Every time I start to get depressed about the weeds coming in on all sides, I must remember that the garden really does get better every year.

It’s not just the plants (although they, too, get better every year—my fire pinks went from a single spindly stalk to a respectable clump and my American spikenard is going from a respectable clump to a terrifying parasol of doooooom that may need thinning.) It’s also the wildlife, or rather, our carrying capacity for wildlife.

My back-of-the-envelope math indicates that for the last few years, we got four to six fledglings per year in the immediate vicinity of my garden. What they ARE varies–last year was a banner year, we had two apiece of chickadees and gnatcatchers and ruby-throated hummingbirds, a few years ago it was red-bellied woodpeckers and titmice, but generally those seem to be the numbers.

This year we’ve got six ALREADY, by early June. A juvenile chipping sparrow, a rather wobbly great crested flycatcher (nowhere near as vivid as the parents, and spending a lot of time floundering amid the flowerpots) three baby Carolina wrens who are all gone from the nest today (hoping they fledged and weren’t devoured, but honestly, I’d rather have “part of the food chain” than “not enough food to exist in the first place.”) and a juvenile brown-headed cowbird.

Not sure how I feel about the cowbird, honestly, but there he is.

There was also a rather delightful first-year summer tanager, who was molting red over yellow, like a goldfinch with psoriasis. He perched on a tomato cage and sang his heart out. I would be perfectly happy to have tanagers settle in here—we’ve had them pass through but not stay—but this little guy may be out of luck for the year. I don’t know how first year males do in the great songbird wars.

On top of that, more and more birds stop by to grab a drink or a snack on the way to something else. The butterflies are thicker on the ground every year. (I have enough pipevine for a couple of swallowtails this year, instead of just one!) My neighbor’s honeybees coexist peacefully with respectable quantities of native bees.The frogs…well, the frogs tend toward a boom-and-bust cycle, near as I can tell, and the pond is SWARMING with predacious diving beetles, which are very cool even as they are keeping the tadpole numbers in check this year. (I have faith it will all reach equilibrium eventually.)

There are fireflies in the field, and occasionally wandering through the garden or sitting on the screen and pulsing with light.

This spring I found a wild native honeysuckle growing on the fence, where I hadn’t planted it. (And yes, I pulled about half of it before I realized my mistake and felt like history’s greatest monster.)

And this is all with big bare mulched patches left between plants still. When it all grows in, if I ever manage the lush cottage-esque garden of my dreams…well, who knows what might show up?

ETA: As of 6/10, there’s a juvenile (probably) female cardinal, mourning dove still with baby fluff, and a juvenile red-bellied woodpecker spotted as well. Also a herd of grackles on the feeder. That’s one new yard bird (never had grackles before, oddly enough) and three more fledglings, for a grand total of NINE.

Also grackles are bad at sharing. And if we get much more water, the yard will just be underwater.

Filed under: Birds, My Garden by ursulav
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WARNING: Biological Icky Bits Ahead!

Guess what I found!?

I’m a larva!

This peculiar devil is the larval form of the American Carrion Beetle! How cool is that? (They feed on mushrooms and dead bugs as well as rotting meat, so I hasten to assure you that I do not, in fact, have dead bodies rotting in the woods. At least, to the best of my knowledge.)

Spring sprung and was promptly batted aside by summer, so it’s hot and humid in the garden, and I am trying to stay ahead of the stiltgrass with copious amounts of mulch, because the flamethrower is questionable in a dry pine wood and would also take out all my nice jewelweed that has established so marvelously.  Thinking of trying to fight it by transplanting in Virginia knotweed, which is an aggressive loon of a plant, but native, attractive, and host to a couple of butterfly species. (I have the variegated form, “Painter’s Palette,” which comes true from seed and boy, is there a lot of seed!)

Other than that, everything is blooming, the pollinators are out in force, I had a Zebra Swallowtail show up the other day (an uncommon butterfly in this neck of the woods!) and the pond is full of frogs and predacious diving beetles. On the downside, the weird cold/hot/cold/hot weather sent most of the spring veggies straight to bolting, so I got no daikons, some very sad beets, and the tomatoes are already starting to come in. Lost a bunch of peppers, too. Sigh. But the cucumbers and squash are happy, and I am holding out hope that the peas will produce a batch before the heat exhausts them. (A lot of local farmers just gave up and plowed the peas under. Can’t blame ‘em. This has been demented weather.)

Craw-Bob is still in residence. Haven’t gotten a good look at him, but we’ve got the night vision cameras and just need to get them working with the house network. Mostly he’s a flash of movement into the hole as I go by.

The Patio That Shall Not Be Named has been graveled, sanded, mortared, and now needs bricks. I’m traveling at the end of the week, but hold out hope of getting it done before June rolls around. (All productivity must be crammed into this month, because June is solid travel and July and August will be miserably hot.)

I had a bit of a wildlife mystery this morning. Was going out to feed the birds and found—there’s no other way to say it—a pile of viscera in the middle of the path. Somebody had left their guts in a neat pile on the ground.

Being me, I of course immediately poked them with a stick. Yup. That’s guts, all right.

Guts and….earthworms?

For whatever weird reason, there were a bunch of dead earthworms in the pile as well.

I wracked my brain—had something vomited and lost guts and earthworms together? Was this some kind of weird version of an owl pellet?—until I realized that the earthworms were from INSIDE the guts. Our deceased gut-owner had been out eating earthworms, and had quite a solid meal, then something jumped him, eviscerated him, and presumably ate the tasty bits. (I would have thought the viscera WERE tasty bits, but apparently somebody was picky.)

My guess is that the victim was a large frog, but I’ve got no idea what the killer was. I tossed the remains out of dog range—hopefully either Craw-Bob or the carrion beetles will find it and start the clean-up process.

So that’s all the excitement around here at the moment. Guts! Bugs! Mulch! THRILLS! CHILLS! ETC!

Filed under: My Garden by ursulav
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I figured we were probably well into migration season, since the Juncoes are gone and Thrush-Bob, the Hermit Thrush that overwintered on our deck, has left for more northerly pastures. (We wish him well. Likely we will never see him again, but I like to think that his steady diet of mealworms over the long winter have made him a big, sturdy thrush.* Go, Thrush-Bob! Have a zillion fledglings!)

I was peering out the window at some birds bathing in the pond—pair of Chipping Sparrows, a cute little common sparrow—and I saw something small land on the far side of the pond, next to a clump of spiderwort.

If I hadn’t seen it come in, I would have missed it entirely—a very drab little bird. Grey head, white eye-ring, yellow breast. By that I knew it was a warbler, and Sibley narrowed it down the rest of the way. My garden had been, at least for a moment, host to a Nashville Warbler. (No, they don’t sing country, so far as I know.)

That’s bird #60 on the yard list, which is not bad at all, and a lifer for me.

What I always think in these cases is that I would never have seen it if I hadn’t looked in the exact right place at the exact right time. So I wonder how many birds are passing through the garden unspotted, unidentified, and unrecorded. Which is the sort of thing that can drive a birder crazy, if they think about it too much…

*The cats are sad that Thrush TV is now off-air, and can be found mooching around the windows, hoping for re-runs.

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So apparently the world is divided into two groups.

People who know that lawn crayfish exist, and people who go “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!”

Up until an hour ago, I belonged to the latter group.

And then I was idly raking leaves off some tender plants in the narrow, soggy flowerbed alongside the garage wall, and I happened to glance down into the burrow.

The burrow that has been there since last year. The burrow that I thought had some kind of rodent in it.

There was a crustacean claw in it.

Attached to a crustacean.

Apparently this is a thing in the South.

Well, what else was I going to name him?

I can’t tell the species. At a guess, it’s either a devil crayfish or a Greensboro burrowing crayfish, which are the two good color matches, or it’s one of a dozen crayfish that have no common names and not much in the way of photos but exist in lawns throughout the South. (It is not the common red crayfish, as he is murky gray-brown.)

I did what anybody does when they learn that an aquatic creature is living in their flowerbed–I went to Twitter screaming “HOW IS THIS MY LIFE!?!”

Several people informed me that yes. This is a thing that happens.

Everyone else on earth assumed I was drunk or insane or being an artist or engaging in some obscure form of collaborative fiction, possibly with Seanan McGuire. (Which would be awesome, don’t get me wrong, but no. The crayfish really exists.)

Some species, apparently, live in lawns. Anywhere with a high water table, say. And at night they come out and walk around the lawn.

There is a five-inch crayfish walking around my garden on ten legs right this minute while I’m typing.

Not gonna lie. That kinda squicks me out a little. I mean, I love animals well beyond the point of sanity and reason, but…dude, it is walking around out there. A freakin’ LOBSTER is WALKING in my garden.

(I poked a stick down the hole. It grabbed the stick. I pulled it partway out. It is a good five inches long. No, I’m not going to eat him.)

So. Um. South? Are you listening?

Nobody else knows you have burrowing crayfish.

This is not like having gophers or rats or pigeons. This is…like…NOBODY has lawn crayfish. Nobody in the rest of the country thinks this is a thing. You need to TELL people this is a thing. Preferably when they enter the state. There should be signs posted on the “Welcome to North Carolina” sign that says “BY THE WAY, WE HAVE LAWN CRAYFISH.”

It would be like having a tree octopus. Or squid that roost in the attic like bats. It is not a thing that the rest of the country is aware of. It is weird.

Ahem.

That said, I guess he’s been there for a year now, and he’s not hurting anything, near as I can tell. They appear to mostly cause cosmetic damage to lawns (which I don’t have) and they are also apparently nearly impossible to remove, and if this is a Greensboro burrowing crayfish, it’s a species of Special Concern that may actually be endangered except we don’ t know enough to get good data, so…well…

I guess I have a crayfish.

And this is my life.

Filed under: Stuff In My Yard by ursulav
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Spring, after wandering around aimlessly and hiding behind winter for some weeks, just landed on the garden like a ton of bricks.

We had two eighty-degree days and then it rained all night. I woke up this morning, looked out the window, and the world was GREEN.

Not just any green, of course. That hot, new-leaf green, the kind that makes you wonder why green is ever considered a cool color, a blazing green of unutterable greenness. They do not make greens like this at any other time.

The hickories are the greenest offenders, but the maples and sweetgums are working hard to catch up.

Everything in the garden just exploded. It may not have been overnight, but it was close. Plants that were a small basal rosette for weeks are suddenly a foot tall with flower spikes. The foamflower went from “dormancy” to “LOOK AT ME I HAVE FLOWERS LOOK AT MY FLOWERS I AM AWESOME” at a dead run. I spend over an hour a day roaming around the yard, and I STILL find new plants out of the blue that I didn’t see the day before. (Logic says that I must have overlooked them, but they’re also going at the speed of a galloping racehorse.)

You drive down the road and the trees are every shade from chartreuse to dark pine. My cherry tree has lost all its flowers and is now covered in green. The native plum is doing the same. Plants that I never expected to survive are throwing flowers. (Columbine! I have a columbine! I have NEVER successfully overwintered a columbine, and every time somebody said “But they’re practically weeds!” it was a dagger in my gardening heart. And there it is!)

Also, Operation Jewelweed appears to have been a smashing success. And by smashing, I mean “the way Godzilla smashes Tokyo.” Hmm.

There are over twenty frogs in the pond. I think the salamander eggs either hatched or were eaten or have been covered by algae or something. The cricket frogs fling themselves out from underfoot with every step.

Tomorrow I’ll have to plant out cucumbers and melons, because I don’t think we’re getting much of a spring this year. I suspect we will be propelled directly into summer without stopping. Some of the beans are up. I planted out pitcher plant seeds, which were promptly drowned by the rain, so…maybe not. But we’ll see.

It is glorious out. I can hardly stand to stay inside, and if I didn’t have books to write, I don’t know if I would.

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Good: There are spotted salamander spermatophores in my pond! (And also egg masses, lots of them, and some frog eggs, but dude, spermatophores!)

Bad: I should not be allowed to go to the nursery with the huge selection of salvias without a minder. I, um, got a few more than I realized. Many of them get five or six feet tall. Um. Send help.

Weedy: I spent all this morning pulling out pepperweed, which really loves a cool wet spring and went rioting through my garden this year. I can turn a blind eye to chickweed because it’ll die off in the heat, I am perfectly happy to have white clover covering areas as long as it lets the perennials grow through, I have made some peace with the corn speedwell and the henbit, but pepperweed is on the list of Things That Must Die.

At least it pulls easily.

Filed under: Invasives by ursulav
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I really need to start a master list of plants I’ve given up on.

It would be much more useful than “plants I’ve killed and will try again” which is a very very long list at this point.

Also, when I make stark declarations in the middle of August that I am DONE this is MADNESS and from now on I will grow nothing but tomatoes and basil in the vegetable garden GODDAMNIT, I really need to write that down and perhaps have it witnessed, because here I am at the end of January wondering if I’ve got room for those dwarf snow peas after all.

And the vegetables are the easy part. When Prairie Nursery and Prairie Moon Nursery send out their catalogs and I find myself going “Why do I not have ramps? Ramps would be a great idea!” and drooling over the blue cohosh (which is a very expensive plant to possibly kill, and I am a bit nervous) I need a clear, laid out plan that says “This goes here. Nothing else will fit.”

Actually, what I need is a sign taped to my computer saying “YOU HAVE NO PLACE TO PUT IT SO PUT THE CATALOG DOWN.” That would cover most eventualities.

I should not be thinking of blue cohosh. I should be thinking vines. I have space for vines. I made space for vines. I’m thinking two Carolina jessamine, then a coral honeysuckle, then two jessamine, then a coral honeysuckle in the full sun area. Might mix it up with American bittersweet in the shadier sections. I do not need wild cucumber. It’s an annual and not edible anyway. WHY DO YOU TAUNT ME, CATALOG?

There are so many empty places in the garden. They never warn you that you will live with eyesores for years and years and years, that parts will be gloriously lush and other parts will still be a dead zone under pine trees, that lots are scraped and that stuff isn’t DIRT, it’s subsoil and self-respecting plants won’t grow in that and it’s really not your fault, that your yuccas will grow in the moss and the moss will grow in the yuccas and both will apparently be happy and dear god what is wrong with this picture?

This is the season where I stare at the garden and realize how many things need fixing and how many things I am completely unequipped to fix. I realize what a large garden I have made and how many years it’s going to take to fill it. (All the years. All of them.) I am simultaneously paralyzed by too much space in which hardly anything will grow (that grove of oaks and hickories and all those cedars! Mature trees one might kill for, and I stare at them and wish they were ten feet back on the other side of the fenceline!) and too little space in which nearly anything would grow, having painstakingly hauled manure and topsoil and mulch for multiple years to make it habitable.

I want a cottage garden that overflows with exuberance, and did not realize how often that meant that an exuberant plant would eat its weaker neighbors. I want to grow fascinating vegetables and end up having to glove up and root out the cardoons which were supposed to be annuals, goddamnit, and why did no one mention that they will re-seed like Satan on a bender?

And can I grow artichokes in a whiskey barrel?

And why did I wait so long to discover ferns? Why did no one beat me over the head with ferns until I listened?

And why are there never enough tomato cages? They work great for pea trellises—by the time the peas are dead of heat stroke, the tomatoes are just starting to need cages. Chop the peas at the roots, move the cage three feet, there you go. Except that I need more tomato cages so I can grow more peas.

And why is it only January, when there’s so much gardening to be done?

Filed under: Gardening Downtime by ursulav
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I went to take the trash out with Kevin, and as we walked back down the long gravel drive, I happened to look up. It’s been very foggy these last few days, so it was one of those oddly bright dusks where the fog is brighter than the sky.

A V-formation of swans went overhead in total silence.

They were very low over the house, almost skimming the tree-line, their outlines just faintly blurred with fog. I could see the darkness of their bills. It was a perfect monochrome image—white birds on white fog with black bills and black scribbles of trees reaching up toward them. There were nine or ten of them, maybe more—it didn’t even occur to me to count them.

It was eerie how silent they were. Geese honk when they go by. These didn’t.

I, being the cool operator that I am, yelled “Shit! Dude! Uh! Thing!” and pointed wildly.

Kevin looked up and said “….whoa.”

I scrambled inside and checked the internet. It turns out that North Carolina has the largest wintering population of tundra swans on the East Coast—75 thousand birds. These birds were a good bit farther west and south than usual—I’ve never seen one out here before (or in fact ever, they were lifers for me!)—but given the weird weather and the fact that we’re due a winter storm coming in very soon, I expect they were moving in response to incoming weather, probably heading to Jordan Lake. (All tundra swan reports in this county are on that particular lake, making it a safe bet.)

It was an extraordinary sight, and not one that I expected when I was pulling my coat on to help Kevin drag the trash down to the curb. So I guess you just never know, huh?

Filed under: Birds by ursulav
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Ta-da!

Made of eighty-five concrete drystone wall blocks (the kind with the little lip so that the top ones can’t slide off the one underneath in response to pressure from behind) and holding a little over a cubic yard of dirt. I did it all myself with my little red wheelbarrow and my little Pontiac Vibe. (Okay, the dirt was delivered, but I still had to truck it from the front yard in the wheelbarrow!) For those keeping track at home, that means I moved well over a ton of materials in the wheelbarrow, over the course of a week.

Stamina. I haz it.

It gets more or less full sun (more toward the front), but is in partial shade in the afternoon, which is actually what you want for veggies down here, since the afternoon heat is merciless. I don’t know if it’ll take tomatoes, but I plan to plant beans, carrots, daikons and beets to start, and maybe some lettuce is in the shadier bits around back. There are a couple of small gaps in the stone, mostly at the corners, owing to the wedge-shaped nature of the beast, and I’ll finally have a spot to tuck a few of those little species that all say “Try planting in the cracks of a drystone wall!” Well, HA! I finally have a drystone wall—sort of—and I WILL so THERE!*

It’s not as big as my main veggie bed that wraps around the deck, but it’s over a foot deep, which is amazing compared to the other beds. (A scant few inches of topsoil and compost over clay subsoil. We do not double dig here. We do not even single-dig. We break our shovels and burst into tears.)  I’m hopeful for the root vegetables this time—I’ve managed small beets in the other beds, and I’m trying Parisenne carrots there this year—but it’s so nice to finally have a space where I’m pretty confident I can do real, finicky, must-have-deep-loose-soil root vegetables.

The rest of the garden in this shot is not very attractive at the moment. Winter is visually much harsher down here. (I never realized how many sins snow hides.) Most of my efforts have been on the front yard, which has nice dried grasses and evergreen Carolina jessamine, but this patch is…rough. Oh, well. I will eventually get some evergreens back here to break up the monotony of dead oak leaves and to disguise the chain link fence, but frankly, there’s only so much you can do in such an aggressively deciduous climate.

But—NEW VEGGIE BED! Woohoo!

*I may be retaining some small bitterness after all these years.

Filed under: My Garden by ursulav
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I have lately developed a moderate obsession with monastery gardens.

Mind you, I always liked monks. I’m a lousy Catholic by any standards—the bit about not actually being a Christian is problematic, and my failure to be confirmed is worse and the fact that I never really liked the Virgin Mary* is REALLY bad—but I retain a soft spot for monks. Franciscans particularly, but St. Benedict apparently also laid down in his Rule that the implements of the garden were to be treated with as much honor as the sacred vessels of the altar. This made me feel warm and fuzzy and then squirm with guilt when I remembered where I’d left the pitchfork.

Lots of monasteries were expected to be self-sufficient and so had very elaborate gardens to feed the monks, provide herbal medicines, and make beer. (See, this is why monks are cool. Nuns are terrifying and awesome but I bet they didn’t get beer.)

The whole homesteading movement sometimes leaves me cold—some parts are really great and I support wholeheartedly, and then suddenly the nice person telling you how to make chive-blossom vinegar begins telling you about how the ATF is coming for the guns and the End Times are upon us and how the hell are you supposed to follow that in a conversation? “Ah…heh…well…uh….so what kind of vinegar was that again?”—but I do like the self-sufficient monastery. Much more sensible than one person trying to do it in the backyard.

It was while digging around reading about monkish gardens that I finally (at thirty-five!) learned what a “cloister” is. I always had a vague notion that it was a box you kept nuns in or something, but in fact, it’s a covered walkway around a (usually square) courtyard. It was covered so your monks and nuns could walk in it in all weather, walking around and meditating or sitting and reading or what have you. The center was usually left as empty grass as a meditation on the unseen divine or something along those lines.

Dude. If I had known that’s what that was, I would have been trying to build one for ages. I think infinitely better when my feet are moving and as a small child would pace back and forth in the backyard, daydreaming. (Sit down, brain stops. Walk, brain starts again. I have gotten somewhat better in that I can now type and think at the same time, but I still have to wander around while talking on the phone.) A covered walkway around a courtyard? For walking and thinking in all weather? I would have killed for one of those!

…mind you, I would put some tomatoes in the center. Divinity is all very well but you waste good full-sun growing space, that’s at least a venial sin. And any god worth worshiping would understand about the tomatoes.

The French have a marvelous version called the jardin de curé or “priest’s garden” which is the very small one-parish-priest version. It was supposed to supplement the priest’s diet with veggies, provide flowers for the altar, and herbs for treating the sick. It’s as informal as a French garden gets, which is to say that it’s still about ten times more formal than mine, but still pretty laid back for the type—paths laid out in a cross, religious icon in the center, boxwood edging for the beds. Boxwood was always grown for use on Palm Sunday and was often used to sprinkle holy water. Many of these gardens also had religiously themed areas—plants grown because of their association with Mary, for example. (There’s an excellent little article about them here, which includes the sad fact that in this day and age, the jardin de curé is nearly extinct. Too few curés apparently.)

This appeals to me greatly, and if the topography of my garden had not completely ruled that out, I would be laying out cross shaped beds right this minute.

I have no idea why I like this so much. You already know my feelings on Mary and my idea of a medicinal herb is vodka, but still…something about the whole thing just pokes me right in the hindbrain going “This! This! Like that! Yeah! That’s awesome!” Possibly Catholicism has a genetic component unrelated to the actual faith, which would explain a few things when you think about it. I haven’t the least interest in going to a Catholic church, but the idea of building a Catholic garden causes something to punch me in the back of the head.

Maybe it’s just any spiritually themed garden, and you just don’t see many Protestant gardens out there. (Unitarians, I imagine, do a lot of gardening. It’s probably all community plots and organic vegetables, too. More power to ‘em, sez I.)

Although I couldn’t do a Zen garden. Getting the weeds out of the raked gravel in this climate would leave me anything but Zen. Catholicism seems to keep coming up by default.

I’ve already got the boxwood, valiantly as I have tried to slay it. And while you will find no representations of St. Fiacre, patron of gardeners (who was a total dick to women) there’s at least a half-dozen icons of St. Francis in the house. Kevin is a fan. You don’t feed birds and do cat rescue without developing a certain appreciation of Francis. And there’s a couple of Frida Kahlo, who is at least 30% religious icon by now.  Mind you, I’ve got not one but two statues of Ganesh out in the garden, so I’m probably covered on the religious icon front, and I imagine Ganesh and Francis would get along just fine as long as they kept the conversation to the care and feeding of small animals and large elephants.

I’m not sure what I’d do about the medicinal herbs. Perhaps I should just pick very obscure medicines. For example, I recently learned that Virginia iris was used by the Seminole Indians to treat “shock following alligator-bite.” I can’t cure the common cold, but you get bit by an alligator, I can hook you up.***

Probably can’t manage the cloister. But man, if they ever make the blockbuster Dragonbreath movie and I have a bizillion dollars, I am so building one in my dream home…

*I don’t know why. It’s not just her, I suppose, I never had much interest in any mother goddess figure.** Blame it on my utter lack of any maternal instincts whatsoever. I know it’s all vital mythological stuff, but it left me cold. Isis didn’t do it for me either. And Mary never DID anything. There were lots of saints with interesting lives that you could totally get into, and instead everybody’s ga-ga over Mary, whose chief claim to fame was virginity and apparently did nothing much of interest beyond that point. At least Isis went wandering around turning into a bird and engaging in recreational necrophilia. I don’t blame anyone for being boring, but something about Mary just rubbed very young me the wrong way.

**Except Freya. Freya had a cloak of feathers and Valkyries. If Mary had Valkyries, I might still be Catholic.

***My apologies to my readers at BWG who had to read this factoid twice, but seriously, that is just so COOL!

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