Shift of Tow

Dear Grass In My Yard,

I got a little slack at the end of last summer, and you ran rampant through my flower beds. I am writing to put you on notice: That’s not going to happen this year, and I’m busy right now pulling all of last year’s remnants out so you don’t get any ideas.

It’ll be easier for both of us if you remember your boundaries.

Sincerely,
Shelly

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Dear Daffodils and Crocuses,

Hi! Welcome! I had no idea you’d be here so early!

Love,
Shelly

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Dear Yellow Jackets,

I’m totally calling an exterminator to deal with you this year. You could, you know, leave before I do that and save us both the pain.

With fear,
Shelly

P. S. Don’t sting me.

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Dear Previous Homeowner,

You were a really great gardener, but I’m afraid that this year I am not going to treat my garden as if I’m just maintaining it for you. I will not think things like “well, I imagine they wanted this area to just be ground cover, so I’ll leave it that way.” I don’t know much about gardening, so I’ll probably kill a bunch of stuff, but better that than letting it be overrun by weeds.

I know, this isn’t about you or your expectations, especially since I never met you. I’m just saying.

Sincerely,
Shelly

P. S. Did you plant mums everywhere, or do they just spread like a disease?

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Dear Readers,

Hello! It’s been a while, huh? We’re putting in a vegetable garden this year, which ought to be a grand adventure. It’s February, and all this week the temperatures are supposed to be in the 60s. I love North Carolina.

Love,
Shelly

We have such a mosquito problem out back. I am tempted to not weed again until it’s cool out there and the plants are dying and the mosquitoes have gone to wherever they go in the winter (mosquito heaven?). Today I went out and took a few pictures, then spent my time picking up debris from the wee little tropical storm that came through, then sweeping off the patio, deck, and carport. I did this instead of weeding because when I got out there I was instantly attacked by several mosquitoes, and spent the rest of the time out there doing the “don’t bite me” dance. I could probably help this by mowing, but it’s super-cloudy and about to rain, and our mower plugs into the wall. Ah, well.

I thought this was a weed, but it’s suddenly blooming. Maybe it is a weed, but now I don’t want to yank it out:

The flowers are papery and have little speckles on them.

There are three of these growing along the shady side of our house, and I don’t know what they are:

These little guys were choked off by the coreopsis and weeds; I bet if they hadn’t been, they would’ve been really gorgeous. Next year!

Someday I will know the names of all of these things. In the meantime, if you know, tell me.

It’s September and I’m still finding little surprises in my yard. This is the latest:

I don’t know what it is, but a bumblebee liked it and it has huge, succulent-looking leaves that get bigger toward the bottom.

I hate this stuff:

Sorry for the shadow in the picture, but this one gave a clearer shot of the plant than all the others. I have ripped out many of these little fuckers, because they show up all over my yard where I do not want them. This patch is out front, and I left it for now because it doesn’t seem to be choking anything else out. It probably has a limited number of days left, however. I want to know what it is before I rip it out, though.

Is this lantana or mint? It’s in a shadier part of the yard than the plant I identified as lantana, and we all know how mint spreads. I honestly can’t tell, though.

This morning I went outside to yank things up–that’s all the gardening I seem to be doing whenever I get out there, because there are so many weeds. Want to see what’s going on in our yard?

My favorite thing right now is the little patch of native sunflowers:

Melissa and I saw some lovely lantana growing out in front of Guglhupf (our favorite bakery), all pink and orange and yellow and perfect. I looked at our list of plants a few days later and realized that we were supposed to have lantana growing in the yard. The problem is, the leaves look a lot like mint leaves and too many of our plants have gotten overcrowded by weeds and by other plants spreading (I’m looking at you, coreopsis), so I didn’t know where it was. Today, I know: It is just in front of where we have the pots of vegetables, and it was kind of choked off by the love-in-a-mist remnants that I only yanked out a couple of weeks ago. Now it’s free and blooming.

Our smaller tomato is going through a burst of productivity right now. I’m not sure whether it’s because I got more conscientious about watering it or if it was just time:

The bigger tomato isn’t producing much and never has–I think we needed to be pinching it back all summer, and we did not. The tag said it was a determinate variety, but given the monstrosity of a tomato plant we have out there right now, I do believe the tag lied.

We have three huge crape myrtles in our front yard.

As you can see, they aren’t blooming yet. Crape myrtles all over town are blooming right now, but ours haven’t, and I worry. The web tells me that the biggest reasons that crape myrtles don’t bloom are too much shade, too much pruning, or not enough water. These get plenty of light and I certainly haven’t pruned them, so I wonder if they’re still recovering from last year’s drought. But that wouldn’t explain why even the crape myrtles across the street are blooming and these are not.

The trunks are pretty, at least.

Like most of the plants in our front yard, the crape myrtle is originally from East Asia. It was first cultivated in the US in the late 1700s, down in South Carolina.

If the zombie apocalypse comes, I could use the bark as a fever reducer, a stimulant, and to staunch bleeding. The flowers have been used to treat colds, though I imagine that we’d not be too worried about the sniffles if the zombies were coming–good, since there are no flowers yet. The root is an astringent, detoxicant, and diuretic. I read in one place that you can brew and drink the leaves to help reduce blood sugar for diabetics, too, which might help once the insulin runs out.

I will let you know if they start to bloom. It’s especially heart-breaking since crape myrtles bloom for a really long time. Cross your fingers for me.

Today I talked myself into another attempt at canna removal, even though I’d convinced myself that the bees had taken over the compost and there was little I could do about it except wait until they moved on. My conviction faded along with the pain from the bee sting, and I managed to get the rest of the cannas out of the compost bins. I also didn’t get stung again, despite stirring up the bees a couple of times while shoveling compost. I got a few mosquito bites, but that’s nothing compared to the fire of a bee sting. I am suddenly cavalier about mosquito bites*.

Here’s how it looks now:

The compost smells fantastic to me, like everything good about the outdoors. If it weren’t for the bees and the wariness they cause, getting out there to dig in the dirt would be a completely fantastic experience. The stuff in the bins now is loose, a little leafy, and full of little bugs. Oh, and our bins are really huge! Each one is about four feet on a side; I had to climb into one of them to get the last of the plants pulled out. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all of this compost when it’s done—I’ve been really focused on having a way to reduce and reuse household waste and haven’t given a lot of thought to using the product of the bins. I guess compost is great for mulching, and maybe next year we can use it as a top layer for our planned vegetable garden.

I accumulated quite a pile of what I was calling canna bulbs, but it turns out that what I’ve got are canna roots with little “eye” bulbs coming off of them.

Cannas are apparently a huge source of starch, and they’re grown agriculturally for just that. I can see it; some of the roots I pulled up were huge. I have a ton of the little bulbs, and I think I’m going to try to dry them and give them away to friends.

I also think I figured out where the cannas in the yard are, now that I’ve seen a bunch of pictures. They’ve got stalks with smallish red flowers on them, but the leaves look a lot like the cannas in the compost. It’s just that they grew a lot taller in the compost, and I never saw them flower. These were probably a result of thinning out the ones in our sunny side bed, and the little patch out back. You apparently have to thin these out every few years, in our zone (right on the border of 7 and 8, for the curious), though in cooler places they have to be dug up each fall.

The next thing I have to do for the compost is finish shoveling it over (and covering the canna waste), and then set up a compost bucket inside. I think I might just use a bowl that we’ll keep in the freezer (to prevent smells), and take it outside each day.

*Someday, a shark will bite me and then I’ll dismiss bee stings as nothing. But it will totally take a shark bite and nothing less.

We’ve got a couple of compost bins out back, and I’ve been meaning to start using them almost since we moved in. The hold up is that one of them has a bunch of cannas growing in it.

Since there aren’t any cannas growing in our yard that I can see, I wonder where they used to be, and why they were thrown away.

Today I got on my new gardening gloves and went out there, intending to yank out all of the cannas and turn all of the compost over into one of the bins.

I yanked out a bunch of the cannas and started making a big pile of the bulbs. I’m hoping that removing them from the cannas I’m putting right back into the compost will keep them from growing again. The bulbs were buried pretty deeply, so I imagine this was more a problem of not turning the compost than anything, or maybe the previous owners stopped caring so much and just tossed them in at the end of last summer.

I got a lot of them yanked out, which you can see if you compare the next picture to the first one.

Why did I stop before it was done? The canna side of the compost is full of bees, and one of the little bastards stung me right through my glove.

I forgot how much it hurts to get stung by a bee. I fled inside and left the shovel and the pile of bulbs laying in the yard. I’ll get back out there… sometime, and finish. I need to find a bucket to use for compost, get the last few cannas out, and turn the whole thing into one bin. However, I think I’m going to spend the rest of today on my fainting couch, clutching ice to my hand.

Jalapeños are something else I’ve wanted to grow for a long time. I confess: I want a salsa garden. I haven’t grown cilantro, garlic, or onions yet, but next year. Oh, next year, we’re going to grow so many things. This year we’ve got the jalapeños, though:

Look at all of them! I’m surprised at how well they’ve done, given that we’ve got two huge, staked plants in one pot, but they’re really thriving. They’re doing better than the tomatoes, even. I imagine that’s because jalapeños love heat, and we’ve had a really hot June.

Chile peppers come from South America, originally, though they quickly spread to Central America. They were used as currency by some natives, or so I’ve read in a couple of places on the web.

I already knew that capsaicin is the stuff in peppers that make them hot; you can’t really watch food television these days without learning that. I did not know that capsaicin is a pain reliever for birds (rather than an irritant), which helps with the spread of the seeds.

There’s a big section in the Wikipedia article about capsaicin all about the medical uses, which I won’t quote, but if there is an apocalypse, I am going to be relying on our jalapeños to make a pepper spray to deter the zombies as well as to contribute a spicy, fruity note to our salsa.

We’re going to have so many of these things.

When we first noticed the big, bulbous things growing on the tree in our side yard, we called it a zucchini tree.

I actually thought they were just alarmingly big flower buds, but then I got around to looking through the Southern Living Garden Book loaned to me by a friend and found out we have a fig tree! The leaves are unmistakable in their Dr. Seussian shape and size.

I’m super excited this week because our figs are starting to turn colors:

Figs produce two crops of fruit a year, the first on the old wood and the second on the new growth. The first picture is from the same tree at the same time as the second picture; the smaller fruits will be ready in September or so. The first fruits ought to be ready sometime in July, though I’m not actually sure what they’re supposed to look like when they’re ripe. My guess is that this is a Brown Turkey or a Black Mission fig tree, judging from the areas where they’re grown and how common they are, but I imagine we won’t know until we have some ripe fruit to compare to photos I can find online.

We have a fig tree. I think it’s the coolest thing in the world to have plants that give us food. It provides a weird sense of security. Plus, figs are insanely fraught with meaning (though our particular variety isn’t the famous one):

• Figs are the first plant mentioned by name in the Bible–Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves.
• According to the Torah, figs are one of the foods you’ll find in the Promised Land.
• Figs were probably one of the first plants deliberately cultivated by humans, possibly even before grain.
• The Buddha found enlightenment while meditating under a Sacred Fig tree.
• That same species is the World Tree of Hinduism.
• And it’s one of the two sacred trees of Islam.

Goodness. I got all of that from Wikipedia, which also tells me that the fig fruit is more properly the flower of the tree. I feel vindicated for thinking that the fruit was a big flower bud at first.

I read Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire recently, so I also have to point out that each kind of fig can only be pollinated by a specific type of wasp, which is a crazy kind of co-evolution.

I’m growing to really love this tree.

I’ve been taken by the nigella damascena since I first noticed it while walking around the yard with a friend. My friend called it (along with the penstemon digitalis–that’s the stuff with the burgundy stems in the first picture) a “fairy garden,” and it absolutely is. It’s a place for tame, pretty fairies that wear tiny white dresses and show up in picture books, frolicking with little girls. That area of one of our sunny back yard beds is practically Victorian in appearance and feel. If we ever re-enact the croquet scene from Alice in Wonderland or have a spring picnic while wearing boaters in the back yard, we’ll have to make sure these flowers are in the background.

The common name for nigella damascena is Love in a mist, though it’s also gone by devil in a bush or devil-in-a-cage. Ours were white, blue, and lavender, though I guess sometimes they come in pink. The scene above is long gone; all of the flowers turned into pods in early June.

These pods get used in dried bouquets a lot. A few gardening websites recommend dead heading the flowers so they’ll bloom for a little longer than the two months (May-June) than is usual, but I let nature take its course and maybe I’ll dry some of the seed pods now. Love in a mist is an annual, but it reseeds itself. There are tons of them in that one bed, but they popped up all over the yard this year and I hope that by leaving them alone, I’ll see them again.

I have a slight obsession with herbal lore and I’ve been looking up medicinal uses for all of the plants in our yard. Love in a mist is an expectorant, and you can distill an oil from it to use in perfumery–weird, since it didn’t have much of a scent. I guess that means that if we have an apocalypse any time soon, I can eat tomatoes and use these to deal with any stuffiness or smellyness.