Life and Death in the Summer Garden

Moon over the beaver pond last Monday.

The week began wet. It rained early Monday morning. I went for my morning walk and got soaked and enjoyed it. It let up in time for me to work in the garden through the day. The rain came again in the late afternoon. We had just finished dinner and Family Home Evening on the Shillig’s back porch when it started to pour. After a while the sun tried to shine and treated us to yet another rainbow. I don’t recall having so many rainbows before. We’ve had four in the last two weeks. After a wet Monday, the rest of the week was perfect summer weather – sunny, warm, even hot as we hit the high 80s.

On one of my evening walks.

Early on Tuesday morning, Independence Day, Chase and I drove up into Allegany County, New York, to the farm of my friend Jeremy Harrison. Chase is an avid mushroom hunter and so is Jeremy. Jeremy took us on a tour of the back roads around his place and showed us where to look for Golden Chanterelle mushrooms. He showed us a nice patch of them, but they were too small to pick, Chase wants to go mushroom hunting in a few days when the chanterelles have grown bigger.

Finding chantrelles with Jeremy.

Little chantrelle buttons.

Most of Tuesday was a work day. Later that morning, we had a weeding party out in the big garden. We weeded the corn patch and pulled out bushels of pigweed. We have two kinds that infest our gardens, green pigweed (Chenopodium album) also known as lamb’s quarters, and red pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus) also called redroot. Both are edible and nutritious, but I’ve never eaten them. When we finished weeding the corn, I worked in the brassica patch and harvested a big basketful of cauliflowers. Stacey and little Kurt went on to pick strawberries. We also worked on tying up tomatoes. With this warm and rainy weather, they are growing quickly and have begun to bloom.

Weeding.

A basketful of cauliflower.

Picking strawberries.

Our Independence Day celebration began in the evening. We ate dinner at 6:00 – the classic cookout menu of hot dogs, hamburgers, bratwurst, and a variety of salads – potato salad, frog-eye salad, spinach salad, and pasta salad. We had great desserts, popsicles, cookies, a trifle. After it got dark, we had sparklers and fireworks. It was a great day.

A game before the cookout.

Kurt and Grant at the grill.

Our Fourth feast.

On the Shillig's back porch.

Desserts.

Sparklers.

I don’t know how to adequately describe how beautiful these summer mornings are. Because I’m up and about before everyone else, I get to greet the day in quiet. Well, it’s not completely quiet. The peacock is up even before I am and he’s pretty noisy as he greets the morning. And the birds singing their dawn chorus are loud in a lovely way. But other than that, it is quiet. When I go out in the half light before dawn, the air is cool and heavy and still. Odors hang in the air – the smell of cut grass, the perfume of mock orange and sweet milkweed flowers, and the rich smell of dew drenched earth. There is often a low fog over the beaver pond. On my walks, I never meet another soul. There is very little traffic on the road that early. These mornings refresh and recharge my spirit. The best and simplest description I can give is to say they are serene.

A sunrise last week.

A sunrise last week.

A sunrise last week.

A sunrise last week.

While my early mornings are usually serene, often the rest of my day working in the garden is not. For the most part, my time in the garden is rather violent. I spend a great part of the day killing things. I kill weeds. At the end of a day in the garden, the ground is littered with the casualties of my botanical battles. I feel no regret for the slaughter. I rake them up and toss them into the compost. I treat them like dirt, which is what they will become.

I also wage war against other more mobile enemies to either drive them away or annihilate them – deer, woodchucks, rabbits, chipmunks, robins (the worst enemy of the strawberry patch), voles, snails, slugs, aphids, raspberry cane borers, coddling moths, tent moths, Japanese beetles, rose chafers, lily beetles, and a host of other pests. I employ various weapons in my battle against these garden foes – nets, traps, salt water, soap spray, Tanglefoot, sticks and stones, and my fingers. I know I will never win a total victory over any of them. I carry on an endless war of attrition that only halts temporarily when the world freezes, and sometimes not even then with the rabbits, deer, and voles. And although I am the death-bringer in my garden, I’m also the life-bringer and care-giver and protector of the plants I cherish, so I feel the carnage is justified.

Of all the garden pests I do battle with, one of the ones I loathe most is the scarlet lily beetle (Lilioceris lilii). I have a hard enough time with my lilies to begin with. They are often damaged by late frost, like this year. If they do survive the frosts, they are attacked by scarlet lily beetles. They are native to Europe and Asia and were accidentally introduced in the USA in 1943. The adults of this species are easy to spot. They are bright red. But they are not so easy to catch. When disturbed, they drop to the ground and hide. When I catch them, I crush them with my fingers. After a session hunting lily beetles, my finger tips are stained red. It is their larvae that disgust me most. A female beetle can lay up to 450 eggs each season. The eggs hatch into yellow larvae in about a week that feed, beginning underneath the leaf then working up the rest of the plant. Then they burrow in the ground to pupate for about twenty days when they emerge as adults and continue to feed until winter. The disgusting thing about the larvae is that they cover themselves with sticky brown frass for protection from the sun and predators – and me. Frass is a nice term for poop. They cover themselves with their own poop. This deterrent works. While I have no problem squishing adult beetles with my fingers, squishing the larvae is disgusting. I usually scrape them off the leaves with an old butter knife and then smash them on a stone. This year the lily beetles are especially bad. The war goes on.

Scarlet Lily Beetle.

Lily beetle larvae covered in frass.

Last week I began a batch of comfrey/nettle tea. It is not something to drink, at least not for humans. It is a fertilizer broth I make every year. I have comfrey that grows abundantly all over our property, usually in places where I don’t want it, but it is a very useful plant so I don’t mind so much. When I make my fertilizer tea, I cut comfrey and chop it up a bit and stuff it into five gallon buckets. Several years ago, I planted a patch of stinging nettle just for the purpose of making this tea. It grows along the side of the woodshed and has also spread to places where I do not want it to grow. With gloves, because it does sting, I pull it up and stuff it in the buckets with the comfrey. Then I fill the buckets with water and put lids on them. I let the buckets sit for several weeks while the comfrey and nettles rot in the water and make a very smelly, brown, soupy fertilizer. When it’s ready, I dilute it with water and pour it on my plants and fruit trees. The plants love it. It is rich in potassium, nitrogen, and trace minerals. But it does stink. I made five 5 gallon bucketfuls that should be ready to use in three weeks.

Larkspur.

One of the delights of these early summer days is the wild raspberries. And I don’t mean eating the berries. They are not ready yet. In fact, they are just blooming. The thing I find delightful is the scent of the leaves. In the morning as the sun is drying the dew, raspberry leaves give off a sweet aroma. I assume there is some volatile oil involved, but I couldn’t discover any information about it in my research. I have large patches of wild raspberries in parts of my property, around the woodpile and in the woodland garden. I love to stand near them on a warm morning and breathe in their perfume and watch the bees working among their flowers. In a few weeks they will delight me again with their sweet berries. I have a domesticated raspberry patch too. It gives us bigger berries, but they lack the tang of their wild cousins.

A fragrant path through wild raspberries.

Both the wild and domesticated raspberries, as well as my blackberries are under attack from raspberry cane borers (Oberea perspicillata). This beetle chews two rings around the canes and then lays its eggs between the two rings. The rings girdle the canes, which makes the tips wilt. When the egg hatches, the larva bores down inside the cane and overwinters in the roots of the plant. I go out every morning and look for the telltale wilted cane tips. I break them off and dispose of them. One more pest to combat.

What raspberry borers do.

And yet another – the annual Japanese beetle battle has begun. Every year Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica) emerge from the ground where they have lived as grubs for the last year. They are beautiful beetles and I hate them. They are the most destructive insect pest I deal with. They devour leaves and fruit and flowers. One of their favorite foods are plants in the rose family – raspberries, blackberries, apple leaves, and, of course, roses. I stopped trying to grow grapes after several tries because the beetles destroyed the leaves and the vines could not thrive. I’ve tried various methods to eliminate them. I’ve used store-bought traps, and they do work – sort of, but they seem to attract more beetles from all over the neighborhood, many of which don’t go into the traps. I’ve considered spraying milky spore, which is a bacterium, Paenibacillus papillae, that kills the grubs in the soil. It only kills Japanese beetle grubs. But it is expensive and can take years before it is effective. And even if it works in my yard, my neighbors still have grubs in their yards and the adults fly, so I end up with beetles anyway. My friend Pat Mann gave me her recipe for a beetle trap that I am trying. It uses yeasty sugar water and bananas to lure the beetles into a milk jug. I’ll see if it helps. Meanwhile, I’ll employ my usual method of control – going out every morning while it is still cool and the beetles are sluggish, and picking them off the plants and dropping them into a bowl of soapy water. I gather dozens of them every morning. Morning after morning.

Japanese beetles on grape leaves.

We had another week of big meals with the combined households, and all of it was delicious – Hawaiian haystacks, Mexican food, our Fourth of July cookout, and breakfast for dinner (pancakes, waffles, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, toast and jam). On Friday the Shillig crew went up to Niagara Falls and were gone all day and into the evening. It was really quiet here. For dinner that day, Hannah made our traditional pizza, but it was just the four of us and it seemed odd. That evening Stacey and I went to the movies, just the two of us. We went to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. I’ve long been a fan of the Indiana Jones movies, well some of them, anyway. I went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark when it came out in 1981 and thought it was great. The second one, Temple of Doom was not very good. The third one, The Last Crusade, was as good as the first. The fourth one, The Crystal Skull, was terrible. I’d heard a lot of negative things about this fifth and final one, but I went hoping it would make an odd numbered set of good movies. It did not. It was okay, but I think it tried too hard to outdo the other movies and suffered from the strain. I find that fewer and fewer movies measure up these days.

This morning.

I took an early Sabbath walk this morning and noticed that out in the flower gardens, things have gotten sloppy. The common poppies are past their prime now. I have to let them go to seed so I’ll have some to spread for next year’s extravaganza. But that means they stop flowering. And they are top heavy and collapsing onto other plants. I’ll tolerate that until I have enough seed and then I’ll pull them all up. To take their place, the opium poppies have started to bloom. I love their different forms from fluffy pom poms to single petals. Their bloom time is later and shorter. I let them go straight to seed. I save seed for next year’s garden, but we also use the seed in baking.

Common Poppies.

Opium poppies starting to bloom.

I spoke in church today, a talk I prepared a few weeks ago on finding truth and personal revelation. I think it went well. Now we are home. We’ve finished lunch, leftovers, just the four of us. After lunch we sat and discussed plans for the next few weeks – people coming here, people going there. So much going on. This evening we’re having dinner over at the Shillig’s. Before then, I think I feel a nap coming on. Good Sabbath!