The Gardener's Merry-Go-Round

Can you remember the excitement of a carnival’s Merry-go-round when you were a kid?  Racing to get on the big black horse, then deciding you like the white one better, then finally settling on the little gray pony so you’d be next to your buddy. The first warm days of spring are a gardener’s Merry-go-round  as we rush from one job to another. The excitement of seeing that your special rose bush has survived the awful winter, then noticing the delphiniums already need staking, heading back to the shed for stakes,  but unable to resist the sight of a scummy birdbath and getting a bucket instead and…

You get the picture.  Just a thousand different horses to choose from.  This year the first day my back was good enough to let me contemplate getting on my Merry-go-round, I thought I’d  start by checking out the Abitta garden.  To my amazement it was thick with Self-Heal, an interloper I’d never seen on Locust Hill before.  How or why it had managed to settle there, uninvited, was a puzzle.

Prunella vulgaris, the Latin name for self-heal, flips off my tongue with ease because in one of the early paragraphs in my Wildflower program I say “By the time I got married and moved to my husband’s home town, I’d long forgotten all those Latin names I learned in college Botany, and didn’t know whether Prunella vulgaris was a wildflower or possibly one of Hank’s old girlfriends.”

Fortunately good old Prunella has a small weak root and is easily pulled up, but once that job was done, my back needed a rest so I walked down the perennial border, just admiring the sight of the little green hands of lupine leaves, the dazzling clumps of forget-me-nots, unable to resist dead-heading finished daffodil blooms, finding a dozen peony shoots pushing up from under last year’s old leaves.

At the end of the border is a funny little building we call our Hottentot house.  Back in the early 70s we were inspired, having just enjoyed our first sauna  while visiting friends in Vermont,  to construct one of our own.  The Hottentot is a circular building made out of the tongue and groove boards from an old silo George Ford had just pulled down. We cut the boards into eight foot lengths, set them up against the circular foundation we’d poured, and tightened them together with wire, the same way you’d make a barrel, and  topped them with a plywood roof. Inside we constructed a platform which we filled with sling-backed chairs (so much more comfortable than benches,) put in an old kerosene stove  and  filled its top with a pile of nice round stones.  

We had a double reason to build the sauna.  Because our new pond leaked badly, it was only full and swimmable in the spring and fall, and resembled a mud puddle in the heat of summer.  The sauna allowed us to dive into the icy water in April and May and again in October and November.  A few years later we added industrial rubber to the roof so I could plant a variety of flowers on it. The roof's baking heat required  almost daily watering, more frequent than I could manage, so the only plants to survive were dandelions and weeds, but we continued to use the sauna frequently until the kids were married and were no longer living at home. From then on it was only used to store inner tubes, life preservers and other swimming paraphernalia.

What can happen to a neglected building over a period of twenty years can be shocking.  When I opened the door that day, I could hardly believe what I saw.  The weight on the roof combined with termites had collapsed the large roof beam. The silo boards had rotted in places, leaving large holes in the walls. Woodbine vines growing at the back of the building had snuck inside and wrapped themselves around the chairs whose cloth backs were tattered rags.   Decay had turned our Hottentot house into a catastrophe. 

I’m sure if Hank were here instead of in heaven, he’d have some wonderful idea of what to do, but I am a total blank. Is it worth repairing? If I tear it down, what do I do with the cement floor?  Should I buy a gazebo to take the Hottentot’s place?  I’ve been looking at dozens of gazebos on the Internet.  They're very expensive and they're just too cutsey.  I can't picture any of them on Locust Hill. And what would we use a gazebo for anyway?   It would be too open to hide the mess of swimming gear (with the leaks fixed, the pond is swimmable all summer long) or the tangle of weeds and woodbine sprawled behind it.  If any of you have a suggestion to solve this Hottentot problem, please send me an email.  In the meantime, I've shut the door.

Before the day was over both my back and I had cheered up and I continued on my Merry-go-round, transplanting a half-dozen clumps of forget-me-nots that had appeared in the vegetable garden to spots in the border, weeding around the blueberry bushes I bought last year and mulching them with fresh pine needles. They didn't look very happy, so the last thing I did was mix up some Spray ‘n Grow (a marvelous concoction that acts like a double dose of vitamins to plants) and gave the blueberries a bath and used the rest of the mix on the clematis vines, tree peonies and other perennials.

What a treat to finally spend a warm day in the garden.  I hope you're enjoying your days on the garden Merry-go-round.  We've certainly waited long enough for spring to arrive, haven't we?

Where are you putting that Vegetable Garden?

                    

Back in January I wrote a column on having a vegetable garden, hoping the idea of all those fresh vegetables would inspire my readers and help solve our  country’s obesity problems.  Now there’s another good reason to start raising vegetables – food inflation.  The price of fresh vegetables at the super market are getting as painful as the price of gas, so let’s look at the essential requirements needed for a successful vegetable garden.

Picking a good site is of course the first step, and sunlight is the most important aspect of the site to consider. That may seem obvious, but I've seen many a garden shaded by a barn or a big maple tree in the early morning or late afternoon. The more sunlight your garden gets, the better and faster just about any vegetable will grow.

When you think about where to put the garden, there are a few other things to think about besides sunlight.  Here in New England where late spring and early fall frosts are always threatening the plants that need a long growing season, picking a protected site for the garden can make a big difference.  Vegetables like melons, winter squash, and sweet potatoes may require as much as 90 days to ripen.  And of course tomatoes, which we all grow, not to save money but to get that real home-grown flavor, are the most susceptible to frost.

Our first garden on Locust Hill was up behind the barn, surrounded by open meadow.  It was so unprotected that we could easily get a killing frost in June and once had one in mid-August. We hardly ever got anything but green tomatoes.  It took us almost ten years to move that far away garden down to the back yard. By doing so, we gained almost a month to our growing season as it was beautifully protected from frost - the garden shed on its north side, a retaining wall to the west and the house (not so close as to block the sun) to the south. 

Obviously good soil is another important ingredient for a successful garden  and was actually the reason we put our first one where we did.  Our other choices had terrible soil - clay fit for a potter's wheel and rocks enough to build a stone wall.  But unlike limited sunlight, poor soil - too much clay, sand, rocks - can be turned into good soil.  Adding compost and manure will turn the worst soil into something vegetables  thrive in.  Planting Swiss chard in a different area each year can do wonders as its roots spread and dig down for five or six feet, aerating the soil.  Then they decay over the winter adding humus and nutrients.

Having the garden in the backyard had many other advantages.  The previous garden had been "out of sight" and also "out of mind." It was easy to neglect, easy to forget to weed or water or even harvest the beans. Having the dinner's vegetables ten steps from the kitchen was a boon when suddenly I needed a few chives for the salad or  a cucumber for a sandwich.

It also eliminated the problem of deer and woodchucks and other wild critters that had plagued the other garden, since our dogs bark their heads off whenever unwelcome wildlife is tempted to invade.  And that brings me to another important ingredient of a successful garden - a good fence. Possibly if you live in a suburban community, the wild critters that would plague my garden wouldn't bother yours, but I think even suburbia has rabbits, chipmunks and nowadays probably more deer than are found out in the country.

I have my fingers crossed that two columns on the delights of growing your own vegetables will inspire you, even if it's just to grow a few tomato plants in a big pot.

Spring Chores at 45 degrees??

I suspect all New England gardeners have been waiting more impatiently for warm weather than kids wait for Christmas.  After the monster winter we've suffered through, the hunger for spring has become more and more painful as the temperature refused to get beyond 50 degrees.

When the day finally arrived that I didn't have to put on a woolly hat and mittens, I went out to face the winter's destruction.  I knew exactly what my first job would be - picking up the bark and branches my dying sugar maple had been shedding all winter and the stubby broken limbs littering the lawn from the Carpathian walnut, riddled with holes made by the sapsuckers.

That debris will make good kindling next year for the wood stove, but picking it was a full morning's work and not what my bad back needed.  In fact the only other job I could tackle that day was one that didn't 

involve leaning over - cutting back the autumn clematis beside the front porch.  It always amazes me how fast  the new stems of that clematis will sprout and climb and even reach the porch roof by June. That is 

not true of my other clematis vines which I must cut back in a very limited way.                                      

Since my back is still in bad shape, I was relieved when that one warm day was followed by more cold  and rain, but how to finish the rest of this column presented a problem.  I decided to fill it by mentioning a few of the other jobs I will tackle when my back and the weather improve.  You probably won't learn much, but it   might make you thankful that your own garden chores aren't as major as the ones I'll face on Locust Hill.     

As you can see, I don't tidy up my 100-foot perennial border each fall.  The big reason I wait until spring is because the stalks of all the tall plants, phlox, asters, daisies, etc. if removed in late September or October must be individually clipped, while in April they can be broken off by hand, a dozen at a time.  Plus the fact that doing the job in April is much more fun - discovering the first green leaves of a lupine pushing up through the debris, uprooting a thistle with ease from the wet soil, or releasing a struggling daffodil of the old dead leaves strangling it.


There are scummy birdbaths to clean and all that tired ivy on the wall behind the birdbath that needs to be clipped - so much prettier when you can see the stone wall.  There are also many shrubs that need pruning and as you can see below, hunks of lawn uprooted by the town plow to replace.

                                                     

And lest I forget - there's the yearly chore of mending the sheep fences.  This is usually not a big job, but after the winter's heavy snows, our fences, as you can see, are showing their age.  Hopefully you will not have quite so many spring chores to tackle when warm weather gets here.  Surely we will wake up to      beautiful sunshine on Easter morning. 

                                 

Harbingers of Spring

I must have written half a dozen columns on the harbingers of Spring - the first flock of robins landing on the lawn in a whir of wings, the sudden appearance of bright red buds on the silver maple just beyond my bedroom window, the goldfinches shedding their drab winter gray to don sunny summer feathers, the happy sound of peepers singing in the swamp.  This year for the first time in almost twenty years one of my favorite forerunners of Spring is missing - Golda Meir.

You probably remember my beautiful goldfish who died last summer at the age of twenty-five. Every April she would rise from the muddy bottom of the pond and hover beneath the inlet where I could greet her.  When she died I asked my readers if any of them could offer me a good name for my next goldfish.  I'm ashamed to say that I didn't keep a record of the 10 or 12 names I was sent, exept for the one I liked the best, Ben Hur, sent to me from Beret Woodworth.

Several readers also wrote to tell me the best variety of fish I should buy next, fish that are able to survive being dumped into a totally new environment.  If you're one of those readers, please send your recommendations again as I didn't keep those emails either.  I'm afrad that once read, I delete all too many nice emails.

This year there seem to be very few harbingers of Spring to be seen yet.  A few snowdrops and crocuses are the only cheerful sights I spied when I went out looking yesterday.  Did you know that the ancestors of the crocus resided in the tropics and had no bulbs?  As they migrated north to colder climates they developed this method of storage in order to survive.  It took untold millions of years to perfect such a clever tecnique.

If you slice down the center of a bulb - a daffodil bulb is easier to try than a crocus - you can see the pre-formed leaves and flowers packed tightly inside, waiting for the warmth and water that will swell them to their full size.  What would we northern gardeners do if crocuses and daffodils and other such plants hadn't figured out how to store the following year's growth in this form?

When I eliminated my Monet garden many years ago, turning the area into a lawn, I decided to plant crocus bulbs  as well as grass seed, but there was a problem.  Once the flowers of the crocus have faded, the plants need a certain amount of time for the slender leaves to store enough food for the next year's blooms. No garden book that I could find would tell me just how long that amount of time needs to be.  So the following spring  after these little darlings bloomed, I marked the calendar and waited until Memorial Day to mow the lawn.  At that point the crocus leaves were turning brown and the lawn looked like a hay field.

The following year I had plenty of crocus blossoms, but Memorial Day is pretty late to start mowing the lawn.  To make a long story short, I cut the lawn a little earlier each spring until the year when only about 3 crocus appeared.  Lawns are not a very good place to plant crocuses.  Fortunately the ones I've planted in the cracks of the terrace flagstones or in the flower beds do just fine.

A flower that rises almost as early as the crocus is the coltsfoot, a sad little yellow bloom that is most often found in large clumps at road edges.  If you see it only from a car window, you might easily mistake it for the common dandelion.  Look carefully, however, and you'll discover that even though the golden shaggy head is similar,, it is unaccompanied by the usual jagged green leaves.  In fact it doesn't have any foliage at all.

What an odd name, coltsfoot.  Was it a cure for hoof and mouth disease back in the days of our ancestors?  Maybe it grows in horse paddocks? With no leaves and a scaly anemic stem that couldn't possibly produce enough chlorophyll to support the blossom, could it derive its food from horse droppings?

I might never have found the answer had we not asked the town for its road sweepings many years ago to fill in a washout on our road to the upper pasture.  Salty sand seems an inhospitable environment for anything except hermit crabs to grow in, but that summer I noticed that it was supporting a large cluster of unfamiliar leaves.  The following spring I found dozens of golden coltsfoot flowers bloom in that same spot.

Sure enough, when I looked up coltsfoot in the garden encyclopedia (strangrly enough it is rarely included in wildflower books,) there was not only a picture of the blossom, but another of the leaves.



          Coltsfoot in bloom                                      Leaves of the Coltsfoot



According to the Encyclopedia the name comes from the fact that the leaf resembles a colt's foot.  It does?  I've never studied the hoof of a cot, but I can't imagine it looks like those leaves.  Obviously I'm in the minority, however,  as other names for the plant include horse hoof, foal's wort and bull's foot.

Coltsfoot's botanical name is Tussilago fargara, from the Latin tussis, meaning cough. The plant was brought to America by early settlers to be used as a remedy for coughs and other respiratory ailments.  The leaves were collected in small bunches, dried and then added to a variety of tonics.  They were also smoked as tobacco by asthma sufferers.  Why someone already having difficulty breathing would want to smoke even an herbal cigarette is a mystery more puzzling than the name coltsfoot.

I don't think I'd consider this ordinary little plant the most exciting harbinger of spring, but I guess that after this past winter any of Mother Nature's signs that warm weather is arriving would be pretty thrilling. 

A Corker of a Controversy




Ferdinand under the Cork Tree

I'm not much of a wine drinker, but a few weeks ago when I was helping host an art reception at the library I was looking around for the corkscrew when I realised I didn't need one.  All the wine bottles had screwtops. I turned to my fellow hostess in surprise. " Is the library getting so cheap it can't afford to buy good wine for these receptions any more?" I asked.

"No, no," she replied. "This is an expensive wine.  It's just that  most wineries have given up using corks.  Apparently they've discovered that screw tops are much better."

Sure enough, when I went on the Internet I soon learned about "cork taint," the reason why even the most expensive wines have screw tops nowadays.  Cork taint refers to the undesirable smells and tastes found in a bottle of wine, especially spoilage that can only be detected after bottling, aging and opening.  Other factors can be responsible for a bad smell, such as wooden barrels or poor storage conditions, but the cork is usually blamed, hence the expression "corked" when referring to a wine found to be tainted.

 The chief cause of cork taint is the presence of trichloroanisole (TCA) in the wine.  The production of TCA results when a cork tree takes in chlorophenol, a compound which is found in many pesticides and wood preservatives.  More frequent use of such chemicals in recent years is possibly one reason the problem of cork taint has increased. Corked wine containing TCA has a characteristic odor that wine connoisseurs think resembles that of a moldy newspaper or a wet dog.  In almost all cases the wine's native aromas are reduced significantly, and a very tainted wine is quite unpalatable, though harmless.

A study of 2800 bottles of wine tasted at the Wine Spectator, at its facilities in Napa, California, showed that 7% of bottles were tainted, but the cork industry claims a 1% or less in their latest study. I'm afraid the debate between the cork industry and those advocating screw tops will undoubtedly be lost by the corkers.

How sad!  I guess I shouldn't feel nostalgic, but I felt the same way when I finally gave up my wooden tennis recquet for the new one Hank and I referred to as a "fat head."  All this talk about wine corks also recalled vivid memories of the vacation we took in Portugal when we saw many cork forests. 



       A newly skinned cork tree                A  tree not skinned for 9 years


"Forest" isn’t a good description for the large fields where  cork oaks grow. Since these handsome trees usually live for about 150 years and spread their branches over a wide area, they are planted at least 20 yards apart.  The ground beneath them is usually plowed and seeded with sheat.  Once the wheat has been threshed, flocks of sheep are allowed to graze the stubble. 

The first cork bark is harvested when a tree os 15 or 20 years old..  The process involves making a circular cut around the base of the trunk close to the ground and another one where the tree begins to branch.  This layer of cork bark is then peeled away. 

The first time Hank and I drove through a cork forest we both winced as we saw the trees that had been cut that year.  They looked terribly  raw, and tender,  their trunks a shocking color, as deep red as a Hereford bull.  We felt so sorry for these poor skinned trunks that we finally stopped the car to see them up close, and much to our delight discovered that the velvety looking new bark felt as strong and rough as the bark of trees that hadn’t been skinned.

To protect future harvests, a law requires that each cork tree be marked with its harvest date and cannot be cut again for nine years. All those sore-looking red trunks were marked with a “0” representing 1990, the year we were in Portugal, while those marked with a “9” for 1989, were the rich brown of a thoroughbred horse.  Trees that had been cut in earlier years had turned from black to gray as the outer bark grew thick (from the inside out) with new cork.

A one-inch cube of good cork has about 200,000,000 air-filled cells, the reason it can be compressed to make good insulation. Virgin cork, the first stripping, is of poor quality, but surprising though it may seem, does no harm to the tree and in fact stimulates it to make better and better cork.

So now you know that the marvelous picture of Ferdinand the Bull sitting under a tree full of dangling corks is not for real.  Cork bottle stoppers don’t grow on trees.  Neither do bulls behave like Ferdinand. I speak with authority about that as the highlight of our trip to Portugal was a bullfight.

The bulls in Portugal are neither dairy nor beef cattle, but a fierce breed known for their propensity to charge without the slightest provocation. Well before the event we were convinced by several knowledgeable Portuguese that the barbed darts and lances which pierce the thick layer of fat on a bull’s neck during the performance are no more than pin pricks to the bull and are  not used to anger him.  He’s already furious by nature.

After a glorious parade of matadors and picadors marching around the arena to stirring band music and dressed in silver embroidered costumes,  the fight between a snorting, pawing, swaggering bull and a superb horseman called a rejoneador begins. Making a terrified, dancing horse prance directly toward a charging bull is a breath-taking feat to see.  And to watch the rejoneador deflect his mount at the last second and thrust a lance between the charging bull’s shoulders left us gasping.

Once the horseman has succeeded in putting his three lances and three darts in the bull to a background of marvelously dramatic band music, an even more spectacular event follows.   With a fanfare of trumpets, eight young men vault into the ring and line up opposite the panting irate bull.  The lead boy, arms crossed with great bravado, stalks toward the bull shouting taunts until the animal thunders toward him.  With split-second timing, the boy leaps onto the bull’s head and the other seven boys try to stop the bull’s charge before he reaches the other side of the ring.

I say “try” because it doesn’t always work, in which case these macho volunteers all scatter, leap over the wall or fall down and protect their heads from trampling hooves. Heart in my mouth, I sat through this amazing performance by six different bulls, not one of which resembled Ferdinand.  Each bull eventually became dizzy from going in circles, trying to shake the last macho male from his tail, at which point he joined a herd of fat lazy steers brought into the ring and led them out the gate.

No bull is used for more than one bullfight.  If he’s been especially good in the ring he is then used for breeding.  If not, he ends up on the dinner table.  You’d think such an angry creature would make tough meat, but we were told that it is twice as tender as that of regular steers. 

It's Elementary, Dear Readers - Growing Radishes

    

            How I miss my old website. I dislike blogs!  Even the name is unattractive.  My blog won’t let me put my photos where I want them.  It won’t let me indent the first sentence of each paragraph.  It won’t let me have tidy margins. If I preview a column I can't get back to fixing it. 

OK, got that off my chest!  Computers give everybody grief except the young who don’t seem to have any trouble at all.  I remember how excited I was the first time I tried writing on the computer at the Torrington Register where my first columns were published.   What a thrill! It was like magic!

Being able to highlight and pick up the third or fourth paragraph when I realized it would make the perfect opener and just drag it right up there. Wow!  Being able to check my spelling, which is outrageously poor, or strike a key and have a whole column zip off to my editor. I was as exited as a caveman who’s been rubbing two sticks together to make his fires and is suddenly offered a Bic.

As I recall, I burned myself a few times before I got the hang of my first computer. I particularly remember the screen blinking “INVALID ENTRY” every time I tried something new.  When it did that for about the 5^th time I screamed “Don’t you dare call me an invalid!  I may not being doing well, but I’m not SICK!”  

Old ladies such as yours truly have computer problems every time we turn around, but there’s no question but these machines are a fantastic invention. I just wish I’d been about 15 instead of 50 when I started using one. My mind gets dimmer and dimmer with each year. Even reading “Computers for Dummies” is difficult.

The other day an old friend (his
name will probably come to me
some time late at night) came up
to me at a party and asked if it
was a good time to plant his
radishes. He was obviously
being funny since another
blizzard had just dumped
another foot of snow on
New England, but I totally
missed the joke and started
explaining about radishes
before I caught on.  Yes,
radishes are one of the first
vegtables you can grow, but not quite yet. They are also one of the easiest to grow.

They sprout in only a few days and before you know it, they're ready to be harvested.

All that may be true, but you can still produce cherry bells with the crunch of a sponge, white icicle with the bite of a jalapeno pepper, or some black Spanish that taste like garden dirt.  So I’ve composed the following manual for Radish  Culture.  If followed it should produce good results, and hopefully no frustrations.

                                                RADISHES FOR DUMMIES

The Plant Key  -  The fatter the seed and the deeper it is planted (one and a half inches), the bigger the radish.  If you like small radishes, plant the seeds only an inch deep or even less.  The soil's Ph can be anywhere from 6 to 8.  Use lots of compost or well-rotted manure, but no fresh manure.  As with all root vegetables, a loose sandy soil is best.

The Grow Key – Steady, uninterrupted growth is important, which means soil temperature between 60 and 70 degrees.  How you control this factor can be a problem, but it’s your problem, not mine. The other essential is plenty of water. If necessary this is done with the hose.

The Harvest Key – Don’t try to prolong the harvest of a row of radishes that have been planted all at once.  They will be ready to pick for only a few days and if any are left in the ground longer they will become tough and pithy.  Plant short rows a few weeks apart.

The Enemy Key  - If you have problems with root maggots, dig some hardwood ashes into the soil before planting and spread them on the top as well to repel the flies that lay root maggot eggs.  Few other marauders bother with radishes, although we once had an Irish water spaniel named Bog who adored them, the hotter the better.  Bog would pull one up, hold the leaves between his paws and chomp down on the red root.  Then his eyes would water and he’d foam at the mouth.

The Save Key – This function key is not necessary for Radish PCs. I just mention it because if it's if not used properly on a computer, catastrophe may result, such as losing a completed column two hours before deadline.

The Cook Key – Don’t just use radishes as a snack or appetizer.  Try putting these crisp vegetables in stir-fry dishes, in salads, or turn them into pickles.  Add some radish leaves when you’re cooking spinach.  Although radishes aren’t particularly rich in nutrients, a cup contains about 26% of the vitamins we should consume each day.

If you have trouble following this manual, don’t worry.  You may have sick radishes, but no one will pop up telling you you’re an INVALID!

Winter Limits

Snow on Locust Hill

The world beyond my window is a vision of white.  It's been a really tough winter, hasn't it?  I can't get to the compost pile, my sheep can't get out of the barn, I had gutters that blew away in the wind, leaks in  the
master bedroom, plus a chimney fire.  But you've got to admit this year's New England winter has been     spectacularly beautiful.  It's a little hard to think about gardening, however.  My solution has been to get     out my Idea File which is full of newspaper clippings, jotted down thoughts that never germinated and a lot of little informative nuggets on a par with string too short to save.  I think of them as balloons too small to blow up into full sized columns.   
, 

                    

For instance, did you know you could turn your flower garden into a clock?  There's a flower that opens at just about every hour of the day.  These time-keeping mechanisms are known as circadian rhythms, from the Latin circa diem     which means "about a day."  We start with the Scarlet Pimpernel whose blossom unfolds each morning at 8 AM.  By   9AM the dandelion shakes out its shaggy yellow head and at 10 the morning glory tells us the time.     At 11 the water lily opens, followed at noon by the goatrsbeard.  Now we're up to 1PM when Califormnnia poppies spread their petals, but only on sunny days.  Chicory tells us when it's t 2PM, but when we skip to 4PM and - you guessed it - the 4 l'clocks open their flowers. Next it's the evening primrase...  OK, you get the idea.  I'm chucking that article into the wastebasket. 

Let's see what else is in my file. Here's an article titled "Doggedness pays off" about a Florida gardener who spreads

dry kibble, cat litter and alfalfa pellets on her garden, covering this unusual combination with cardboard and hay.  The dogfood is full of vitamins and trace minerals.  The alfalfa pellets provide potassium and beneficial bacteria as well as releasing nitrogen and phosphorus.  The clay in the cat litter helps to hold water in the garden's sandy Florida soil and the topping of cardboard and hay deters raccoons                                                                                                                     

Here’s a newspaper clipping I probably should have already thrown away.. “David Kurt of Pennsylvania State U. says that nude gardeners pick up 16 more pesticides on their bodies than gardeners wearing normal clothing.” Daughter Trum sent me this ages ago because I happen to live at the end of a dead-end road without a neighbor in sight, and used to enjoy sitting on a car mat in the nude when weeding the garden. Then I began wearing a Walkman while I weeded and decided if I was going to wear earphones while gardening, I’d better also wear clothing. OK, that’s crumpled up and thrown away.  I doubt if I could turn it into a full length column.

How about this one -  “What the Trees Really Say”  No one has discovered what Longfellow’s murmuring pines and hemlocks are talking about, thank goodness, but biologists have evidence that when Sitka willow trees are attacked by insects they communicate their distress to other trees by sending chemical signals.  Trees attacked by tent caterpillars exude a chemical called ethylene, a caustic compound present in wood tar, which when introduced into the tree leaves, makes them less appetizing to insects.  Nearby trees, even though not yet under attack, obviously get the word and begin producing this defensive chemical as well.

I always like to include something useful in my columns and I'm afraid my Idea File has failed in that respect.  Just this week, however, I  received an article on the affects of weather on the world’s food supply. that is well worth reading. I’m not a great believer in Global Warming since the temperatures on Locust Hill have already been below zero three times this month, but there’s no question that our climate gets crazier every day. So whether we’re headed for years of roasting heat or another Ice Age, our food supply will be in trouble. I hope you’ll go to http://tracking.etapestry.com/t/15336973/697217843/53995403/0/, click on “Food Fight”  to the right and read the article.  And when you finish, I hope you'll start planning where you’ll put your vegetable garden come spring.                                                                                                              

Here's one more little balloon in the form of a light-hearted poem  given to me by a biology teacher whose name I’ve forgotten.                                                                                                                  .

There should be no monotony

In studying your botany.

It helps to train and spurs the brain

Unless you haven’t gotany.

It teaches you – does botany –

To know the plants and spotany

And learn just why they live and die

In case you plant or potany.

You learn from reading botany

Of wooly plants and cottony

That grow on earth, and what they’re worth

And why some spots of notany.

.