Garden Rant

Hummingbird feeders? I can't handle the commitment

I've been reading up on hummingbird feeders and have learned that there's a RIGHT way to use them:

• Mix one part sugar with 4 parts water, boil to dissolve.  Or use baker's sugar, which dissolves in cold water.  (Is that the same as confectioner's?)
• Or you can buy "instant nectar," which comes in flavors.  (But why?)
• Clean really well, before using, with Qtip and vinegar-water.
• Replace and clean every 2-3 days or more, depending on how hot it is.
• To remove black mold spots, advice ranges from special cleaning concoctions to doing something with sand that made no sense to me.
• Use an ant guard AND a bee guard to keep them from - I don't know, but I'm sure it's bad.
• Hang them in partial shade so the nectar doesn't ooze out, which attracts ants, which we've established is bad.
• Not much action?  Add a red ribbon to feeder, though some people say any color will do.

Here's what NOT to do:

• Do NOT use food coloring or honey - bad for the  birds
• Do NOT use honey - it ferments, and that's bad for the birds.
• Do NOT use artificial sweetener - it has no nutritional value.

Replace and clean as often as every other day?  Only for my cats would I go to that much trouble.

OR how about just growing a few colorful plants and maybe adding some water?  I'm lusting for some bloomers to climb up the pillars of my front porch - crossvine and American honeysuckle, and maybe the tropical annual tacoma I'm hearing good things about. 

Reading up, I've seen a few plants I already grow recommended as attractants, but I've never seen hummers feeding from them - petunia, columbine, azaleas, butterfly bush, and weigela.  Y'all have any luck with them?  What plants work for you?

I love this video, though I can't help worrying that the little guy might be slurping up red food coloring, which we know by now is a no-no.  But guess what - he's not drinking this stuff by sucking.  I found out that hummers are actually LICKING.  Really, really fast. 

 

These folks seem to know how to do it - with a red pipe-cleaner wrapped around a solution-filled tube.

Once I started watching, I couldn't stop.  This next one shows one feeding its babies.

Photo credit: University of Alberta.

Is this how the Left sees gardeners?

I stumbled upon a leftie website called Irregular Times, which has a section on "Gardening from the Underground," titled Irregular Growth. I suppose that's a good thing, but read the introduction: 

Gardening - when one hears the word one thinks of old people: retired couples with nothing to do, aged devotees of Martha Stewart, or rich, matriarchal wives jealously guarding access to their garden and gossip clubs. Like so many other traditional domestic activities, gardening often feels like a relic, a holdover from a past of little relevance to the electronic, simulated, placeless world of today.

The gardens that we see on television and read about in newspapers and magazines reflect the ludicrous mismatch between the literal earthiness of gardening and the desires for perfection that have emerged as a part of our virtual culture. These gardens might as well be experienced on a computer monitor. They are completely managed, with no surprises. They are without depth, texture, and odor, separated from the environment around them. They are to nature what the Epcot Center is to culture.

Irregular Growth rejects the idea of gardens as museums. In a world in which consumerism is equated with virtue, gardening has the potential to become a subversive art. These pages are centered around the effort to realize that potential, reacquainting people with their humanity through a symbolic immersion in the natural world.

Come grow with us.

Where to start!  Maybe with the description of gardeners, with "old", "retired, "aged" and "gossip" all in the same sentence.  And is YOUR garden ludicrous, perfect, completely managed, with no surprises,  without depth, texture and odor, an Epcot Center Museum?

And turning to the articles themselves, it's a weird little collection that I read so you don't have to.  Just one quote, though, on weeds:

Weeds help a garden seem integrated into the landscape that surrounds it. Weeds remind a garden viewer that a flower bed is located in a particular place with a natural community of plants. Unlike the artificially perfect curves of the trendy mulched flower beds, the curves created by weeds make sense within a landscape. Weeds follow the terrain, living in great sweeps with borders defined by the rise and fall of the land and the natural distribution of nutrients and soil texture. Weeds always make sense where they grow. Their appearance is never contrived.

Yeah, down with trendy mulched flower beds!

The obvious question is who ARE these people, so I wrote to ask- there being no About page - and was told that "Some of the people who post to our site don't want to have their political writings interfere with their day jobs (which unfortunately can happen)."

Wow, if people are being fired for their positions on flower beds, we want to know!  We're bloggers, after all, risking our livelihoods every day to take positions on these defining issues.

Photo by Michael Krinkle via iStock, where it's filed with the tag "active senior".

Getting geeky at the National Ag Library

My plant geek friend John Peter Thompson offered to arrange a tour for me of the National Agricultural Library's super Special Collection, so how could I say no?  I've written about the Library previously, and so has Barbara Damrosch, because their funding is in such grave danger (after years of flat-lining).  I think my snarky title for that earlier post was "U.S. sees no need to teach people to grow food," and that applies especially to poor farmers in developing countries with no Internet access. With budget cuts, the library will stop mailing how-to-grow-food pamphlets to them, as they once did to Eliot Coleman when he was a gardening newbie.

So in the chilly, hermetically sealed confines of the Special Collection, with its 15,000 rare books, 200,000 catalogs, and posters, I feasted my eyes on some of those catalogs and posters, plus wax fruit, fiber samples and some big ole' books.  When we stopped to see the 1509 "Tract on the Benefits of Herbs," John Peter stepped up to translate the Latin for us (yes, he's THAT geeky).  We saw the first known illustration of corn, from 1541, in the photo left.  My point is it was very cool stuff, even to this non-history buff.

So I asked the staff what else the Special Collection is good for, besides cool tours and history books, and here's a sampling of their many examples:

• Finding heirloom fruits that will do well today.  There used to be thousands of varieties of apples grown in the U.S., not the handful in the stores today. The Pomological Watercolor Collection has helped researchers of heirloom fruits, and the seed catalogs provide illustrations of heirloom fruit and vegetables.

• The Animal Parasite Collection spans 100 years of animal parasitology research, including original line drawings and photographic records of animal parasites with descriptive indexes.  Kinda helpful in researching food safety issues.

• And across the street at the Ag Research Center they're researching rice that will thrive in this new era of increased CO2.  Germplasm stored there dates back 150 years.

Abraham Lincoln started the the National Agricultural Library in 1862, in middle of Civil War, coz he thought food was important.  Isn't it still?!

Lawns and lawn mowers in the news

Here's a curious juxtaposition.

A terrific New Yorker* piece about the anti-lawn movement by Elizabeth Kolbert.  It's an exhaustive history, starting with Rachel Carson, taking us through the Wild Ones, Sara Stein, Michael Pollan, Ted Steinberg, Food not Lawns author Heather Flores, Fritz Haeg, and several others I'd never heard of.  Kolbert concludes with some pretty big ideas: "The American lawn now represents a serious civic problem" and "This is perhaps the final stage of the American lawn." 

And in the same week, a Washington Post article about lawnmowers titled "Deere John: It's Been Good Knowing You; Lawn Behemoths are Going out to Pasture."  It reports that the "riding mower industry is 'deeply troubled by the decline in housing starts'" that's caused a slowdown in sales of these $6-11,000 man-toys.  But guess what - not a word about the growing anti-lawn movement.  Not a word about the public starting to grasp the environmental consequences of all the lawn grown in the U.S. Toxic pesticides, water pollution, waste of water, loss of habitat, or the pollutants spewing from the mowers themselves - you'd think SOME of those would have caught the attention of the writer.

Or am I the only one who's even surprised by this?

Photo sources:  top, PetersPhoto on MorgueFile; lower from the John Deere website.

*By the way, did any of you New Yorker subscribers out there even receive the latest issue, the now notorious one with the  Obama cartoon on the cover? Mine never came and two out of three friends I asked didn't get theirs, either.  What's happening?

The Footprint in Your Garden, Part 1

Guest Post by Michael Johnsen (a/k/a DJ Monet)

With all the talk of being “carbon neutral,” I'm often asked, usually by friends strolling through my garden, how much carbon dioxide my plants are absorbing, storing, and generally combating global warming.  But the simple question: “How much CO2 does my garden absorb?” is actually more complicated than the typical sound bite can handle. 

Different plants in different soils absorb CO2 at different rates.  Even the same plants in the same soils will absorb at different rates depending on every factor that affects plants, from available water to disease.  The impacts are real, however, and some scientists believe the effects of climate change are offset by the re-growth of the forests in the Eastern U.S.  But before I even get into all that, let me back up and look at the big picture.

The overall CO2 level in the earth's atmosphere at the start of the Industrial Revolution was around 280 parts per million (ppm) and increased to about 379 ppm by 2005¹. That's most but not all the CO2 released from fossil fuels²; some is absorbed by the oceans (making them more acidic, but that’s for the aquaculture column) and the rest is absorbed by plants and soils (yes, there’s lots of carbon in soil- well, in good, organic-rich soil).

OK.  So we've established that plants and soils - what our gardens are all comprised of (sans gnomes) - absorb some of this fossil-fuel CO2 we’re releasing. Plants use the carbon they pull from the atmosphere to build their cells and structure.  Determining what plants absorb the most CO2 is a bit trickier and really depends on where your garden is.  A tree’s dry-wood is widely accepted to be around 50% carbon, but newer research (not much has been done) shows that trees can differ, from about 50 percent for maples to over 55% in the very old heartwood of Sequoias³.

Yet another factor is how many different species of plants you grow in your garden.  Scientists at Brown University, in research plots on the steppes of Patagonia, found that biodiversity makes a big difference in the amount of organic matter a system produces. The scientists found that patches of diverse planting produced more organic matter than patches of single species even with equal rain, nitrogen and sunlight⁴. 

And it's exactly the amount of organic matter or biomass produced that determines how "productive" scientists consider whole ecosystems to be.  While the amount of carbon differs between plant types, that biomass is made up of carbon.  As you might guess, a tropical rain forest is gangbusters with a score of 2,200 grams per square meter per year⁵.  A temperate evergreen forest clocks in at 1,600 and a temperate deciduous forest at 1,200⁶.  Thus a picture starts to emerge as to the effects of different plant choices. 

The next big question is: Where are you PUTTING all of that biomass in your garden?  Before overrunning your garden with a bunch of kudzu, Norway Maples, and pokeweed, think about where it all ends up.  Meaning, what do you do at the end of the season when you cut your garden back?  Do you compost those stems, branches, and weeds?  Send it to a landfill or incinerator?⁷.  These options for disposal all release some (or most, in the case of incineration) of that carbon back into the atmosphere, so letting it grow and NOT cutting back keeps it out of the atmosphere.  But compost is returned to your soil and because soils lock away carbon - until the soils are disturbed - composting stores the carbon long-term.

Bottom Line
So, to store lots of carbon in your garden and keep it there, grow big trees and lots of biomass with woody stems, make sure these plants live a long time, and compost all your yard waste.  Wood is the key, whether it's in canopy trees, understory trees or shrubs.  So, while your trees are slowing capturing the carbon you emitted 10 years ago flying to Las Vegas⁸, compost all your garden wastes on site or in your community to lock most of that carbon up in the soil  for long-term storage.   

Part 2 will cover composting and soil CO2.  Footnotes to Part 1 are below the fold.

My friend Michael Johnsen studied Natural Resource Management as an undergraduate before receiving an M.S. in Environmental Policy and Science at Johns Hopkins.  He's been an environmental professional for 20 years now, working in the private, public and non-profit sectors .  He often ponders environmental issues while working in his garden.  Susan

Notes on the Google

GOOGLE READER
I used to be one of those blog-writing slackers who rarely remembers to visit and comment on other gardening blogs.  Then Elizabeth mentioned that she uses Google Reader... and it changed my life.  I just use the feed symbol in my Firefox browser, clicking on it to subscribe to each blog I want to follow.  Then it's SUCH fun visiting my Google Reader page and seeing who's posted something new - like finding little gifts here and there.  I even pop in on a few nongardening blogs, like the family friend who got me into blogging back in 2005. (And guess what HER score was on the Cuss-o-meter?  A whopping 45.9 percent! That should put GardenRant's prim 4 percent in perspective.)

So, sorry about my slacker behavior these last 3 years, everyone.  I was waiting for this feed thing to get super-duper-easy, and it has.

GOOGLE IMAGE TO IDENTIFY PLANTS
Okay, this only works if you have some leads as to what a plant's name might be.  But if someone gives you something that could be X or Y, just put X and Y into Google's Image search and voila!  Of course you can't just grab those photos for your blog, but for any other purpose - like your own garden records - it's cool.  While you're at it, Google-Image yourself - it's fun!

FOR LOCAL GARDENING INFO
Now all of YOU GUYS know this but just in case someone ELSE is reading this, here's a comment that was left on my 3-year-old post about HGTV's Gardener Guy Paul James:

Paul, My wife and I are moving from Malibu, CA to Montreal, Canada, (long story don't ask, ha, ha ,ha).  What are the growing zones in Montreal, and what are the best shrubs, flowering plants, and herbs/vegetable plants to grow in the region?  And, yes, loooong winter is also correct there too.  Looking for advise for my wife, hope you can help.

Sincerely, Desperate Husband Keeping Relocating Wife Happy

What are the odds this desperate husband is going to make his wife happy by writing to some TV guy in TULSA, OKLAHOMA to ask about growing conditions in Montreal?  Honestly.  If only he'd found the Regional Garden Gurus' Upper Midwest page, huh?  But this guy simply didn't try very hard  because a quick Google search for "gardening Montreal" would have sent him to this meaty-looking site by the Montreal Botanic Garden.  How hard was that?

Support our Gardening Troops in Iraq

by Susan 
I'm not kidding.  A Logistics Specialist over there recently left this comment on an old article about HGTV's Paul James:

I am presently stationed in the Kuwait/Iraq region and miss watching "Gardening by the Yard". I was told of a tree called a Bulb Willow. I seen pictures of the tree but I have never heard of that type of Willow. Can you help?
Also, are there DVDs of "Gardening by the Yard"?
Thanks from the sandbox!!

My gawd!  Can you imagine what being in that world would do to YOUR gardener's soul?  Of course I shudder at the whole thing but I'd sure like to help this gardener from St. Louis see his damn gardening shows.  What with him serving in such a hell-hole and all. 

So I checked with HGTV and there are a few Paul James videos on their site. (Just put his name in the search on this page.) And YouTube has exactly one of Paul - plugging nurseries.   

So come on, Gardenrant readers, is there some way we can help out Norman Bullerdick, a passionate gardener who's needs a gardening fix bad? Can anyone make DVDs from their TV?  Or maybe he can use old-fashioned videotapes?

If you're thinking of Netflix, here's their offering of gardening DVDs.  Here and here are raves about our favorite garden-related movies, and here's Google results for "gardening DVDs".

And what the heck is a bulb willow?  I Googled it and got bupkis!

THE PAUL JAMES REPORT
Now if I did the sensible thing and took my  now-inactive old blog offline I'd save 90 bucks a year but you know, I'd miss hearing from Paul's fans, like the 81 other commenters there with Norman.  Maybe they'd just find this other post about Paul here on GardenRant and join the 66 other fans who've left comments on it - in the vain hope of actually reaching him or his bosses at HGTV - but I'd hate to miss any of their passionate messages.

So Paul, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'll always be here for you.  I'll take your messages and cheer on your fans as best I can, because I'm as ridiculous about your show as they are.  Norman speaks for us all. 

Photo credit - the U.S. Department of Defense.

UPDATE:  Gloria at Pollinators Welcome sent me this link to a photo of a bird - in a bulb willow tree.  We're closing in!

The "Mouse and Trowels", and the Power of Awards

by Susan

Remember last year when Colleen first announced the Mouse and Trowel Awards to honor online gardening and we all knew instantly it was a great idea?  Then almost 500 of us voted and the happy winners got to put little badges on their sites and blogs and call their endeavors "award-winning".  And the whole enterprise brought attention to our community.  In a fit of pompous proclamation worthy of cable TV, I called Colleen "blogosphere-changing," something I just assumed must be true and see no evidence to the contrary so that settles it.  Anyway, online gardeners are indebted to her for going to a LOT of trouble not in hopes of winning awards herself but just to promote good garden writing on the Web.

2008
Well, it's that season again.  Bloggers are asking their readers to nominate them, because who doesn't want to be nominated?  Lord knows WE do, so we humbly suggest you give us a nod.  And don't forget our individual blogs if they've amused or enlightened you over the past year.   Here's the link to the nomination form.

BLOG CATEGORIES
There are lots of cool blog categories to choose from again this year and even 2 new ones:

• Best New Blog, a category many of us lobbied for and I can't wait to see the nominees.
• Blog Post of the Year, which is a bit more challenging but the results will surely be worth it.  I'm more of a skimmer than a reader elsewhere on the Web but here on the Rant I read every word so I'll be nominating: Michele's "The Commencement Speech No One's Invited Me to Deliver",  Amy's "Confessions of a Fake Memorist," and Elizabeth's "Welcome to my Nightmare".

WEBSITE CATEGORIES
Beyond the blogosphere, the categories are pretty discouraging.  There's no Best New Website category, and these three categories from last year have been discontinued: Best Informational Gardening Site, Best Plant/Seed Source, and Best Gardening Magazine Site. Seems that there was low participation by us voters, and there's a perception that they don't fit in with the other awards.  So gardening websites are down to Best Forum and Website of the Year.

Bummer! See, I get excited about promoting good gardening information websites, making it easier for the public to FIND them.  Instead of the crawlers that steal from us all.  Instead of the income-dominated sites that have more ads than content.  Instead of the corporate sites that are filled with products we're supposed to buy.  And instead of sites that require payment in order to read them.  A few of us webmaster types interested in offering high-quality alternatives to all the crap online have banded together to help Googlers find the content-oriented sites, but we're few and far between.  Whole regions of online gardening information are still missing.

So readers, how about voting for that little band of webmasters as a way to encourage others to start content-oriented sites, too?  By nominating Regional Garden Gurus you nominate all of us and more to come, plus all the other good sites we link to.  (Of course you're invited to peruse our individual sites for possible nominations, too.) "Website of the Year" sounds awfully grand and we thought we had a better shot at "Best New Website" - but enough whining from me.  Start nominating right here.

GARDEN WRITERS ASSOCIATION AWARDS
Of course we're HOPING that the blogging community rallies this year and goes nuts nominating sites for the two remaining website categories so that the website Mousies make a comeback next year but just in case, I did a little lobbying of the GWA Awards Committee on behalf of the electronic world.  You may remember they have zillions of categories for writing, editing and photography in PRINT, and scant mention of "electronic" efforts, a category that includes everything on the Web, plus DVDs, podcasts and television.  Well, I recently ran into the Washington Post's Scott Aker - he's the guy responsible for these awards - and asked if new categories would be created, at least one for each unique medium that falls into that supercategory, and his response was superdiscouraging.  Oh well.  Their entrance fees would inhibit participation by most of us anyway.  (GWA awards are a fundraiser for the association.)  Here are their 2007 winners.

So bloggers, until something else comes along, it's up to us to encourage and reward websites in our chosen niche, so let's go for it.

Beneath the term locavore lies...confusion

by Susan
Did anyone catch "Big Foot," the recent New Yorker article by Michael Specter about carbon footprints?  It's long (of course), so here are my favorite bits.

It seems that England's grocery chain Tesco has declared its intention to drastically reduce the number of products they sell that are shipped by air - to 1 percent - and the lonely 1 percent will be labeled as such.  Trouble is, they've since discovered that "green" isn't exactly synonymous with "local", or even "air-travel-free."

The Latest in Sustainable Gardening News

The February issue is out, and here are  some items that are new to GardentRant.

ON THE BLOGS

• Jane Berger's review of Native Ferns, Moss and Grasses by William Cullina makes me lust for both the book and the plants. Included are some frightening projections of changing cold-hardiness zones.
• Kathy Purdy reviews a great-looking book called Fallscaping by Nan Ondra and Stephanie Cohen.
• Pat, the Commonweeder, reviews Weeds of the Northeast.
• Our Commonweeder friend also reports having great success with the unintimidating rosa Rugosa.
• Pam Penick shows us what a green roof looks like in Texas.
• Here's my rant against Arbor Day and Earth Day being in the spring.  People, fall is for planting.
• My "Standard Disclaimer about Lawn Removal" defends the honor of turfgrass - when it's grown organically.

IN THE NEWS

• This weekend - Feb 15-18 - is the Great Backyard Bird Count, brought to us by the   National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.            
• These 10 Rules of Eco-Gardening are great, including the very English "Thou shalt leave a messy bit."  Both the language AND the content are distinctly different from similar advice in the U.S.
• Pesticides are STILL on our apples, according to this in the Seattle PI.
• There's a report on California's Sustainable Agriculture Conferfence on Grist. From the same source, check out "Buzz Kill," a beekeeper's take on Colony Collapse Disorder.
• Leafblowers - not a climate problem? is certainly a provocative question, also on Grist.            
• The European Union may ban all outdoor patio heaters,  because of complaints about their inefficiency.  And remember open fires are big polluters, so IS there a good alternative?

Here's the whole newsletter.  As always, the sidebar is blatantly off-topic.

Gardenblog Round-Up

The folks at Elements in Time have issued a Growing Challenge to encourage people to grow food and help them do it. Hey, I'm there.  Click on this cool graphic for all the dope.

Kathy Jentz's Third Annual Seed Exchange [pdf] was a big success, with only one tiny complaint from one attendee (but it still bugs her.) 

And thanks to Kathy for sending me this intriguing rant about environmentalists.  It asks:  "If it's so easy to see that Greens are often right, why are they so damned annoying? The answer is that they hate people" and goes on to compare and contrast "Dark Greens" and "Bright Greens."  Anybody see that breakdown in the eco-gardening community?   

Our friend Ed Bruske is getting to be a regular in Martha Stewart Living Mag - this time on the subject of rhubarb.  And here's his post about urban chickens.  He wants 'em bad!

I got some great ideas from Shirley Bovshow's post about creating garden maintenance manuals for her clients.

Carol at May Dreams Gardens has chosen Michael Pollan's classic Second Nature as the Garden Blogger's Book Club selection for February-March.  I hope to have time to do a little rereading and participate because it's chockful of challenges to conventional wisdom and a meaty discussion will surely follow.

And here's a cool new gardenblogger thing to do: The Garden Bloggers Geography Project! Fellow map nerds, this is for us.  Jodi at bloomingwriter asks readers to write posts about where they live, then send her the link for her very cool collection.  Great idea.

Later today - even more links to recent gardenblog posts, so check back!

The English are paving over their front yards?

My, this IS depressing - the news that Londoners are paving over their gardens for parking spaces. And if the ENGLISH don't give a fig for growing plants, who does?  Simon Burch reports in the Financial Times a 30 percent loss of green space in London as a result.

Pave-overs have been in the news in my part of the world, too.  A town in Northern Virginia passed a law prohibiting them, in response to the trend among immigrants living as large families with lots of cars.  So of course it's politically charged, but there's no disagreement that paver-overs result in increased run-off and the likelihood of flooding. 

But back to Simon Burch's article.  He goes to tell us the history of the front yard and make it quite interesting. 

Then my favorite part is when he says that my town offers "daring inspiration" and "ostentatious challenges to the normally sedate British front. "  Hey, that sounds like fun.  Brings back nice memories of tooling around Richmond, Virginia in full hippie regalia in the late '6o.

Okay, here's the article.

Garden blogs by region, too

Boy, we are really going regional here today.  Marie's request that the Friends of Rant be listed by region prompted me to finish the reorganizing of my own Blogroll by Region (already in progress!) and get it up here today. 

Who's on it?  Everyone who was on the Friends of Rant list last summer when I started the blogroll, plus everyone who's asked to be included since.  It's open to all and I'll be adding it to our Regional Guru site, so y'all send me your links! The Friends of Rant list is open to all readers, too.

And guess what.  Grouped by region, the list is suddenly interesting to me.  I get to be impressed by the irrepressible blogging spirit of Midwestern gardeners.  And is anybody doing it in Arizona and New Mexico?  And if not, why not?

Hint.  Garden in two different regions - or better yet, different countries, like Graham Rice - and you get listed twice. 

Beavers in the Burbs

by Susan
In Martin Luther King Park, just minutes outside DC's beltway, beavers are hanging out in this cozy lodge, waiting for darkness to come again so they can get back to work.

Wikipedia tells us: "There are typically two dens within the lodge, one for drying off after exiting the water, and another, drier one where the family actually lives. Their houses are formed of the same materials as the dams, with little order or regularity of structure, and seldom contain more than four old, and six or eight young beavers. Sometimes some of the larger houses have one or more partitions."

Now look at the other result of their industriousness - felled trees all around the pond, with Wiki telling us one beaver can bring down a sizable tree in one night.  Did the one who hacked away at the tree in the photo above just get bored and not bother to finish the job?  Isn't the purpose of all this cutting to get the tree on the ground where they can eat the bark?  Or not?  (Wiki can't tell us everything.)

So yeah, it looks bad for this little bit of heaven but maybe not: "The actions of beavers for hundreds of thousands of years in the Northern Hemisphere have kept these watery systems healthy and in good repair, although a human  observing all the downed trees might think that the beavers were doing just the opposite." (Also from Wiki.)

One tree whose days were numbered is, according to this plaque, a seedling from the famous, dearly departed Wye Oak I mentioned recently.  But beavers can't read and white oaks make good chewing, so to hell with claims of famous parentage (presuming to speak for them).

Luckily, this famous seedling has a protector.  My friend Pam lives across the street from the park and walks it almost daily. (Retirement IS bliss, she reports.) Her solution - wrapping it in wire - seemed to work and was soon copied by the park maintenance crew, who've since encircled all the still-standing trees with wire. 

What I found most interesting is that contrary to our automatic suspicions about humans always behaving badly in nature, the park authority is doing nothing else to protect trees from damage by beavers.  Despite MAJOR tree loss, the beavers remain safe in their lodge, still eager.

Beaver photo credit.

Jerry Baker's Revenge - Spam!

by Susan
Several times a week, every week, I get an email telling me that either Hillary, Britney, Helga, Sveta or Bush has left a comment on my old Jerry Baker post.  There's no need to open the messages anymore because they're always spam.  You know the kind - "I really like your site" followed by a link to some outfit selling Viagra or its competitors, a link now deposited on our unsuspecting blog.  Makes me wonder:

• Why do they ALWAYS target posts about Jerry Baker, not just on the Rant but back home where I first ranted about him?
• Why do they use just those names over and over?  Although I admit that just today there was a little relief from the monotony of Britneys and Hillarys.  This time it was "Musclemen xxx" leaving a comment about Jerry Baker and he deposited a link I thought I'd have to be in the mood to actually click on. I'm no prude but no porn before noon, please.
• And don't they know that comment spam doesn't work anymore?  At least that's what one IT person told me - that Google no longer recognizes the links deposited on our blogs that way. 

So please, Britney, Hillary and most especially Bush and Musclemen XXX, find something better to do with your time.  How about assembling a nice rain barrel kit for your home?

For the record, I'm not the only one ranting here about good ole Jerry Baker, just the only one putting his name in the title. 

Garden Coach Leaves Client in Tears

by Susan
While reports of great publicity about garden coaches keep coming in (and they're all compiled here), there's this other story - a funny/sad one in the SF Chronicle about a coach who needs some coaching herself - from Miss Manners.  Writer Leah Garchik was the high bidder for an hour of garden consulting at a charity fund-raiser and the experience was so bad, she wrote this article advising readers to hire consultants only if they really have to. 

But there's lots more than one rude consultant in this fascinating story - it's also about our relationships with our gardens and how to use the services of any consultant, for better or worse.  Let's dissect:

• The consultant asked Garchik to gather some photos of gardens she liked before their appointment.  That's a great idea because most people have NO IDEA what they actually want, so how can a consultant help them get it?  But notice that magazine photos didn't actually help.  Too perfect, too expensive.  Instead, I ask people to find a garden in their neighborhood they like, if possible, and show me THAT, or at least a photo of something reasonably REAL.
• Was it too-too judgmental to describe the consultant as "carefully made up" and "newly coiffed"?  It FELT like that, and maybe because this hit a little too close to home and now I'm worried that make-up and blond highlights leave me vulnerable to the same reaction.  (Though in my case there's nothing careful about any of it.)  But a consultant's appearance does say something about their style and if it's perfect and tightly controlled, maybe that's a legitimate red flag.
• Suggesting a bunch of plants that Garchik didn't know from petunias is useless, and that's why I started creating plant profiles.  Now I just send links to each plant page.  And if they live nearby I invite them to stop by and see most of the plants I'm recommending right in my garden (or we sneak next door to see even more).
• And what the heck is that invasive plant that's destroying Garchik's garden from below?  In my area bamboo certainly does that but what could it be in the SF area?

Now let's look at what Garchik could have done to benefit more from the consult:

• Raked.  I've been called to look at gardens that I also COULD NOT SEE, either because they were covered with leaves or, even worse, a jumble of invasive vines mounding to 5 feet high over a sea of mystery plants.
• And Chron reader comments are SPOT ON about people not understanding the commitment it takes to have a nice garden, either of their own time or the money to pay someone else to do it.  People want no-maintenance plants, or plants that do really well in the absolute worst places, and are unbelieving when told that no such plant exists.

"I'D NEVER WORK WITH YOU PEOPLE"
That's what a friend of Gorchik's was once told by another consultant, supposedly because the friend and her husband were "bickering".  Well, considering that designers of all types encounter marital bickering ROUTINELY, it must have been really bad.

Me, I've had only two clients that I wouldn't work with again for all the money in the world.  One was a husband-wife team who'd imported me to resolve conflicts over their yard, and the bullying husband who assumed I'd agree with him was none too happy with me.  What a relief it was to just hop in my car knowing I'd never see HIM again.  Then there was the woman who started attacking me as soon as I arrived, kind of a preemptive move before I could attack her, it seemed.  "I suppose you won't approve of THAT."  And "I know THAT's not your style but..."  And so on.  And everything single suggestion I made elicited an angry response.  After all that she demanded that I draw a sketch for her property and when I said I don't do that she almost lost it.  I won't even mention the extremely weird and disturbing way she kept displaying her private parts to me.  Get me outta here!

So readers, can you relate to any of this - as either the customer or the person being hired?   

Thanks to Chuck B at Back40Feet for posting about the story.

Amal's Back

by Guest Essayist Ed Cullen.  Ed's a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and feature writer and columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate. This essay is from a published collection called Letter in a Woodpile. Listen to more of Ed's essays on the NPR site.

Amal, the night visitor, is back.

Amal. That’s what I’ve taken to calling the armadillo that visits my garden on cool fall nights. Amal is looking not for a miracle but for grubs that glow enticingly in the light of the street lamp next to my front yard garden.

This tank of an animal, this throwback to a time when an armadillo’s biggest threat was not car tires but any animal able to flip it and eat it, comes around a few nights after I’ve turned the dirt to plant mustard seed and transplant red sail lettuce.

I don’t know where Amal lives, but I suspect under a neighbor’s shed, beneath houses that are on piers and, possibly, the drainage culvert that runs beside my garden. I do know this: Amal has the timing of a U.S. Navy seal on a mission of do-or-die.

This armadillo is clever, though his head, so tiny compared to the rest of him, doesn’t seem large enough to hold a long thought. Amal doesn’t dig in undisturbed ground. He roots in the ground that I’ve busted, pulverized with a hoe, fluffed with a garden fork and decorated with tender plants.

He’s after the grubs. Make no mistake. In the morning, when I approach the garden with a steaming cup of coffee and the hope born of sunrise, I find a garden that looks like it’s been churned by an outboard motor’s propeller. In Amal’s wake, my red sail leaf lettuce lies atop the ground like debris floating behind a party barge.

What’s this that greets my morning eyes? Has gravity been turned off during the night? Has a playful neighbor on his third Old Flugie thought to play a prank? No, surely, it’s an animal but what animal has been so careful in its destruction, so thoughtful in its cultivation?

A cat? Doubtful. Cats never work long enough at a stretch to cause so much turned earth. A dog? Hardly. If this were the work of a dog, there’d be a single trough of a hole with a nearby hill of dirt.

The first time Amal came, I replanted the uprooted vegetables the morning of discovery and was lying in bed the next night wondering what had been in the garden and if it would return. Then, outside the window I heard the slow shuffling of the armadillo, like a Depression-era hobo, noisily shoving aside empty plastic plant pots, rolls of chicken wire and the summer’s tomato stakes.

I have a neighbor who does more damage in my garden than Amal. This guy has a knack for stepping on everything between the entrance to the garden and the basil he craves. I garden so that the interloper could harvest herbs for that night’s dinner without flattening everything in his path.

By comparison, Amal is considerate. He doesn’t eat the lettuce. He lifts and separates it from the dirt in search of grubs. Usually, it’s not hard to replant the lettuce or the parsley or the green onions. Sometimes, after one visit, Amal doesn’t return. He knows the thoroughly worked plot has yielded its grubs.

I’ve tried spreading blood meal and red pepper. The last time, I swear I heard Amal yell, “Aieee, laissez le bon temps roulet” (Let the good times roll) as he rolled out of sight.

That’s the thing about gardening in South Louisiana. Everybody likes his food spicy.

Photo credit.

A Gardening Playlist

Clematis is climbing the trellis
Hydrangea is burgeoning blue
One sunflower is towering over the others
Could it be that there’s nothing to do?
—Kate Jacobs, “Hope is a Weed”

While I agree with those who don’t necessarily need music playing outside while they’re gardening or just sitting in the garden—especially when there is the fabulous sound of a pond—I think I’ll enjoy listening to songs about gardening inside the house this winter. My friend and mentee Ron made a CD that was given away as favors during a milestone birthday party Friday night and I’m listening to it now. It’s great: light and poppy, with a little bit of rootsy stuff here and there, some eighties classics, and just a touch of Brazil.

Century Plant / Victoria Williams
Steppin’ Out Queen / Van Morrison
Hope is a Weed / Kate Jacobs
Acony Weed / Gillian Welch
Like a Rose / Lucinda Willams
(Nothing But) Flowers / Caetano Veloso
Children Play with Earth / Arrested Development
Hong Kong Garden / Siouxsie and the Banshies
Gardening at Night (different vocal mix) / R.E.M.
Leaves that are Green / Simon & Garfunkel
Scarborough Fair / Canticle / Simon & Garfunkle
Lily Garden / Vashti Bunyan
Aboretum / Vetiver
Tiptoe Through the Tulips / Nick Lucas
In the Garden / Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama
Trampled Roses / Tom Waits
Vegetables (1999-QVL outtake) / Granger
Weeds / Michael Penn
Plant a Radish / Martin Vidnovic & Leo Burmei (thiese credits ran off the page of the little sheet and I can’t find the rest online but it’s very funny)

Except for “Scarborough Fair,” which brought on extreme melancholy, this music is cheery on a dreary November morning-after. Though, again, I don't listen to music in the garden too much, my favorite summer garden party music is definitely Brazilian jazz. What music makes you think of gardens?

Had a tough time choosing which videos to grab, so here are two: a real old one from S&G, (the lyrics are way appropo) and a newer one from R.E.M. Of course, neither is the same version I have on the CD.

by Susan
On a budget?  (A nice way of saying "cheap" or "underemployed" or, in my case, both.)  Then try bartering your gardening advice or labor for services you need.  My adventures in bartering started with my friend Dan, who's a professional computer-guy.  In exchange for fixing my many tech problems he got not just my off-the-cuff suggestions for landscaping his new building but the collective advice of blog commenters, so he thinks he got a really good deal.  Then, following Elizabeth's suggestion, I went to CraigsList to offer "gardening consultation for website consultation" and found a winner.  I ultimately hired him to set up my website and turn it back over to me, the technophobe, using a Dummies-friendly program to upload the content.

Then recently after I'd spent a morning helping my wonderful neighbor create a wildlife garden, she asked what she could barter in return and suggested cooking for me.  (It's true I don't cook, but I didn't realize it it was so obvious.)  Her idea was that occasionally she'd cook up some extra for me when cooking for her family.  Sounds good, I said.  Then I got really ballsy.  "Um, some of my high school girlfriends are coming for lunch and I WAS going to do carry-out...." I hint.  "Great!" she exclaims, "I'll cater!" 

And cater she did.  A full Tex-Mex meal to die for.  Recipes were demanded!  Imagine avocado soup, green pepper strada, apple crisp with vanilla ice cream, and a cool salad I can't even describe.  Here are Margaret, Rick and Lucas delivering the feast just hours before my guests arrived.

For me, barter doesn't just save money.  It takes me back to small-town life in the spirit of barn-raising and all that good stuff that real communities are so famous for.  (I grew up in a central Virginia town called Bon Air and yes, the air was good and so were the neighbors.)  And for self-styled but long-subdued subversives like myself, barter has the added appeal of screwing the taxman, so what's not to love?

So, is bartering your gardening know-how working for anybody else?  Let's hear it!  In my brazenness I once offered to barter for physical therapy treatments (and what middle-aged gardener doesn't need a PT on retainer?) but she didn't bite.  I'll keep trying, though.

I recently mailed out the first issue of Sustainable Gardening News, then parked it on the site right here. Already I've received some great suggestions about it but I'm thinking:  Why not tap into the wealth of knowledge (and opinions) right here on the Rant?  I've been researching newsletters for a while and have my likes and dislikes but what do you folks like to see in newsletters?  And this time I'm not naming any sites in particular - see, I've learned something from my Post about Pay Per Post.

And to those of you who requested an RSS feed - well, I went and got one created and it doesn't work yet.  I'm being very Zen about all these frustrations, though.  (Trying to, that is.)

Gardening Know-how as Currency -Barter, Anyone?

by Susan
On a budget?  (A nice way of saying "cheap" or "underemployed" or, in my case, both.)  Then try bartering your gardening advice or labor for services you need.  My adventures in bartering started with my friend Dan, who's a professional computer-guy.  In exchange for fixing my many tech problems he got not just my off-the-cuff suggestions for landscaping his new building but the collective advice of blog commenters, so he thinks he got a really good deal.  Then, following Elizabeth's suggestion, I went to CraigsList to offer "gardening consultation for website consultation" and found a winner.  I ultimately hired him to set up my website and turn it back over to me, the technophobe, using a Dummies-friendly program to upload the content.

Then recently after I'd spent a morning helping my wonderful neighbor create a wildlife garden, she asked what she could barter in return and suggested cooking for me.  (It's true I don't cook, but I didn't realize it it was so obvious.)  Her idea was that occasionally she'd cook up some extra for me when cooking for her family.  Sounds good, I said.  Then I got really ballsy.  "Um, some of my high school girlfriends are coming for lunch and I WAS going to do carry-out...." I hint.  "Great!" she exclaims, "I'll cater!" 

And cater she did.  A full Tex-Mex meal to die for.  Recipes were demanded!  Imagine avocado soup, green pepper strada, apple crisp with vanilla ice cream, and a cool salad I can't even describe.  Here are Margaret, Rick and Lucas delivering the feast just hours before my guests arrived.

For me, barter doesn't just save money.  It takes me back to small-town life in the spirit of barn-raising and all that good stuff that real communities are so famous for.  (I grew up in a central Virginia town called Bon Air and yes, the air was good and so were the neighbors.)  And for self-styled but long-subdued subversives like myself, barter has the added appeal of screwing the taxman, so what's not to love?

So, is bartering your gardening know-how working for anybody else?  Let's hear it!  In my brazenness I once offered to barter for physical therapy treatments (and what middle-aged gardener doesn't need a PT on retainer?) but she didn't bite.  I'll keep trying, though.

Website Newsletters - What do you like?

I recently mailed out the first issue of Sustainable Gardening News, then parked it on the site right here. Already I've received some great suggestions about it but I'm thinking:  Why not tap into the wealth of knowledge (and opinions) right here on the Rant?  I've been researching newsletters for a while and have my likes and dislikes but what do you folks like to see in newsletters?  And this time I'm not naming any sites in particular - see, I've learned something from my Post about Pay Per Post.

And to those of you who requested an RSS feed - well, I went and got one created and it doesn't work yet.  I'm being very Zen about all these frustrations, though.  (Trying to, that is.)