Perfection

Yeah, we all know . . . nothing in life is perfect.

Well, I beg to differ. Late last week we had an Absolutely Perfect Day.

The sky was a cloudless, brilliant blue. The air was ideally comfortable for bare arms and legs and feet, with a light breeze air-conditioning your skin in the event you moved around enough to perspire. No matter what you did, you were comfortable.

And everywhere you looked, the scenery was beautiful. Lawns and trees still vivid summertime green, with color tinges creeping in to signal the pending change of season. But it's not here yet -- wildflowers and garden beds were still in full bloom, with vegetables and fruits adding bright dots of color between the foliage.

Birds and butterflies still darted about in their own color show before packing up for migration. Crickets and cicadas added music to the air.

It was a perfect day for doing anything outdoors, from hiking and boating to sitting on the porch with a book. If you couldn't get outside, it was a perfect day to look out the window, and open all the windows wide, and curtains, too, to let all the air and color and light flow through.

In our complicated and inconsistent world, it's good to know that Mother Nature can proffer up a perfect day now and then. And a joy to be alive when it happens.

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)

The green wave

Here it comes!

Peak summer, and the garden runneth over. This time every year I regret planting more than one of a given vegetable on a given day back in spring. Now I have too many snow peas, too many broccoli heads; in a few weeks will have too many beans; and by the end of summer will have too many tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash. (I've never had enough red peppers, never mind too many!) At least with lettuce I've managed to stagger the crop.

As well, raspberry and blueberry bushes that came with the house are rolling into ripeness simultaneously. Hubby made it worse by starting a strawberry patch. We can't eat them all before they spoil and have run out of room in our freezer. How lovely to have enough to give away!

Meanwhile, the grass grows faster than we can cut it, the weeds regrow as fast as we can pluck them out, and certain perennials spread faster than they can be divided and transplanted. It happens that paying work peaks this time of year, so available time for picking and processing shrinks while everything expands.

Cruel irony that the best season is the shortest and most packed with demands and excitement. No wonder we always shake our heads in the fall and wonder where summer went!

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)

The best week

This is it! The week we spend all year waiting for. The week embracing the summer solstice. The longest days of the year -- 15 and a half hours of official daylight, an hour more than that if you count time of light in the sky, when you can still see outside -- and the most glorious weather, the most exuberant blooming of flowers, the peak of birds and critters making babies -- the best time of the northerly year.

It passes so quickly . . . so this week demands that we look and listen and feel and appreciate and know joy. Then remember it all during the darker and colder majority of the year, until it comes around again.

So comforting to know that it will come around again!

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)

Tis the season

Memorial Day is the target date for all gardeners in these parts to put in their vegetables. This year we were blessed with terrific weather for the week before and after, broken only by brief passages of rain to water it all in and refill the rain barrels. So, no problem meeting the deadline, despite having an injured foot.

As part of the annual planting marathon, I now rig up plant protectors; for instance, wire cages covered with lightweight insect barrier fabric over all the broccoli. An experiment with this setup last year worked, sparing half my crop from the little green worms that crawl out of the heads when you're preparing the harvest. This year I'm covering all the broccoli and hoping for a repeat performance.

Liking the barrier idea, I placed hardware cloth (metal mesh) over the green bean seeds so birds won't pick off the hulls when they rise to the surface ahead of the sprouts, and critters won't dig them up.

Then I put Wall-o-Waters around tomatoes and cucumbers. These gizmos, which are essentially solar teepees, are made by different manufacturers in different sizes and colors, all in a soft, durable plastic formed of tubes you fill with water. They protect tender seedlings from chill and wind, and can be pulled open or pinched shut as conditions warrant. In theory, they can extend the growing season by several weeks. I haven't used them long enough to prove this yet, but initial results are encouraging.

I always place a yogurt or butter tub, or similar plastic cup with the bottom cut out, around the base of all transplants. Originally I did this upon advice to discourage tomato hornworms; it seems to work against other undesirables as well, plus makes a contained area that holds water.

In response to last year's slug infestation, I purchased some Sluggo -- granules of iron phosphate that are toxic to slugs but, again theoretically, safe for pets and people. I'm not real sure about that, so I only sprinkled it in the areas under cover, so the birds won't pick it up and cats won't get it between their toes. I'm also leaving the bed unmulched, to make a dry and crusty surface for the slugs to suffer on while crossing, instead providing a moist haven for them to thrive in. This creates a lot of splash-up against the undersides of leaves, which can create disease conditions especially for tomatoes, so for them I put down fabric mulch. We'll see if that helps.

Where possible, I place some sort of frame around my plants at the beginning and end of season, to which I can attach plastic or fabric for frost protection. It can come as late as June 15 and as early as September 15, and it's so much easier to have frames already in place when you have to fling covers over everything. Someday I'll have cold frames and hoop houses, but until then I wing it with found materials, tie-wraps and clothespins, and a few reusable accessories.

Over time, even such simple protectors have proven their value in this chilly, erratic climate.

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)

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)