It’s a new year in the garden, boys and girls, and you know what that means?

MORE MULCH!

*cue rising hysterical laughter here*

That’s right, it’s mulchin’ time! I had successfully finished off Mt. Mulch II by putting down a layer on the sideyard that will hopefully cook down until fall. (The permaculture workshop I attended last year suggested that if you’ve got an area where you know you want to plant, but aren’t going to get to it right away, put down mulch over it to help get the soil wetter and more pliable and wormy. This is particularly vital on our deathly clay soil.) It’ll be a mostly-shady bed, and I hold out hope for some solid fern-on-fern action, but the soil is currently hard packed clay. So, mulch!

I ordered a mere 5 cubic yards. This is great restraint by my standards. However, I’m kinda running out of new space for flowerbeds. There’s one big one left to put in the back, when I finish laying the patio, and then everything has been bed-ified.

Welll….I mean, I could expand the vegetable bed a smidge…no! Need to leave that project for fall! Otherwise fall will see me twitchy and restless and starting in on the wooded areas, which could totally be woodland garden space, and…well…I was kinda saving that for the bit where I go stark raving mad NEXT year.

Mt. Mulch III arrived today, accompanied by a smaller load of mushroom compost. I had noticed that they were selling it last year, and as we have moved waaaaay beyond “get a few bags of cow manure from the farmer who does our meat CSA” I’ve been looking for a bulk soil amendment. I went to the internet to do research into the world of mushroom compost.

After about an hour, I thought, as many have before me, that the internet would be really awesome if it wasn’t for all the damn people on it, and left the internet. The discussion seemed split between “This is the best thing ever created by human hands” and “This is useless and probably bad,” plus the obligatory “This will kill you and everything you love,” which I dismissed out of hand, since, y’know, internet.

I did what we all do in times of dismay—I called my mother.

“Oh, that stuff is awesome,” she said. “We got some one year and the garden was incredible.”

Good enough for me. As my mother has not, to my knowledge, mutated, exploded, or turned into a large Kafka-esque insect, I’ll give it a try and see how well it works. About the worst that happens is that I add some more organic matter to my poor wretched soil, really—even if it doesn’t get BETTER, the soil can’t get any worse unless I sink spent uranium fuel rods into it. We live in such a wet climate that the build-up of salts is unlikely to be an issue. So I’ll top-dress most of the beds with an inch of the stuff and see what happens. (The prairie planting is exempt, as we do not fertilize those, lest they become floppy and sad.)

For science! And mulch!

Filed under: My Garden by ursulav
5 Comments »

Annnnnd the NWF said “Um. Right. Toxic birdseed, you say? Well, never mind then.”

Now, realistically, I’ll bet you dollars to daffodil bulbs that what REALLY happened is that the internet got really mad at the NWF and the NWF said “Oh dear, didn’t think you’d notice…” did the math of PR outrage, and took this as an excuse to bow out before the hate mail reached epic proportions. There’s no way they didn’t know this was coming, particularly since a major focus of the NWF’s efforts with Scotts was the birdseed thing, and I’m very sure that Scotts got them on board specifically as damage control, because “Scotts Sells Toxic Birdseed” as a headline is only slightly better than “Scotts Products Made Of Puppies” or “Scotts CEO Says (Your Beloved Regional Cuisine Here) Tastes Like Sheep-turds.”

However, any excuse is a good excuse in cases like this, and however annoyed we may be that the NWF got to that stage, it behooves us to praise them for having pulled back. (You have to praise people for doing the right thing just as much as you yell at them for the wrong thing—otherwise you’re just yelling and people eventually buy earplugs.)

Am I happy they were willing to partner in the first place? No. Have I lost a lot of faith in the NWF? You betcha. Would I love the NWF to come out and start cataloging all the bad thing Scotts has done and vow to stop them? I would love that more than pie.

But that’s clearly not gonna happen, and at the end of the day, a bunch of people yelling on the internet made the NWF pull out of the partnership. And in my book that’s a win.

Filed under: Inept Activism by ursulav
1 Comment »

So y’all heard me complaining a few days ago about the National Wildlife Federation partnering with Scotts Miracle-Gro, purveyers of fertilizers and bug-sprays and other things that make ponds and wetlands Very Sad, kill helpful bugs, etc, etc, ad deathium.

The blog-o-sphere was not happy about this, although the NWF is going out of its way to dismiss the complaints as all coming from crazy fringe organic gardeners. (I think it’s probably more widespread, but as I myself am a crazy fringe more-or-less organic gardener, I am hardly able to make a case.)

Today, we get the word that Scotts just got fined for—I kid you not—selling toxic birdseed.

And also they apparently falsified EPA numbers on their pesticides, so it looked like things had been approved that maybe kinda sorta were never actually approved by the EPA. Which is arguably much worse—hell, they recalled the birdseed—but if one were looking for a visceral argument about Why The NWF Should Not Climb Into This Bed, I don’t know that it gets any more visceral than “By the way, we sold killer birdseed!”

Well, it’s obvious to me at least that Scotts saw this coming and said “Crud! Who can greenwash us before this hits the news?” and jumped on the NWF. My real question is whether the NWF knew it was coming, or whether they got blindsided, which more or less works out to “Were you dumb and naive?” (arguably forgivable) vs. “Were you completely out of your ever-lovin’ MIND?”

Meanwhile, the amount of PR babble coming out of NWF is so thick that I feel the need to up my Corpspeak skill. Aztechnology’s got nuthin’ on these guys…

Filed under: Inept Activism by ursulav
2 Comments »

I’m on hold to the National Wildlife Federation. I’m cancelling my membership and getting off their mailing lists (or trying) because they have announced that they are partnering with Scotts Miracle-Gro…the primary pushers of unnecessary lawn fertilizer, which turns into runoff, which kills ponds and streams and the wildlife in them (and those are only the most obvious effects.) This is greenwashing of the most blatant kind, and the gardening-o-sphere is furious, but of course, there’s only so many gardeners in the world, and our collective outrage probably can’t compete with the kind of money Scotts has to throw at them.

…and I’m off hold, and the nice woman said she’s cancelled everything and made a note in the file as to why I’m upset. Then she apologized twice. Poor woman. She’s gonna get a lot of this today, I expect.

If you’d like to express your outrage, you can probably find the NWF on Facebook, and you can definitely find them on Twitter at @NWF. They were answering tweets until sometime last night, mostly trying to get people to take the conversation off Twitter, but have now stopped. Nevertheless, I suspect they’re reading. You can also call them at:

1-800-822-9919 ; M-F 8 a.m to 8 p.m. EST

and leave comments for them directly at   http://www.nwf.org/About/Contact-Us.aspx

(As always, if you do choose to do these things, I suggest being firm and angry but not abusive. People stop reading if you start off with “You dumb shits…” Let ‘em know you’re pissed, though.)

I’d take down my NWF certified habitat sign, but it fell over in the last hard rain anyway. Now I need a new sign that conveys “The reason we have all those butterflies is because I don’t mow this bit” without the NWF logo all over it.  Hmm. Maybe I should get a Squash’s Garden sign printed…

Filed under: Inept Activism by ursulav
6 Comments »

I’ve made compost!

I realize that this is both misleading and underwhelming for most readers, since I myself didn’t exactly MAKE the compost—that was various small to extra-small organisms—and composting is old hat for a lot of you.

For me, however, successful compost is actually a first.

As many of you know, I haven’t had that long with any given garden, owing to a lot of moving around, so this is the longest I’ve ever been in a garden. And I had a compost bin, but it was sited very badly, on top of a hillside that’s a clay desert at the top and a swamp at the bottom. This sucked all the moisture out of the compost, and the hillside, when covered in leaves, became an ankle-breaking Zone of Treacherous Footing.

So I had given up on ever getting good compost. And that was okay, because I have great luck with sheet mulching, which is sort of in-ground composting, and the compost bin was still useful as a dumping ground for banana peels, onion tops, wilted lettuce and a great many eggshells.

Yesterday, in a fit of energy, with nothing much to do in the soggy and muddy and supposed-to-be-dormant garden, I moved the bin to someplace wetter and more easily accessible, and when I’d pitchforked the top layer into the wheelbarrow, what I found underneath was…compost.

Beautiful! Crumbly! Brown! Yes, okay, heavy on the eggshells. But compost! Six or seven buckets worth!

I dumped a bucket out on my future tomato spot, and then I stopped, because it’s the middle of winter and nothing really needs compost right now. But compost! Eeee! It’s like a magic trick! Even in the most inhospitable of locations, it works!

Filed under: Uncategorized by ursulav
4 Comments »

Wuzz!

I am always amazed at how fast these little guys can move when they put their mind to it. I saw one once and thought it was a mouse, it was scurrying so fast.

Filed under: Insects by ursulav
No Comments »

I love fall migration. Black-thr0ated Green Warbler in one of the cedar trees out back! (Not a lifer, but a nice little bird, and a new one for the yard list.)

The vast majority of the birding I do is out my window—I keep my binoculars on the windowsill, atop my dog-eared Sibley. It always astounds me the sheer number of birds that come through the tiny vistas seen through the windows. While the odds are skewed somewhat by the fact that my yard is generally pretty darn bird friendly—tall trees, lots of water, heavy on the bugs and birdseed, light on the predators and pesticide—there still must be just an unbelievable number of birds streaming south for any given migrant to show up in my little patch. Even my super-casual birding out the window generally turns up two or three new birds a year. (This year it’s the Black-and-white and the Black-throated Green, last year it was the Red-Eyed Vireo and the rather late Yellow-Billed Cuckoo.)

Haven’t seen the vulture for awhile. Wherever he is, I wish him good health and many tasty road-killed deer. I did encounter a massive family flock of black vultures gathered around an ex-deer on the roadside yesterday, so maybe it was a teenage rebellious phase and he went back to his family.

There was a shed snakeskin in one of the flowerbeds yesterday. I’d judge that the owner was about as thick around as a sharpie. The skin was about a foot long, but the head had shredded off or wasn’t attached, so I’m not sure exactly how large he was. At a guess, probably one of the little brown snakes that love flowerbeds.

Meanwhile, it’s raining, the windows are open, things are cool and damp and smell lovely, and I have a check and sales statement from Penguin informing me that Dragonbreath 1 has sold a smidge over 75K books. Even though I pretty much just get to wave at this check before sending it to the IRS, life is good.

Filed under: Birds by ursulav
3 Comments »

Found this lovely lady on the lid of the trash can when I was checking the mail. She’s a female Carolina mantis, Stagmomantis carolina. She’s a native and a voracious predator, and yes, one of those types of mantis that do eat their mates given half a chance. While she won’t overwinter, odds are good there’s an egg-case somewhere with her name on it, although the odds of my spotting it are nearly nonexistent—Carolina mantis egg-cases look like odd bits of tree bark and unless she actually cemented it to the trash can, I won’t find it.

Quit chasing me around with that cameraphone, mammal! I took out my last four husbands, I'll take you down too!

Filed under: Insects by ursulav
2 Comments »

Mulch, I think, is like heroin.

And it's mine! ALL MINE! MUAHAHAHAAH!

The more you get, the more you need. Seven cubic yards, which seemed a truly apocalyptic amount this last spring, caused me to build multiple new beds, expand others, etc, etc.

I just had nine cubic yards delivered, because I need more.

In addition to building the new beds, which I gotta do, and throwing a large quantity down over areas that I intend to get to in a year or two, and wish to start improving soil fertility/quashing weeds on now, I also need to re-mulch the old beds, because mulch breaks down over time, which is great for soil enrichment purposes, but not so good for weed-suppressing purposes. I had been reduced to doling out mulch one shovelful at a time, because I was running low. Finally I said “To hell with it!” and ordered more. (Also got some topsoil/chicken manure mix to use for the new vegetable bed that I’m putting in. It is glorious. It has tilth. I kinda want to roll around in it, but that would compress it and make it less glorious.)

So getting too much mulch caused me to build more beds, which now need more mulch, which required me to get more mulch, which will cause me to build more beds which will then require mulching and the end result of all of this is that I will have forearms like a dockworker and blisters the size of tangerines.

But this should be enough mulch.

Until next year.

Filed under: My Garden by ursulav
2 Comments »

O internet brain trust, you found me the caterpillar in record time! Can you do the same with a weed?

There's a lot of it, anyhow...

Never seen this one in the yard before, but it popped up everywhere after I mulched a large bed in the backyard, leading me to believe that the seeds may have come in on the mulch (although it’s a low and unobtrusive thing, so it may just have gotten lost in the crabgrass and I only noticed it because it was the first thing to show up in the mulch.) I haven’t caught it flowering. It’s not smothering anything, it pulls easily enough, but it is entirely too vigorous, and I suspect it on principle.

It is found only in the shaded areas of the yard and does not venture into sun. My attempts to locate it in lawn weed ID systems fail utterly. The leaves are really genuinely lance-shaped, with the little flare to keep it from going all the way through your enemy’s torso and everything, but I don’t know if that falls under the “lance-shaped” leaf category, so…y’know.

Advice on whether this is a delightful native that honors me with its presence, a scourge that I shall curse from the bottom of my heart, or whether I must now nuke my garden from orbit would be grateful appreciated!

Filed under: My Garden, plants by ursulav
5 Comments »