Category / Bunberry

by Sixer

Learning from Old Growth

As my first major task of the new year I cleaned out my garden, trimming down the hen-and-chick’s tall, hollow stalks; giving the Japanese maple a severe haircut; and trying yet again to kill the only healthy boxwood in the entire neighborhood – the one that insists on growing between my air conditioner and my house.

One of the many, many reasons I do not like the boxwood is that it gives the wasps yet another place to build their nests. I admire wasps in theory, but I do not like them buzzing around my garden, holding me hostage to fear. When they first started visiting my yard, before they actually moved in, they would hang out in the sunny patch right in front of my door, or buzz up loud as jumbo jets to peer into my bedroom window. This did not leave a very good first impression. Since they’ve started nesting they actually have become less obnoxious, but I still like to encourage them to nest on the other, uninhabited, side of the pond. So when I saw little papery pods on the hen-and-chick I gave a long suffering sigh and assumed it was those wasps again, trying to over winter. It wasn’t until I was stuffing all the rest of the yard debris into trash bags, and realizing just how many pods there were, that it occurred to me they might not belong to wasps at all. After all, bees also overwintered in gardens too. There had to be dozen of other very nice, mild creatures that needed warm places to stay in these cold, dreary days. So as soon as the yard was cleaned, and the bags were dumped, and lunch was devoured, I looked them up. With amused horror I present to you an ootheca of a tenodera sinensis, or Chinese praying mantis.

It's all natural styrofoam!

Yes. It’s an egg case. Each one can apparently hold between 10-400 eggs, which is a large factor into why I don’t feel too bad tossing them. There were well over ten of these babies in my small yard alone – just the idea of 4,000 miniature warriors swarming all over my front walk is enough to make me squirm a bit. Other factors to consider: the tenodera is not native to Maryland and some think it threatens to push out other species of mantis. They’re also big enough, as adults, to eat frogs (no!) and hummingbirds (I’m not the only one that finds this scary, right?). Of course, all these excuses aside, they are considered a beneficial insect and, too, it’s not a good idea to get into the habit of eliminating things just because they give us goosebumps. Still, the large likelihood that some pods missed my pruning and remain safely attached to the lavender, or rosemary, or maple tree makes it hard for me to feel guilty.

I do feel bad about being found so ignorant of my own little piece of dirt – I discovered a bird’s nest in the maple tree while pruning that I had no idea existed, even though the tree is so close to my front window its practically part of my living room. I’ve vaguely known, and have been happy to know, that the number of insects in my yard has been increasing over the past few years (most obvious in the number of pill bugs and slugs I discovered this spring). I saw a praying mantis or two near summer’s end and thought nothing of them beyond a happy remembrance of childhood past. I didn’t realize how much they’d had made themselves at home here. I want my garden it be a place of life, to be safe and inviting for most “creatures great and small.” But I have never thought through what it means to share my yard, or taken the time to sit and visit with all the new faces moving in. Great big tasks, like clearing up the yard, look excellent on the to-do lists, but where do we put all the little tasks we must first do to ensure the great ones are done to best effect?
Nobody home

by Sixer

Naturally, the Garden

I might not know where I plan to be in five years, or what path my career will take me by 2030, but I not only have plans for my 2020 garden I have already bought seeds.

2019 saw growth for myself, as gardener, in two ways: first, I was finally able to start sprouts successfully, managing to keep alive three Okinawa sweet potato slips and about two dozen seedlings. True, many didn’t survive transplanting, but the fact they died outside of the house, from something other than me forgetting to water them, feels like a level up. I also kept much better records than normal. Not perfect records. Not even complete-but-lacking-significant-details records. No, they petered out with the warming weather, leaving me little insight into how my garden works past May. But this is still significantly more information than I’ve ever captured before. I’m excited to improve further in these areas, and to add a few more to my tool belt. Top on my list to try out in 2020 is succession planting, which will require a number of changes in my attitude (and additional care in transplanting seedlings). Also, I plan to devote an hour a week, every Sunday morning, to garden tending – maybe if it’s on my calendar it will actually get done. And maybe if I keep up with it I won’t be so prone to negligence come June.

So, those are my two 2020 personal goals. My goals for my garden are even more ambitious. I really, really, really, want to eat more veggies this year and somehow this desire keeps getting tied into my garden plans. To be able to provide a good portion of my food needs from my own front yard is the distant Ultimate Goal that all other yearly goals point towards. To that end, this year I want to effectively use the spaces I’ve already established, rather than introduce more spaces I do nothing with. I do need to buy more soil and supplements to build up my first box’s soil, and I want to try out a few grow bags this year – especially for my sweet potatoes. But my growing plans are still as audaciously unlikely as ever. I’m starting a butterfly section near my front door which, to start with, is going to have bronze fennel, orange milkweed, and whatever extra marigolds I get to germinate. I also might stick a ground cherry in there, if I have space. Long term, I hope to have zinnias, cone flowers, and perhaps another perennial with the power to entice butterflies and bees (but not wasps). I’m also going to stick marigolds, ground cherries, kale, and lemon grass in my lower front window bed, which has historically been neglected. Both of these areas have uncertain to outright awful soil, and are going to be wedding nightmares. Scheduled weeding will be a must.

The main box is going to be my Succession Planting Learning Arena (SPLA).

  • Season one, spring: Kale, lettuce, beets, radishes, carrots, string beans
  • Season two, late spring: Cucumber, tomatoes, basil, marjoram, marigolds, okra, cilantro, string beans, carrots
  • Season three, summer: Peppers (sweet and spicy), nasturtiums, okra
  • Season four, late summer/early fall: Winter radish, squash, carrots, lettuce, kale, beets, cilantro, garlic (from grocery store bulbs)


And then, finally, in the half barrel I’m trying out …… peanuts! They should be a lot of fun, especially since I went ahead and ordered the striped variety. Extra peanuts and peppers will, hopefully, go into grow bags.

Even if I fail miserably to reach my goals, it’s going to be a very, very yummy year.

by Sixer

On a Snowy Morning

 

It’s not the first snow of the winter, but it is the first snow of the year.

A thin blanket for a cold, cold beginning. There is something sad about it – is it the gray clouds which even now hover over the new-made world? The occasional gust of the wind, making the lonely chime sound its solitary note of cheer? Maybe it is the slight wish that this present had come not so close to Christmas, not so close to a time when presents are so plentiful.

I am off today. Off because of the snow. Yesterday was my first day back, and today is, now, another day off. I will enjoy today, but I will feel a bit guilty about it. I think this sums up my relationship with joy fairly well. If there really were a cosmic balance, a giant scale by which happiness and misery were dolled out,  what would I have in store for me but misery, in this life front-heavy with blessings? Misfortunes have been like lemons in a pie. How sweet, still, the sum of the parts!

2017 has been a well balanced, wholesome year. Less pie and more biscotti-with-whole-wheat. The theme has been, sometimes too overtly, community. This was the literal theme for my church’s women’s committee (“living in the light of community“). And the inferred dream of all the up and coming adults in the area. Two different bible studies were started this year, each at a different church. Each by different personalities, with different life experiences. Yet each established with the desire to build relationships with more people, and to build more people’s relationships with God. In the midst of all this, the Geekette established a new weekly tradition: dinner, Stargate, and excellent conversation. All theses things have been a peculiar kind of blessing for me. A direct answer to a prayer I made in 2015.

Answered prayer is kind of like a fulfilled wish list at Christmas. You look at your new treasures and wonder “Now what do I do with you?” Often, I think, when we ask for things – spiritual or otherwise – we only imagine having or receiving and we fail to fully think about using or living with. And this has been my experience with community this year. In bible studies, home, and at my church, I have suddenly found myself in that net of relationships that extends far under the surface of every group, like tree roots. Or mushrooms. And now that I am finding myself a part of it, I wonder what I’m supposed to do. What does a root do? It gathers what is necessary to grow and nourish the tree. Not by creeping up to the surface – which is rather my instinct, to find the light and be visible, to be the tree – but by functioning where it is placed, whether that’s rich or poor, loam or sand or clay.

Or, to summarize, though this year has been the year of community, the lesson I think I’m supposed to learn from it is the same lesson I have always resisted learning. Be still and wait.

Though the same, in looking back, I seem to see a nuance to this message which I have never noticed before. Or, perhaps, noticed only by its absence. The root does not wait, inactive, but rather waits through action. Its stillness is the quietness of living, content, not the motionlessness of death. And the waiting is not an impatient desire. An hourly frustrated expectation. The root, in its slow absorption of water and nutrients,  experiences the tree’s future second by second. The waiting is not for something to happen, but for what is happening to continue. The stillness is not in defeat, but in complete assurance that victory is present even here. Even now. Does the root have a certain point to which it desires the tree to grow? And does it chafe and fret if the tree grows slanted, towards the sun, or twisted in the wind, or thicker than its estimated girth? To wait is to live not just in expectation but in the daily fulfillment of that expectation. It is not a hope based on the whim of wishing, but one proved each day. Best seen in hind-sight, of course, but still there to be seen if one looks. To be still and wait is to look for God and to see Him, and to live looking and seeing.

I’m hoping that 2018 will teach me about friendship; about reciprocity, and thinking of others, and thoughtfulness in general. But if the lessons on being still and waiting are to continue I would not mind either. What once I considered boring I begin to find enticing. The meekness that once seemed incapable I now suspect is the most confident of all. If I could be still, in living; if I could wait, in the midst of achieving; if I could thread each day through the weft of God’s promises, instead of tossing them away like stray ends, or storing them up against some coming time – what need would I for pie to make life’s lemons sweet to me?

by Sixer

And in the the Garden was . . . .

What is your memory of gardens?

Like so many things, my memory of gardens is of books. I had plants in my yard as a child – the mint patch that defied any attempts to plant something else; the clump of cattails that I can never quite be certain actually existed; dandelions, used on cheeks as yellow blush; Azaleas, flanking the path to our house like two shaggy, ornamental lions; pokeweed, the berries happily used to stain our fingers brightest pink. But all of these, except for the dandelions and pokeweed, were inert. A background, as it were. Flat and interchangeable with imagination.

In books gardens often are characters. Even when they are not, there is a certain kind of book that, without ever having any actual gardening in it, still speaks of them in hushed voices. Certainly Anne of Green Gables would make anyone long for glades of velvet violets, and most older books sprinkle fresh flowers about until you’re certain they are being conjured out of air. But it is Mandy and the Sunflower Garden and Cicely Mary Barker’s faeries, and even the water colored flowers in one Ariel picture book, that I draw my definition of a garden from. Those and The Secret Garden, which filled many a day with the exulted wonder of seeing things grow. Maybe that is why I am discontent with giving up and washing my hands of green things, or maybe it is less conscious than that, an assumption, seeded into mind during childhood, that gardens are as much a fact as breathing and cake. Even Bilbo had gardens. Gardens large enough to justify hiring someone just to tend them.

My plans for my garden this year are modest. We reap what we sow, after all. No fig trees. No hand built containers. Just seeds. And a blueberry bush. My parents have two large planters that they’ve never used which I have relived them of, and I’ll need to get dirt, of course, but other than that my shopping is done. Well, mostly done. I do want to get some Arp Rosemary. And maybe some lemon grass. But other than that my shopping is done. My list is a funny, malformed thing. Half practical, half fanciful. There are no roses, none of the heavily scented flowers I dreamt of last year. No larkspurs, which always make me think of Nancy Drew. Mary Crawford would likely not be too inspired by what is essentially going to be a scraggly vegetable patch. The drama is to be supplied by echinacea, luffa gourds, chard, and nasturtiums, but otherwise it is all business. All small lettuce and baby bok choy, long thai egg plants and small french radishes. And herbs  – fanciful ones, chervil and rue and crinkled garden cress.

In all of this, it is apparent that the thing which grows strongest in my garden, besides the mint and the weeds and the love-in-the-mist, is my own undaunted optimism. Perhaps that is the flower most worth cultivating.

by Sixer

Here and There Again

I just feel like words.

It’s like a craving for chocolate, or seaweed, or popcorn after walking past the movie theater, catching the soft edge of its salt and oil smog. The warmth of that smell is an edible thing. A flavorful thing. You, almost, could be satisfied just to pause there indefinitely. Drinking in the aroma. Satisfying your soul with it.

But then, of course, you’d remember that the smell is not the popcorn. Your heart would break over the cruelty of a world that could tantalize you with such wonders and yet deny you even the smallest claim to them. And you would have to choose: withdraw or enter?

Thus I stand with words right now. They follow me around at work; creeping into my notes, tripping around the edges of my tongue, and tangling with my thoughts until I can hardly concentrate. The warm weather is not helping. Today was so bright and green, it felt like the 15th day of Spring instead of the beginning of True Winter. Far be it from me to complain though, I like all days, and it is only fair winter has its cold ones to balance out the heat we get in August. Still, the cold has had a bite this year. A vampiric bite that clamps in and refuses to let go, draining you of all healthy marrow and replacing it with brittle steel. You can not merely bundle up more if you wish to defeat it. You must employ outside aid against this foe. Hot drink by your hand (properly capped, of course) and the oldest, heaviest, warmest laptop you can find to balance on your knees.

Between the gothic cold and the false spring, my mind has been all a buzz, in a true excess of words, and so I have done some creating to purge them out. I got an excellent dumpling book for Christmas, and crimped my first batch with surprising ease – although my arms were sore for the next few days. Pathetic. I have ordered my garden plans, and my garden seeds. I have started another sewing project to add to all the other ones I have languishing untouched in my little green room. And I have tried instagram.

The trouble started when I realized I couldn’t change my language. My browser is in Japanese and, sometimes, sites, in an attempt to be helpful, will mimic that. Most of them are thoughtful enough to provide a handy language picker in their footer for when things are Not What They Seem. Not instagram. But then, it is a picture site, so words aren’t really necessary. I set it up, followed a few people, uploaded a profile picture, and then put the app on my phone. Yes, the app annoyed me pretty instantly, but only with all the little-normal things that are assumed nowadays. It wasn’t until it stopped letting me use the app without a phone number that I gave up and uninstalled it. Then I un-gave up and went back to my computer . . . . and found that my account no longer existed.

True Story.

I probably could have summed that whole debacle up with a gloomy photo of the login page saying, in red Japanese, that my username wasn’t in their system, but the words would not have it. Paint with us, they almost screamed.

And so, here I am, making another practice sketch. Letting my words play here and there across the page. Maybe here is not a place I can stay in everyday – maybe too much page is as bad for a person’s soul as too much popcorn is for the stomach – but as long as the words whisper to me amidst the silent days, here is where I will be.

Adventure is just around the kitchen