Done In

or In Which We Wage an Epic Battle

Actually, the subtitle is a little misleading.  The epic battle has already been waged and won, and now the biggest sand cherry and I are off nursing our wounds.  I won't bore you with a blow-by-blow replay, but our opponent was the hunk of concrete below:

It's a little over a foot long, about six inches wide, and four deep.  I hadn't meant to start a tussle, but then, who does?  Yesterday while I was loosening the soil under the cherry to plant some dwarf columbines (Aquilegia chrysantha var. chaplinei 'Golden Treasure'), my trowel came across the hunk of cement about eight inches down, not wanting to be loosened.  (Where was it five years ago, when I dug through the whole garden twice just to get rid of such things?)  Thirty minutes of root- and branch-breaking, vocabulary-stretching work later, victory was ours.  The sand cherry and I are both done in, but it will have been worth it.  At least, it had better be.

I'm off to bed again for a while.  A pity.  I was thinking so many exciting thoughts about mulch, just perfect for a sparkling post.  Another time, I suppose.

In the meanwhile, I have some vocabulary to unlearn.

Scary Scenes

or Throwing Down the Gauntlet

No!  Hang on to that gauntlet!  You may want it again, although gardening gloves would probably be safe enough in a pinch.  Probably.
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Think of this as one of those movie rating blurbs that tells you why the rating was given—bad language, violence, whatever.   Once I watched something Star Wars-y with my youngest nephew that was rated PG because of "Scary Scenes."  The rating was apt, and I'm afraid it's apt again today.  We are facing real life, PG-rated Scary Scenes, although the following preview has been approved for general audiences:

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I've been shifting potted plants around a lot lately.  It shouldn't be a dangerous thing to do, not if I wait for an hour after eating and remember to lift with my legs and not with my back.   And yet, after moving one of the big urns the other day, I found this hanging out underneath its rim:

Oh, good.  A black widow.  (That's really the only Scary Scene.  You can look again now.)  Judging from the coloring, she may still be immature, but that's only mildly comforting.  I could easily have put my hand on her while I was moving the urn.

The thing is, I know better than that.  I may not always wear gloves for actual gardening in actual dirt, but I usually do when messing with the furnishings, for just this reason.  The Widows have lulled me this year.  They've been keeping themselves to themselves, quiet-like, and I've grown careless about taking precautions.

Generally speaking, I don't mind—or at least, violently object to—black widows.  They're useful to have around in a way; their messy, shapeless webs are strong enough to hold grasshoppers and waterbugs.  They're unaggressive unless threatened, and they don't seem to want to see me any more than I want to see them.  And after all, their bite won't actually kill you.  Not usually.

So when they all came out of the woodwork at once this week, I was initially pretty laissez-faire about it.  A black widow on the lip of the urn?  Maybe that urn doesn't need to be moved again after all.  Another one in the keypad box for the garage door opener?  Hey, I can just use the remote.  Living in the patio table's hollow legs?  You know, it's really too hot to enjoy eating outside anyway.  In the pineleaf penstemon next to the patio?  I don't really need another super-close-up macro of a fallen salvia blossom in the penstemon's leaves.

Ever again.  Another black widow in the strawberry pot where the thyme and oregano are growing?  Pfff.  Herbs, schmerbs.  Suddenly I prefer the dried ones in nice, safe, hermetically sealed containers from the store.

Admittedly, the patio has been less a place of peace and sanctuary and more like Mirkwood Forest lately, but that's the price you pay for being smugly virtuous chicken green.  Nonetheless, when I found not one but two black widows, a male and a female, setting up housekeeping under the Adirondack chair, the live-and-let-live, they-have-their-ecological-niche-to-fill, all-creatures-great-and-small-ness went flying.  They had thrown down the gauntlet; they had crossed a cosmic line in the sand, and I just let 'em have it.

Somewhere I read that morality is essentially about keeping your own needs and the needs of others in balance.  This week has certainly tested that balance in the miniature ecosystem of the garden, pushing matters to the tipping point that decides the issue for me or for them.  At least now we know what the tipping point is.

It's the Adirondack chair.  No one messes with the Adirondack chair.

As for all the other black widows waiting their turn to enjoy my favorite seat, this is one of the rare occasions when I wish someone big and heroic would just come along and take care of things while I look on adoringly.  More likely, I will use a spray bottle of insecticidal soap to handle the problem from afar.  I'll be wearing gloves.

Gauntlets would be even better.

Offensive Weaponry

or The Many Uses of Mulch

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will know that I have an on-again, off-again relationship with an outgoing, middle-aged, silvery-gray haired cat named Sir Marley, who belongs to one of my neighbors.  What I admire most about him is his taste, as he clearly prefers my garden to anyone else's in the area.  What I admire least about him—well, we'll get to that in a minute.  When he is sitting in a shady corner of the garden with his feet curled under him, blinking contentedly and purring quietly to himself, I am quite fond of him.  Then there's the rest of the time.

Sir Marley and two other neighborhood toms are currently trying to decide just whose territory my garden is, and "mine" does not seem to be one of the options.  That is, they may let me think of it as "mine" in quotes, but my thinking has nothing to do with their reality.  True, watching Sir Marley sit outside the gate, guarding it against all comers, while one of the other cats slips in over a wall, has its entertaining side.  But when I am working in the garden and the scent of tomcat (so nicely enhanced by all that warm sunshine) overpowers the much more pleasant scent of sand cherry blossoms...we stop being amused.  Transplanting young seedlings into freshly turned earth with your bare hands only to discover that it's not all earth has its downside as well.

Kindly hold that thought for a moment—well, maybe not that particular thought, but the general idea of bothersome catness—while I blather for a minute about mulch.  At long last, I finally managed to pick up 120 pounds of pecan shell mulch from one of my favorite independent garden centers.  (Three cheers once more for helpful young men, and for my Dad, who just gave me a nifty hand truck!)  Mulch, of course, is a fine thing, especially in a dry climate.  It suppresses weeds, shelters helpful decomposers, and adds organic matter to the soil; it cools the earth and keeps it moist; and it keeps the dirt from blowing away altogether, at least until the mulch has blown away first.

Pecan shell mulch, with bonus woolly speedwell

Pecan shell mulch is wonderful for other reasons, too.  Since New Mexico is in the "pecan belt"—the tier of southern states where pecans are grown commercially—the shells are locally sourced, from a product that would otherwise go to waste.  (I hear they're good instead of hickory or mesquite chips in a barbecue, too.)  Only local garden centers carry them, and at least one of them will re-use the bags if you return them.  It's also an attractive mulch, with a distinctive regional look.

Now, to all those virtues, add the fact that it seems to be prickly enough underfoot that cats dislike it.  I would never have thought of mulch as an offensive weapon, but it seems appropriate somehow—in keeping with the spirit of organic gardening, where everything seems to multitask, and where the best offense is a passive, even indirect defense.  Problems with aphids?  Plant flat-blossomed flowers to attract lady beetles and lacewings.  Cabbage moth larvae?  Put out a shallow dish of water to draw predatory wasps.  Cats?  Well, obviously, put down some mulch.

I can't decide whether it's more like Quakerism or chess, which is a little disconcerting.

We'll see how well the mulch works over the long run as a cat deterrent.  This is only round (what are we up to now, three?) three.  Hopefully, Sir Marley will do more contented blinking and purring from the bench and less of the other from here on.

Otherwise, round four may be a dog...

Pecan shell mulch, with ironic catmint

Meddlers

or Hastening the Inevitable, Part II

In my last post I wrote about letting go, especially of the care and upkeep of the micro-garden.  To let go was a relief, a pleasure, a grace—and not just any old grace at that, but a lovely, lovely one.  By relinquishing the remaining plants in the micro-garden to their fates, I was simply yielding to the inevitable; rather than trying to elbow autumn out of the way, I was going to curtsy politely to it, extend an ushering hand, and say graciously, "After you."  Death would come decorously to the micro-garden, and all would be peaceful and sweet, perhaps even a little soulful, as I practiced the virtue of non-attachment and allowed nature to pursue its course unimpeded.

But when I wrote of hastening the inevitable, that did not mean that I wanted any help.

Now that all of the flat-blossomed flowers elsewhere in the garden—the yarrow, feverfew, and marguerite daisies so beloved by beneficial insects—have more or less stopped blooming, and the bugbath isn't filled so assiduously, and the pest-eaters have grown sleepy and slow, aphids have moved in to the micro-garden in droves.  Ironically, the plants they are attacking are the perennial bunching onions, which I planted in part to deter pestilential insects, the entire allium family supposedly being anathema to all that goes on more than two legs.  Ha.  The onions are covered.

I know these aphids of old, and nasty little blighters they are.  A few winters ago they obliterated every "Powis Castle" artemisia in the neighborhood.  (Which ought to be a lesson to landscapers not to plant the front and side yards of an entire neighborhood with the same five species, thus creating easily destructible monocultures, but probably won't be.)  They are impervious to frost; the sharp spray of water from a hose that is supposed to wash them away and kill them only allows them to take a little exercise while incidentally making a royal mess of the kitchen window; insecticidal soap just gives them a fresh, clean scent.  Where are all of those praying mantises that were peeking in my windows a few short weeks ago?  Where are the lady beetles, the lacewings, the hoverflies?

Gosh darn it, I like the onions.  I was planning on continuing to  harvest them enthusiastically through at least November.  Aphids, why can't you just munch on the sweet potato vine?  I'm done with that.  Or the amaranth?  Help yourselves—there's plenty for all and sundry.  The basil? marigolds?  Go for it.  But why the onions, you perverse little pests?

Grrrr.

(Do people who have let go usually growl this much?)

Toad Hall

or

A Place for Everything,

and Everything in A Place

What I love about toads is the way they ignore me. They're useful bug-eaters, of course, and I appreciate that. But I love the way they go about their business as if--well, as if I didn't particularly matter to them.

My garden has a toad--a chubby, unflappable, cool cat of a toad--that has made itself at home in a potted mint plant. In my ongoing quest to encourage murder and mayhem in the garden (but only the good kind of murder and mayhem), I've tried to create a toad-friendly habitat. I've provided a "bug bath," a shallow dish filled with pebbles and water at ground level; and I've created toad houses from broken pots and cinder blocks, hoping that the shaded hollows would appeal to a cold-blooded creature during the heat of the day. And instead of these cool, private shelters, "Mr. Jackson" prefers the potted mint that sits in the sunshine on the patio. Every morning while I sip my tea, I watch him hop over from some other part of the garden and clamber awkwardly into the pot. I harvest the mint regularly; he blinks at me. I water it daily; he blinks at me. I occasionally whap him with the hose by accident; he blinks really quickly at me.

It's not even a pretty pot.

In its own mild way, the situation radiates a whole "the best laid plans" thing that I regard with wry amusement. (I'm reminded of how I originally designed my garden around Luther's habits. He always used one area as his privy, so I made a clear pathway to it and left it unplanted. He never went there again. That area is still an odd, empty space that nothing seems to fill properly.) In another way, it's eloquent of the best spirit of gift-giving--that a gift, once given, takes on a new life, new meanings, in the hands of the recipient.

The real gift in this case was water--as good as gold in a region that gets eight inches annual rainfall, and much more interesting to a toad in any case. The "bug bath" is what drew him and what encourages him to stay. One morning when I had forgotten to refill it, I found him looking at it (blinkingly) and watched him stretch out a foot to the basin and rest his chin on one of the dry pebbles. He stayed that way until I had filled the dish with water (he didn't bother to move), and after a good soak he went merrily about his business (which was to climb into the mint pot).

Of course, the water wasn't a real gift if I was hoping to get something out of giving it--a toad at my beck and call, ready to eat ants and flies on demand. I did get a toad, yes, but beck and call? Not noticeably. And I find his complete obliviousness to the choices I had pre-made for him so beautiful that it almost takes my breath away. The sense of interaction--of creative give-and-take with an alien species--fills me with delight, and that is far more wonderful than the smug satisfaction I would have felt had he moved into those concrete blocks. Above all, I can't help wondering now what he will do next, and what pleasure I might have in responding to his new choice.

Violence Is Golden

or

Why Gardeners Are Like the Mob

I wonder sometimes about the morality of gardeners, especially organic gardeners. Well, especially me. Here I am, trying to raise vegetables that wouldn't naturally grow in my environment. Every one of those succulent, juicy, tender salad greens and sugar-snap peas and tomatoes is adored by plant-eating insects--and who can blame them? But since I don't want to use pesticides to protect my produce, I attract carnivorous insects instead who will do their level best to devour all of the vegetarian ones.

I don't know about you, but I know how I feel during films at the natural history museum when T-Rex goes for the peaceful plant-eaters. Or when the pride of lions takes down the lonely baby elephant. Or when the fox finally catches the despairing rabbit. Wicked predator! Poor prey! Sure, it may all be the course of nature and blah blah blah, but how the heart weeps for the harmless little creature that's writhing in agony, desperate to stay alive...

Yet in the garden I happily go out of my way to attract the predators, which, in a masterful Orwellian move, organic gardeners call "beneficial insects." Oh, the irony: first I invite the planteaters to a banquet the likes of which they've never seen, and then I call in the big guns to kill 'em off. As I recall, the Borgias did stuff like that. Is it good? Is it moral?

Frankly, it's irresistible. After the first radish gets eaten to the midrib by cabbage moth caterpillars or the first tomato leaves start to curl with an insect-borne virus, I am more than happy to consort with the thugs of the insect world. "Ladybird?" A charming name for an entire species of serial killers. "Lacewing?" Oh, yeah, sure--as in "Arsenic and Old..." "Praying mantis?" Soulmates with the crusading Abbot Amalric ("Kill them all--let God sort them out."). I love them. And I will gladly take out a contract on the life of every last aphid and leafhopper.

Meet my cousin Guido, little planteaters...