frogs chasing each other in the pond.  We go outside and look up at the sky and feel a rush of automatic DNA-mandated joy.

And then everything turns gray:  how can we feel like this when in a city close by people are hurting and mourning and afraid?

There has to be a solution, I thought this morning, alternately rejoicing at the sight of the sun and wincing at the radio's accounts of the suffering in Boston.  If we let awareness of human suffering in distant parts prevent us from being happy, I realized, we are guaranteed of dying without ever feeling happy again.  Worst of all, our unhappiness does nothing to alleviate that suffering.

So on days when tragedy hits nearby, let us do whatever is in our power to help:  send a few dollars, donate some blood.  And if that is not possible, let us perform small acts of kindness for our fellow humans or for the planet:  stop to chat with a lonely neighbor,  recycle those plastic bags.

And then go ahead and seize the day.  Breathe the air;  squint up at the blue sky.  You never know when a hawk will snatch the songbird, or the frogs perish from acid rain.  And cloudy weather always returns after a sunny day.