slimy surprise

Earlier this week I just about finished deadheading all the freesias and hyacinths in our front garden. It's a complex process and has required several sessions of work. We're talking about hundreds of snips here, with faded blossoms joining the perma-mulch and leaves left to dry in place while nourishing the bulbs and corms beneath.

After our recent rains, the floppy freesias tend to form an ugly sodden mass, and so I have developed a technique of lifting their leaves, trimming off the faded blossoms, giving the leaves a shake or two, and letting them fall. This exposes weeds -- petty spurge, oxalis, tufts of grass, and even the occasional Star of Bethlehem -- while fluffing up the dying freesias and making them look a little better during the wait for convolvulus mauritanicus and Mexican evening primrose to fill in.

Hyacinths' blossom stalks stand taller than those of freesias, and their glossy leaves stay dark green after the flowers fade, so deadheading them is easier. Nevertheless I started poking around in their foliage to look for weeds and -- voila!  -- found snails clinging to the undersides of hyacinth leaves. Since discovering Sluggo Plus two years ago, we have not had a problem with snails and slugs, but by the time I'd finished deadheading the hyacinths I'd found eight mature snails and trampled them gleefully in the gutter.

And now my morning ritual must include hyacinth leaf surveillance and land mollusk sacrifice, until the snails find safer places to wait out our summer dry spell. Three succumbed this morning.

noiseless, patient

I enjoy watching spiders, indoors and outdoors, at home and at cultural venues such as zoos and natural history museums. I try to set a good example for arachnophobic friends by transporting spiders gently outdoors instead of smashing them or sluicing them down the drain. I do try to stay away from the black widows and brown recluses, but tarantulas fascinate me.

The phrase "a noiseless patient spider" often comes to mind when I am watching spiders, and recently I felt an urge to know more about its origin and context. I turned first to the works of Emily Dickinson. Since she had written "a fly buzzed when I died" and "how public, like a frog." I assumed she must be my spider poet.

So wrong!

Walt Whitman wrote A Noiseless Patient Spider. This knowledge was strangely satisfying to me, because I've always liked Whitman's poetry much better than I've liked Dickinson's. Reading the whole poem, I was entranced by its tight structure and the parallelism of its two five-line stanzas: the first describing the spider in its "vacant vast surrounding" and the second making an analogy to the poet's soul, "Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them ...Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere."

Ah, the old microcosm / macrocosm theme! Of course I was reminded of Andrew Marvell's On a Drop of Dew, which for me is the quintessential 'metaphysical' poem. "Seeking the spheres to connect them," I moved on to William Blake's Auguries of Innocence, which starts: "To see a world in a grain of sand ... And eternity in an hour" but turns into a series of rants against cruelty at all levels, including "The wanton boy that kills the fly / Shall feel the spider's enmity."

And so I am brought back to spiders, and to my surprise that Walt Whitman had written A Noiseless Patient Spider. I think of Whitman as the poet of noise and impatience -- known for the "barbaric yawp," and "happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place—not for another hour, but this hour" Carol of Occupations, line 157).

I prize silence and spiders, but might never have thought of them together if I hadn't been stuck in this web of poetry.

tree revision

In Cyathea mater epiphiticorum, I wrote about tying a variety of epiphytic plants to the trunk of a dead tree fern that has stood in our front garden for years. I had started this experiment late last fall with two cuttings of basket plant (Callisia fragrans).

With almost daily misting from a spray bottle, the basket plant regularly produced new green leaves at its tips, while its older leaves turned a purplish red and then brown. The redness was caused by exposure to sun, while the crispy brown leaves were simply dead. As new growth slightly outpaced losses, I not only rejoiced in having remade a tree, but also added epiphyllums and epidendrums to the mix and  gave my creation its outrageous Latin name..

A couple of weeks ago, while cutting off dead leaves,  I noticed something sticking out of one of the basket plant stems. Curving to a sharp point, it looked like a parrot's beak, but in fact it was a whole new shoot of tightly furled leaves. Looking more closely, I saw that it was growing on a short piece of stem that had no other leaves. Evidently this stem had broken off one of the two original cuttings.

Delighted with the new growth, I looked critically at the tree as a whole and decided that the clumpy epiphyllums had to go. They had made absolutely no progress, and even if they had, they didn't seem compatible with the feathery basket plant. And so I untied several strips of the raggedy brown towel I'd used to tie the epiphytes to the tree fern trunk, removed and discarded the epiphyllums, and moved a sad epidendrum to a less obvious position.

Two delicate tillandsias of different sizes took the place of the rejected epiphyllums. Finally I added some strands of Spanish moss (actually a type of tillandsia) at the top of the trunk and the bottom of the basket plant stems.

Potentially, my recycled tree fern could bear five different colors of blossoms. I have never seen a basket plant in bloom, and would bet on the common epidendrum to be the first if not the only flower. But it's time for me to step back and let nature surprise me with whatever new growth my efforts may have fostered. Meanwhile, nasturtiums are creeping toward the base of the tree and will create their dependable bright orange accents.

Balanced between control and chance in this fascinating project, I feel uniquely ready for the equinox.

reprieves and rationalizations

In my continuing quest for personal organization,* I have felt that perhaps I should be planning my blog postings more carefully. In a sense this is a non-issue, because I've never had a problem finding topics. In line with my simple theme of pre[and/or post]-occupations, I simply write about what's on my mind. Problems may arise, however, when an issue is 'date-sensitive.'

Having learned late in 2010 that the Pantone company announces their Color of the Year in January, I have taken pains to post about it on January 31 of 2011 and 2012, and I look forward to doing so in 2013 and beyond. On the other hand, I was chagrined to have missed National Bean Day this year after covering it lavishly on January 7, 2011, only one day late.

In January of this year, I set a goal of writing two blog posts per week, and in the seven weeks since January 9 I have in fact achieved this goal by writing fourteen. Feeling very good about this, as promised by my personal organization guru at Simplify101.com, I have turned my attention to March's postoccupations.

Ada Lovelace Day would seem to loom on March 24, as it did when I last posted about it, in honor of Beverly Grigsby. But wait! That post was written in 2010, and my post in honor of Grace Murray Hopper was written in 2009! So what happened to Ada Lovelace Day in 2011? Googling reveals that it was celebrated on October 7 -- not with the traditional barrage of blogging, but with a 'live' event in the U.K. and a few dribs and drabs of videos and blog posts.

Ada Lovelace Day 2012 has been set for October 16, and I have subscribed to the FindingAda blog and requested to join the Ada Lovelace Day group on Facebook, so as to keep abreast of the latest developments. But wait (yes, again)! All of the FindingAda posts  -- even the announcement of the 2011 event -- are dated on a single day (February 9, 2012), and the Facebook page had no postings between March 3, 2011 (announcing the 2011 event) and February 22, 2012, when the group's 'admin' stated: "Oops, forgot we had an FB page! Anyway, yes, 16 October this year! Get the date in your diary and keep an eye on Twitter."

I have indeed made a note of the new date. Keeping an eye on Twitter, however, is beyond my level of commitment to Ada Lovelace Day, and frankly I don't have a lot of faith in the event's other modes of communication. One of FindingAda's February 9 postings revealed that the original blog had been "severely hacked over Christmas" and was in the process of being "rescued." This is sad, seeing that Ada Lovelace Day's mission is to provide role models for women in the 'STEM' disciplines: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.

I certainly am in favor of role models, and sometime between now and October I should certainly find one to honor on Ada Lovelace Day. In fact, I have two very special candidates in mind. It's nice to know that I have several months to choose between them.
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*Currently this takes the form of almost continuous enrollment in the excellent on-line workshops given at Simplify 101.

can you take me to the ice rink?

I'd spent most of two weekends helping Sandra get ready to move to Visalia, and when  I drove home from a round of errands on the following Tuesday, I really expected to see that she was gone. She'd been bustling around in front of her garage when I left in the morning, and it looked like she had everything packed up and/or neatly arranged in the parking strip so that scavengers could easily take what they wanted.

As I drove out of the alley onto my street, I spotted Sandra. She saw me, and ran toward my car, virtually throwing herself onto the hood. "Can you take me to the ice rink?" she asked breathlessly. I was puzzled by her request and the urgency of it. Why would a middle-aged woman, needing to get out of town in a hurry, decide to go ice skating in the middle of the afternoon?

The explanation turned out to be simple. Our community's ice rink is a major landmark, but the truck rental agency across the street from it is not so well known. Correctly sensing that I could easily find the one but not the other, she asked me to take her to the ice rink. We both dissolved in giggles at the vision of ourselves wobbling around on the ice in the middle of a weekday afternoon.

Then Sandra said, "I wish we'd known each other when we were young." I just had to reply, "I AM young, but I know what you mean!" Our vision shifted to that of our teenaged selves hanging out after school at places like ice rinks, and the moment became serious for a little while.

I dropped Sandra at the ice rink and watched her run across the street to pick up her rental truck. After tearful goodbyes, she made the three-hour drive to Visalia, where a nice home and a new job awaited her.

There's never enough time to spend with friends. I wish we'd known each other when we were young.

volunteerism

Yesterday I noticed two volunteer sweet peas growing in a crack along the edge of our front walk. I tried pulling them up, but they were deeply rooted. and I fully expect to see them emerge again. Sweet pea surveillance will be part of my puttering routine until the path is cleared..

My first experience with volunteer sweet peas was in November 2010, when I carefully transplanted every one to stand along the fence, interspersing them with sweet peas I'd grown from seed. These became the plethora of purple sweet peas noted in spring 2011.

On the verge of spring 2012, thanks to having mulched last summer with spent sweet pea vines and their mature seeds, I have countless volunteer sweet pea seedlings in the front garden. I provided stakes for the first ones to climb on, and even placed a tomato cage over a big clump of them. But, having read somewhere that sweet peas may be allowed to sprawl, I think I'll remove these props and see what happens.

With three volunteers thriving in the space where sweet peas have been planted in the past, we WILL have a dependable source of blooms -- probably dark purple. Their spent vines will again become mulch for the front garden. Meanwhile, regardless of their state of development, the sprawling sweet peas will be fulfilling their fabaceous destiny by drawing nitrogen out of the air and into the soil. If they manage to bloom, we'll enjoy seeing the flowers rear their little heads in unlikely places. What fun it would be to watch them climb up the camellia or azalea, or even venture among the epiphitic plants on my beloved dead tree-fern trunk,

While sweet peas compete for space, my single hyacinth bean stalk has become rampant on the side fence and garden arch. Its unscented blossoms, though not as frilly as the purely ornamental sweet pea, make lovely bouquets with the addition of African blue basil or another fragrant herb. I try to keep the hyacinth beans from setting mature seed, but it would not surprise me to see them show up as next year's new volunteers.

berry imperative

Two years ago we bought two one-gallon pots of "spineless" boysenberry plants -- with two plants in each pot -- and planted them next to our chain-link fence behind the herbs and occasional veggies that grow in a 30"-wide strip of south-side garden.

The summer of 2010 brought very few berries, 2011 a few more, and the 'fring' of 2011-12 has brought long canes that must be cut back and tied up properly if our little 'berry farm' is going to be at all productive this summer. This will be a chore, since not all of the plants are as spineless as advertised. I shall wear long sleeves and maybe even gloves to do the deed, but inevitably blood must flow and Lady Macbeth be "done."

Some of the boysenberry canes have grown to where their tips touched the ground and took root. These are usually called "pups," and dealing with them must be my first priority if we are to avoid an impenetrable thicket such as Alice's raspberries made in Idaho when she stopped tending them. If our  boysenberries strayed even a foot from the fence, they'd make it dangerous to pull garlic or pick parsley.

I think I can find room for three or four boysenberry pups along the fence, thus doubling our initial planting. Others will be potted for friends and neighbors (Marsha has been asking for them since she heard that we were growing berries) or shared with the garden club.

The history of boysenberries can be read on Wikipedia, and will explain why those of us who've lived in California for a long time can't hear the word berry without thinking Knott's. Now a massive theme park, Knott's Berry Farm was a place to take visitors from the mid-west for a chicken dinner topped off with Mrs. Knott's fabulous boysenberry pie. The rides grew from exhibits built to entertain folks who were waiting for tables.

I boggle at the notion of having enough boysenberries to make even one pie. Generally I've eaten them out of hand while on my morning putter. Filling a bowl and eating them with a spoon, lightly macerated, is for now a consummation to be wished.