HAPPY NEW YEAR



                 I thought you'd get a laugh over this new

              addition to the  menagery of animals on Locust Hill

How's that for a great Christmas gift!

A Christmas Poem



 

 

 

                   

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

 

 I’m afraid my Christmas spirit has fizzled just like those blow-up Santas and snowmen people put in their front yards at this time of year that lie in airless puddles each morning.

 

Trying to come up with something to write about, I got some old photo albums that I hoped might inspire me.  Much to my surprise, one of them turned out  to be full of poems composed by my mother that I hadn’t read in years. 

 

Unlike the doggerel verse I write, my mother’s poetry was… what shall I say, serious?  Much of it she successfully published.  When I came upon a poem she’d written about Christmas,  I realized it expressed the same sort of feelings I’m having about this season, so… no column this week, but best wishes for a joyful Christmas.

 

       Christmas Thoughts

         By

          Alice Dickinson Robinson

 

Dear Lord, forgive the clutterings we strew

Across an hour that once was clean and bare;

The gilt and tinsel trappings hang anew

Upon a truth so humbly nurtured there;

Forgive the meaning lost, the word mislaid

In all the fevered rush of this bazaar

And quicken foolish children who have made,

With backs to heaven, a wistful paper star.

 

The Three are gone; so many men are wise;

Half-heartedly, confused by myriad ways

We face the East – The wonder-flooded skies

Are dark… we rest upon our shallow days.

Forgive that we are sheep who nibble sod

And not the Shepherd, searching out his God.

 

  

    

       WISHING YOU

   A JOYFUL CHRISTMAS 

 

                AND A PROSPEROUS 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All about Wild Vines



 

 

 

 

Wow, it's already December?  2012 has been a difficult year. and I'll be glad when it's over.  I shouldn't complain, especially when I think of the devastation caused by Sandy which missed my corner of Connecticut, but I am not feeling very Christmassy.  Since 1982 when I started  writing Weeds and Wisdom, I've probably  composed at least 30 Christmas columns -- , choosing the tree, trimming the tree, family traditions,  making wreathes, lights and decorations, gifts for gardeners -- so I’ve decided to ignore the coming holiday and write about vines today.

 The first vine, however, is one whose seed pods  can be used at Christmastime, the wild cucumber vine. When my kids were little we always went out and collected these unusual seed pods to hang on our tree, spray-painting them silver or gold.

I went out to find a few for this column, but I couldn’t scare up a single vine, so I went on the Internet to get a photo. At first I got nothing but pictures of big edible cucumbers, and when I finally found the one above it had obviously been taken too early in the year to look at all like the lovely lacey net that makes a good Christmas decoration., but none of those could be copied.

If you go on the Internet and google Echinocystis lobata, the wild cuke's Latin name, you'll see lots.   I'm no horticulturalist and rarely use Latin names for plants, but found this one amusing,  It translates into  the Greek words for  bladder and hedgehog. The vines grows fast and has dozens of white clusters of bloom all summer.  It makes a nice screen to shade a sunny porch or hide that ugly propane tank in the back yard and other unattractive objects. 

Few gardeners plant wild vines, preferring to buy cultivars such as  clematis, silver lace or trumpet vines, but for many years I made do with whatever grew wild on Locust Hill – woodbine, which turns a handsome red mingled with clusters of blue berries each fall,  wild honeysuckle that fills the air with perfume, or – DON’T’ EVER DO THIS  - the nightmare of bittersweet, a rampant uncontrollable vine that strangles anything it can climb. 

The one cultivated vine I grew back then was English ivy, but only because my grandmother had beautiful ivy beds and I could make root cuttings from her vines by just sitting them in a glass of water for a week or two.  Yes, ivy climbs, but it should only be allowed to do so on brick or stone buildings, so like my grandmother I planted mine as a border.

The leaves looked lush and green all summer, but because they faced south they are exposed to harsh sun and wind in the winter, so each spring I face dried up brown leaves until the shiny new ones appeared. If grown on the east, west or north side of a house ivy gets little sunburn, and if you’re willing to protect  ivy you’ve planted in a southern exposure with pine boughs or burlap each winter, this problem is eliminated. 

My grandmother’s ivy beds looked lovely each spring as her gardener performed the tedious task of covering them from winter burning. I suppose I could protect  mine each fall, but I think I’d rather put up with brown leaves than a mess of burlap right by the front door. 

The Baltic and the Bulgarian varieties of English ivy resist burning, but by far the best variety of all is one you may never have heard of, 238^th Street Ivy.  It was discovered on 238^th Street in Manhattan and was introduced by the New York Botanical Garden where it is grown in extensive beds.

One of my readers brought me two little containers of this fancy ivy after I’d written an ivy column and  complained about winter burning.  I planted them under the sugar maple in the front yard where they faced lots of harsh winter sunlight, and promptly forgot about them.

Two years later I suddenly noticed that two or three stems were busy climbing the maple’s trunk and had already reached higher than my head.  It had been a hard winter, but there wasn’t a single brown leaf on these vines. 

Sad to say, that beautiful maple tree started to die about six years ago.  The two different tree surgeons who inspected it could find no reason for its dying limbs and offered me no solution, but both assured me that the ivy was not the cause.  They each gave me an appallingly high estimate of what it would cost to cut down this very large tree.

 My solution is slow but cheap. I have a wonderful yard man, Steve, who comes for  an hour or so a week to do the "man chores", mow the steep banks around the pond, lifting rocks I can’t lift, fixing mechanical problems.   He handles a chain saw with great skill, so when there’s nothing more important to do, he cuts off a dead limb or two that I saw up for firewood.  As you can see above, the 238^th Street ivy loves this tree.  When Steve has cut off all the limbs, I'm hoping it will make a lovely covering for the trunk.

 

I think you must make a visit to the New York Botanical Garden if you’d like to buy 238^th Street ivy, but if you want a bed  of this handsome vine on the south side of your house, it would be worth the trip. Or better yet, put it on your Christmas wish list.

Teddy Bear Trees



Of all my favorite months, November is NOT one. It is such a funereal month, filled with farewells – goodbye to warm, sun-ripened tomatoes and fresh lettuce, colorful bouquets of asters and goldenrod, and New England’s  flaming autumn colors.

Our woodlands stand gray and black to face the coming winter. There’s one exception, however, a most unusual tree that is just now turning from green to a warm cinnamon brown.  It’s a tamarack, the only conifer that is deciduous, not evergreen.  You may know the tamarack as a larch, or even a hackamatack, but I never knew it by any name until the year daughter Bridget turned 16 and got her license.

That summer, driving on a back road in Falls Village, Bridget swerved to avoid a little bird, and then looked back (Not via the rear-view mirror) to see if she’d hurt it.  The car knocked down three guide posts, sheared 20 feet of dirt bank and landed in a tamarack tree.

Neither Bridget nor the bird was hurt and that was how I  learned what a tamarack tree looked like.  Such a unique conifer, the only needled tree native to North America that drops its foliage each fall.

Tamarack needles grow like small shaving brushes along the branches and are soft and delicate compared to those of spruce or fir. They may be hard to tell apart from their evergreen cousins in their summer greenery, but now when other deciduous trees have been stripped naked, their needles lose their chlorophyll and become as conspicuous as polo-coated preppies at a nudist colony.

These tufts of needles have turned a soft warm brown and have opened out so that each branch looks like a tiny modern hayrake, making the trees resemble furry teddy bears.  By December their needles have all dropped and the black skeletons left bare give the impression of having been charred by a fire, looking totally dead.

Although tamaracks are most commonly found in swampy areas, they can  live equally well on a dry hillside where they grow very fast, as much as three feet a year.  Along with sumacs and poverty birches, they are often the first trees to appear in open land and are called nurse trees, as they prepare the way for trees needing shade.

After the Mad River dry dam was built just west of Winsted, I watched the open meadow beside Route 44 fill in, first with sumacs and a few popples, then tamaracks.  Eventually white pines moved in, and at this time of year make a spectacular sight of rich green and cinnamon.

Searching for more facts on tamaracks to fill this column, I located an article in a 1926 Antiques Magazine written by Hank’s grandfather describing a variety of products made from tamarack.  The wood is apparently very hard and almost impervious to water, so it is used in ship building and dock pilings.

If you’ve never known about or noticed tamarack trees right now is a good time to spot them, especially on that hillside to the right as you head down into Winsted.  n

Canaan has hardly any tamaracks, but when I drove to Sharon the other day I saw one here and one there.  They've almost lost all their teddy bear look, so you may have to wait until next November to spot one.    Happy Thanksgiving.  

A Really Tasty Tomato?






It’s a rare occurrence when reading my daily copy of the Wall Street Journal that I find an article on gardening, but several weeks ago I was stunned to discover an entire 4-page section entitled “Innovations in Agriculture.” It contained eight articles, starting with one titled Vertical  Farming about growing crops in urban high-rises, and ending with one on robots harvesting fruits and vegetables.

I’d just consumed the last two delicious tomatoes from my garden and since I refuse to buy the tasteless offerings at the supermarket, I skipped straight to an article headed with an illustration of ripe red fruit, eager to read about producing a truly tasty tomato.

The first five paragraphs explained why store-bought toms are so bland and tasteless – farmers demanding plants with high yields, retailers wanting toms with good color and long-lasting shelf life, and of course the shippers need sturdy fruits that can withstand their  traumatic journeys crammed into crates.

All these excuses for ignoring taste are well known, but the last one was a surprise, the fact that back in 1940 a genetic mutation was developed that made tomatoes ripen uniformly, but was discovered only recently to seriously reduce their sugar content.

Fortunately this mutation is not incorporated in many of the seeds sold to home gardeners such as Big Boy and cherry tomatoes as well as the Heirloom varieties.  This is one  reason our home-grown tomatoes are tasty compared to store-bought offerings.  

 

Although scientists have been struggling to discover how to improve the tomato’s flavor, progress has been very slow because at least a dozen genes account for a truly mouth-watering tomato – its aroma, texture, sugars, acids. And field trials take years and often end in failure.

The article does end on a hopeful note.  This past May scientists decoded the tomato genome for the first time.  Plus something called “marker-assisted” breeding is now making the discovery process of genes much faster. In the meantime, growing a few tomato plants in your backyard each summer is definitely worth the effort.

I skimmed through the article on growing crops in urban high-rises. It may be of interest to city folk who have no access to local farm markets, and will be able to get produce close to home, but not to me.   The same can be said for the robots who harvest vegetables and fruit.

The other article that I found intriguing was one on the breeding efforts to improve our fruits and vegetables.  Monsanto has bred iceberg and romaine lettuce together to combine the sweet taste and crisp texture of iceberg and the higher levels of vitamin C and deeper green color of romaine.

Soon there will be seedless watermelons, broccoli with higher levels of antioxidant, its cancer-preventing properties.  Ah, a new variety of onion with less pungency, meaning no tears.  Grown for fall harvests, it will serve the winter market when the famous Vidalia onion is not available. 

Reading about all these agricultural pursuits in the WSJ was a real treat compared to plowing through all the stomach-grinding articles on politics.  I hope it inspires some of you to think seriously about having a vegetable garden next summer.  

Carpathian Walnut Trees



Whoever wrote “Here we go gathering nuts in May” must have been nuts!  Late October is when we expect to collect nuts.  When I mentioned my Carpathian walnut tree in my last column, several readers wanted to know more about it, but first I’d like to tell you a bit about the yellow-bellied sapsuckers who have drilled rows and rows of holes in our tree as they searched for insects and sap. 

Despite the fact that my tree is riddled with these holes, I have never heard a sapsucker drilling rows of holes on a limb, much less seen one of these yellow-bellied woodpeckers. From what I’ve read, they usually pick on birches or maples, so I don’t think they are normally a problem with walnut trees.

Our tree produced a bushel or more of nuts every other year from 1978 until about 2002.  I think a tree yielding a harvest of nuts for close to thirty years could be considered a success so I would recommend planting one.

The Carpathian walnut, as you might guess, originated in the Carpathian Mountains of Italy, and consequently can tolerate the freezing temperatures we who live in the Icebox of Connecticut often shiver through in the winter.  Its nuts are as delicious as those of English walnuts, which cannot survive freezing temperatures.  

We bought our little seedling from Jung’s Nurseries in Randolph, Wisconsin in 1972.  Getting this unusual tree was Hank’s idea, and when I saw the pathetic looking twig he unwrapped, I couldn’t help but tease him a little.

“By the time that poor stick produces nuts enough for a Waldorf salad, you’ll be gumming it!” I laughed as we dug the hole. We planted it at the edge of the big meadow, and planned to mow under it each October so the nuts would be easy to find.

We didn’t need to mow for six years, but finally one May we were thrilled to spy blossoms.  Hank rushed to get the lawn mower, and waved the recipe for Waldorf salad in my face.  Come fall, however, there were no nuts. Discouraged, we got out the tree book and learned that the blossoms had all been males.  Not until the following year would we get both male and female blooms and be able to harvest our first crop. From then on we could expect a really good harvest every other year and a slim one in the off years.

When walnuts ripen properly they fall out of their casings to the ground, but if there’s a high wind or rain at the wrong time, they may be blown off the tree with their husks still intact.  When that happens, the husks must be pulled off so the nuts can dry out.

Fresh off the tree, the nuts are too moist to eat and should be stored in a warm dry place for a month or more.  If you can’t wait, you can zap a few in the microwave to hurry the drying process.

The Carpathian’s shape is not especially attractive compared to the other trees on Locust Hill.  It has a fat circle of greenery atop a short but sturdy trunk. The leaves are large and provide dense shade in summer, but each fall when other deciduous trees have turned gold or crimson, these leaves turn an ugly brown and make the lawn look as if some mechanic’s oily rags had escaped from the clothesline.

We’ve often parked the car under the walnut on hot summer days as it’s just opposite the front door. A month ago I did just that, parked my little Miata in its shade. I guess I should have known better as the tree is obviously dying.  The trunk has lost great hunks of bark and the limbs are so full of woodpecker holes they resemble a cribbage board.

Around four o’clock that day a brief but very windy rain darkened the world and when I heard a large crack I looked out the window.  One of the largest and highest limbs had broke off and crashed down, missing the Miata by about a foot.

I wish I’d thought to take a picture of this miracle.  There’s no way my little convertible could have survived had that enormous limb landed on it.  At least the extension cord for my chain saw was long enough to reach it, and a nice little pile of next year’s firewood is now stacked up in the long shed.

I just googled the Carpathian on the Internet and found many nurseries that carry it, so don’t let the sapsuckers discourage you from buying one.  We not only enjoyed  Waldorf salad with our walnuts frequently, but also many batches of brownies. 

Why Leaves Turn



I’ve just finished reading descriptions of what goes on inside a leaf at the end of summer – dying cells, clogged arteries,  altered chemical.  Who wants to hear about the complicated inner workings of a tree’s foliage that go on to produce the autumn spectacular?  It makes the process sound as if trees were going through the menopause, their flaming colors the result of severe hot flashes.

Every morning I look across at Canaan Mountain, wondering when it will don its cloak of many colors.  What is it waiting for anyway?  Actually, it is waiting for cool nights.  Not killer frosts, which many people think are needed to produce the gold and crimson autumn colors, just temperatures that have dipped down into the 40s. A lot of different elements go into making Mother

Cool nights are what stop the corky layer between leaf stems and branches that develops to blows the whistle on food production.  The trees may like a few extra weeks of good green chlorophyll, but that green is so strong it covers up the yellow pigments, carotene and xanthophylls which are waiting eagerly to turn the woods and roadsides into shimmering gold.

The scarlet and purple pigments, anthocyanins, require high light intensities and high sugar content for their development, so they, too, need bright sunny days and cold nights.   These pigments will turn a sun-drenched (and sad to say, salt-drenched) roadside maple into a flaming orange torch. The woodland maples, who’ve been unable to trap sufficient sugar in their leaves, however, will turn a soft butter yellow.

Jack Frost is not responsible for the autumn extravaganza.  He’s the culprit who puts an end to the show by filling the woody fibers that hold the leaves to the twigs with ice crystals so that they break. If his timing is poor, Jack can ruin the entire performance, forcing the leaves to drop before they’ve had a chance to show off their colorful costumes. 

Autumn turns the dowdy, shapeless sumacs into raspberry-robed partygoers, but makes the vibrant green apple tree look more dingy than a derelict. It decorates the delicate birches with a thousand gold coins, and eventually replaces them with copper ones. 

An ash tree keeps its golden crown for only a few days, but a beech will hold its fluttering leaves, as pale as winter sunlight, until wind and snow finally tear them away.  The oaks cling to their leaves even more tenaciously.  Red oaks deepen to a beautiful burgundy, but the white oaks merely fade to brown with oxidation, the same way the flesh of an apple does when exposed to the air.

Locust Hill has no trees that become really colorful each fall.  The photo of my sugar maple at the start of this column was taken years ago.  This is what it looks like now.   And the Carpathian Walnut tree beside it. riddled with sapsucker holes, always has ugly brown leaves by October.  Even Canaan Mountain’s autumn colors are not worth a photo this year.    I hope, unlike me,  you’re surrounded by gold and scarlet trees. 

Why the Leaves Turn

Farewell to the Joys of Summer

Weather is such a safe topic of discussion in New England.  I sometimes wonder what people talk about in sunny California.  We have infinite variety here in the East – dramatic thunderstorms, heart-stopping rainbows, exhausting heat waves, exhilarating blizzards.

Even our change of seasons offers good conversation -  the first heady days of spring as the earth turns green; the lazy, languid days of summer; the precious days of autumn when we soak up the turning of the leaves and the last harvests of fresh vegetables and flowers.

You can’t really argue about the weather, just rejoice or complain.  Mother Nature goes right on about her business.  Even discussing a coming hurricane or a winter blizzard is pleasant compared to talking about the candidates in the coming election.

I have to admit that knowing Jack Frost will soon return from his summer vacation is a bit of a downer. Seeing a flock of sparrows gather in the locust trees to discuss the best route south or watching the last golden maple leaf float to earth make me feel as melancholy as the cricket’s sad lament.  How much I will miss the sweet smell of new-mown hay, the fun of picking bouquets for the house and vegetables for the table, playing exhausting but delightful tennis games.

This may sound silly, but one of the things I will miss the most will be fresh corn on the cob.  Oh, I freeze plenty for the winter, but it doesn’t compare.  I don’t grow corn since the Fords who rent my pastures and hay fields let me pick mine straight from the vast acres of corn behind their farm stand. 

I can’t remember eating corn as a kid.  What I do remember is hiding under the branches of a bridal wreath bush in the backyard and pulling the dried silk from a few ears with my cousin, stuffing them into a corncob pipe and puffing and coughing.  Do you know what corn silk’s real purpose is?  Each of those pale yellow threads is the style of a female flower.  If you think back to your school days you may remember that the female flower is called the pistil and consists of an ovary, a style and a stigma.  Deep within the immature husk, each filament of silk is attached to an ovary, which will grow into a kernel of corn when fertilized.

At the other end of each silk is the sticky stigma, waiting to catch a grain of pollen.  Under a microscope the thin strands look like feathers, each one covered with tiny hairs.  Since there are close to a thousand kernels on an ear of corn, there are also a thousand silks, which anyone who’s husked corn well knows.

The male flower is the tassel that blooms at the tip of the corn stalk.  It is made up of hundreds of pairs of spikelets, each pair containing six anthers, each anther producing about 2500 grains of pollen.  When a grain slides down each silk it fertilizes an ovary, turning it into a kernel. 

That plethora of pollen is spread by the wind and can travel hundreds of miles. It isn’t fussy about where it lands, but happily most varieties of hybrid corn will not accept pollen from a different variety. The one exception is pop corn.

 My sheep love eating all the husks as I strip them from the ears.  Mmmm.  Almost dinner time.  Guess I’ll drive down and get two or three ears for my dinner.

The Greensward



One of the few improvements man has been able to make in Mother Nature’s landscape is a well-mowed lawn.  Her prairies and mountain meadows may look smooth and beautiful from a distance, as do pastures that have been grazed, but they’re not much fun to walk over in bare feet.

This summer as the price of gas nearly doubled I didn’t see that anyone had stopped cutting their lawn to save a few pennies. Even this parsimonious old lady mows the weedy lawns on Locust Hill pictured above each Friday. They always look just fine on the weekend. 

There is just no real substitute for the incredibly green green of freshly mowed grass in spring, or the deep blue-green of a maple-shaded summer lawn, or even the pristine white blanket that stretches beyond the window in unbroken splendor after a winter snow.

Do you remember back in 1972 when the Arabs treated us to an oil embargo?  Environmentalists urged everyone to turn his or her lawn into a meadow full of wildflowers.  That idea may sound appealing, and would certainly eliminate the weekly chore of cutting the grass, but I wouldn’t call it an adequate substitute of the greensward.

When I was growing up in West Hartford, one of our more prosperous neighbors put in a six hole golf course in his front yard.  A few years later the Second World War’s gas rationing forced him to let it turn into an unmowed field. My friends and I played far more delightful games than golf in that luxurious meadow, matting down secret tunnels and serpentine paths that led to incredibly soft nests on the overgrown putting greens.

Most country clubs kept their golf courses mowed during the war by using their members’ pooled gas coupons.  But I can remember one in Vermont that found a better way.  I don’t play golf so maybe “different” would be a more appropriate adjective.  That golf course was fenced and grazed by sheep.  Each ewe was outfitted with a football helmet to protect  her from the flying golf balls.

We are so lucky in New England compared to the West and South where drought so often turns everyone’s lawn into ugly dry dust.  We usually have just enough rain to prevent such discouraging landscapes.  The last drought  I can remember that was serious enough to turn the lawns on Locust Hill brown was in 1999.

Plants sweat in hot weather, just the same way we do, but it’s called transpiration, not perspiration.  We sweat to cool our bodies, but plants do it to get rid of excess water.  Their roots need that water to carry minerals up from the soil to all parts of the plant, but once it’s been released, the plant gets rid of the water through its leaves in transpiration.

When temperatures soar into the 90s as they tend to do more frequently every summer, a maple tree can lose several hundred gallons of water in a day; an acre of pasture grass can release up to 400,000 gallons during a growing season.  So next time your tennis game gets washed out in a summer storm or all the shirts drying on the clothesline get drenched, don’t complain.  Be thankful. 

On September 24^th two years ago,  Golda Meier, our 25 year old goldfish, died.  I thought it would be nice to put her picture up for those of you who didn’t read the column I wrote about this remarkable old lady. 

Many readers have asked about the new fish I bought to replace Goldie. A tiny Comet, silvery white instead of orange, whose name, Ben Hur, I chose from among many suggested by my readers.   Shortly after I released him into the pond, we had a tremendous rain storm, so drenching that the pond overflowed the dam.

You know that song “…and he swam and he swam, right over the dam!”  I’m afraid that is exactly what little Ben did as I haven’t seen him since.  If I don’t see him by next spring, I guess I’ll get another little fish who will hopefully be strong enough by the autumn hurricanes to survive. 

Sweet Songs of Summer



So many summer songs! Sit on the porch in the evening and listen to the grand variety of insect sounds – sweet or shrill, soft or metallic, melodic or droning.  Unlike good children who are seen but not heard, summer insects are usually heard but not seen. 

 It all begins with the sweet piping of the spring peepers.  As the soft gray pussy willows turn to yellow catkins, the volume of this cheerful chorus grows almost deafening until the skunk cabbage leaves rise to fill the marsh when it peters out.

When April slips into May another frog choir made up of the greens and the leopards tunes up at the edges of the pond as dusk falls.  These fellows (girl frogs hardly ever speak, much less talk back) are followed by the belching “chuggarums” of the bullfrogs.

Soon the tree toads start, a happy trilling from the treetops. And by July the evening is filled with the rasp of the katydids.  As the days grow hot and sultry we hear the scratchy buzz of the cicadas, constant and monotonous.

Then all too soon we hear the cricket’s serenade, the finale of summer’s sounds.  As the days grow shorter and woodland green turns to scarlet and gold, this black instrumentalist appears from wherever he’s been hiding, tunes up his squeaky violin and offers us a plaintive requiem.  When those sweet notes are gone, autumn has buried the gardener’s season under a blanket of fallen leaves.

The joyful chorus of the peepers each April tells us spring has arrived.  These tiny creatures are less than an inch in size, but their “pee-eep,” two notes between B and E two octaves above middle C, can travel over open meadows for more than a mile.  They get their Latin name, Hyla crucifer, because of the small black cross on their brown backs.  Like bigger frogs their tiny throats balloon out just like bubble gum with each peep.

Tree frogs, Hyla versicolor, are not much bigger than peepers, and as you might guess from their Latin name, can be brown, gray, green or mottled.  They start life as minute tadpoles, but as soon as they replace their gills and tails with lungs and feet, these little frogs hop to land and head for the trees.  They have large disks on both their fingers and toes to make climbing easy.  Their enthusiastic trill is at least an octave below the peeper’s song.

One rarely sees the tree frog, but one year there was such a  stupendous trilling in our front yard that we went out to look.  Apparently dozens of tadpoles had suddenly turned into tree frogs all at the same time.  Hopping up the bank from the pond, they’d mistaken Bridget’s bike for a tree.  The handlebars and seat were solid tiny frogs, squished together and trilling with all their might.  What a sight!

The cicadas,  from the 17-year variety, which remains underground for that length of time, to the annual, dog-day cicada, which is the primary food of the digger wasp, all emerge from the soil in August and live in the treetops, enjoying the hot weather and making their atonal buzzing both day and night.  But they live for only a few short weeks before returning to the ground to lay their eggs and die.

The great green katydid is a long-horned grasshopper, who makes his summer noise by scraping the toothed file on his left wing with the “scraper” on his right wing.  Normally he picks his tuneless banjo only twice, “ka-ty” but sometimes three times, “ka-ty-did.” He’s likely to repeat one or the other 30,000,000 times a summer.

All too soon we’ll be hearing the cricket’s requiem that ends the summer’s symphony.  Enjoy it while it lasts. 

Teaching Kids a Love of Nature



I became a great grandmother on March 16^th, but it was only this past week that I finally met my first great grandson.  I feel very flattered that Twain (no relation to Mark.) has my middle name, Evans, as his middle name.  Such a smiley baby! I’ve yet to see him cry. 

Having a new small child sitting in the garden on Locust Hill has reminded me of all the years I spent educating children about the joys of Mother Nature. I guess I was too busy to teach my girls much except how to weed and pick the beans, but I had a grand time teaching my grandchildren.

I have six, but sad to say, Trum’s two girls grew up far away in Oregon, and Tam’s girl and boy far away in New Orleans.

Fortunately Bridget’s two boys spent summers on Locust Hill in their early years, and were constantly helping me in the garden.  

Eli, pictured above, was particularly enthusiastic, even as a toddler.  Both he and Reed learned a lot about what grew on Locust Hill, and when they were seven and nine I sent them on a treasure hunt together to see how much knowledge of the farm they’d acquired.

I wrote out my clues on white cardboard and tucked them in a variety of places. “Look behind the biggest pumpkin for your next clue.” “Where are the sunflowers?”  “Your next clue is hiding under a delphinium.”  “Tired?  Have a rest on great grandfather’s big swing.” The two boys raced around Locust Hill and had no trouble finding the clues, galloping up to the manure pile behind the barn to check out the pumpkin patch and remembering the sunflowers I’d planted way down by Hank’s shop. 

The treasure hunt was such a success that the next summer I designed a scavenger hunt, giving each grandchild a basket and a list of things to find.  The list included items such as a birch tree catkin, a stinging nettle, a poppy seed capsule, a feather, some frog eggs, a ripe raspberry, and a pachysandra leaf. They had a real struggle to figure out that long word!

Reed was smart enough to hold onto an old rag when he pulled his stinging nettle, knowing how to avoid the awful itch.  Eli knew about the itch, too, and explained that he'd picked a beautiful blue lobelia as a substitute. 

The last thing on each list was “the most beautiful thing and the ugliest thing you can find.”  Reed’s choices were a perfect lemon lily bloom and a festering, moldy apple that had been floating in the pond for a week. Eli’s choices were a bird’s pale blue broken egg shell and some scummy green algae vegetating in a neglected birdbath.

It was very satisfying to discover how much knowledge of flora and fauna my grandchildren had absorbed in their short lives.  I hope in a few years that baby Twain will be as much fun to teach. 

I’d like to remind everyone that the Norfolk Library’s fabulous book sale will be held on August 25^th and 26^th from 11 to 3PM.  There have been many more books donated than in past years.  From the first of June until the deadline on July 31^st, the 40 foot long ramp that slides the donations down to my sorting table was solidly full of boxes day after day. 

Obviously dozens of people have switched to “E-books” and decided to give the library what I call their “Real Books.” As a result over 100 hard-cover novels in mint condition have been donated this year.   And as usual, there are beautiful books in all the other categories,  from History and Biography to Gardening and Cooking, Sports and Science and of course hundreds of children's books.  There are 14 categories in all, so do come browse and buy. 

Poison Ivy



 

Can you spot the poison ivy in this photo? Anyone who lives in the country or spends time communing with nature learns to recognize the three shiny leaves of poison ivy in the spring when they're the color and sheen of mahogany veneer, but come summer, this menace can be hard to identify.

Poison ivy is a member of the sumac family which also includes poison sumac and poison oak.  It grows in most parts of the United States and can also be found in China, but does not grow in Europe.  By summer the oval, pointed leaflets (only the middle one contains a stem) are a bright, smooth green, slightly hairy underneath.  Mature plants have small greenish flowers in loose clusters, followed by grayish fruits when the leaves turn a dull red in the fall.

The plant grows in a variety of ways. It can keep its stems underground and just send up short erect branches to form a green mat of leaves, often mixed with other vegetation as in the top photo. In other areas it sometimes has long stems above ground, trailing over rocks or scrambling up tree trunks. When it climbs trees, its hairy stems look dead, but those hairs are actually aerial rootlets that help feed the plant.

I suspect most people could tell a horror story or two about this ubiquitous plant – the brother who ate it, the neighbor who ended up in the hospital after burning a pile of pulled plants, the friend who picked it to use in her first flower arrangement for the garden club.

My horror story took place when I was 12.  I went off to summer camp, cried myself to sleep with homesickness the first night and woke up the next morning with my eyes glued shut with poison ivy.  I spent the next several days in the camp infirmary, a grand beginning for a kid who’d never been away from home before.  

Locust Hill had every type of poison ivy when we moved here.  We kept a good supply of calamine lotion or its equivalent in the medicine cabinet as all three small daughters managed to acquire that nightmare rash. Can you remember that first blissful lathering of pink glop on the itching, burning bubbles?  Unfortunately, I can also remember the flaking pink paint chips of calamine that soon dried up and made the itching agony worse than ever.

We spent years trying to eliminate the poison ivy on Locust Hill, but had no success until we acquired a goat.  Comfort, a beautiful Nubian with long velvet ears, adored poison ivy leaves. Like most goats, her stomach resembled a cement mixer, managing to digest tin cans, cigarette butts and stinging nettles as well as poison ivy.

Once Comfort had gobbled up all the poison ivy, we put her in the pasture with the sheep where she gambled around in untethered freedom. Unfortunately she soon discovered that the split-rail fence was a challenging “tight-rope” she could strut across with ease.  The morning I saw her leap gracefully down from the fence into the perennial border and begin eating the flowers, she ceased to be a comfort. 

Our newspaper ad offering a free goat happily found a new home for her and since then we’ve stuck with gentle, well-behaved sheep.  When my elderly flock was recently reduced to two and I asked my readers if anyone had a cheap sheep for sale, I had a delightful response.  Here’s a photo of our new young ewe, Intrepid.  Isn’t she handsome?

If you have poison ivy on your property, getting a goat is a fine solution, provided you keep her on a tether and bring her a bucket of water every day!