The un-garden

For a laundry list of reasons starting last year, I knew that this summer would find us behind on projects and losing ground. So I decided to not do a vegetable garden, for the first time in 15 years.

It isn’t total withdrawal: I popped some carrot and lettuce seeds into the planters nearest to the house, and filled the rest of them with bright annual flowers. Then cover-cropped the veggie beds with buckwheat to avoid raising a fine crop of quack grass and milkweed. (Also to attract our scarily shrinking population of bees.)

This, in addition to the loss of my mother’s help (see “R.I.P. Garden Elf,” September 1, 2012), has meant a yard and garden scruffier than at any time during our residence. Since spring we’ve mowed only three times and I’ve trimmed only once.

Such neglect has created an interesting new environment . . . proving the adage “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Anywhere a spot was bare or unattended, plants moved in, creating a natural garden of delight.

Borders normally groomed have exploded in daisies and black-eyed Susans, asters (still to bloom), and campanula; plus the more weedy species such as lamb’s quarters, amaranth, pigweed, dandelions, thistle, yarrow, Queen Anne’s lace, and all varieties of clover. Not to mention every form of grass.

Wildflowers not seen in the yard before have grabbed corners and crevices between rocks: various mints, joe pye weed, and the indomitable burdock. Dropped bird seed from winter feeders has sprouted into mixed varieties of sunflower, over here and over there.

In areas where trees were harvested last fall, ferns and jewelweed have run rampant, as have the bee balm and phlox, overrunning the borders of abandoned perennial beds and popping up in areas far across the yard. I can no longer get to my compost pile, as it has been consumed by flowers.

My favorite surprises are the daisies and black-eyed Susans that took over the walk and terrace. For almost a month, we had to hitch up our legs and climb over them in order to get in the front door—I couldn’t bear to cut them back until after they bloomed. I also love the single, sentinel sunflowers that have appeared in the middle of the lawn, thumbing their petals at the cultivated ones struggling on the edge of the garden. Nothing I planted (galliardias, nasturtiums, marigolds, zinnias, morning glories) has done half as well as wild things that grabbed a molecule of dirt and grit between cracks or in disturbed soil.

This unconstrained growth proves something I talked about five years ago in my book Open Your Heart with Gardens. You don’t have to actively create and tend a garden in order to enjoy one; nature will take care of that herself. So even though I’m not actively cultivating this year, the yard is full of color and beauty and food in spite of me. Many of these wildflowers are edible, and of course there’s the berry patch. It, too, is going insane this season, overgrowing the firewood stacks despite pre-season cutbacks. In the past three weeks, we’ve harvested no less than 20 pounds of perfect, thumb-size red raspberries!

It is restful to step outside and just enjoy the bloom for a change, instead of having to haul watering cans and hoses and fertilizer, patrol for pests, set up and take down protection. I’m almost tempted to make a habit of it, though I’m sure by next spring I’ll be back to drawing plans and buying transplants and seeds.

The gullywhumper

One of my favorite words is "gullywhumper."Apparently this is a regionalism or idiom or slang, since I can't find it in any standard dictionary. Not sure where I heard it in the first place, but it means a storm that dumps a huge amount of rain.

We had one of those yesterday afternoon.

All summer long, we've had daily showers or thundershowers, intermittent or steady; and when not doing that, the weather hass been hot and sticky.

Icky.

Our wet season has been object of envy for the regions suffering extreme heat, drought, and fire. Can't say much to that, other than wherever one lives, one has one's own weather crosses to bear.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon's storm unleashed 5+ inches of rain in about 40 minutes -- massively overloading the drainage capability of the landscape. Result: Road washout. Pond overflow. Well drowning. Plumbing muckage. Driveway scouring. Normality disruption for the rest of the day.

All that in our dooryard; then out on the main road, mudslides and property destruction. In other words, a honking great mess, on par with the damage generated by Hurricane Irene two summers ago.

The big difference is that this storm was local -- neighborhood vs. state -- so that our little dead-end road was first on the repair list instead of last. Nice change of pace for us, and a relief for the state as a whole.

Here's what it looked like in the first hour afterward:

What you're seeing is where the town road meets the bottom of our driveway. High on the right is the entry of the dry streambed designed for runoff, now so full that it jumped the (blocked) culvert and sliced down the side of the road (1-3 feet deep) instead of under it, then washed across it (6-9 inches deep) to deposit all the removed road surface material into our pond, out of sight on the left.


Out of sight on the right, about where the tree disappears into the ferns, is our well. The downstream flood was so intense that it ran through the woods and flooded the well and lifted its 8x4 plywood lid, dumping it into the stream that normally feeds the pond, and filling the well with muck.

Good thing we have lots of filters in our plumbing, else this flow would have gunked up the whole house. As it was, the filters had 1/8" of glop completely encasing them.

By next morning, the town road crew had patched it all back together, but town budget won't allow replacing the damaged, too-small culvert and engineering the drainage correctly. Thus, this will continue to happen every few years whenever we have a Weather Event.

Our tax dollars at work: solving or ignoring problems intead of preventing or fixing them. At least we could get out!

Kittens!

Remiss of me to not report the most important event in our household this year—kittens!

My excuse: This is a yard-and-garden blog, and the kits have nothing to do with our outdoor life. Nevertheless, they will eventually become indoor/outdoor cats and play their own parts in our landscape. So here they are, and here’s their story.

Friends of ours from autosports collect, buy, sell, and race BMWs. One day they had to remove a rare European version of a BMW sedan from a ratty old barn where it had been stored for a decade. So they wrestled their way in, dug out the car, tossed loose parts and stuff inside it, dragged it onto a trailer, and towed it home.

It sat in the driveway for four days before they had a chance to clean it out in preparation for sale. At that point they found, beneath the junk in the backseat, three very hungry kittens.

Not being pet people, owing to their crazy work and racing schedules, they weren’t equipped to suddenly become cat-parents. But they dashed out anyway to get supplies and commenced kitten caretaking until homes could be found. Keeping with the BMW theme, they named them Boris, Manfred, and Werner.

Meanwhile, spouse and I had emerged from the grief of losing three of our four cats in 18 months, and were ready to get a kitten or two in replacement. The surviving three-year-old was getting bored and lonely, and we missed the love and companionship that comes with a full-size furry family.

So we visited the local farm where two of the cats had come from 13 years before, only to learn that there was no litter this spring. Disappointed yet relieved (were we really ready?), we returned home . . .

. . . and found an e-mail containing the above story and photo.

A week later, our friends drove six hours on a stormy night to bring us all three kittens. By then they were approximately a month old and weighed about a pound apiece. It had also been determined that one was female, so Manfred had been re-dubbed Minnie.

Now they are almost three months old and a second one has been identified as female. Both girls have been renamed: Spirit and Cricket. The male, Werner, has not yet shown what his permanent name should be, so we're temporarily calling him Blondie.

Spirit

Cricket

Werner/Blondie

All are happy, healthy, vigorous, and have tripled their size and weight. They are at the crazy-kitten stage where they get into everything and make constant mess around the house.

Our young-adult cat took a mere five days to get over the surprise before adopting them. We are counting on him to teach them how to be cats, since they had no chance to learn from their mama. For now our challenge is to keep him from playing too hard with them. The games started when he was literally ten times their size and weight; they grow so fast, that differential has now been halved, yet he still has the power to hurt them by accident. It’s a good thing we work at home full-time!

Pond repair, ctnd.

I went away for three days and came back to find the empty pond essentially refilled. Amazing spouse did the whole repair himself in two day! Here's his summary of the situation.

*********************************

At this time the pond is ½ full depth wise, just a bit over a foot below the lowest point of last year.
I have two leaks on the very lower sides where I had tried to bed in the rubber sheet but then removed it and by the time of removal was far enough below water I was not willing the reach down to reflow the tar. If I had a scuba mask I could have fixed it. Carolyn just got back from RI and guided me as I used a tool to reach 5' below water and plug the leaks with plastic bags.
I would like to get the scuba gear and go down and do it right.

I would say the pond is ready for fish and at the current rate of filling should be all the way up on Tuesday.

So, yesterday at 11AM Friday there are 13 boards on the lower section at a touch under 6" wide each.

And again at 4pm Friday, water was well over my waist at this time.

And at noon on Saturday

The pond when I started on Friday,

And midday Saturday. The sticks in the canoe are what I cut off the submerged tree.
I am tired.

Down the drain

Followers of this blog may remember an entry last summer about fixing the leak in our pond ("Our Pond," 8/12/12).

Today I must report an unhappy follow-up to that episode. Around midday, I stepped out on the deck to look across our little world as the weather cleared after three days of rain -- and saw that the pond had disappeared.

OMG!

Apparently our hard-won repair to the outflow gave way against water pressure and split sometime overnight, emptying the entire half-acre basin in one big swoosh.


We knew this was a possibility but had fingers crossed all winter and spring, hoping the patch would hold and we could effect a proper repair under controlled conditions at our convenience this summer.

Alas, not to be.

Now it's an emergency repair, for there's just a small pool left in the deepest part where a few fishes managed to survive. The rest, presumably, went down the drain with the water and, hopefully, made it all the way through the runoff channel through the woods to the river (which itself had been stripped of aquatic life two years ago during the flooding from Hurricane Irene).

Hubby rigged a rope to hang on to as he slid down the mucky slope to inspect the damages. Along the way, he found a dozen or so freshwater clams still alive, stuck on the exposed bank, and tossed them into the pool. So maybe there will be enough creatures left over to repopulate when all is done and the pond refills. Too soon to tell.

Not only is this a distressing hit to a micro ecosystem, but also an unwelcome disruption to our already too-long list of delayed and complicated projects. *sigh* The joys of homeownership and land stewardship.

Here's how it looks. I hope, in the not too distant future, to post a photo of the normal water level back up against the bottom of the dock.

Before the leaves

Of all the things I love about spring, the best is the way the land comes alive before the leaves break out.

In November/December—a.k.a. “Stick Season”—you get to see the contours of the landscape through the trees, but everything is brown and gray and shriveling. In April/May, you get the same long views and revealed features while the land turns progressively more colored.

During one season, the living world is contracting; during the other, it’s expanding back into life. So although the scenery is technically the same, one season brings dismay and the other inspires joy.

Then there’s the light. In spring it gets stronger by leaps and bounds, and a sunny day is bedazzling. Whereas in fall, each day gets dimmer, faster, triggering the urge to dig in.

As the grasses slowly turn from beige-gold-mustard to lime and emerald, the flowers begin to stand up and shout. Yellows predominate: first coltsfoot, then daffodil and forsythia; with ground-hugging purples—crocuses, violets, myrtle—providing a near backdrop, while afar the hillsides acquire a mauvish tint signaling no more maple sugar.

Then come the secretive plants, which lurk under shrubs and in the forest’s humus, only blooming during the brief window between frost and leaf-out. These are the lovely wine-colored trilliums, and purple-speckled yellow trout lilies, and white-star bloodroots, along with uncurling ferns.

Each week, a new wave of songbirds returns, and wood or pond frogs emerge, to add musical accompaniment. One day you turn around to find that the grass needs mowing, insects have become bothersome, perennials are growing inches each day, and tender beauties like azalea opened up their bright hues overnight. Trees are so lushly budded that you expect to hear popping noises when they all unfold.

Everything happens within a few short weeks, regardless of weather. Suddenly lilacs and fruit trees are blooming and it’s time to put in the vegetable garden. Poof! Spring is over, and a green canopy covers the land.

The big blow, redux

Six months ago (October 26, 2012) I reported on the microburst that sliced through our neighbors’ parcels at the end of the road. Last night it was our turn, only instead of a straight-line chop, we had our own private tornado!

It had been windy all day—unusually and unnervingly so—but lessened as usual toward dusk. We checked the radar map before retiring, noting a bright green line running straight north-south, with yellow and red boxes well below us. This suggested that we would have a short, intense hammering of rain pass through overnight from the west but would not feel the main action.

Fine. Nighty-night!

But then, around ten o’clock . . . a dull, steady roar arose, which got louder and louder, closer and closer, inspiring neck hair to lift in instinctive alarm. Hubby was still up, trying to reboot our computerized weather station that was beeping after a split-second power drop a few moments before.

Since the juice had come right back on, I attended to the blinking bedside clock, trying to ignore the oncoming crescendo—until it broke against the house with a thunderous whoosh! that rocked the whole building! Then got louder, and stronger, and things outside started to crash and bang and rend in the dark.

We thought it might be a derecho, having heard a few of those roll in over the landscape in our lives. But this wind had an encompassing pressure that made me throw back the covers and start scrambling to get away from the windows.

Don’t know how long it lasted: long seconds or short minutes, followed by a pause, then lightning and thunder, then just rain, to which we fell asleep. In the morning we went outside at first light to inspect the aftermath. And found a strange combination of things.

Heavy items—like four metal extension ladders stacked horizontally atop each other across beams, which have never so much as rattled in a blow—had been lifted as a unit then dropped to the ground. Light things, like empty five-gallon fuel cans, drain basins, and pail lids, which had been left outside the shop door, were strung in a perfect diagonal line across the backyard to the treeline.

Yet very light items, such as the plastic-dome squirrel guard suspended from an S-hook in an apple tree, were still there (I bring in feeders at night and leave out this dome because it’s too hard to reach); and plastic sheeting enclosing an addition in process, already split and frayed and flapping from winter and UV damage, didn’t tear another inch. But a framed-in vinyl window in the same addition had been blown out of its track.

On the opposite side of the house, the trash can and loose things nearby were strewn across a diagonal line like the fuel cans but along an opposite axis. On both sides of the house, shingles on a particular roof face that had been shedding in onesies and twosies for years had been peeled en masse and, on one side, dropped to the deck, and on the other side, hurled up and over the house to scatter on the lawn. A metal panel on the same roof face, underneath our solar hot-water array, was folded upward, and glass bits from one of the solar tubes (also previously damaged) landed in the side yard with the shingles.

Yet only one resin deck chair went over. The others stood in place next to the glass-topped table, undisturbed.

All around the property, various types of firewood cover—plastic sheets, tarpaulins, short metal panels, all held down by hefty rocks and concrete blocks—took off, along with a metal rain barrel, which we had tipped upside-down for the winter behind the house. That launched about ten feet and clipped an outdoor faucet handle, giving us a well-pump-cycling mystery that took until midmorning to figure out.

Oddly, no broken limbs or fallen trees, not even shattered small branches. Nevertheless, we are VERY GLAD the big pine trees next to the house are gone! It’s hard to imagine that something wouldn’t have split and fallen during the cyclone. This sort of event is precisely why we went through the big fandango to take them down.

The debris patterns clearly indicate rotary wind direction. And unlike the straight-line microburst that hit our neighbors, this wind lifted things up instead of blowing them down. I checked the local newspaper and all our neighbors, only to learn that nothing happened anywhere else. Except with our closest neighbor, who heard the same huge noise and had a tree fall across his driveway. It broke halfway up, in the middle of the pine stand along our shared border.

Wow. Twenty-four hours later, I’m still rattled . . . and better understand what flatlanders experience when they hear that telltale “locomotive” sound that sets off sirens and makes people duck and cover!