The grass is always greener...

"I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn."
--William Henry Hudson, author and naturalist (1841-1922)

I agree!

It's lawn-mowing season again, and this time every year I rue the fact we have 2+ acres of lawn to manage. All we have to do is mow; not for us the fertilizing and feeding and obsessive grooming that many homeowners undertake in order to achieve perfect greenswards. We think grass grows just fine by itself (especially where you don't want it!).

Simply mowing it is work and expense aplenty. It's also very un-"green" because we have to use oil and gasoline to beat back field and forest. I've considered letting parts of the yard go wild, but that invites biting creatures closer to the house. By keeping a moat of trimmed grass around us, we limit the mosquitoes, ticks, and blackflies in our main activity area, and remove hiding places for bird and pet predators. Plenty of wilderness remains for them to prowl in.

In May, grass grows so fast and lush that we need to mow twice weekly. Can't be done, though, owing to twice- or thrice-a-week rain. By the time things have dried out enough to rev up the tractor, we need machetes just to find it!

As the season advances, we end up with half a wildflower yard anyway. Islands of clover emerge; we mow around them to leave a banquet for the bees. Volunteer black-eyed Susans pop up; we mow around them because it's too callous to destroy their cheer. And so forth. Ultimately lawnmowing becomes a gymkhana, zooming and dodging around obstacles in summer sport.

Then, before you know it, the season has flashed by and it's time to stow the mower again for seven long months.

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Out the window, revisited

Little-known fact: Gardening can be hazardous to your health!

Some months ago, my mom stepped backward into her bucket of trimmings, went down hard, and cracked her hip. Some days ago, I stepped forward onto irregular lawn, went down hard, and severely sprained my foot. These mishaps deprived us for weeks of our favorite activities: gardening, walking, and birding.

Which renewed my awareness of why I live where I do, and why I've sacrificed so much to keep it.

We have windows. Lots and lots of them, all the way around the house. From any window I can see combinations of yardscape, fieldscape, woodscape, pondscape, gardenscape, skyscape, and mountainscape. So even if I'm stuck indoors, I can keep track of what's going on out there. And enjoy sunlight as well as starlight and moonlight, since we never bothered installing curtains.

Thanks to these windows, I can participate in the natural world even when disabled. City people surely feel the same about their views of bustling communities. Our neighbors happen to be furred, feathered, and leafed, but their communities still bustle, and I love to observe.

In fact, I spend way too much time looking out my windows, whether lame or fit!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Backyard ecology

I love birds, and feed them year-round in sight of my windows.

I love cats, have four, and let them out year-round.

I live in the country where predators that eat birds and cats, and raid bird feeders, prowl the area year-round.

How to keep everybody alive and well?

First, I cleared the shrubs away from the front of the house. That eliminated places for the cats to hide and ambush feeding birds. I also hung trellis netting over the exterior of as many windows as I could get to, which prevents birds from flying into the glass. These two acts have almost entirely eliminated bird fatalities. And bringing in the feeders every evening has eliminated raids.

Second, we trained the cats to come in at night, though it remains difficult to keep them in during the crepuscular time (dawn and dusk), which is the true danger zone. Nevertheless, we haven't had an injury or disappearance in many years.

Third, we have a lot of stuff around the property -- vehicles, construction material piles, scrap piles, tools, and equipment -- which partially serve as territorial markers that repress predator traffic (while giving prey places to hide). It's not foolproof by any means; after all, I see fox and coyote prints sometimes quite close to the house during winter, and during the year the fishers passed through, they roamed wherever they pleased. I dread the day they return.

Nevertheless, we've done what we can do to minimize opportunity for critters to kill themselves and each other. This includes using no toxic substances in the garden or yard. The rest is up to fate or vigilance. In reward, we harbor many species of resident birds, the cats are healthy and happy, and our human selves get to enjoy the whole.

If only that balance extended to the rest of the world!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

My favorite sound

No, not music. Or birdsong, or waves against the beach. My favorite sound is water rushing down the hill a few hundred feet from my house.

Here in the rocky, forested hills, channels have been carved by man and nature for capturing excess water. Some of these are steep and create a muted roar when full. I see and hear them every time it rains, but the noise stops shortly after the rain does. Usually the channels are silent during the winter, except for intermittent, short-term melts.

This time of year, however, these dry beds become gushing, galloping streams for days or even weeks as mountainloads of snow succumb to temperature and gravity. It’s kind of like a bathtub emptying: water goes down the drain and land emerges.

It happens suddenly -- one day I step out the door and hear the rushing. It continues during dry weather, which is how I know the season has turned. This year, this week, I started hearing it again. It’s also the week that the daffodils broke through the ground and migrating birds started returning. These are my favorite events of the year. And so that rushing water is my favorite sound.

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Signs of spring

As the calendar progresses toward the vernal equinox, our landscape remains buried under two feet of snow and ice. But signs of spring are everywhere.

* We can now see out the windows at suppertime.

* Seed consumption at the bird feeders has dropped significantly.

* The cats want to go outside again.

* Everybody in the household (human and quadruped) has started shedding.

* Maple sugaring has begun.

Unlike previous years at this time, the forecast is for a long stretch of sunny weather with moderate temps. I'm hoping we get lucky and just melt into spring without further drama.

But even if a classic March blizzard comes through, those other signs of spring make it clear that the season has turned and the worst is over. Hooray!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Wacky weather

The big event this week was weather. It's been a big event all over the country (and the world) this year; our turn came with a bizarre and vigorous, multi-day storm that first dumped 2+ feet of snow, then 3 inches of rain, accompanied by big winds and followed by several days in a row of 1-3 inches of snow layered on daily, with a hiatus of sun, melting temps, and a gorgeous full moon squeezed in between.

For frosting on the cake, the first round included a stick storm -- big roof-denting pine limbs raining down on the house and yard. Thankfully, my spouse was on the ball and moved all the vehicles out of range before things got serious, sparing us a week on the phone making insurance claims. Luck took care of the rest. An impressive pile of thumpers fell around or between things, or just missed by inches. All we have to deal with this time is a very messy yard.

Less than a week ago I was standing in that yard feeling spring in the air and watching the ground start to emerge. But I've lived here long enough to know . . . it was only mid-February. Historically, this area gets the bulk of its snow in March. Way too soon to hope for deliverance. And, sure enough, Mother Nature proved me right.

Last year we didn't get the late snows. That's the exception, not the rule. Our worst snow, in fact, occurred the last week of March some years ago: 5 feet in 10 days, on top of 2-3 feet already on the ground. We snowshoed over cars without knowing they were there.

What's more amazing is how fast the snow disappears once the season decides to turn. And that day is coming soon. Only 4 weeks left until official Spring; within a week of that, daffodils will be poking through and the woodcock will arrive.

I can't wait!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Gardening with trepidation

It's that time of year when the catalogues come out and garden plans are sketched and seeds get started. Normally my pulse rate rises as the promise of spring draws nigh.

This year, I'm feeling hesitant and a little wary. Increasingly erratic weather has made gardening more difficult, with less-satisfactory results, caused by too much or too little rain and plagues among the pollinators and insect eaters so that the pest equation is out of whack -- along with my yard's inherent shortage of sunlight and good soil.

Now I have to add plant protection devices, not only to extend the growing season, but also to help my vegetables survive the growing season itself! Such devices cost money, take time to assemble, and add more complication to an already hit-or-miss enterprise. The prospect inspires a great big sigh.

Of course, none of this will stop me. Like most gardeners, I can't bear the idea of not trying again. And again, and again . . .

Skipping a year -- or stopping altogether -- would upset my sense of life cycle and balance far more than any crop failures. Then there's the awe generated by the strength and creativity of plants themselves.

Short of catastrophic weather that strips away the entire surface (e.g., hurricanes, century floods, wildfires, and tornadoes), plants will survive anything. In the wettest years, the driest years, the pestilence years, the coldest years, a garden will always produce something. It will survive good-old-fashioned neglect, as well. I once rented an apartment in a farmhouse where nobody had gardened for decades. Yet asparagus still grew three feet tall in the front yard!

So I've got my seed order together and the garden plan drawn. I've started rummaging through scrap piles in the yard to find materials for making supports and frames for weather shields and bug screens. Recent home renovations have donated enough scrap copper to warrant trying that slug-deterrent trick I read about. Renovations have also opened up space in the living room (whose south end is floor-to-ceiling windows) to set up more experiments in indoor gardening.

Weather and pests be damned! I'm gonna have a garden no matter what Mother Nature throws our way.

(Now, what will I be saying about all this in September?)

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com