yard

garden : resisting the siren call of Monsanto

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When I talk with neighbors about our yard, they are uniformly positive about the way it looks. Which I can understand: we eradicated the pokeweed orchard in the back corner; we cut the vines back out of the trees; we’ve pruned deadwood and limbed up the border hollies; and we’ve managed to create relatively weed-free areas around the shrubs and various flowering plants. When I look at the yard, though, all I see are the weeds popping up in the beds we’ve somewhat cleared, the vines creeping back over the fence and up the trunks of trees, the mulberries growing (literally) out of the foundation of the garage, and the poison ivy popping up here and there in back corners. It’s enough to make a girl forget all her principles and just wholesale blanket coat the area with poison, deep-seated hatred of Monsanto be damned.

That’s where I was last week, ready to spray Roundup ™ on everything that was growing anywhere I didn’t want it. I thought, ‘Hey, next week will be hot and dry for the first seven day run all summer, perfect!’ So I started reading more about applying it. Which led me to studies that reminded why I hadn’t used it in the first place: negative impacts on amphibians, the possibility of residues lingering in the soils or harming various types of insects, and scary correlations with miscarriages in women exposed to the spray. Golly.

So, it’s back to the digging up, pulling out, and smothering plan. We’ll still spot-spray the poison ivy, and likely apply some kind of glyphosate to the stumps of the saplings we’re trying to kill. It appears that the universe approves of this change (back) of heart, because it’s delivered me a (literal) truckload of old newspapers that will be put to use in the smothering part of the plan. Just as soon as I read up on how to do that.

garden : resisting the siren call of Monsanto

garden : yellow jacket ground nest

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As a general rule, I don’t like to spread poisons around. Not inside the house, not on the lawn, not to kill bugs, and not on any of the plants I’ve planted. There are, of course, exceptions. For the first couple of years we lived here, we sprayed poison in a perimeter around the foundation of the house to discourage the ants that had decided the interior was better than the exterior during the year in which the house stood empty. The past two springs we’ve sprayed the cherry trees with larvacide to prevent Eastern Tent Caterpillars from recurring to the extent they did the year I drowned 2000+ by hand (from which I still haven’t truly recovered). I spray the poison ivy with the strongest poisons I can find whenever it crops up, for what little good it does me. And, this year I spot-sprayed ‘insecticidal soap suitable for organic gardeners’ on the bee balm and hostas that were becoming totally covered in little midges and white flies and aphids and what have you. Most of the time, though, I rely on nature to balance itself out (although reading that tally does give the impression of quite a lot of poisoning).

When it comes to wasps, I generally try to keep an eye out for their nests and knock them off the porch ceiling with a broom handle before they get too large. This year, however, yellow jackets made a ground nest at the edge of the lawn. I discovered this in the same way that everyone discovers yellow jacket ground nests, by getting stung on the ankle while mowing the grass. Besides pissing me off and making my ankle swell up like a red-hot baseball for a couple of days, this was disturbing because it’s right in the clumps of weeds that I typically yank up by hand whenever I get the chance. After consulting with our town public works manager, I conceded that the best thing to do was mark the spot and have my partner spray a can of Raid ™ into the hole in the middle of the night. It took us some time to locate the opening; for a while I was thinking we would have to weed-whack the area and run, but some careful observation eventually revealed the spot from which they were coming and going.

Last night after dark we did the deed, nobody got stung, and this morning I didn’t see any wasps coming or going. I can’t say that I’m totally pleased to have emptied a can of toxic chemicals into the ground, but I’ll certainly feel better about the whole thing if it actually works.

garden : yellow jacket ground nest

garden : butterflies

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First of the Gay Butterflies Butterfly Weed assortment to bloom.

One of my goals in selecting plants to add to our garden is to attract more butterflies and predator insects. As with the desire to have more birds, it’s my hope that the mosquitoes can be kept to a minimum by natural predation. So far, we’ve seen some improvement over last year; it’s now possible to walk around in the yard and work in some areas without getting eaten alive. There are still a few problem areas, notably the puddle-ish area at the foot of the basement stairs (where we’re going to install a drain as part of the work on the basement) and the bumpy black plastic downspout extension on that same side of the addition. So, that corner of the yard is not so great. The rest is pretty good on a sunny day though, and even working outside at dusk I was able to make do with just the citronella bucket and not a DEET coating. Between our water management work, the birds, and the insects, we seem to be making progress.

In terms of butterflies, I’ve so far seen only the most common ones. They’ve appeared in greater numbers than I remember, Spring Azures and Cabbage Whites being the most frequent visitors. We had a larger black and blue butterfly hang around for a few days in the spring, however I wasn’t able to identify it. I’ve been using a poster that I picked up in Hilton Head, Butterflies of the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, as a way to narrow down my options and then Peterson’s Eastern Butterflies or an online guide to our county to confirm the identifications. In addition to the two common white butterflies, I’ve noted several Eastern Tailed-blues in the yard, and caught visits by a Clouded Sulphur and what I believe was a Hobomok Skipper.

During trips farther south, I’ve seen a few other species. During our bi-annual farm party we saw a large number of Cloudless Sulphurs grouped along a puddled lane. We also spotted a Tiger Swallowtail and a variety of small and medium orange-and-black butterflies that were just too fast for us to identify. Similarly, we spotted a large orange butterfly that looked like a Great Spangled Fritillary during an outside wedding last weekend, but had neither binoculars nor book at hand. I’ve seen orange butterflies in our yard, but haven’t been quick enough to get a good look at them. I’m hoping that once the flowers start coming into bloom I’ll start to be able to get a good look at them at rest.

garden : butterflies

garden : rain barrel

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Freshly installed rain barrel, with rhododendron.

I have two overarching goals with regard to our house: (1) to make the entire enterprise of living here more energy efficient and (2) to make the yard and garden more pleasant and usable. Rain barrels address both of these aims to a certain degree, by reducing the amount of water used outside and taking away a favorite breeding ground for the nasty little daytime mosquitoes that proliferate in our town. While the rain barrel has an overflow tube, the tube can more readily be screened to prevent mosquitoes from breeding in the tube, since the water in the barrel is screened at the entry point.

I had been thinking about rain barrels for some time when I read about a local workshop in Organic Gardening magazine (something I probably never would have looked at but have greatly enjoyed since receiving a subscription with our composter). The workshop took place at the Accokeek Foundation, and was a collaboration with the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB). ICPRB has commissioned Rain Bear Rain Barrels, which are well-suited to the hot mosquito-heaven that is our area during the summer; I thought we’d be making the barrels ourselves, but then learned that they are pre-assembled by volunteers onsite at the Accokeek Foundation. The workshop was more informative that hands-on, designed to make sure that we all knew how to install the barrels safely in order to not have them drown a raccoon or fall on a child. Once we’d gotten the information and signed a liability waiver (‘I will not sue you if my rain barrel drowns a raccoon or falls on a child’) we were free to go. A very nice man who lives two towns over from ours loaded one of my barrels into the back of his ginormovan SUV and dropped it off at our house after it was a surprise only to me that just one of the 60-gallon barrels would fit in our Saturn (now is the time when you’re impressed that any 60-gallon barrel would fit in our Saturn).

Once we got the barrels home, they stayed in the backyard against the house (upside down) for a month. Mostly because we hadn’t decided what modifications we’d make to the downspout and partly because I wasn’t that confident in my ability to level the ground. Even though I intellectually understand that paying the bank an obscene amount of money every month means that we can do whatever we like here, including lopping off the downspouts, I have a pretty large barrier to undertaking new projects of that sort. In the end, we decided to create a replacement short downspout that could be swapped out in the winter, thus avoiding having any flexible tubing that invariably turns into a mosquito Club Med. In the end, I mostly supervised and my partner did all the work of leveling, cinder block carrying and arranging, downspout cutting and reassembling, and barrel placement. It took us two days with the heat, some order of operations errors, and the fact that it was going to rain that night so it couldn’t stay half-assembled. In the course of getting the space ready, we had to cut the rhododendron back a bit; we dug up some of the rooted branch and passed along the section to a friend who was looking for something to replace an azalea that had died. By the time we got the segment into and out of the car again, it looked much scruffier than it had when we started digging it out. So far it’s survived, though, and we’re hoping that with some TLC and rain it will bush out and look like an actual plant.

The night we finished assembling the barrel—singular, as we still need to scrounge up some more cinder blocks and clear out some underbrush to create a space for the second barrel on the other side of the addition, a task delayed by having two wedding things, a pool party, and a 40th birthday party to attend last weekend—it poured rain. We ran outside to check on our barrel, all excited, only to discover that my partner had assembled the pieces of the spout inside-out and water was gushing out at each of the seams. So, in the middle of a lightning storm, he stood on a metal railing and dismantled the metal downspout, using metal pliers to reshape the pieces and make them fit back together the other way. After which our barrel filled up in about 39 seconds flat, and we were able to determine that yes, the overflow tube works just as it’s meant to. Since then, I’ve used the water for the ficus trees that are now out on the porch and some of the indoor plants; I need to get a watering can with a more narrow spout if I’m going to water the indoor plants from the barrel and not have to make a million trips out to the backyard with the plastic cups I typically use. Already I’ve noticed a marked downturn in the numbers of daytime mosquitoes on that side of the house and the water comes out as cool as promised.

I don’t know how many barrels we’ll end up with, although I did have this vision of a barrel at every downspout (which would probably not look the best at the front of our historic brick house, so is unlikely to happen). The barrels are $90 each, which is about half as much as those I found online, but if you’re buying more than a few it’s more economical to get a 400 gallon tank-style barrel. I’m not sure we have either the space or the watering needs for the larger barrel, so I keep reminding myself that the goal is not to collect every drop of water possible from our roof, but is instead to replace the tap water that I’d be using anyway. That isn’t actually a lot, as I don’t typically water my garden after the plants are established (the water is not recommended for car-washing, as it collects small grit from the roof and gutters). Having 120 gallons on hand at any given time seems pretty sufficient for our purposes, and we’ll just need to keep working on managing the water deluges in other ways.

garden : rain barrel

garden : nesting birds and a developing ecological balance

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There have always been a lot of birds around our yard, but this year we seem to have hit a sweet spot in terms of cover and food because we’ve seen a greater variety of fledgling birds than ever before. It’s possible that these birds have been here every year and I just haven’t noticed because I haven’t been as active in the yard after April. It’s also possible that I was finally sufficiently threatening with regard to the neighbors’ cats being in the yard every other day for three years, as I haven’t seen them around in months. We’ve also sprayed the cherry trees for Eastern Tent Caterpillars for two years now, which has enabled them to fully foliate and have enough energy to actually produce cherries. Most likely the proliferation is a combination of all of those factors plus the near-constant rain keeping fresh water in the birdbath.

At any rate, I’ve seen rumpled no-tail-feathers wobbly-flying young of 13 species in our yard (or on the street in front of the house): American Crow, Blue Jay, Catbird, Eastern Phoebe, Hairy Woodpecker, House Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, Grackle, European Starling, Brown Thrasher, Mourning Dove, American Robin, and (just this morning) Carolina Wren. Of all of these, I was most pleased by the ones I hadn’t seen before. The phoebe was a wonderful surprise, as I’d read they were shy nesters; in addition to being a pretty little bird (I have a northerner’s affinity for the gray species) they eat mosquitoes almost exclusively. I was excited about the crow, too, mostly because it’s one of those large birds about which you joke of never seeing a juvenile. And, truly, the young one would have been indistinguishable from an adult were it not making such plaintive cries for attention and had I not witnessed its parent actually feeding it. Finally, the woodpecker was a treat just because it was so cute. Without tail feathers, it was the quintessential Weeble ™ fluffball as it tried to peck for bugs up and down the limbs of the red maple.

My father rightly observes that all of these birds are ‘the loud ones,’ which is likely related to being the large ones, which is definitely related to being the voracious insect-eating ones. After years of effort, I seem to be finally developing ecological balance. We have numerous predator bugs in the yard, most noticeably fireflies, and just this week I discovered a beautiful spider—I bet you never expected me to use those two words together—camped out in the daylilies and another of the same in the climbing rose in the backyard.

Now, if only the slugs would attract some toads, I’d be set.

garden : nesting birds and a developing ecological balance