Stop Wasting Paper and Become a Better Gardener

River Birch (Betula nigra)

This winter:

A couple of weeks ago some architectural stuff was torn from the roof of my house by cascading ice. Said stuff (dangerously heavy) rocketed through a kitchen window, unleashing an explosion of broken glass. Everywhere. 

I discovered a twenty-foot section of rain gutter dangling by a thread after heavy snow had pulled the gutter's support screws from the overhang.  

The door to the chicken pen was frozen shut. I had to take the whole thing off its hinges to let the hens out that morning.

Etc.

Cattail Flower in Winter

But it is nearing the end of February, when our hopes stir again for what we will make of the 2013 gardening season. Or more accurately what the 2013 gardening season will make of us.

First, seed companies unleash truckloads of paper catalogues beginning the day after Christmas. I've mostly gotten off their mailing lists. If I need pictures the internet works fine, and that's where I order my seeds anyway. Honestly when Saturday mail deliveries cease this summer I'll rejoice in one less day of junk.

Next comes the deluge of emails and invites offering gardening classes, workshops, symposiums, conferences and lectures. The best of these presentations bring together urgent environmental concerns, aesthetics and practical knowledge (Doug Tallamy and William Collina come to mind); the worst of them show a slide set of 50 new varieties of annuals and read aloud from their handout. No intelligent gardener should have to pay a $65.00 fee for a list she can get for free, and then read it quietly to herself.

Ice Crystals in Little Deer Creek

Sidebar:

Speaking of handouts, what is it with audiences and piles of paper? Historically, when exactly did the handout become a binding agreement between the speaker and the listener? For twelve years I've been fighting this assumption, that a lecturer owes his audience a handout. 

Most handouts are glanced at and then tossed in the trash. This is an area of waste that garden speakers (and their audiences) ought to be more responsible about. I purposefully limit my presentations to a page or two whenever I can. If I'm feeling radical I'll forgo supplying a handout to my audience, but I'm guaranteed to receive a few complaints. 

(Please don't be one of those types. You can easily get these things called pens, which you can write on with something called paper, both of which can be conveniently carried into the presentation in something called a purse or a pocket.)

Red Twig Dogwood (Cornus sericea) 

Anyway.

Another opportunity for restless gardeners in mid to late winter is volunteering. Many nature centers and botanical gardens are in great need of help at this time of year. I belong to an organization called CFI. Last spring our service committee helped Blandford Nature Center plant hundreds of native shrubs. This March we'll be assisting Blandford with its annual Sugarbush Festival--tapping the Sugar Maples and making syrup.

It's too early to dig, but there's plenty of time before planting season begins to teach yourself, and others, new ways to think about gardening.

All Time Bee Time in the Hive

*Illustration by Fredy Santiago

     A hobby beekeeper is a bit lonely during the winter.  He sometimes sulks and worries about his bees, and he wakes up shivering on a blustery night fearing that his bees will freeze to death when the temperature dips below 32 F.  He routinely visits his hive every day, although there is nothing to see because bees don't fly when it's cold.  He asks his chickens, who live alongside the hive, if they know anything.  They do not.  They only want grapes.  

     Sometimes the beekeeper gently taps on the side of his hive and shyly inquires, "Hello?"  But he is only disappointed by the lack of response, and he wistfully remembers the good times: last summer, when his bees never failed to greet him.
     So what exactly do domesticated honeybees do to pass the time during the cold season?  Play checkers?  Tell ghost stories? Take up knitting?
     A for-profit beekeeper tends hundreds or even thousands of hives and ships them someplace warm during the winter, such as Florida, where he leases his bees to citrus and nut farmers for crop pollination.  (Sadly, it's not in a bees' contract to receive paid vacations, so there will be no side trips to Disneyworld to see famous animatronic bees reading the Gettysburg Address.)

     However, a picayune apiarist has no need to truck a single hive down south, so he is hanging tough with what's left of his hive after the Great Swarm of 2011. 

     Honeybees stay warm in winter by clustering together in the middle of the hive at the top of the comb, contracting their chest muscles (they have no Pilates instructors in the colony) which keeps the center of the cluster at a constant 93 F. 

     Inside the cluster the workers all point their heads facing inward. The queen of course luxuriates at the balmy nucleus of this big bee snuggle, pampered by her devoted workers.  If she needs an extra pair of socks or someone to bring her a mug of honey, she gets it.  The workers continuously rotate their location within the cluster--those in the middle eventually move to the sidelines and vice versa.  The division of labor is surprisingly democratic.

 My Insulated Hive

     When outside temperatures are above freezing, bees can comfortably move about inside the hive.  Below freezing, the bees are immobile, with nothing to do except stare at each other's butts.  In fact they cannot even walk two inches to eat honey.  The longer and colder a winter is, the more a colony is at risk for starvation, especially if they did not have a good supply of pollen and nectar to forage from the previous spring and summer, or if the size of the colony is small.  
     Any amount of additional insulation helps the hive retain heat, thus boosting the colony's survival rate.  In a warmer hive the bees will shiver less and can conveniently access honey reserves without risk of freezing to death. 
     Apis mellifera are meticulously domestic. They don't poop indoors they and they prefer not to have corpses piling up on the living room floor. On a mild windless day, dead bees are dragged to the landing board and then dumped overboard.  This behavior indicates that the colony is alive and organized around their queen.

Bring Out Your Dead

     If all goes well and the bees survives until daytime temperatures are consistently over 50 F., the queen begins laying eggs.  Lucky surviving workers will by now have reached an uncommonly ripe old age of nearly six months (during the busy season a worker may live only 60 days) and without complaint these old ladies begins to raise brood and nurse them to adulthood. This will be the beginning of the success of the colony for another summer.  Only then will the anxious beekeeper breathe a sigh of relief.
     

A Worker Laid to Rest

*A special thanks to the very talented artist Fredy Santiago for creating the queen bee illustration specially for this post.  I love Fredy's drawings for their clever humor and incredible use of line and color. He is for hire!  Be sure to check out Fredy's ultra cool website: www.imsugarcoated.com

Shane VanOosterhout is The Passionate Gardener.  

For more garden inspiration, you can follow him on Facebook. 

    

Early (Early) Winter

Snow and ice has been piling since late November. The forecast has been for below average temperatures and above average precipitation. Both have panned out. I've noticed that meteorologists are remarkably accurate in the high-tech age, although they have a tendency to sensationalize every drop of rain and snowflake as if it's the end of all creation. Weather forecasters have become shameless drama queens for the sake of scoring a few rating points.

Winter, for the record, does not officially begin until the end of this week.

The first really big dump was surprise if only for its intensity. Wet and heavy, virtually everything left standing in the garden was crushed, including the tallest and toughest of the ornamental grasses. Flattened like wet paper, the long shoots and blades now lie limply in ruins upon the earth. Most years I am able to enjoy the shuddering dry canes and seedy plumes lingering into well into March.

Winter interest, that's what we gardeners call it, or leaving a few things to look at for when the gloom seems eternal. Some gardeners subscribe to the scorched earth approach - picking out every remaining stalk and seed head still remaining by late autumn- No Plant Left Behind, if you will - for the sake of efficiency.

Others, myself included, like to see powdery caps of snow atop the Echinacea on a winter's morning, or flitting goldfinches devouring the remnants of Rudbeckia seeds. We find the blank winter garden sterile and sad, nothing to contemplate except frozen, lonely soil.

The mantra for some is to "clean" the garden of pests and diseases by not allowing them to overwinter on decaying plant matter. In the home vegetable garden this makes some sense (crop rotation and soil amendments should always be primary) but in the flower garden, bah.

I've never on my property detected an overabundance of plant disease. I don't trouble myself with a few spots of powdery mildew, anyway, so perhaps I am simply more tolerant than some. One gardener's "problem" is another gardener's shrug of the shoulders.

This morning I took another look around. Some of the miscanthus looks as if it's been hit by a meteorite but in other places things are not so bad after all. Sunflower stalks are indestructible as always, and there are plenty of milkweed hanging around, their silvery-gray pods still stuffed with gossamer. The new waterfalls in my ponds make spectacular ice formations. It's not so bad after all.

With nature one must learn to put things in perspective or find a different past-time.