Who's Talking? Just Listen!



This new computer is still giving me grief, but it has one program that is really great.  It’s called Mail Chimp and wheneever I post a new column it let’s me  write a single email to all my readers, then set a date and time for mailing it.  So here I am in California playing tennis with my three daughters, and you’re getting this column. 

It’s just a poem I probably composed thirty years ago, but vegetables don’t change much.  Enjoy.  Hopefully when I get back home I’ll be able to write a column about the fabulous gardens we saw in California.

The vegetables were arguing

Which one of them was best,

Which had the most achievements,

Which was the tastiest.

The beautiful asparagus

Spoke up the first pf all –

“I maybe past my prime, my dears,

But no one grows so tall.”

“Aw, Shucks,” the corn grinned down at her,

“I guess I shouldn’t boast,

But my old stalk can stretch beyond

The highest garden post.”

A ripe tomato shyly spoke,

“I’m fancy and high-bred,

I love the heat, it makes me sweet.”

She blushed a rosy red.

The Swiss chard leaves began to curl

And yodel at the sky.

“Our stems get cut right at the butt,

Yet still we multiply.”

“We’re very fresh and tender, too,”

 the baby onions cried.

“I think you’re fresh and impudent,”

Miss Broccoli replied.

“Such bickering!” Aunt Lettuce sniffed. 

“I think my head will split.

We’ll never figure out who’s best

Til we calm down a bit.”

The mealy-mouthed potato moaned,

“I’ve got the scabs this year. 

I’ve had no starch since early March.”

She shed a milky tear.

“Oh wipe your eyes,” an old beet said,

“At least you’re not too plump.

If I continue gaining weight

They’ll throw me on the dump.”

The cucumber let out a burp,

“My indigestion’s bad.

I guess it must have been that dose

Of garden lime I had.”

“Pipe down!” the red hot radish yelled,

“Pipe down, you silly clods!”

And each young pea laughed out with glee

And nearly split their pods.

  

The carrot plants got all choked up.

It really was absurd.

Their heads were buried in the dirt

So none of them were heard.

Poor Mr. Celery tried to speak,

His skin a sickly white.

His voice was just a whisper ‘cause

His collar was too tight.

Then Grandpa Cauliflower coughed

And shook his snow white head.

“I think we’ve bickered long enough,

Let’s get to work,” he said.

The vegetables all dug right in,

Their argument forgot.

And each long row began to grow

To fill the garden plot.   

Mouse Problems and Puzzles



We’ve had mice problems since our very first day on Locust Hill.  And not only mice but
 rats.  Since our little farmhouse hadn't been lived in for six years, I suppose it made an inviting home.  Eventually we got rid of the rats, but we still get plenty of mice, especially in the winter.

  Sad to say, my cat at age 18, died and hopefully went to a land of heavenly catnips in the sky.  Not that she’d been solving my mouse problems all these years.  She much preferred being outside catching moles, and once even a chipmunk.

Mice love Locust Hill. In winter they take over the dozens of bird houses on the place. Three or four set up housekeeping in these safe little boxes.  When I go out with a stick to clean the nests in early spring, they have a total panic attack at my invasion, scrambling around and finally leaping down to the ground. I went out several weeks ago and managed to get a few pictures of these little guys.

Catching mice in a simple snap trap never appealed to me. It  not only looks painful, it IS painful if it snaps shut when you’re trying to set it. I use what I call a “Hav-a-Heart trap, a metal box that sweeps curious mice into a holding area until I release them.  

I have two of these benevolent traps.  The Mouse Master, made by Whitmire Micro-Gen, doesn’t compare to the Ketch-All made by Kness Mfg.Co. On winter mornings it almost always contains at least one prisoner which I can easily release from the trap far from Locust Hill. Both traps can catch more than one mouse, but the Mouse Master never manages it, while the Ketch-All often has two little guys nervously peering up at me.  I suspect that the first caught mouse probably squeaks pitifully to his friends, who come to help and are swept in to join him.

I must admit that coping with these captured mice when you’ve hardly swallowed your first cup of coffee, is not the greatest way to start the day. Having that appealing little face with its round frightened eyes peering out at you is hard. Most captives are so scared they don’t even eat the cheese I’ve used as bait.  

Last month I had such a strange mouse experience that it inspired me to write  today’s column.  That morning both my traps were empty, but every time I went into the kitchen I heard little scratchy sounds. I peered in cupboards, inside the waste basket, just about everywhere until I suddenly saw a whiskered wiggling nose.

Guess where this mouse was hiding. In the toaster!  I could just make out his little pink nose  poking out from a hole no bigger around than my index finger.  I’ve circled it in red

Not wanting to turn the poor creature into toast, I pulled the plug, then tipped the toaster upside down and shook it.  Nothing happened.  I examined every possible place where he could be hiding with no luck.  When I set the toaster back up I could still hear him inside. 

I’m happy to report that that clever rodent must have escaped the toaster because there were no more little scratchy noises, much less a yowl of pain when I finally decided to make some toast. The mystery of how he got in or got out, however, will remain a mystery.  Hopefully he is now in one of my birdhouses, curled up in a nice  cozy nest.

How’s that for a mouse tale?  I couldn’t resist writing about my mouse experiences, especially when I had all these photos to use.  If you like the idea of using a benevolent trap like those I've mentioned, they're easy to find on the Internet.  . 

How's your Latin?



My mother became a sort of hermit in her old age, rattling around all alone in her house in West Hartford.  When she broke her hip at age 92, however,  she reluctantly agreed to hire some help.  The agency sent an attractive young girl whose name was Virus. If germs didn't immediately come to mind, wouldn't that name be as pretty as Vera or Violet?

Isn’t Vermin as appealing as Vernon, unless of course you automatically conjure up visions of rats and cockroaches?  Words like syphilis or rebella could make pretty names if you didn’t have previous notions of their meanings.  Why isn’t rancid as nice a name as David?  Is Claudia any prettier than phobia? The names for plants can cause these same sorts of problems.  Take the name streptocarpus.  You might think that attractive houseplant could give you strep throat if you weren’t familiar with the pottted plant

above, whose common name is Cape primrose.

 . Isn’t the name Doll’s Eyes, a baneberry's seeds pictured below,  a more fun name than Actaea Alba? I rarely use Latin names for the plants I write about.  To me a name like Prunella  vulgaris doesn’t bring to mind the little purple flower we know as selfheal, It sounds like it might be the name of one of Hank’s old girlfriends.  Of course it helps if you know that the Latin word vulgaris means common in English

When translated, all those Latin names help to identify plants, but another even more important reason to know them is because they are universal, unlike the common names which vary from place to place. 
 

You may call the wildflower above with a little yellow bloom and spotted leaves a dogtooth violet.  Other folks call it the adder’s tongue.  I like to call it the trout lily because it is a lily, not a violet, and has those speckled leaves that look similar to a trout. We should all call it Erythronium americanum and there’d be no confusion at all.

What a mouthful! I much prefer the imaginative common names, but maybe I’d feel differently if I hadn’t had such a bad start with Latin. I spent my first two weeks at boarding school in the infirmary with bronchitis and when I finally got to my first Latin class I found I’d been placed in second year Latin my mistake. The teacher was convinced I was just panicked at missing the first weeks of class, and as a consequence I was four weeks behind when I got to the right class. By then I loathed Latin. 

The first botanical name I ever succeeded in remembering was Dentaria.  Its common name is toothwort and its white blooms resemble teeth.  There are two species of this wildflower, D. multifida  which translates as "many times parted," referring to the leaves,  and D. maxima which means "largest." It could really help to know Latin.

I've never managed to keep Chimaphila umbellata and Chimaphila maculata straight, two little evergreen wildflowers of the same genus. The common name for C. maculata is pipsissewa or spotted wintergreen, a summer blooming wildflower with a variegated leaf.  It turns out that maculata means spotted. C. umbellata has no white in its leaves.  It looks like a miniature pachysandra. Its flowers are umbels. I confess I had to look that word up – “a flat-topped flower cluster in which the individual flower stalks arise from aabout the same point.”  Chimaphila combines the Greek word cheima, meaning "winter," and the Latin word phila meaning “having a preference for growing.”

This column has suddenly turned into a lot of work.  I’m afraid I’m too old to start studying Latin. I’ll leave all those botanical names to the botanists, and spend my time enjoying the flowers, whatever their names.

More Difficult Rams

D

 

 

Today marks the beginning of my 31^st year of writing Weeds and Wisdom. I thought just offering you a picture of my wonderful new zebra to finish off 2012 would help me over my feeling of burn-out, but it wasn’t enough of a rest, Writing garden columns takes a bit of research, especially when the world is blanketed in snow,  so because animal tales are easy I’ve chosen to write a little more about the rams on Locust Hill which requires only a good memory.

 

Last June I told you a bit about Rammit, the first father of our flock, Beaver, our lethargic second ram, and Zinnia, a newborn male whose mother had died.  I never finished his crazy story, so here it is.

 

After Zinnia’s mother’s death we were down to just  three ewes, so instead of turning two of  his daughters into lamb chops, we let them join the flock.  Of course this meant that come fall, incest would run rampant, but we didn’t think that would be a problem.

 

Apparently Zinnia disapproved, however. He became very cranky, backing off  and lowering his head threateningly at anyone’s approach.  We learned to treat him carefully, but that winter we’d planned a family vacation. We hired a young neighbor, Tinker, to feed dogs, cats, sheep and chickens while we were gone, and also asked our good friend Henny if she’d water the houseplants and collect the eggs. 

Each morning Henny would stop on her way to work and search out the eggs laid by our roaming chickens. One day she spotted several eggs in the sheep manger, innocently opened the inner door and  collected them.

The next thing she knew she was laid out in the muck with a tongue-panting Zinnia leering down at her.  She escaped with no serious damage, unless you consider going on to the office with runs in your stockings, manure on your skirt and egg on your face damaging.

  Henny never thought to close the door as she fled so Zinnia, his appetite whetted by his first victim, waited outside for his second.  That afternoon Tinker raced into the yard on his motorcycle and suddenly was racing around on foot, chased by the snorting Zinnia.

Tinker’s reaction was not fright but fury!  As soon as he got over his surprise, he jumped back onto his  motorcycle and gunned it straight  at his opponent. The chase was reversed (as the muddy tire tracks in the lawn showed for weeks afterward), and Tinker pursued Zinnia until the ram was as harmless and worn out as an old wool sweater.

Since there are no photos of  that catastrophe, here’s  one of nice gentle sheep eating their dinner.

 

Once we’d learned about Zinnia’s behavior we  decided we should probably sell him, but before we found a buyer, he followed in his mother’s hoof prints.  We acquired more rams in future years, but I will save their stories for the next time I need a break from gardening columns

 

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.