Welcome To The Jungle - Random Thoughts While Weeding.

I find myself having to stop, midway through weeding the gardens for the thousandth time, and remind myself that this is the time of year that I dream about in January - hot, humid, and green.  And yet, when I am in the midst of it I am too hot and it is too humid and way too green!  The corn is about 4 feet over my head, the beans are stringing all over the place, the peas are getting totally lost amid all the weeds, my flower gardens are horribly neglected and the sweet potato vine has taken on the personality of Audry II in Little Shop of Horrors.   The list of vegetables and flowers to try to save from the assault of the weeds gets forever longer and my back and shoulders become ever more sun burnt from being stooped over pulling weeds all day.  Thankfully, there are a few plots of vegetables - namely potatoes and squash that were mulched well with straw and newspaper that don't require much work other than to pull out the occasional errant weed, but the other seemingly endless beds of plants needing my attention are enough to make anyone wish for a sudden, yet definitive frost.

I often channel my grandmother when this sense of being completely overwhelmed strikes.  Her motto for cleaning her house - which was a large four square and a lot of space for an elderly lady to tackle - was to "clean one corner per day"  At the time she told me this I was probably about 15 and thought 'that's crazy - it would take weeks to get the house clean' not realizing at the time the wisdom of my grandma.  The hardest part is always starting.  A task too big will put just about anyone into procrastination mode, but to set the goal of cleaning just one corner....that is do-able and so you begin the task and before you realize it, the entire house is cleaned because you naturally progress from one corner to the next and so on.  I apply the same thought process to my gardens although it is modified slightly to  "save just one plant from the weeds". 

This particular mindset came about when I was about 8 months pregnant with kid number 4 and I couldn't bend over anymore to get at the weeds - those were long, hot days indeed - but plant by plant I continued to weed.  Some days I literally did save just one plant at a time before having to go inside and take a break, but these days I start with one plant and slowly drift from plant to plant to plant until I look around at the carnage of weeds around me. I was so proud of weeding my entire tomato patch the other day that I just sat on the dirt as though it were the nicest sand of the beach and basked for a few minutes - actually looking up at the sun and letting the front half of my body have some exposure to the light for once.

I think of my grandparents often when working in the garden.  Things my grandma used to say, poems she taught me, the lives they all lived.  One of the things that I most enjoy is knowing the favorite flowers of my grandparents  - for my Grandpa George it was Marigolds, for Grandma Syl it was Petunias and for Grandpa Dave it was Four o'clocks.  Grandma Vera had so many favorite flowers and grasses that I don't think she could ever pick just one.  I grow all these flowers in my garden and have found that most of them will self seed year after year, which gives the feeling that my grandparents are with me all the time.  That connection, however abstract it may be, is very comforting and I will find myself mentally talking with my grandparents periodically as I go about saving one plant or another from hostile takeover by weeds - I imagine what they would say about current events, the kids, my old house.  All of my grandparents were farmers in South Dakota and lived through the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.  Imagining what those times were like - how difficult, how frightening - makes my own stress about current events slightly more bearable.

 Weed, weed, weed......drifting about the gardens thinking all the while.....it is incredibly hot right now and I know there are many that consider me crazy, but we don't have air conditioning and I like it that way.  Again, I think of my grandparents that lived (and enjoyed) their lives without the benefit of air conditioning. The trick is to cool the house off at night by opening all the windows and then closing them during the day to contain the cooler air.  It works well, no expensive air conditioning needed.  We have become a society of wimps - addicted to our televisions, iPhone and air conditioning.  There is a way to becoming energy independent....it's called 'not using it'.  Given the current state of society, it will never happen. 

Weed, weed, weed.....sorting through flowers and weeds and came across the season's first Preying Mantis.  Very small - only about the length of my little finger and very quick.  She doesn't realize yet that she is the top of the insect food chain.  I won't even dare to hurt her because she is too valuable for eating unwanted bugs.  I will perhaps move her to a more desired hunting location, but I wouldn't think of harming her.

The worst part to all this weeding is collecting and disposing of the weeds afterward.  Inevitably, while raking up all the weeds I will spot a few thousand more and it will take me another half hour before they are all raked up and thrown into the compost bin where they will be quickly broken down into something far more useful than the weeds they were.  The jungle still lives on, but at least one corner of it is now more under control.

The Scourge of the Beetle

There is one part of summer that I completely dread - the part that includes removing, by hand, all the vermin that seek to decimate our crops before we have a chance to devour them ourselves.  Potato bugs, squash beetles, cabbage moth caterpillars, horn worms, but the very worst of the worst.....Japanese beetles.

They show up on the scene at about the same time as the blueberries ripen and within days can completely ruin a vineyard of grapes or raspberry bushes.  I have also known them to eat all the silks off my corn thus limiting the corn's ability to germinate well.  Not to mention the destruction that they cause to my flower gardens - roses, Canna Bulbs, and woodbine all get munched into small Japanese beetle pellets.

The farmers, of course, spray for them with whatever nasty, harmful chemical the agricultural industry has come up with to kill them, but many will fly from their fields to mine in front of the sprayer.....thanks neighbor, that's just what I wanted - toxic chemicals AND the nasty beetles.

They didn't seem to be so bad the first few years of having the farm, but my suspicion is that we just didn't recognize or care so much about the food that we were attempting to raise to notice the destruction that was caused by these little beasts.  Now they are significantly worse than they have been in the past years.  Like all obnoxious pests, when they gain a foot hold they seem to make the most of it.  I always joke that if we actually tried to get them to spread and grow they would probably die off.

There are a lot of natural ways to try to decrease the numbers of beetles - traps (which, incidentally, seem to actually draw them from miles around), nematodes to infest them and kill off the grubs in the soil before they hatch into beetles (which takes a bit of work and the right timing to know when the grubs are most susceptible), and my preferred favorite - hand picking.

Every morning my husband goes out with a bowl of water and collects bugs.  Some people suggest soapy water, but we avoid the soap....with good reason that will be revealed later.   Sometimes it takes a quarter hour and sometimes it takes an hour and a half to get most of the bugs off the bushes and grapes.  It never seems to matter how many are picked off, there will be more by nightfall when it is done again.  I try to spend some time in my flower gardens picking them off the flowers there as well, but I can honestly say I am not as diligent as my husband is about picking them off the grapes and raspberries....and my flowers pay the price, but then again we don't have to eat my flowers. 

As time consuming as this is, and as monotonous, it has an up-side.....disposal.  We had started out with the soapy water, but then I had a thought while watching a chicken working like mad to find a cricket that had escaped into a crack in the sidewalk.....maybe the chickens will like them. It was like Mikey on the "Life" commercial, "... He likes it!  Hey Mikey!"  A small handful of the swimming, swarming mass is tossed out onto the floor of the chicken coop and then the feeding frenzy begins. 

I am not really one to deliberately hurt beings if I can help it, but there are some lines that do get drawn when attempting to grow your own food. It is a bit gladiatorial, but very satisfying.... if you are a crop eating bug, you will be summarily sentenced to death by chicken unless you are strong enough or lucky enough to escape from the coop unscathed.  Some do, I know, I have seen them crawling off to hide out of sight of the chickens.  My luck, I am slowly, inadvertently running a Darwinian experiment and evolving a new breed of Japanese beetle that is smarter, faster and luckier than the typical beetle.  Hopefully, my chickens are also evolving right along with them.

Blue Period

If June is the month of strawberries, July is the period for blueberries.  Somehow I had the forsight to plant three bushes of blueberries about five years ago and then planted two more bushes last summer.  I think maybe I should have planted at least another ten this year.  These tiny little packets of anti-oxidant bliss are nothing like the ones that you buy in a store.....sorry, but true. Sure the ones from the store are round and blue, but they are berries formerly known as blueberries by the time they hit the shelves.  Right off the bush is the only way to eat them.  Some are small and tart and others are as big as a dime and juicy.  "Tart and sweet all at the same time" is the way that my daughter aptly desribes them.  They take a simple bowl of cereal to whole new heights.   This time of year, the writing definitely slows down, but it is only because I am outside on hands and knees around the blueberry bushes getting every last one.