Cupola Doing Double Duty?

I have to confess, I accepted this fabulous gift with some trepidation. A 120-year-old cupola, a bit decrepit, and so heavy it took a front-end loader to get it onto the trailer we brought it home on. But I had in mind a place for it; I planned to use it as an anchoring point for the garden that sits halfway between the kitchen window and the vegetable garden. Even more important, it would become, I hoped, a bat condo. We’re getting overrun with mosquitoes. We have bats, but not enough apparently. I love to sit outside on summer evenings. But given that there is no screened-in porch and too many mosquitoes, my desire is incompatible with current reality. Enter ecology. I hope.

“Aren’t you afraid the bats we have in the attic will stay there and invite more friends to live in the cupola?” asked my son, who set the cupola in place.

Matt’s an inimitable bat-bouncer. When he lived at home, I could call on him to take care of the occasional in-house bat. He takes sieve and cookie sheet, waits until the bat lights, then immediately slaps the sieve over the bat, slides the cookie sheet beneath, and ushers the creature outside unharmed. Bats, who follow spore trails to find their nesting places, are also curious and can slide into the most amazingly tight places – I once watched one slide up under an asbestos shingle in our old house.

The cupola laid on its side partially wrapped in a tarp, all winter. I worried about it becoming an eyesore and unfinished project. But for my birthday, Matt and Gary set it up on the foundation Matt built. Several days ago, Matt painted it with solid stain. I love it. Whether or not this very cool garden ornament will also serve as a growing bat population’s summer house remains to be seen. Meanwhile, I just enjoy looking at it as a plant the beans.

*For anyone interested, I know where you can get another reasonably priced antique cupola for your garden. Just let me know via a comment on this blog

Greenhouse Volunteer

"You know," my gynecologist said during a visit I made to her some years ago. "Life wants to live."

This was her conclusion to the story of a woman who had come worried that she was pregnant yet knowing she couldn't be. She had had her tubes not just tied, but had had a section cut out. Yet here she was: pregnant. When my gyn operated, she discovered that the severed tubes had reached a tiny strand across the gap, like sympathetic hands, creating a bridge for the egg that became that woman’s surprise last child. "Life wants to live."

Sometimes that's hard to believe when gardeners work their fingers to the bone to get something to grow and end up skunked year after year. That's how it was with me and sweet peas, those oh-so-simple heirlooms. To everyone else, maybe, but not to me. I had been putting out sweet peas, in the ground, then as plants, for years with only anemic results; nothing like the lush displays that lure you (me) in catalogues. I had decided to give up on sweet peas and enjoy them in OTHER PEOPLE'S gardens. Enviously. Yet I went out to the greenhouse a couple of weeks ago to clip some of the parsley that sprouted from a seed I apparently dropped onto the pea gravel floor this time last year while starting plants. And lo and behold, there it was: the sweet pea!

This little guy had fallen into the gravel, had sprouted during one of the worst snowstorms in living memory, and was BLOOMING! A pair of rich mauve flowers, a lovely contrast to the sagey-green vine, were happily snugged against one of the table legs. As a result of years of poor performance when I work at it, I don’t think I’m going to try to grow sweet peas outside this year. I just don’t want to devote the space when so many other things can legitimately claim it. But I might just buy a packet of sweet peas to dump in the pea gravel at my feet in the greenhouse, and wait to see what happens.

Redemptive Pruning

This year things are going to look different thanks to the twin blizzards visited on us here in Maryland. It did some ham-fisted pruning, ripped tree limbs half-off, smashed aged boxwood, halved the density of yews. It’s a misery when you lose a venerable tree or treasured shrub and a loss for the local wildlife. The golden juniper at the south kitchen window gave us a close-up and personal view of more than one warbler family as well as various avian tourists over the years, but it's going to have to come out. The old holly on the east side, the one that was home to a family of robins where we could watch generations of fledglings take their first awkward attempts at flight, is iffy. And the now-ravaged cedar that for years shielded the fragrant bank of Hostas by the driveway may end up either having to go or be pruned to such a degree that it will completely change the light that reaches that space.

But the scattered demolishments also offer an opportunity to reassess.

Once we clear away the fallen, we need to look at things through new eyes. Can the cedar be saved? Do we want it to be? Or will its absence give that corner a new look, new possibilities? Will the holly have to come down? Its absence would let sun into the east windows in winter, (a blessing), but would also add unwelcome heat in the summer. Or will we be able to prune judiciously to give it new life?

It’s always a jolt to be forced to change just when you think you have things just as you want them. But it’s also a reminder that life is change. Nothing is static. Even rocks are made up molecules that are made up of moving parts. Being forced to adapt keeps our sinews working, stretching, as unwelcome and difficult as that can sometimes be. But first, the chain saw.

Outdoor Critter Food Bank

I’m a sucker for gadgets, especially new-technology stuff. Some work, others not so much. Two years ago I bought a solar-powered pedestal birdbath, which was fabulous. For a while. It was two-tiered, spouted water up through a little tube that came as a sparkling stream out of the top. The birds loved it, and so did I. But it gave up after six weeks and I could never get it to work again, despite cleaning off the solar panel, installing a new motor assembly sent by the manufacturer, who was clearly having problems with the thing, since the person at customer service mistook me for another unhappy solar-powered birdbath buyer. I’ve also got two Soki solar lanterns, one of which has done US Postal Service duty through rain and sleet and dark of night, the other of which has not worked once.

I’m most attracted to the gismos intended to make sustaining wildlife easier This year after the first really cold snap, I bought lower-tech gismo: a heated birdbath, a blessing for the critters (and me, since I don’t have to keep slogging out to keep an unheated one filled and thawed).

This conversation about gadgets is actually only adjacent to what’s really on my mind, which is how we help wildlife without making it a fulltime job for ourselves. I plant to supply critters, especially birds and other pollinators, throughout the seasons. I don’t believe in buying bird food, which attracts the rats and makes the birds dependent. But I do believe in giving them all the natural help we can. In winter, instead of clear-cutting the garden, I leave the seed heads waving. They are usually denuded by spring.

But right now, the gardens are still smothered beneath about 18 inches of snow. Only a few seed heads wave above that blanket. Even with very little to offer, the poor critters, desperate for food, come. Yesterday evening, about 100 Canada geese landed in my back yard to glean what they could from the seed heads and garden detritus I’d left as well as the little bits of brown lane starting to peek out of the snow. I’m going to scatter corn for them this evening, leftover from my ill-starred attempt to heat the house with a more environmentally friendly corn stove. Scattering the corn, a use of what has otherwise been wasted and stored in metal trash cans, is not baiting – which is illegal – since I won’t shoot the geese. It’s one neighbor helping another in tough times.

Snow Gardening

There will be no gardening today. Not even in a bathrobe. Nor tomorrow or the next or for a while until we dig out. I was all set to drop in a picture of more blooms that are out of sync with the seasons – my dafs were completely open in mid-January when we had a snow – a subject I think is incredibly relevant to the discussion of climate change.

But I’ve got more immediate concerns right now that we’re blanketed as though we live somewhere out in the plains. I spent part of yesterday slogging out to the greenhouse to make sure the little thing didn’t collapse, though it’s rated to withstand a fair amount of wind (50 kts) and weight (can’t remember). I was glad I wasn’t fretting about getting water to seedlings and making sure an outage didn’t freeze a whole batch that I had already started in flats of seed-starting mix. Expensive and frustrating, but then again, gardening can be too, let’s be honest. Meanwhile, I’ve got wads of seed packets on my dining room table, and as soon as I get a few minutes, I’m gonna start to sort them into a series of timings: what gets seeded into flats as soon as I dare (probably after next week’s snowstorm passes and diminishes), and what doesn’t get seeded until later. Waste not, want not. Which is what sustainable gardening and living is all about.

Early blooming

MG blog

I do a good chunk of my gardening in my bathrobe. I go out first thing with the dogs, and while they inspect the yard, I always get sucked into SOMETHING garden-related. Even in winter, if it’s not blowing and minus two I got out with gloves and nippers. Which is how I ended up with black raspberry sprigs in my bathrobe pocket the other day. I’d put the nippers in my robe, boots on my feet (no socks, like a dope) and clumped out to the wild and whippy raspberry (Rubus) patch. Black raspberry canes are like an alien species determined to take over the world. They send out great arching stems that reach down for soil and root from the tip. They always reach outside their bounds, and into the reds’ territory to claim a stake. I had pruned and yanked last fall in late November, but here I was again only eight weeks later doing the same thing in what felt like the dead of winter. You have to admire their determination.

The thing that startled me though, was the fact that a lot of the red raspberry canes’ buds are already starting to swell. It’s too early. Having grown red raspberries, both summer (floricane) i.e. once-beaaring, and fall (primocanes) i.e. twice-bearing if you let them – for 30 years, I look for them to start swelling at the end of February, maybe beginning of March depending on the cold and light. Mid-January is too weird.

Likewise, the tulip magnolia (Magnolia x soulangiana), with a gorgeous buttery bloom, is swelling way early. It’s planted in a fairly protected spot, which last year prompted it to bloom early and then get smashed by heavy frost, but still… For thirty-plus years, the Smithsonian has been doing bloom time studies, which show that plants in the mid-Atlantic region have increased their bloom times anywhere from 2 days to 48 days. Their assumption is that it’s a result of climate change. Still. Even though I get a little stir-crazy and go out with the secateurs in my bathrobe pocket on still winter mornings to prune the berry canes, it doesn’t mean I’m looking for a complete shift. If I’d wanted to live in the Carolinas, I’d have moved there.
Rose is finished inspecting the compost heap, and my toes are ready to fall off inside my boots, so I clomp back inside. When I get there, I discover the thorny bit of black raspberry cane.