2012: A Year in Gardening

Sunflower photo by Shane Vano

Before my thoughts shift into 2013, I thought I'd reflect on some of the memorable items of this past year's gardening adventures. I tried new things and kept in mind Albert Einstein's famous quote: "The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Here are a few highlights from my 2012 gardening season.

The 80 degree March days followed by freezing cold nights destroyed every flower bud on my five pear trees and seven apple trees. Nearly all of Michigan's tree fruit crops were also ruined by climate change.

I bought a tiller. Not a wimpy little tiller, but a big one that actually works. It has an 8 HP engine and cultivates my heavy soil beautifully, backwards or forwards. 

Before I tilled my vegetable garden in May, I asked my dad to move the drip irrigation tubes to one side. When I went back to check on him I discovered, to my horror, that he had ripped up the entire drip system and tossed it in a broken, tangled heap. My dad does not follow directions well. 

I covered one row in my vegetable garden with Agribon cloth. Beneath the "floating row" I grew pest-free lettuce, cabbage and broccoli. Once or twice I applied the organic insecticide Spinosad, a naturally occurring bacterium that kills soft-bodied insects. I have never had such beautiful, pest-free lettuce and cole crops. I planted a second crop of lettuce in August, which I harvested through November. 

I tilled up a small section of field and put in a pumpkin patch, far enough away from the vegetable garden so that the vines could not creep in and strangle everything. (Overturning un-tilled sod always yields an explosion of weeds the first couple of years.) If you're lucky you'll get something benign, maybe clover and golden rod. I got poison ivy, a truckload of it. Thankfully I'm not allergic to urushiol, the plant's volatile oil that brings affliction to many a soul.

In August, a weasel infiltrated the chicken pen and stole some eggs. (Seriously angry birds.) I trapped the weasel inside the hen's roost box. It escaped, because weasels are shape-shifting demon spirits. Then I put out a weasel trap for several weeks. No luck. In October, the weasel returned and this time, four of my hens died from heart failure. Two survived, along with my brave lady duck, although she held a grudge against me until I hired a friend to come out and re-screen the entire pen with 1/4" hardware cloth. I also buried a trench of wire in the soil around the perimeter to prevent weasels from tunneling. The hens are now truly safe. It cost me a small fortune.

Art by Claudia Pimentel http://strangeteethillustration.tumblr.com/

My friend Kevin's old dog Sydney died the same week I lost my hens. We buried her on my property, out by Shed 2, together with the birds. We fondly remember Sydney as "Flower Crusher" for her joy of charging into the large border of Coreopsis blooming along the driveway, and sitting on them. 

My dad and I installed 150' drainage pipe to move standing water away from the backyard (cat-tails were actually sprouting in the lawn). We rented a trencher. After our neighbor and his son helped us pull the trencher out of the mud where I had gotten stuck, the results were uneven, literally. The trench became deeper the closer it got toward the water source. Fortunately we got smart on that project and hired two hunky college dudes to finish the job with long-handled shovels.  

I introduced a couple of friends to the Top-Bar beekeeping method. It was nice to have some bee buddies on hand to bounce things off of. Top-Bar is a small but growing method for hobby apiarists. We need to help each other out. Right now my hive is jammed with honeycomb, workers and a healthy queen. I sure hope they make it through the winter. 

For the first time, my potatoes were invaded by Colorado Potato beetle larvae. I spent a few early evenings picking them off by hand. Problem solved.

Finally, I gave a handful of garden lectures. At one lecture I discussed things a gardener can do in the fall. A woman brought me a three-page list (double-sided), an A-Z of every perennial in her garden. She hoped I'd tell her specifically what to do with each plant. My answer? "Cut it down if you want, or don't cut it down if you don't want." That's the same advice I give everyone who asks this question, because there's no profound secret to cutting back perennials at the end of the year. (I leave most of mine up for insect habitat and to feed the birds.)

Another couple at this same presentation complained to the event coordinator, "All he did was show pictures of his garden."

I apologized for not showing pictures of other people's gardens.

See you next year.

Do Plants Communicate?

During harvest time I was interviewed by a local writer on the subject of garden vegetable oddities. He shared with me that a citizen gardener whom had grown a Mickey Mouse-eared tomato had gotten him on the phone, and how terribly excited the caller was, believing in miracles. A tomato that looks exactly like Mickey Mouse!

The journalist emailed me the pictures taken by the breathless gardener of his curiosity. I replied that I thought the tomato resembled the shape of a simple molecule more than Disney's famed cartoon character: the fruit was composed of three, smooth, conjoined orbs; lacking eyes, a pointed nose, and whiskers, which I do believe are essential features on Mickey's head. Call me picky.

In my opinion I was being prompted to exclaim this tomato phenomenon as, well, phenomenal, but my pulse remained steady. I explained to the journalist that plants do all kinds of crazy stuff, especially in their tendency to mimic the sexual organs of humans (don't tell me you've never seen a phallic gourd). A three-pronged tomato was, to me, not as amusing or unusual as the yams I had judged at the county fair this summer, resembling bug-eyed chihuahuas or angry old men.

Scientists have known for years that our human brains require recognizable data in order to cognate, and so what we at first do not recognize as "normal" we match with what we already know, the same way we see whales and horses in cloud formations. Or, for some, the Virgin Mary on a french fry.

It's unquestionably fun to look for patterns in nature. The more patterns we learn to recognize the deeper our scientific appreciation and understanding of the natural world. Teaching children how to identify trees by their leaf shapes, for example, is something most of us can relate to. And what a pleasure it is when the child sees the face of a fox in a blob of mildew on the freshly picked leaf!

A grown-up gardener should pause to remind herself that in the age of industrial macro-farms we rarely have an opportunity to glimpse nature's creative whimsy because we no longer get our hands dirty. When all of our edible plants come from a grocery store; hybridized, cultivated and preselected for absolute uniformity, it should not be surprising that when a gardener really sees nature unfiltered, she will be taken aback. It is when a gardener expects to pull a few bizarre-looking carrots from the soil that she has re-established an honest dialogue with nature.

There is much exploration to be done on exactly how plants do communicate, - with one another, even with us if at all possible. But it is the quiet mysteries of plants I hold in the highest regard. Knowing that my tomatoes are not scheming to intentionally look like a billion-dollar trademark by way of Mickey Mouse, or trying to bring forth religious miracles, or even attempting to appeal to my narcissism in any way whatsoever is profoundly satisfying.

Writer Mark Germer stated it well:

"Recent work on information processing (even kin recognition) in plants suggests that there may be more going on there than we now understand; as for birds and mammals, it has long been appreciated that they are perfectly capable of deception and subversion. For my part, I don't find these things odd or disturbing, as it's the continuity of all life that intrigues me most. Humans are not alone in their baseness -- though a few may be alone in their desire to rise above it."