Rain
August 13, 2011
Not the tropical Sadie Thompson sort of rain, keeping people indoors and insane day after soggy day, but the welcome surprise of gentle showers in the prairie after months of high temperatures and drought. Indeed, our dry beautiful days were making us a little crazy.
This morning I rolled over, the alarm must be going off too early, the window was still dark. I glanced out at the side fence I use to tell if I can drag hoses to water today; before dawn on even days my neighbor’s sprinklers hit the lower two-thirds of the silvered wood, but this morning the entire thing is dark.
Opposite the fence the dogs weren’t outside, they were in the doorway of the garage, looking out into the yard. Polite inquiring looks asking if they had to get wet this morning. Only for food or a chance to hang out in the house would they leave their straw-filled stall.
After months of moaning about the heat and drought, we got our wish, a gentle rain. I can smell the moist soil, the concrete, the roof, the bricks, the garden, all giving off their wet scents that a hose or sprinkler can’t duplicate. We’ve lost a lot of plants, some will be giving off the gentle composting scent of death as they stand brown in the moist earth. The whole world will probably smell like compost tomorrow with all of the dead turf and down leaves through the region.
I don’t know how long it will last, but right now I am perfectly happy with the weather. These photos are dark, there is no fill-flash, no retouching to lighten them in Photoshop. They were taken after dawn on a rainy North Texas morning and are perfect just the way they are.
The Anti-Social Life of Paper
August 6, 2011
Several years ago a Malcolm Gladwell piece in The New Yorker reviewed a book to do with how we use and store printed paper documents, and what struck me most profoundly is how we stack and store paper. Like a squirrel burying nuts and returning for them later, we seem to have a memory based upon proximity, tempered by remembering color, texture, and size, so we can find papers in the appropriate stack. I’ve used the topic in my my writing about libraries, and I’m sure I still have the original article here, torn out of the magazine, and I think I’ve downloaded and printed it a couple of times since, when I couldn’t find my clipping.
On my desk, the middens grows to the point of sliding apart and forming new sub-stacks. I have many flat surfaces in my office, indeed, in my house, that have papers on them. And for some time now, I have been fighting a slow but important battle to overcome both the amount of paper and my habit of piling it higher and deeper.
No, I don’t have a Ph.D, but a master’s degree and an all-but thesis second masters are enough to have fed my paper habit for years. Now I am being the postmodern writer and deconstructing my stacks, files, shelves, and boxes, where I may have stashed important papers. Odd boxes on the floor contain papers I was going to go through soon, to sort out then toss. Didn’t happen; they just got buried by the next box. I don’t know what might be in some of the boxes, but having had a couple of near-misses with identity theft, I know better than to just toss the boxes unopened, even though I know that what I don’t know is gone I won’t miss. What I won’t miss someone else might find very useful.
Generational Habits Die Hard
My parents were both readers. Newspapers, books, magazines, letters, and more, so after moving away from the region I regularly received manila envelopes stuffed with clippings from the home papers and periodicals they knew (correctly!) would interest me. Magazines slipped in, occasional books, cassettes, VCR tapes and CDs all came my way. And now that my parents are gone, these notes from the past seemed more precious. From the perspective of years it’s clear that if I don’t need them, these thoughtful packages are also clutter.
After all of this, it is necessary to say I’m not a hoarder. No intervention is required here, you can see lots and lots of dusty floor tile and carpet in my house, my books are all on shelves, you can sit in my chairs and move around furniture and through rooms without moving things or turning sideways (well, all except the sun room, where I stash my eBay stuff, but that room is meant for that). You can even get in and out of both sides of my pickup in my garage without having to scoot in through a mess of stacked stuff along the sides. But there are boxes and shelves and stacks in my office and a few other areas around the house that need addressing. I sometimes feel like until I slay those earlier ideas of things to research or write about, of letters and cards from decades ago friends long forgotten, it’s difficult to move forward. I was somehow trying to capture snippets of myself and others but I’ve lost myself in the evidence.
The heart of my problem has been that I’ve done for myself what my parents used to do, set aside things that are interesting that I might use later. But where they had to make selections and then package and mail the most pertinent pieces, anything that caught my eye for a moment could go into a stack or on a shelf. These in the past were paper landmines, slithering stacks that tripped me up or made it difficult to work because I had to keep moving them. So I put them in boxes, the ones I need to sort.
Paper is only one part of the clutter problem here. Inherited furniture and interesting stuff from a couple of my east coast great aunts I met when I was a young adult is part of it. These objects took the place of the family members I never met and wished to know more about. I gathered up what I could and brought it back here to examine, and to use to remind me of the stories and conversations I had with these interesting elderly women. I have given away and sold pieces of furniture and objects that I simply can’t use and things that I don’t collect. I tell myself myself that my home is not a museum.
My children might be interested in some of these pieces of furniture when they have homes of their own, but they won’t need all of this stuff, and like so many of us who have worked on estates of parents and other relatives, I know I don’t want to leave a mess for my kids. My parents both had houses full of stuff; Dad’s house was tiny but packed and he had a shed across the road with more. My mom had a large house full of a lifetime of stuff, yet she collected things (carvings) later on just so she could give each grandchild a collection. Ironically, the bits that we really love are not artificial collections but are the things that we know they both valued from many years from work and travel. The things they chose when they were poor, and the tangible products of their hobbies, the things they spent their time doing.
The tyranny of paper and stuff
My parents lived through the Great Depression. I’ve heard it all, thought it all. And now I look at the drifts of papers, the mass of notes to my future self and recognize a cacophony of ideas smothering interesting objects from my family. Smothering the lines of the house. I have realized that a passing idea alone doesn’t make a good story, but if it comes my way several times, then I should make a note and file it where I can find it and use it when the time is right. Don’t let it drift into a stack and be forgotten until it tumbles back to the top again. (This photo is of a house I will never visit, but it’s nice to think that someone was able to pick up all of their paper before the photo was taken.)
There is a good outcome to this: I’ve identified things that I have no interest in keeping that collectors have bought from me on eBay. I’ve given away pieces when people expressed an interest, and I’ve donated a lot. The garment that my mother made of interesting cloth that I wouldn’t consider wearing is turned into beautiful cushion covers for a window seat. I am using and reducing what is here. One of these days I’ll have the house I visualize.
The kids may be stuck getting rid of books. I’ve thinned, but there are always going to be a lot of books.
Bug Bopper
The life cycles of insects in the garden are most obvious when they impact me. I see the lace bugs as adults walking on my eggplant leaves and I find (and eradicate) the sticky eggs or the cluster of young before they do any more damage. I finally intercepted the bugs tacked together butt to butt, to get the rest of the story. I’ve seen the cycle with the assassin bugs on my cactus plants, the leaf-footed bugs on the datura. One can be a voyeur in their own yard and no one the wiser.
I have tarantulas and tarantula hawk wasps, neither of which I’ve seen mating or eating, but a few years ago I finally saw a wasp drag a stunned spider across the yard and drag it into a hole. It was a study in navigation genius as the wasp dragged the spider around weeds and over dog poop and hoses. This insight into the wasp/tarantula link was fascinating, because the life cycle activity that happens when I’m not out there looking remains a mystery. Only rarely does it present itself with a thump, like last Wednesday.
The cicada killer wasps have been in my gardens for several years, and each year there are more. I’ve seen them mate, fight, and dig, but it wasn’t until last week when I finally saw the comedy of one of these wasps hauling a cicada to the nest. This act is apparently fraught with difficulties. I was standing next to the front tomato bed, when I felt a thump on my side, as if a badminton birdie had hit me. It had about that size, weight, and velocity. I looked down to see a huge cicada lying on its back and a wasp detangling itself before flying off. Since Mom wasp never returned for the cicada, I can only presume that she lost interest or thought I might eat the cicada myself. I had observed a recent wasp casualty in the garden so I placed that dead wasp next to the stunned or dead cicada to give some perspective to the process going on in the garden. They are resting beside a standard size nail clipper for scale.
Little Rocks Make the Big Rocks Work
June 1, 2011
By Maggie Dwyer
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Several years ago I decided to take a proactive approach to the speeders who laid rubber on the curve around the front of my house – youthful (and not so youthful – I saw you, with your middle-aged lead-feet!) drivers habitually charged past my house, testing the G’s on my curve, on their way out of the village. And there is the “T” intersection out front – a side street that intersects and lines up directly with the front bedroom on the southeast side. If someone doesn’t stop, or hits a patch of ice, they could easily end up not only in my yard, but in my house. And I didn’t want my sleeping son to be mashed by a reckless car. So I started building The Lump.
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| It isn’t pretty, but it was put there to do a job – keep automobiles from charging across the lawn to hit or penetrate my house. I started building this with earth-filled tires (I picked up trash tires dumped in the woods across the road) and covered those with dirt, compost, and mulch. |
My kids and I took the wheelbarrow to the woods across the road during the winter months, when we could see the tires dumped in years past. I have probably 6 or 8 tubeless tires, packed tight with earth, anchoring the heart of the berm. As I gardened I dropped my compost and occasional bags of dirt and mulch on top to slowly build it up.
Neighbors would occasionally ask me what I was doing with that lump, and once I explained, they understood. They’d seen deep tire marks gouged into other neighbors’ lawns, especially those on curves. They probably winced inwardly at the idea of this lump of mine out in the front yard, but they understood. They may not quite visualize the intended final results, but I had a plan.
I have a lot of spare pieces of quarried limestone extant in the yard, from a demolished planter structure that once sat near the front porch. It was torn down years before I bought the property. My house has a rock front, limestone, and this large and probably very ugly planter had once commingled with the wrought iron gate that I found around the back when I moved in*.
The limestone pieces were dumped at the back of the yard, down near the gate to the creek. Once I cleared out the brush, and found the gate, and started clearing, I realized I had tons of beautiful limestone rocks. I began to use them to make informal walls around my side door and my driveway vegetable garden, and I even built a keyhole garden with a bunch of it. But the main use of this rock, as I always intended, was a wall in front of the berm. All I was missing was the dirt that would fill in between the wall and the berm. I could buy $50 worth a half mile from the house, but they wouldn’t load it in a pickup with a camper shell. It wasn’t worth it to me to 1) remove the shell or 2) pay double the price of the dirt to have it delivered. So my berm/wall waited. Last month my next door neighbors had a new footer dug for an enlarged patio, and there was a lot of extra dirt. So I grabbed it, and this was the missing link in my wall building. No more procrastination – I had what I visualized needing, so I finally built the wall.
I’ve worked out in the open, wearing my hat and bandana in the bright sun, and my extra long over-size t-shirts to avoid getting a burn on the small of my back that appears when regular sized shirts pull up and expose the skin. People passing rarely stopped to ask about my project, they continued past silently. But they did notice. I spoke with a woman in the next block, she’s about my age–on her own, with the same interest and the drive (and no extra money)–to take on this kind of challenge at her house. “I’ve been watching your wall. It’s beautiful!” she said recently. “I’ve had to build it in stages, as I had time,” I answered. “Of course!” – she responded, understanding perfectly. We do these projects as our employment allows.
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| In April 2010 my son Dylan played classical guitar in the UTA Central Library atrium as a faculty reception was getting underway. This charming young man sleeps in the front bedroom in my house. |
Today I put the last few little rocks on the top layer – and I must pay brief homage to those little rocks that made this all possible. The big ones are charismatic, they are the ones people will notice as their headlights illuminate this limestone wall, but it was the little rocks that helped it all fit together. The ones I scrambled to find as the work progressed. And the last few I stuck onto the top of the wall before layering on a coat of mortar. I finished that wall with its coat of mortar on top with a cheap Dollar Store whisk broom that has been my constant companion. Cleaning off the rock surfaces each time I resumed work, and then at the end, providing the lovely scored surface to the mortar I smeared on top.
This wall has grown slowly, and the end result isn’t much more than two feet tall, but the goal is to stop a vehicle in its tracks if it slides into my yard. My goal is to save the life if the sleeper in the front bedroom.
Thoughts range widely if you work without a radio or phone in your ear. Thoughts about what lived here before the house was built, and about the life in the yard itself. I like to attract wildlife with my organic gardening and plant choices. There is a domestic shorthair feline buried nearby, next to the Italian Stone Pine in front of the wall. This is Clementine’s wall. I’ll plant flowers to make the whole area shimmer with color, so who will care about a wall when it has bright zinnias or chartreuse sweet potato sprawled over it? A ghostly calico cat might lounge there watching people pass by, only we will notice.
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| I am an organic gardener so it always pains me to dig up a bed in the spring or fall and find displaced lizards, snakes, spiders, etc. With this wall, I have added habitat. A gorgeous large tarantula moved in as I was finishing the mortar cap of the wall. |
As I placed the last stones and swept the mortar across the top of my wall this evening I saw a large tarantula climbing the stone support on the right-hand side. I couldn’t pull off my gloves fast enough to get the phone camera button pressed to capture the beauty of this velvet spider with it’s black thorax and russet patterned abdomen as it moved into a cavity in the new wall. I sent a message via my phone, and Dean Crabtree responded “Tenant already? Very nice job, I would say!” Of course! Not only is this a protection for my house, but I have created a new habitat area in the yard.
The stone matches that on the house. Most people probably won’t notice it after a while. The little wall is a passive sentinel, standing in place to protect the inhabitants of the house, and provide shelter for native wildlife. Not a bad assignment!
*There is a family story about an ugly planter, that takes place in Connecticut. My great aunt Josephine lived across the street from the Ansonia Public Library. There was a very modernist pink or beige granite-looking horse trough and fountain at the front of the library property. It turns out that the land was donated by the family of Anna Sewell, the author of the Black Beauty stories. And legend goes that if the trough and fountain are removed, the land reverts back to the family. So the library groundskeepers filled the trough with dirt and planted flowers.
One man’s trash is this woman’s compost
May 8, 2011
An Open Letter to my neighbors in the Edgecliff Village area:
In the spring, usually when you start “thatching” or cleaning up your yards and mowing that first mass of tender weeds and winter grass, this organic material is really great for making the compost cook. So when you bag it and put it at the curb, understand that I may drive by in the evening and look into or at least give the bags a few tentative pokes to guess the contents, and then load them up to take home to my compost. Try to follow these simple rules:
Once trash is at the curb, it goes somewhere. Efficient men come by in the morning and toss these bags into a compactor truck and take it to the landfill where it is buried away from sun and air and where it doesn’t break down or do much good for the environment. You may have an inkling of proprietary fondness for your trash – it’s yours, you can do what you want with it, but in a lot of places, a growing number of places, that isn’t the case. One of these days, I hope, you’ll have to sort your trash and recycle the glass, plastics, and metal, and you’ll have to put yard waste in a decomposable bag. Until then, have pity on those of us who sort and recycle voluntarily and who keep an active compost system going in our yards with your lawn waste. Thank you. Your neighbor with the white pickup truck. |
Did you know that when I pick up your bags of grass clippings that they smell of compost already, and are warm to the touch because the composting is beginning in the bag? I leave these bags in my back yard and every time I have a wheelbarrow full of my own yard clippings or weeds from digging the vegetable garden, I mix in at least one of these bags of yours, pouring it out over the existing pile then put my weeds on top to hold yours down (especially if it is loose leaves – I want them to stay put). Your clippings help kick start the next cooking phase in my compost.
I tend to pile it and work these layers, the pile gets so big that I don’t try to turn it much. Two years will pass before I sieve then shovel this fine dark brown compost into my garden. There are composting hot shots with thermometers who are going for heat records as it cooks, I prefer to let time do it’s job, and I keep three piles going. The one I’m digging from this year, last year’s garden waste is nearby, and the stack from two years ago is waiting to be used next year. In this photo from last summer, you can see two stacks and the bare area left from where the oldest one was completely used that season.
As mentioned in the last blog post, I also put kitchen waste in the compost, but because I have dogs who think all food is interesting, I let it break down in a bin first, then pour the soupy mix into the middle of the compost. It still smells pretty interesting to them, but I have started with Howard Garrett’s suggestion of mixing up a bucket of dog poop tea (just what it sounds like) to pour over the compost once I’ve poured in the liquid and covered it over. The poop smell repels the dogs, who under most circumstances, leave their own droppings alone.
I know one argument I’ll hear already: what if those people use chemicals on their lawns? I can’t help that, though I push the organic message pretty hard in the village. I get the earliest clippings, before folks fertilize. I figure it’s the least I can do, to recycle those nutrients before chemicals kick in this year to replace what they threw away.
As mentioned last time, I am adding a worm bin. I completed my research and am now in the design phase, but it should be up and running by late June. I have the parts and now I need to build the bin and get the bedding started before adding worms.
Dogs love stinky stuff – compost stories
By Maggie Dwyer permalink
My kitchen scraps build up in a large bowl during the day; trimmings, things too old in the fridge, whatever, as long as it isn’t meat or oily, and then I take them out to drop in an 18-gallon bin to break down for a while before pouring the slop into the middle of my compost pile. This process was an experiment to keep my dogs out of the kitchen scraps in the compost pile.
Last night I dug a hole in the top, poured this anaerobic soup into the pile, then covered it over and set a sprinkler on top for a while to soak it in and keep the dogs out until it soaked in. They stayed out as long as the sprinkler was running, anyway.
My pitbull, who usually telegraphs her misbehavior by looking guilty before I’ve discovered the problem (i.e., she loves to tear up boxes and newspaper), reeked of it, and showed not one iota of guilt; I can’t say how much she ate, if she ate any, versus just digging around or rolling in it, but twice I chased her out of it before I remembered Howard Garrett’s suggestion to make some “dog poop tea” (just what it sounds like!) and pour it over the area I want them to leave alone. When I checked this morning, they hadn’t gone in through the top where the poop is, but they did run an experimental tunnel from the side, so I can conclude that I must get full coverage for dog poop tea to really work. I scoop and toss poop in compost, but I hadn’t done it for a while. I rotate two of these bins, so when I empty the one that is still aging, I’ll police the yard and have a big batch of the tea ready to treat the compost.
The 18-gallon bins are very heavy and stink of the ripest compost. It’s produces a soupy slurry during decomposition, and except for the fact that it probably isn’t an aerobic process, it could be the way to produce a potent compost tea in it’s raw form.
I’m going to move on to worm composting for a while and see if it is any easier to manage. The dogs at least should smell sweeter.
Airport Love, Actually
March 11, 2011
By Maggie Dwyer — permalink
My son Dylan is a freshman at the University of Arizona in Tucson and is flying back to Texas to spend Spring break here. He has only returned home one other time this year, during the long holiday break between semesters. I think I saw him four times during that month, and am resigned to the fact that our drive in from the airport tomorrow may be the longest conversation we have until May, when I will drive him with his stuff back here for the summer.
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| I love this photo – a candid shot my mother took. I sometimes miss the days when they were little and their worlds revolved around us, but I am so thrilled to see that all of the reading and attention has contributed to the wonderful young man he is today. |
I’m not surprised, or even dismayed, because I see him maturing as he should, becoming an independent and autonomous young man, and he doesn’t crave long visits with his parents. I have to choose the right moment to ask any question I really want an answer to, or to say something I think he needs to hear. And I have to resist the urge to give this wonderful young man a hug every time I see him. Without that restraint, it is my belief that over-eager parents end up pushing away their children. Holding them too tightly won’t keep them close – quite the opposite. His sister shares a house with other college students 45 miles north of here, and I see her only a couple of times a semester for the same reason. I am not aloof, far from it. They know I love them.
When he flew to Tucson in January, I had it planned. We pulled into an empty spot adjacent to the skycap lines at Dallas Love Field. I turned off the engine, hopped out to ostensibly help him with the door as he put on his pack then pulled his classical guitar in it’s very large case from behind the seat. As he turned, his hands full, I ignored the people standing next to us on the sidewalk and stepped in to give him a big hug and a kiss. He stood patiently, and I released him quickly, and told him to have a good flight.
I’d had an audience, and there were several knowing smiles as we watched this tall handsome college student walk alone into the airport. A woman in the line caught my eye, and I said “he’s 18. I have to choose the moment when I can get that kiss and hug these days.” Again, knowing smiles.
It was so different at the airport in Seattle 14 years ago, when my husband, not my son was the one flying. The four of us had managed three weeks together in a road trip from Texas to Seattle. He had only three weeks off and we wanted longer with the grandparents, so he left from Seattle to go to his work meeting. I’d make the drive home alone with the kids, stopping with friends and family along the way.
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| Last year Dylan played classical guitar in the UTA Central Library atrium as a faculty reception was getting underway. |
Good plan, but the hardest part was when we were at SeaTac airport, waiting at the gate (you could, back then) for the flight to be called. I was carrying then-four-year-old Dylan as we gave his Dad a kiss. As he realized that Dad was in fact leaving without him, my son lunged forward in my arms, stretching out and crying “Dad! Dad! Daaaaaaad!” at such a pitch and in such anguish that it was like someone had released teargas in that portion of the airport.
The brief tableau is frozen in my memory. The urgency of a child so distraught brought all eyes our way, and brought tears to those eyes. We managed to recover, I don’t remember what I said, but after a few minutes of sadness and sniffles, his seven-year-old sister and I had his full attention and we spent more time with grandma before heading south along the Pacific coast in another week of parks and beaches, of sleeping in guest rooms, motel rooms, and sleeping bags. I’m glad I have that memory of my son, as poignant as it is, because our airport visits these days are so restrained. But I know the passion is in there. Maybe one of these days I’ll be the one leaving on the plane and my son will be holding a child, sad to see grandma go.
Getting Back to the Blog
When I set up this blog, I was planning to focus my thoughts in one place where interested readers could follow along. In its natural state, ADD seems to be a feature of the Internet Age; inquiring minds are easily led to the next fascinating story, and are lulled into posting remarks everywhere. At the same time, sharing with friends in one place is comfortable; the shorthand of familiarity means you don’t need to spell out everything or reintroduce each subject. I wanted to challenge myself to write in a more thorough manner, but I distracted myself back to my old ruts, and continued to spread myself too thin.
I have a lot of partially written blog entries saved in a file, and quite a few photo illustrations. I’ll be posting those in my blog sites, probably in no particular order, to get them up and out there. And get back to the satisfaction of writing for a larger audience.
Not exactly a New Year’s resolution, but something I am resolved to do.
What’s the Buzz?
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July 24, 2010
This is a hairy caterpillar with a sting so powerful that you want to sever the limb to get rid of the pain. I'm posting this photo, even though it has nothing else to do with this blog, just so you can avoid it.
Every year the population of insects and weeds in the yard varies. One year it’ll be more thistles than usual, or more leaf-footed bugs. Another year it will be creeping Charley mint in the turf , and occasionally we have an unwelcome population bloom like last fall when the “asp” or “puss caterpillar” appeared on my Japanese flowering quince.
There always seem to be ants, fireflies, cicadas, June bugs, katydids, tarantulas, mud daubers, flies, and mosquitoes, but every year something moves to the top of the population hierarchy in the yard. So this year I don’t consider it unusual to have a bloom of the huge cicada killer wasps (Sphecius speciosus) burrowing in my garden, but for those who don’t pay attention to the ebb and flow of bug populations, this year the numbers have finally registered on the radar of the general public in North Texas. The wasps were digging, getting ready. The connection that many who noticed the wasps didn’t make is that the cicada’s electrical buzz hit a high pitch up about a month ago. These huge iridescent bugs are rarely seen and perhaps with our modern noisy household technology, many don’t notice their arrival. But it’s the wasp’s raison d’être.
On June 16 on KERA-FM’s community call in program Anything You Ever Wanted to Know a woman wanted to know how to kill these huge wasps that she said are attacking her children. To those uninitiated in bug behavior, it might seem to her like they are attacking. Chances are that what they are doing, in fact, is buzzing past anyone who gets too close to their burrows in the garden or turf. These B-52s of the garden insect world are flashing their wasp colors, buzzing their wasp buzz, and telling anyone who gets too close to “move along. There’s nothing for you here.” If you keep going back, they’ll keep chasing you off. Soon each female will capture and sting a cicada, drag the paralyzed insect into its hole, and lay her eggs. (You’ll find these featured on page 43 of Howard Garrett’s Texas Bug Book: The Good The Bad and The Ugly.) And then they won’t bother you. (As I finish editing this, a week later, I can say that I think we’ve reached and passed that point. I didn’t see any wasps for the last couple of days. Their work here is through, for now.)
The males don’t have a stinger, but at nearly two inches long, they can be pretty intimidating. The females do have a stinger, but you really really have to annoy them to get a sting. My frequent forays into the garden have been fine and I do manage to get a fair amount of work done even with these masters of soil conditioning hovering nearby. These wasps are active during the daytime; they’re big and noisy and advertise their presence so they’re easy to avoid when they’re working an area. To the left you see two males in one of their frequent confrontations. They slam into each other in midair and drop to the ground, where they roll around for up to 30 seconds.
Last year I photographed some of the pairs mating, and this year I witnessed the mid-air bug battles that occur prior to mating. They literally slam into each other eight feet up and drop straight to the ground as they tussle. They separate and do it again. Landing this hard on the concrete of the driveway doesn’t seem to hurt them. The only photo I don’t have yet is of a wasp actually dragging a cicada.
I captured a male wasp on a window in the house this weekend. I tried to catch it in thick layers of a folded up dishtowel but it twice struggled out of the folds. I finally released it after catching it on the glass with a plastic food container and sliding across a piece of cardboard.
The wasps are digging in the gardens on both side of my driveway, and digging in softened turf after we had two weeks of steady rain. The one place they have avoided is the area where I put down cypress mulch bark to delineate garden paths. I try not to step in the garden once it is planted, but I need a few ways in so I put down mulch so I can find the same path each time. I find piles of wasp dirt on my cypress mulch paths, but they are piled from holes dug outsize the mulch zone.
On July 18, 2010, I called in to Howard Garrett’s weekly Dirt Doctor radio program
http://www.dirtdoctor.com/ and reported this observation. Howard isn’t fond of cypress bark mulch in general because it takes a long time to break down in the garden (he prefers hardwood mulch), but said the use for paths in the garden sounded good. He offered a useful suggestion for testing next year: Why not grind up the mulch to a finer powder and sprinkle it over a test area of the garden, to see if it repels the wasps without becoming an indigestible bit of organic matter in the garden? That’ll be my research next summer. For this summer, I have the camera handy as I watch for the wasp/cicada pas de deux, but I think it has passed. The heavy rain we had yesterday seems to have sealed the vaults on all of those cicadas, tucked deep underground with a clutch of wasp eggs laid next to them.
One has only to look at nature in our own yards to find the creepy inspiration for Science Fiction thrillers, doesn’t one?
Click on any of these photos to have a new window open with the larger image.
Here’s a more recent view of the veggie garden:
The Dirt
Soaker hoses go into place as soon as garden contours are settled, to aid in planting placement.
My neighbor across the street teases me about the appearance of my garden–the design is one of a kind. I didn’t build a standard rectangle, I didn’t put in boards to support raised beds, but I did bring in a lot of topsoil and humus to mix with the existing soil and shoveled the rest of a pile of dirt from my back yard into these irregularly-shaped raised beds in my front yard. The planks on one side are to stabilize things, but the rest is shaped and tamped down. Once dirt was in the right place, I used homemade compost to top dress it before planting.
Organic gardening always begins with healthy soil. Lots of good biological activity is essential, and I add trichogramma wasps and beneficial nematodes to the mix. These beds are intended to avoid the wet feet that crippled eggplant and tomato production last year when I gardened on the existing land level. Too many low spots formed and put a period to healthy produce. Once the plant roots were soggy and weak, the predatory bugs piled on. As usual in my blog, click on any of these images to see a larger version open in a new window.
The raised beds have beveled sides. Next year I may want to reshape these beds and I don't want to dismantle wooden frames to do it.
This year I allowed the form to entirely follow the function. I have a pie-shaped piece of property beside the drive, wide at the bottom of the garden, so I visualized a interlocking series of terraces when I started moving around dirt. I sculpted the garden, standing back frequently to examine the shapes, anticipating drainage results as I worked. I had to factor in the drenching spring rainstorms we get occasionally, so I sloped the raised beds and dug sloped trench paths between each. I can reach to the center of each raised bed from the paths between them, and I put down a generous layer of free mulch from the city to help hold the moisture in and make it a little less gooshy to step on the paths after a rain. (I started to write “step in the garden,” but in fact, once the beds are in place I try to never step off of the paths, if possible. You’ll find a few well-placed bricks if you come back to my garden this summer. Those are the spots where a step is deemed necessary, but the brick is the placeholder so I know only to rest a foot on that spot). I’m sure I’m not alone among gardeners in trying to avoid compressing the garden soil by stepping in it.
Pretty soon the shape of the land in the garden won’t be visible under the hedge of tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, and my neighbor across the street never teases me about the fine produce I take over regularly. When there is a glut in this little patch, I feed the neighborhood with what I won’t have room to eat, time to can, or room to freeze. I should set up a little counter with a sign at the curb. “Tomatoes today. $1 a pound” or “Eggplants, $1 ea.” Last time I heard anything about it, it was legal in Texas to sell produce without a license. (This explained to annual occurrence of the itinerant grapefruit and orange sellers down our block years ago. Maybe I should load the kids’ old Radio Flyer and make the rounds?)
