Stick It

My father cut off the ends of two of his fingers while reaching for a stick that poked out from under the lawn mower he was pushing. Zing! Blood and bone.

It was a seminal event for a man whose upkeep of the family home and property was the very essence of his soul. Everyone was amazed that he’d ignored common sense in doing what he did, common sense being one of my father’s fortes. In fact, a self-inflected accident was such an out-of-character, image-shattering gaffe that he began to wonder if perhaps he was not entirely at fault. Perhaps if someone had been a more conscientious raker-of-lawns, then the stick would not have been there in the first place, and he would not have had to reach for it, and he would not have inadvertently let the index and middle fingers of his left hand drift ever-so-slightly beneath the rim of the lawnmower deck, and so on.

In my defense, I submit that I was, and always have been, a reliable lawn steward. Growing up, I raked up hundreds of bushels of leaves and sticks, dug out thousands of dandelions, and cut square miles of lawn. I even cut the neighbor’s lawn until their 25-year-old parrot died after choking on some scrambled eggs. No more Polly want a cracker croaking from the lilacs. The facts of their parrot dying and me not cutting their lawn any more were unrelated—I was headed off to college. But I liked that parrot. She was a classic of parrotness. Her name really was Polly and she did loudly insist that she wanted crackers. Unfortunately, she got scrambled eggs.

Which brings us to England.

According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), British gardeners have about 300,000 gardening accidents per year. Lawn mowers are leading culprits—no surprise—and are involved in about 6,500 annual mishaps (one imagines hundreds of stray digits scattered about the verdant lawns of England).

Flowerpots are a close second, accounting for more than 5,000 calamities. Thankfully, it’s difficult to imagine a flowerpot causing the mayhem of a lawn mower. Nevertheless, don’t turn your back on any flowerpots—obviously not all of them are well-intentioned.

Pruners grab third place on the list and unfortunately, it’s not at all difficult to conjure up the kinds of injuries that pruners are capable of administering.

Of course, picking on the Brits is low-hanging fruit because they’re so far away. Also, they have Prince Charles, who sort of looks like the poster boy for a-gardening-accident-waiting-to-happen, and who indeed some years ago suffer an eye injury while trimming trees. Where the Highgrove groundskeepers were at the time is anybody’s guess, possibly at a meeting of the Royal Trimmers and Pruners Society. I’ll add that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents proudly displays the yearly number of folks who have successfully maimed themselves, which feels a bit unproductive, marketing-wise, for the RoSPA.

Nevertheless, with good old American sprit de corps, we Yanks can thump our chests and claim a vastly superior 400,000 garden-related, emergency-room-worthy accidents per annum. Of these, more than 60,000 involve a lawn mower, toes being the most well, you know…

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission offers some sage observations on garden safety, such as the fact that the moving blades of rotary lawn mowers are hazardous (who knew?!!), wearing flipflops while mowing is unsafe (but oh so comfy), and that pushing a mower over rocks is ill-advised.

So in early spring when warm days have encouraged our lawn and associated weeds to grow like, um, weeds, I retrieve our mower from the shed for the first lawn trimming of the season. It rattles and squeaks as I maneuver it over the concrete patio and put it in position for starting. Old Chopper is a venerable gas-guzzler that refuses to die and provide me the emotional license to switch to a more guilt-assuaging electric model. With unfortunate dependability it roars to life at the very first pull, shaking off a winter’s worth of mechanical ennui and sluggish oil, and belches a nice round ball of fumes. Then it settles in, shuddering with anticipation like a leashed dog watching a squirrel.

I’ve never had a gardening accident, knock on wood, although as man and machine sally forth there’s enough clattering going on that I wonder if the blade is coming loose and is about to slice through the back of the mower housing like the weapon of an android ninja. It’s possible. But I calm the fears and sally on, and before long I’m wrapped in blissful white noise and the heady scent of fresh-cut grass.

Then I spot it: a stick laying just 20 feet ahead. It’s a medium-size piece of wood, two-feet long and maybe half an inch thick. I have several choices. One, I can stop the mower and remove the stick from my path. However, this is an inconvenience and interrupts the meditative state that mowing induces and that I so desperately enjoy. Two, I can run the mower over the stick, disdaining the USCPSC’s advice not to do so and trusting in Old Chopper’s hard-nosed ability to grind it to rough mulch, calamitous noises be damned.

Or three, I can approach with due caution and, just before the stick disappears beneath the deck, with the engine running, reach down to…

Snow Job

Winter. Not a lot happens in winter in terms of actual gardening, which at our property greatly reduces the chances for haphazard plant care and troubling soil mismanagement. Within this respite of dormancy, we are hopeful. Because this coming year will be different. This year will be the year of a glorious horticultural breakthrough.

I say “we” although my betrothed, for all her goodness, does not take the promise of a Glorious Horticultural Breakthrough seriously. For one, she thinks “Glorious Horticultural Breakthrough” sounds like a North Korean marketing slogan. Also, she does not share my hopeful visions of peppers big as bowling balls and dahlia blossoms the size of dinner plates. She has seen me in action, muddling about in recalcitrant dirt, and her support is mitigated by history. She says, without rancor and with a fair amount of accuracy, “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Ha! Gauntlet tossed and accepted!

Fantasizing about GHBs is a skill to which I’m particularly well-adapted. Stretched out on the couch, iPad perched on my tummy and aglow with images of magazine-worthy gardens and chockablock with bookmarks leading to vast stores of gardening expertise, advice, and no-fail step-by-step YouTube videos, I feel myself on the precipice of a truly magnificent growing season. (I probably should say approaching rather than on the precipice of; “precipice” suggests disaster is only a step away) Anyway, with so much knowledge at my fingertips, I’d have to be an absolute moron not to be able to grow gorgeous flowers and prize-winning veggies.

As I often do when engaged in a conscious manifestation of corpulent cultivars, I fall asleep. But not before admitting that Glorious Horticultural Breakthrough does sound like something cooked up by a sycophantic Minister of the People’s Cultural Affairs. I need to work on that. Maybe, Superhero Summer or The Little Garden That Could. It’ll come to me.

BTW, here are a few of my favorite places to fritter away the winter:

Garden columnist and blogger Margaret Roach is always chockablock (today’s favorite word) with smart stuff, including recipes. Find her at Margaret A Way to Garden.

Renee Shepherd has an online “garden to table seed company” called Renee’s Garden that’s stuffed (I hope you appreciate that I used “stuffed” instead of subjecting you all to another “chockablock”) with fantastic heirlooms and certified-organic seeds.

Speaking of heirlooms, there’s always the iconic Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa. Since its rustic beginnings, the Exchange has grown into a sophisticated operation. You can buy seeds (duh) or shop the online gift store. You can also visit and tour.

Speaking of peppers (way back in paragraph two; some sharp-eyed editor is going to catch that one and insist on a more relevant transition) I get reverential visiting Jim Duffy’s Refining Fire Chiles where the selection will make you weep with capsicum anticipation. Also, check out “Jim Duffy Growing Chiles” on YouTube.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Winter is just around the corner and this is very good news for me because most growing things are dormant and the chances for a plant dying of human error are relatively low. Which affords the opportunity to ponder how much I've learned about gardening this past year. In pondering I’ve realized that I’ve forgotten or remain unsure about much of what I learned. A brain isn’t like a wasp trap, you know—one way in; no way out.

Anyway, I did learn a few things about bugs. For the most part I like bugs, except when they crawl on you. If you’ve ever had a box elder bug find its way under your tee shirt and then fall down into your ass crack before you can stop it, you know exactly what I mean. And then what do you do while its itty-bitty legs are scribbling around some of your most sensitive nerve endings? Swat it and risk crushing it into your nether crevice? Well, box elder bugs—that’s a whole other blog topic.

This blog is about three bugs I encountered this year. It’s entitled, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” after Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti western, and as much as I don’t want to disturb the cadence of the iconic title, I’ll start off with:

The Ugly

I found several marmorated stink bugs on my pepper plants and immediately my paternal instincts (toward my peppers; not the bugs) kicked in. Initially, I didn’t know what I was up against, so I turned to DuckDuckGo to find out that Halyomorpha halys is classified as an invasive species throughout most of the U.S. According to the EPA, it does major economic damage to crops, including cherries, corn, peppers, and lima beans. I’m not a big fan of lima beans, so I have mixed feelings about that one. But peppers! Were my babies in danger? Hang on! Daddy’s coming!

I went outside and experimentally poked a stinker with my finger and it pissed all over. Maybe it was poop, I don’t know, but it was a clear fluid and it came out of its butt. Luckily, I didn’t get any on me. I assume it was stink fluid, meant to ward me off. It worked but not because it stunk but because it was gross and not a little bit disrespectful. Whose garden is this, anyway? I put on gloves and, in a scene worthy of a revenge movie set in the Old West, I squished every stink bug I could find. You just don’t mess with a person’s chilies.

The Bad

Although I took care of the stink bugs before they could do any damage, I was slow on the trigger when it came to the ash whitefly, Siphoninus phillyreae. This challenge-to-the-idea-that-everything-on-the-planet-has-a-purpose went undetected for months until one day as I was seated on the back patio gazing up into the clouds (one of my core skill sets) I realized that the lower canopy leaves of our raywood ash were filigreed like green lace. That’s odd, my whip-smart brain concluded. I stood for a closer inspection and found the underside of the leaves to be populated by colonies of small white things, many of which were disturbingly moving about.

Another trip via DuckDuckGo to the Palace of All Knowledge to find out the culprit was the ash whitefly—a no-good little creep that eats leaves. The solution was a solution—neem oil and water in a bucket. I cut off the damaged branches and submerged them in smelly neem. (Editor’s note: although neem is a natural substance and non-toxic, the National Pesticide Information Center (NPIC) suggests that you don’t breathe the fumes. They really don’t say what the consequences are except that you shouldn’t do it. However, with cats they are very specific and say exposure to neem oil is known to cause “sluggishness, excessive salivation, impaired movement, trembling, twitching, and convulsions.” They add that, “some of the cats died,” but they don’t say whose cats or what they did with the bodies. Maybe I just have my cinematic mojo going but I sense there’s a three-part mini-series in this cat thing.)

The Good

Make no mistake this is a helluva decent bug. I found one on a pepper plant and immediately flicked it away. Get off my fricken peppers! It wasn’t until DuckDuckGo-ing later on that I discovered I’d rudely disposed of one of nature’s true heroes, the black soldier fly, Hermetia illucens. The BSF looks like a wasp but it’s completely harmless. In fact, it doesn’t eat or sting or buzz around backyard barbecues. In its brief 10-day flying stage (after which it dies), it only wants to mate. (That only wants to mate line begs a witty follow-up sentence. It’ll come to me).

A black soldier fly on our screen door. I scooted it out to mate and fulfill its prime directive.

The real magic of Hermetia is its ability to digest stuff in its larval stage. As a maggot it will eat just about any organic material, including excrement. Then it poops out poop called frass which is—get this—nearly perfectly sterile and free of pathogens. Its special digestive enzymes turn all sorts of organics into rich, clean fertilizer.

There’s more: dried and processed BSF larvae can be used for animal feed, and research is under way about using the insect for human food as well. The taste of the larvae has been described as having an “earthy, chocolate-like, malty, fish flavor." Hmm.

It’s easy to imagine a sustainable food loop in which commercially raised black soldier flies are used to dispose of garbage, reducing the amount that ends up in landfills. The frass is used to grow crops for animals and humans. Leftover stalks and chaff end up as food to grow more BSF larvae. The larvae themselves are used to feed livestock and people.

In fact, commercial black soldier fly farms are beginning to show up around the world using exactly that kind of sustainable model. It’s proving to be an especially hopeful possibility for rural communities in developing nations.