What My Garden Teaches About Change

I used to hate change. I was the kind of kid who cried when they changed the lineup on the Saturday morning cartoons. I liked my schedule. I still do. As an adult, nothing made me antsier than getting into work with my full day planned out and then someone dragging me into an emergency meeting....and to have my entire plan thrown out the window to deal with a crisis.

But change can be good!

My sister and my niece were planning a visit this weekend. I was already so happy and excited to welcome them here. But them Mary called yesterday to say that my nephew is home early from summer camp, and he will join us. Hurray! Part of the New York branch of the family heading down south to visit with the southern branch. Now we scramble to find a sleeping bag and an extra pillow for Matt. There's always the couch....

Then my phone rang and it is my Virginia-based brother....I had invited his family to join us for a barbecue on Sunday, but from my conversation with my sister in law I thought maybe only he could come. Nope, not just my brother, but his entire family, including my niece and her husband and my grand-nephew. So suddenly I am welcoming half of my siblings and their children into my home, and I couldn't be happier!

Changes can be good. When I was growing up, a family party consisted of dozens and dozens of extended family. Being one of five children, with my grandmother living with us, we were 8 people living in a tiny house...then you added my mom's sister and her family of four....and then the great-aunts and uncles. Oh boy, that little house was filled to overflowing. My grandmother was one of 11, my grandfather one of 13 kids, so you can image that when the great aunts and uncles arrived with THEIR families....it was standing room only. Literally. No way we had enough chairs.

During one memorable party, my sisters still remember playing in the hot, dusty attic. It was the only space available in a house filled to the brim with adults that was free for the kids!

I grew up learning to cook for an ARMY. John still complains about the leftovers. Try as I might, I still can't quite learn to cook for three. Luckily Shadow likes leftovers.

Philosophers tell us that the only thing constant in the universe is change. Looking out my window at the flower garden - the one next to the driveway that I went crazy weeding this past week - I can mark the slow, steady progression of blossoms like days ticked off on a calendar. The white and purple and pink of spring have turned into the hot yellows and oranges of the midsummer garden. My hollyhocks have faded, and now the daylilies, Rudbeckia, and marigolds hold court. The Phoebes fledged their young off of the ceiling fan and yesterday we spent an hour cleaning up after them (we had to take apart the ceiling fan to get it clean).

Time marches on...and we go with it, or we fight it. My garden never fights change. The flowers bloom, fade and move on. Sometimes I think I need to learn what my garden has to teach me.

Perennial or Weed?

"Is this a perennial or a weed?"

Good question. As John and I weeded the butterfly and hummingbird flower garden yesterday, he had to ask me over and over again, "Is this one of the perennials or a weed?"

The truth is, many flowers grown in the perennial garden to nurture butterflies and hummingbirds DO look like weeds...or, grown in other conditions, may be thought of as weeds! These flowers tend to be big, floppy, and bloom for only short bursts.

We bought the Butterfly & Flower Garden Kit from Spring Hill Nursery, and added our own plants - Buddleia, Salvia, Nepeta and Lantana.

The Penstemmon is always what confuses us. Once the big red spikes have gone away, and we're left with the long floppy stems, someone wants to rip it up.

But I do admit, we were fooled by a couple of weeds. It wasn't until later that day when we were weeding around the orchard trees that I realized that something I'd left in the Butterfly Garden was really a weed.

But what is a weed, exactly? Just a plant growing where you don't want it!

Considering that Lowe's was selling Goldenrod this week, I'm inclined to broaden my definition of what belongs in the garden...and what constitutes a weed.

Corn Corn Everywhere

I've learned that the end of July is NOT a good time in rural Virginia to try to get together with friends. It's all because of the corn.

Corn...corn everywhere...sweet corn, feed corn...backyard corn...fields of corn....corn, corn, corn.

Everyone's dealing with bushel after bushel of corn to process and store, or process and sell, or process and store for animal feed. The corn stalks along our rural road are a towering mass of green. Field after field of corn dots the landscape, interspersed with hay, tobacco and fields dotted with black and brown beef cattle.

I harvested 40 ears of sweet corn from my little 8' x 10' garden bed. The pictures today are of my 40 ears of sweet corn, awaiting blanching and freezing, and me all dirty from garden work but standing proudly by my sweet corn. We left some immature ears of corn on the stalks, so there will be more to come.


Everyone bands together to help each other during sweet corn time. Friends gather in kitchens and spend the day husking, blanching, packing and freezing corn. Canning pots are out and kitchens filled with steam as jar after jar of corn is packed, boiled and stored.

Did I mention it's corn season in southern Virginia?

Now I'm off to eat lunch...guess what's on the menu.

Victory Over Weeds

Crabgrass is evil. It invaded my flower garden. I have never seen such an invasion. Yes, I was behind in my weeding - but this was ridiculous!

It grew on the pathways. It's overtaken the flower beds. It springs up overnight. It is growing among the gravel in the driveway, along the rocks lining the beds. It grows everywhere.

There are more weeds. Nature provides great variety.

Weeds with big thorns. Vining weeds with little thorns. Weeds that gave me a rash all over my arms and made me itch all over (and no, it's not poison ivy. Poison ivy doesn't make me itch. This was something else.)












I managed to lean across my creeping juniper and gave myself a wicked juniper rash. I looked like someone had rolled me in mud, then rubbed red paint on my arms with some white dots in between. That was after Saturday's weeding session and after the lovely rash broke out on my arms.

You don't want to know what I looked like after Sunday's epic battle continued.

I spent six hours weeding on Saturday, four hours weeding on Sunday, and two days later I am still so sore I can barely move. I dug up weeds. I pulled them out by hand. John used a pick axe on sections where they grew in such a mat I couldn't make progress.

We are about halfway finished. Yesterday, torrential rains and thunderstorms all day kept us inside. Today dawned bright and clear but more thunderstorms are predicted.

Weeds, you are warned: your hours are numbered.

I took photos this morning to mark our progress. Enjoy!

I am working safely at my desk until tonight when I am back in the garden...weeding.

Hot Color Combinations

I raced out yesterday without posting most of the pictures. Here's the pictures to accompany yesterday's post - now you can see the colors! Enjoy!

The July Garden

The July flower garden here at Seven Oaks is hot, hot, hot - brimming with eye popping oranges, yellows and golds while temperatures soar. I seem to have planted midsummer blooming perennials that are just saturated with color. It's a total accident. I have about as much garden design instinct as I do the ability to do calculus (that is: zero ability). The weeds are taking over, but I hope to get out in the evenings and make a dent in them later this week.




My favorite flowers blooming now are the Echinacea - coneflower. I bought seeds in 2007, a kit from Park Seeds. I'm always buying kits. I was told that coneflower is difficult to start from seed. Maybe, maybe not. These seem to love it here in the bright full sun garden that gets hot direct sun all day long.

The kit included purple, Echinacea "White Swan" and a golden color. Now they are all blooming...just stunning clusters of them in the little island garden in the middle of the lawn. The birds love them. They land on them as they swoop over the lawn, and I think they are enjoying the seeds too.

Before temperatures soar, enjoy these hot flower colors in the July garden here in southern Virginia!

Empty Nest

Yesterday we noticed that the baby birds were so crowded in the nest that they were leaning dangerously over the edge. You may recall that in June, a mother bird called a Phoebe built a nest on the ceiling fan on our front porch.

Around noon, John snapped these pictures. We realized that the biggest one, the 'bruiser bird', seemed to have already flown away, but the parents were still flying back and forth to feed the others. I said to John, "They're like kids who won't move out of the house!" The nest was in tatters. My porch floor is covered in...well, you know.

Then at 5 p.m, John let Shadow and Pierre out for their playtime. Pierre has been visiting the birds, chirping and meowing back at them, since they were hatched. He can't get up there. He sits under the nest and chortles at the birds. They squeak back.


Pierre raced over...and suddenly the babies FLEW!



They raced in all directions, flying this way and that, bouncing into the rain gutters, up and over the roof, mother and father bird chirping after them.

And a very disappointed kitty sat on the porch, staring up at an empty nest.

The babies were still flying around the house last night. One flew into the siding but was fine - he or she flapped up and over and onto the roof. This morning, I saw three sitting on the garage roof. They are using the house as a launch pad, taking short flights up and about and then coming back to the safety of the roof. I am relieved to see all of them flying on strong, (fairly) sure wings.


It's so funny how what really happens is different from the perception of what "should" happen. I imagined that the day the babies flew, we would watch them tentatively hop to the edge of the nest, give a few test flaps of their wings, and fly a few feet. This was what I thought "should" happen.


Little did I know that Uncle Pierre would be the ones to teach the birds how to fly!

Celebrations and Memories

Happy 4th of July to all my American friends! For my non American friends, today we celebrate America's Independence Day. It is a big holiday, the second of the year (Thanksgiving being the first) that draws all Americans together across all races, religions and classes to celebrate. Other holidays are big, but many are religious, and for non Christians not a holiday. This is one of the few that is secular and just brings everyone together. We will be celebrating with a barbecue and outdoor picnic tonight and watching fireworks on television. When I was a teenager living near New York City, my brother would take my sister and me into lower Manhattan near the seaport and we would queue up for hours to wait for the Macy's fireworks show near the Statue of Liberty. To be part of a million-strong crowd, watching fireworks blaze behind Lady Liberty, pushes even the most skeptical into patriotism. For me, just remembering the fireworks makes my nose twitch with the sulfurous smell from the fireworks and the scent of hot cart-made pretzels on city streets.

Today made me think of lots of 4th of July celebrations in my life. I remember my mom making a 'flag cake', a big sheet cake decorate with blueberries, strawberries and lots of goopy white icing to mimic the American flag. I have a photo of her holding the one she made in 1976 for the Bicentennial. My dad would grill a steak on a hibachi (a little charcoal fired grill) in the backyard. I would play with my tiny plastic farm animals in the yard while my dad grilled the steak. Guess even then I knew where I belonged!

And of course my mom insisted we got to Mass (church) in the morning...to her, 4th of July and Thanksgiving were added to the official roster of Catholic Holy Days of Obligation. There was no special service, just the regular weekday Mass, but we would sing God Bless America, America the Beautiful, My Country 'Tis of Thee and spend an hour thanking God for the gifts we have. It was a great way to start a holiday for sure. My grandma left Germany in the 1920's, and she never forgot food shortages, runaway inflation, and World War I. My grandpa had fled Germany during World War I, migrating to Holland, then Canada, then the USA. I am thankful I had two first-generation American grandparents and that I knew my grandma and the stories she told, and the stories my dad repeated, to help me understand why she was so thankful to be an American. I remember how my parents tried to make us understand why freedom was so important, and so rare. Growing up in America you take so much for granted until you get to know people living in other countries and you hear news reports from countries where people live under a dictatorship. Then you start to understand why we cherish our freedoms.

No matter where I am, there's always certain sounds and smells and sights outdoors and in the garden that instantly calls to mind a time of year.

In New York, it was the first song of cicadas and crickets, and the dance of fireflies across the lawn. For my readers who don't live in America and might not know these insects, cicadas are large, ugly and pretty harmless insects with big, bulgy eyes and green iridescent bodies. They set up a shrill long cry during the hot, humid summer days. I have heard that they only "sing" when temperatures reach 80. We used to be able to tell how hot the day would be by how early the cicadas would start singing. If they were singing at dawn, running through the lawn sprinklers and buying cherry Italian ices at Shannon's Candy Store were in order!

We used to catch big Hall's toads down at the water sump. Even children like us who grow up in city-like conditions near New York City find ways to be like country kids! A sump is a big drainage area for the street water sewer systems. They generally don't have standing water like a resevoir, but can be swampy. On Long Island, there would be one about every half mile, fenced in to keep kids out, which of course challenged us to get in. The one right by my house was near the railroad tracks and had a lot of trees planted around it which to us was like the country, even though the trees were only about 10 feet away from a paved parking lot for the town playground across the street.

My friends and I would yell to our moms, "We're going to catch frogs today!", grab a pail from the cellar, and run all the way to the sump. We ran up the hill on Magnolia Avenue, down through the tunnel, an area under the Long Island Rail Road tracks that formed a long pedestrian tunnel. It echoed and we would stop and yell and carry on to hear how loud our voices would echo. If a freight train was rumbling overhead, we would count the cars and make a wish on the caboose. If the train had 2 cabooses, it was an especially lucky day!

Around the sump, we'd hide among the trees, watching where we stepped because people would walk their dogs there and never clean up after them. Then with lightning quick reflexes we would catch as many frogs (toads) as we could! They would hide among the leaves, but as kids we were close to the ground and could catch them easily.

We would bring them home and release them into the garden, with our dads congratulating us on how we 'helped' by bringing home frogs that would eat the bugs. Later that summer we would find huge toads hiding under the cucumber and squash leaves in the garden, and I always wondered if they were the same toads we'd brought home in June, now grown to monstrous size.

Here in Virginia, summer's heralds are the blackberries ripening on the bushes growing along my driveway and around the clearing. It's the changing panorama of wildflowers, the spring blossoms giving way to summer's richness of Queen Anne's lace, purple thistle, and so many more I cannot name. It's hummingbirds darting to the feeder and back to the safety of the sheltering loblolly pines. It's a mama deer and her twin fawns scampering into the clearing at sunset.

And of course, the toads. We didn't see any the first year we lived in Virginia. Last night I took Shadow out for her walk around 10 pm, and was startled by several toads hopping around near the garage. The lights on the garage must have attracted flying insects...and the toads knew a good thing when they saw it!

Happy summer on this American "official" start to summer fun!

The Great Spinach Grow Off

Do you remember the Pillsbury Bake Off contests? People enter and bake their prized recipes, and the finalists go to some sort of convention and contest and bake on site. I've seen television shows that depict what goes on behind the scenes. I've always wanted to enter. I'm not skilled enough to win, although my sisters and I have talked about entering my Grandma's recipe for Alsace-Lorraine Bread Pudding that is our family tradition and secret weapon.




I held my own version of the bake-off. It was called the Great Spinach Grow-Off. Here's what I did:

• I bought two packets of spinach seeds. One was called "Teton Hybrid" and it cost me around $2.99. The other packet was a generic "Spinach" variety without even a name that I bought at Lowes for 99 cents.
  
• There were the same number of seeds in each packet - 100 - so I knew if I planted them all, I'd have an equal number in the garden.
• We finished the raised vegetable garden bed on March 23, 2009. I divided one half of the raised bed into two equal sections and sowed the spinach seeds.
  
• They appeared to germinate equally as well.
• The Teton hybrids had dark green foliage and curly-edged leaves that were very pretty. The other spinach grew the traditional green leaves.
• Yield from both beds was about the same. In total, we ate six meals with spinach as a side dish. I froze 3 gallon bags full of spinach too. And I must have cut baby leaves for salads and smoothies at least twice from each bed.
• Yesterday, June 30, 2009, all of the spinach plants had gone to seed and were dying, so I pulled them all up and composted them.

Results of my Great Spinach Grow-Off and my recommendation:

SAVE YOUR MONEY!

The 99 cent package of seeds from Lowes was almost indistinguishable from the fancy, expensive named package. The spinach tasted about the same, grew at the same rate, and went to seed at the same rate.

For our vegetable gardening fans out there, go for the cheap spinach seeds. They grew well in our Virginia garden, and we enjoyed the harvest for many months. And thanks to the frozen bags of spinach in my freezer, I'm hoping to enjoy the harvest for many months to come.



An Update on the Baby Birds
There are FOUR not three! I saw a fourth fuzzy head popping up from behind the three siblings yesterday and called John over to confirm the sighting. The fourth one is smaller than his nest mates and less aggressive. I can't believe there are four birds crowded into one nest. Every day we watch for babies in case one pops out. The biggest one is very vigorous and he rises on his tippy toes and flaps his baby wings and they crowd around the edge of the nest. Their eyes are still shut, but their beaks are ALWAYS open!