This guy (or gal) has been chompin’ on my grass. I think it’s grass, I really don’t know what it is (if you know please tell me). It seems to be some kind of grass, at the very least it seems to not be the milkweed (see below) which is now covered with yellow aphids. Even though it is not even yet like two inches tall.
Internet says we have a Common Buckeye caterpillar here. It will become this Pokemon.
Common Buckeye butterfly
There are plants—the bugs will come!
The story with this caterpillar is that, about three days, I was stooped down to look at these sprouts in this area of my garden, trying to figure out what was what. I had planted butterfly milkweed here, which is what those yellow aphids are on.
I happened to spy an extremely tiny caterpillar on the length of a tiny blade of grass. It was certainly the above caterpillar.
Well, yesterday I didn’t see it at all.
But TODAY, as you can see, I saw it, and it was MASSIVE. I also noticed, before seeing this caterpillar, that the grass seemed to have considerably lessened. I said, “Hey, where’d all that grass go?”
This is where the grass is growing. This caterpillar has about hextupled in size since I saw it literally four days ago, a teeny-weeny greenie baby.
Yellow aphids already assaulting my butterfly milkweed sprouts
I also noticed yesterday, one of my three remaining sunflowers that was again horribly decimated by some predator, squirrel, rabbit, who knows… it was sprouting knew leaves and attempting to make a recovery. That was good. Well, last night I was out there, and I saw no more leaves, I looked closely, and what do I see? Little son of a b**** going hammer on the remaining shreds of those fresh leaves, that it’s devoured all of. Rascal!!
However, I am too soft. I did nothing. The poor thing is having a bountiful feast. It is what it is.
My other sunflower has survived two assaults and massive predation by a variety of insects, and is going to bloom. Look.
Bloom! Bloom!!!!!!
Through drought, chomping, aphids and lace bug… We are getting a flower.
If you have never seen a lace bug (Tingidae), here it is. I remember the first time I saw one of these, extremely tiny and wonderful bugs. It was our very first class walk that we went on in my Entomology class, to go investigate the school garden and find bugs, and we were walking under a tree, and he casually flipped over a leaf and said, “Here, look.” And showed us the lace bugs. They completely blew my mind.
My photo of lace bug on my sunflower
They are extremely small, as you can see. And they are feeding on my sunflowers, and I won’t stop them. The sunflower can handle it. More will probably just come anyway.
Internet photo of a squad of Tingidae
I will say that my sunflowers have had a somewhat terrifying amount of aphids, large aphids on them. I was hoping, praying that a hero would appear. Well, I saw, today…
Ladybug here to save my sunflower from aphids
Is this our hero? Looks like a hero to me. (A ladybug.)
Below is an aphid prowling on my sunflower. Interestingly, a winged aphid. I think that is somewhat unusual, I don’t always see them with wings. Maybe just a full adult?
Then, here are my Zinnias. They’ve made it but are suffering from drought conditions, even with my watering. IDK what the deal is really. It’s only rained twice this August and been blue sky and hot every day. They get full sun, and the soil is clay. Probably tough conditions for them, I don’t know if I haven’t watered enough or my methods aren’t good enough or there’s nothing I can really do about it. But some are making it through. The patch with the white Zinnia is looking better. Who knows. A lot of the Zinnias have made it all the way to having a flower that’s about to bloom, and in the last week they’ve just gotten worse and worse and they’re dying right at this point. That’s sad to see. I’ve watered them, but maybe not enough. IDK. Ah well. But I got some blooms, that’s alright. We’re supposed to get some rain in the next few days, I’m praying. 🙏
I’m gonna try writing. It’s what I do. Even though I feel like crap.
I volunteered for a gardening event at Shelby Park today. I didn’t feel like doing it at all. I didn’t feel like doing anything at all, but as it goes with these things, you warm up to them, and then you’re glad that you did do them. Sometimes you just have to get in the groove. It was actually great that I had this to do today.
The crew was a surprisingly large and cheerful one. There was a naturalist woman named Emily that I have remembered, as she was about to start the TN naturalist program, and I talked to her about that, which she said was amazing. She had the true nature-lover and naturalist spirit, and she was interested in all of the things in the garden and the bugs.
Our host Hazel was a naturalist and knew everything in the garden and knew about all of the bugs, too. She was awesome.
There was another woman who was something of a comedian. She was awesome, and she knew about the things in the garden too. She was especially fond of passionflower and was really wanting to raise some. At one point, she was lovingly touching a strand of passionflower and speaking to it, telling it that it was so beautiful. She was cracking me up.
She told us that passionflower is colloquially known as “Maypop”. She ventured to say that it could be because it blooms in May, or has something to do with the flowers making a popping sound when they open (and unless it blooms multiple times a year, which I know plants do, they were just blooming now, so not sure if May blooms as well)… she said that she didn’t really know the lore, and that we would have to find a “real person” to ask. That became something of a running joke, as I immediately used it to riff off of, saying, “Yes, hello, I’m looking for a real person, yes, does anybody know someone who’s real, I really need to know the lore of the Maypop flowers!”
The garden at Shelby isn’t a big one, but it has some interesting stuff in it, and today I saw that it actually had way more going on than I even thought. But the one thing in that garden that I’ve seen and wanted to know about, today was my chance to ask about it, and I took my opportunity. There was a large, sprawling, low-to-the-ground bush, that is a subtle shade of blue, and although it doesn’t have visually striking flowers, and the flowers don’t even really look like flowers at all, the pollinators go crazy for it. As in, I’ve seen like 500 bugs on this bush at a time. They are literally swarming this baby. I’ve been wanting to know what this thing is for weeks now, and so I asked our host, Hazel, what it was, and she told me— Mountain Mint. A Tennessee native. Mountain Mint, how awesome.
She then said that it grows like crazy, and that she would give me some if I wanted it. And she did. She cut off a section, as all you really have to do with these kinds of plants is dig up a chunk, and she put it in a bucket and gave it to me. She gave some to another young guy too, who was very excited to have something to plant. This guy was entertaining me, because he had a real bro energy, and you could tell he was pretty much a novice, but he was really curious and enthusiastic. You love to see it. And him and I scored, majorly, with that Mountain Mint.
I was talking with the comedian lady about how I was learning that all you had to do was ask gardeners about their plants, and they would just give it to you. That they liked to give things to each other. I told her the story of when I was at Bates nursery just the other day, and had asked about the passionflower (maypop) and the worker had gone and grabbed me some seed pods and gave them to me. The comedian lady said, “Yeah, gardeners are real people.” And she said that there’s something in the soil, there’s a chemical in the soil that’s released when you’re gardening that just makes you cool. I thought that was funny.
It’s a very wholesome activity. It almost feels wrong how wholesome it is.
I felt that way with the master gardeners. They were two of the most wholesome people doing the most wholesome things that I had ever seen. I was really overwhelmed by the wholesomeness. Today, I felt like I was too dirty and unworthy, almost. Or that something is wrong with me, to be seeking out and participating in such wholesomeness.
The polar opposite of debauchery.
I took on the role of weeding, now being familiar with what is crabgrass and other grasses that we don’t need in our garden. Being able to identify what’s what is a skill. I could have gone with the strongmen to do mulch work, but as the one guy said, he wanted to do mulch work because he was afraid of pulling anything good out of the garden. And, I’ve done enough digging in my yard. I was not interested in lugging around giant wheelbarrows of mulch.
Pulling away at the grass, down in the ground, it was about twenty minutes, we had been working around this unique plant that Hazel told us was called Moonflower, when I suddenly spied an enormous green caterpillar. Enormous as in, like seven inches long. And fat. I commented on this to whoever was nearby, and they were very excited, it might have been Hazel. Well, there several more of these fatties, striking fat green caterpillars, and she said that she thought they were Hornworms. They had a spike on their butts, so that would make sense. They were going to town on the Moonflower, if that’s what it was.
I looked it up because it was such a cool plant, but I can’t tell if what I looked up as Moonflower was that plant or not. Hazel knew what she was talking about so I’m inclined to say it was. But anyway, as you can imagine, the hornworms were wildly popular. As you would expect for some marked, fat green caterpillars. I was proud that I had spotted them, I wonder if anyone would have. It took me twenty minutes of working around down in that area before I even saw them, and they had been right in front of my face that whole time. It just goes to show you the power of camouflage. They were the exact same dark green as the Moonflower they were on, and they were adhered to the stalks, so they didn’t stick out in any way. You had to look directly at them, not just a passing, sweeping glance with your eyes. I saw one that way, just taking a good hard look at the Moonflower, because it was cool.
Hornworm
You can see immediately that these guys are awesome.
The curious bro said, “But aren’t they bad? Aren’t they like pests or something?”
Hazel said, “They do what caterpillars do. If you’re attached to your plants, then yeah, they’re bad.”
They were chowing down on that Moonflower, but she didn’t mind.
There was a pretty girl here at the gardening event, I have to tell you. And she seemed to be interested in me.
She caught my eye immediately, and she was at my side as I walked around the room, examining the displays and curiosities. I had been looking for the snake in the snake tank, and I couldn’t find it. She was still next to me, and I said, “Where’s the snake?” And she said, “Right there,” and pointed it out. It was a cute and small snake, hiding under the rock water bowl. I said it was cute, and she agreed.
Then when we out in the garden, Hazel was giving us the rundown for what we were supposed to be doing, and I had hung back, the rest of the group funneling into the vegetable patch. This was now my chance to give this girl a good look, because I wanted to see if she really was pretty, and I saw her face clearly, and she was— and then she immediately noticed me and look back at me. I was caught, and I glanced away, but she didn’t seem to mind that. After Hazel was done speaking, she came over to join me in weeding the main garden bed.
It was me and her down there, ripping out that grass, and I wanted to talk to her, so I struck up a conversation. I asked her about gardening, about what we were doing… We talked for a little bit. She smiled me, and I saw again that she had a pretty smile. I couldn’t get much more out of her though, and then I after ten minutes of vigorous tearing, I started to get bored with that particular patch, and there was action going on around the garden (people making discoveries, CD Paddock showed up, I had to ask about the mountain mint…).
I had come back to my post, then meandered more, made jokes and etc., and this girl did laugh at some of the things I said. She didn’t really engage with anybody else there, that I saw. She was quiet. And I didn’t try to talk to her much more, although I did make some comments, such as that we had moved on to the tougher to pull grass, and I said, “Now this is harder work,” as I had commented before on how easy it was to pull out the grass in the mulch. She laughed, but no reply.
So, I was talking with the comedian woman, we were the last ones left, having gotten our mountain mint, Hazel was still in the garden doing work, and we walked up the steps and back through the nature center, and I saw that this girl was still in the center, the only one left, buying something. I walked through, said goodbye to the lady at the desk, the comedian woman had stayed behind, and I was walking back to the parking lot, when the pretty girl called out to me from behind, “What are you taking home?”
I thought it was interesting that she was still hanging around, and I thought it was now very interesting that she was talking to me. I had a feeling that she would.
I told her, mountain mint. And I said that I had been curious about it, and asked about it and Hazel had just given it to me. The girl did not have much to say about it, I don’t know if I ever heard her response. It would have just been, “Oh,” or “That’s cool,” I guess. And then, I was just thinking, what does this girl want from me? Are we having a moment here? And I was thinking what to say next, and I was about to say, “What are your plans for the rest of the day?” When she said, “Well, have a good day.” And I said, “You too.”
I have to tell you, I’ve been thinking this one over. I’m not an egomaniac and am not assuming that every girl is interested in me, but there were cues. And especially at the end, she could have just let me walk away. I just couldn’t really get anything out of this girl. I didn’t know what to do with her! And then, as it goes, she’s gone. I’m sure I’ll never see her again.
I was thinking about it, because especially after her talking to me at the end, and then rather abruptly walking off, I was wondering about her. Was she just a quiet type? Was she nervous?
Mysterious.
What I was thinking about, during the gardening and as I write this, is the depth of subtlety of human connection. The subtle forces at play between people when they communicate, when they interact. Especially romantically. There all of these cues, currents and mechanics that are going on under the surface, with eyes and smells, body language, voice. So few words even spoken to one another, yet so much is communicated.
I also thought about how they say the way to make friends, and probably lovers too, is to see people repeatedly. These things take time. It can take awhile before you really know what someone is about, such as with this girl. What’s her story? I would like to know.
She was interested in planting natives in her garden.
That’s a good thing.
Mountain Mint (an unassuming pollinator powerhouse)
So I am fully obsessed with gardening. It’s not really an obsession — it’s a new hobby. But boy is it a strong one.
This morning, I would out doing my daily surveying, pulling the rhizome grass sprouts, examining the new sprouts and the general condition of things, and then watering. I have a bunch of new sprouts, Cosmos sprouts. Those seeds laid dormant for weeks, probably three weeks at least, before suddenly shooting up overnight, as tall as three or four inches tall. They came out of NOWHERE. And now they are booming, going to work. Two days ago they appeared out of nowhere. Now today, they’re already duplicating the leaves, and there are twice as many that have popped up. It’s a totally different method of sprouting than nearly everything else that has popped up in the garden, which come up quite meekly, with just two little baby green leaves, and develop slowly.
The marigold sprouts came up quick, as fast as the Zinneas. Within only three or four days, they were sprouting. They’ve stayed low to the ground, but the seedlings have rapidly developed in complexity. I like looking at them just because they have an interesting shape. They are a little crowded by Zinneas and I hope they don’t get consumed, but they are at least on the edge of the Zinnea patch.
My Butterfly Milkweed might be sprouting, but it would be early for them, according to the internet. I’m getting some sprouts in that patch. It’s probably something else.
I’m on a spree of meeting neighbors. This morning, Jay called over to me from across the street. “What are you raising?” He said. That’s all it took. I walked over to him and we talked gardening. He said he was interested in raising some native wildflowers, that his girlfriend had been growing herbs in pots. He had a little dog named Bill, a cute dog. When we walked over to the patch, so I could point some things out to him, Bill trampled the dirt area with my Butterfly Milkweed. I almost said something as I watched him walk all over the dirt, but I held back. They probably weren’t sprouting anyway.
Jay said he’d been watching my garden and saw that things were starting to pop up now. My gardening is starting to draw some attention, now that things are actually growing. It was pretty ugly when it was just a giant patch of dirt. It still mostly is a giant patch of dirt. We’re playing a long game, here. (Although, not even that long. It’s crazy how quickly some of these things grow, like the Zinneas.) I just wonder if I’m going to get any blooms this Fall, or if the plants will decide that it’s too close to the end of the season and that there aren’t any pollinators left… if there aren’t any left. But we’ll see. Maybe there will be?
The first frost for Nashville is approximately October 15. That will be a big date. What will happen with the first frost? Will things die? Will they die before that? Will I have any flowers? And then, what will happen to the perennials? Will they have grown enough to come back next year?
The Zinneas are annuals, I looked up this morning. That’s not a big deal. If everything died and I had to replant everything next season, it wouldn’t be a big deal. The planting is easy. But, apparently the plants take time to flourish, some of them not blooming until years later. I don’t think any of mine take that long for their first blooms—possibly the Butterfly Milkweed. I guess this is to say that it would be better if I didn’t have to replant the perennials, and the plants survived and kept going next year. I really don’t know what will happen.
It’s all an experiment. A very interesting experiment.
I’ve thought about what can go in the backyard. I’m intimidated by the backyard. It’s mostly shaded, with dappled sunlight. The ground is not moist, at least not right now, but it can be. Clover is growing well back there, the grass is not growing THAT vigorously. The front yard has been completely different, compared to the back.
It seems that the backyard, being mostly fully shaded, mimics a forested, woodland habitat. So whatever grows back there will be whatever does well in a forest, I think. One difference is that I feel like it’s cooler in the woods, and the backyard still gets hot. That probably won’t matter THAT much to these plants. The other thing they talk about is soil acidity, and I have no idea about that. I would like to know.
I want to plant buttonbush, really badly. I have a vision for a buttonbush in a space in the corner. It would be a perfect barrier between yards, and would fit the space perfectly. The thing is that they say buttonbush likes moist, wet conditions. That corner is not dry (except now in a drought), but I don’t know if it would be moist or wet enough. I would have to water it, and even then I wonder how well it would do. That could be another experiment.
I want to cover the fences with vines, like passionflower and coral honeysuckle. I wonder how to get those started. I talked with a lady at the nursery/gardening center. I asked about planting, if there were seeds, she wasn’t sure about the coral honeysuckle. Then I asked about passionflower, and she said, “Hold on a minute.” She went through a secret door in the back, and she came out a minute later holding two large green spheres, like perfectly spherical limes. She said, “”We have a passionflower plant growing wildly just outside. Here.” And she gave me those seed pods.
I felt like I acquired a special and rare item in a video game. Like a bonus quest. Ask the gardener at Bates about growing passionflower and you can score two free seed pods.
After the deer attack, I sometimes have a fear that I’m going to wake up one morning and find my entire garden decimated. It’s vulnerable out there, unfenced, by a busy street. But so far, no tragedies except for the horrendous deer attack. And the sunflower that was chomped by the deer and lived, it is still the most vigorous one I have. It’s doing great. It handled that assault without skipping a beat.
Yesterday I went to an event held at the Looby Public Library, for fall vegetable gardening. Just to see what’s going on. Currently, I’ve only planted flowers, and carrots. That’s it. Veggies is a whole new world for me.
I went out to a local iconic gardening store and bought more seeds. I’ve been going crazy. So far, I’ve now planted Cosmos, Zinneas, Butterfly Milkweed, Jerusalem Gold Sunflowers, Smooth Blue Aster, Purple Coneflower, Shasta Daisies, Marigolds, Black-eyed Susans, and carrots. And I still have some Goldenrod to plant, more Purple Coneflower, Wild Bergamot…
The watering is starting to be a lot of work. It takes 30+ minutes to do all this watering, and it’s still probably not enough. I fill up the watering can by hand, at our sink. The spigot is on our neighbor’s side of the house (we live in a duplex) and I’m too lazy to text him and ask if he minds me using the hose.
The hard part is not the planting, it’s the tearing up the grass. Most of the grass in our front yard is some extremely tenacious, rhizomous beast-grass. The roots are nebulous and deep. The sprouts are constantly still popping up, even when I think I’ve completely, thoroughly dug out all the roots, removed all traces of the grass.
This grass is quite entrenched in the lawn. And digging it up is hard work. I would even call it backbreaking. I can’t even imagine working on a railroad line, doing whatever those guys did all day. If it’s anything on the level of digging up this grass with a shovel, I couldn’t do it. And it’s compounded 10x in the hot sun.
Basically, you can’t do it in the sun. You’ll die. Or, you just suffer immensely. You have to get up early enough to get some digging time in, or late at night. I’ve done some digging at 10, 11pm at night, long after the sun has gone down. It’s blissful. It’s amazing to be able to do that work without the intense blaze of heat.
As I dig up more and more of this yard, I realize—I’ve bit off quite a bit. I don’t even want to dig anymore, really. But I want to have a large flower garden. And I have to get these seeds down, because the clock is ticking, the winter approaches—and I bought them.
Tonight I’ll have to do more digging.
When you’re doing hard work, it’s amazing how it feels like you’ve done so much more than you’ve actually done. It can be the same with writing. When you’re putting so much into every line, when you’re really crafting each line — it feels like you’re doing so much work, and then you come back and review how much you’ve written, and it’s nothing. Three pages. You worked so hard for those three pages.
The digging is the same. Two mornings ago I dug for a solid two hours straight, from 6:30 to 9:00 am. I took a short break. Backbreaking labor, slow and difficult. It felt like I had dug up ten acres of land. And then, when I stepped back to see how much I’d done, and how much farther I had to go, I was shocked. Depressed. Only about 12 square feet of earth had been cleared. Maybe 15.
Yesterday morning I met Melissa and Taz. She was taking her dog for a little stroll around the neighborhood. I know this dog; he’s one of the most familiar sights in the neighborhood. He barks at me almost nonstop whenever I’m out in the yard. Melissa and Taz live in the apartments across the street. Taz is cute—he’s a small dog, a terrier or something. Grey and white, long fur. And he likes to yap. He loves to yap.
To be honest, like most dogs yapping, it’s really annoying. Taz’s yapping. All the dogs in the neighborhood like to bark, and they’re all annoying. Sometimes lately I’ve wished that dogs were just banned in the city. Sometimes, when they’re really barking up a storm, I just wish that there weren’t dogs around anymore. Not in the city. God damn, it’s so annoying.
But… they are cute. And the yapping isn’t that bad. Mostly, I can ignore it, or I can put up with it. If it is that bad, then you have to tell them. Hey, can you please shut your god damn dog up? Thanks.
You never want to have to do that, of course.
I finally met Taz, who I had been thinking, if he just knew me, he would stop barking at me. I don’t think that’s likely to happen, now that we’ve met. He was still barking at me, as I squatted down to let him sniff me. I did not get a pet in. Melissa said it was his way of saying hi. What a pleasant way of saying hi.
She was holding a lit cigarette and drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup. That’s the way to wake up, right there.
She asked what I was up to with the garden. I gave her the low down. She was interested. She said it was going to look beautiful when it was done.
I’ll tell you that I have a lot of thoughts about convering all of the boring lawns in the neighborhood into gardens. Into flower beds. I think about how the neighbors will enjoy looking at the flowers in my yard. There are a lot of people living in the complex across the street, like Melissa. They will be able to look across the street and see a wonderful array of wild flowers, hopefully. And the street gets a lot of foot traffic. It will be a welcome addition of beauty on our otherwise mundane street.
Patrick, my duplex neighbor, has done a good job with his house. He’s done a lot of work. He put up a fence, that has been run through twice in the five years since he’s lived in that house, and surrounded it with flowers. Mostly black-eyed susans and purple coneflower, but he’s got some other things. And, he’s got sunflowers.
There are some amazing gardens in East Nashville. Some people are doing really great work.
The Master Gardeners were an old black couple, from North Carolina and Alabama. The man was from Alabama, the woman from North Carolina. But they had been in Nashville for a long time. They were amazing people. The woman did most of the talking, and she was sharp. She knew her facts. There was an incredible amount of gardening information in her brain. The man knew just as much, but he had taken a support role, and spent much of the time showing us pictures of things on his phone, like his collection of plants grown in buckets, the way they had harvested their lettuce, putting the bottom leaves but letting the tops grow, and an enormous, 22-pound watermelon.
After the seminar, which was attended by myself, a black woman named Audrey in her 40s or 50s, and a young white couple who had recently moved to Nashville from California, and who had inherited a plot in a community garden, they offered to take us to their nearby community plot. We went out there and they took us around the plots. The woman was especially excited to show us her peanut plant. It was her first time growing one.
I’ll tell you this — vegetables are weird. Fruits, too. Flowers are easy to understand. What happens? They’re just a plant. They grow up, and then they have beautiful flowers, and you’ve succeeded. They all kind of do the same thing, I feel like. But vegetables and fruits… Strange. They come in all manner of shapes and sizes. What are they doing?
For example, the peanut plant. It was not what I ever would have expected a peanut plant to look like. It was low to the ground, dark green, dense. It had some small yellow flowers blooming. If I had walked across that plant in the wild, never would I have thought it was a peanut plant. And then, the watermelon. It was sprawling. It’s basically a ground vine. I think that it would be described as a vine, right? A vine on the ground. Now, I didn’t know about that. And this couple had a vine that was covering like 80 square feet of ground. Was that one vine? It looked like it. How many plants was that?
Then you have the leafy veggies, kale and lettuce. I mean, those are simple, right. They’re still strange though. And beets, carrots, where you eat the buried part. Is that even a root? Is it a fruit? What is that? And what’s going on with corn?
They had tons of beans. Beans are crazy. Pole beans, green beans… I can’t even remember all the kinds of beans I saw. I learned that there are a lot of kinds of beans.
The man was very excited to tell me how many kinds of tomatoes there were. He said, “How many kinds of tomatoes do you think there are?” I said, “Oh man, there must be a lot… hundreds—” he said, “There’s over three-thousand kinds of tomatoes.”
Probably just as many kinds of beans.
Some of these veggies can grow in as little as 20 days. I think the radishes were one of those. You can have radishes in a month. How wild is that? From a seed to an edible radish, that quickly. But I’ve seen how quickly these plants can grow. The Zinneas, the sunflowers. It’s all they do. They’re a-growin’.
I’ve already allocated so much of my full sun terrain for flowers. There isn’t much land left for veggies. But we have an entire concrete runway along the driveway, that we could cover with buckets and pots, and plant in those. That would add a lot of real estate. I can see that becoming a reality.
The man said something that was really appealing to me. I’ll remember this fact. He said that they would go to the store and price the vegetables that they had grown, and that they had in one year saved themselves about $900-1100 dollars on produce. That’s not nothing, folks. $1k worth of veggies? That stuck with me.
Out in the community garden, in every plot there were fruits and vegetables, except one. There was one plot where the gardener was growing flowers, Zinneas and sunflowers. They had an amazing strain of sunflower that grew only a single, massive flower at the top. They had a row of them, all about the same height, and all with an enormous flower at the top. And then, they eight or ten different kinds of Zinneas. They were all Zinneas I think, the Master Gardener woman thought so, but each one was a different kind. White, red, pink, orange, purple… it was a small Zinnea botanical garden. And the best part is, it was absolutely covered with butterflies. Pollinators in general, bees, leaf-footed bugs, huge, shiny beetles that I don’t think I have even seen, were all there, but the butterflies were amazing. It was like being in a butterfly house. Probably 60-80 butterflies were grazing on that flower patch. It was really incredible.
That made me want to grow more flowers. More than a peanut plant or watermelon, I still think I just want to grow flowers. For the insects. But, why not both?
I imagine my garden to be a kind of Tennessee native flower botanical garden. That’s what I want it to be. And people will walk by and think, “Now, what is that? That’s something I’ve never seen.” And I’ll be able to take people through the garden and say, “Yes, these are the Smooth Blue Asters, the Swallowtails love them, yes, that’s right, those are Drop Dead Red sunflowers, surprisingly easy to grow. That? Oh, that’s buttonbush, hard to grow if the soil isn’t wet enough, but I’ve managed it here…”
I stepped out to investigate my garden, and found that the sunflower seeds I had planted less than a week ago are already sprouting vigorously. This was an incredible sight.
Kawaii sunflower sproutProof of concept: Seeds = PlantSunflower sprouts
It’s proof of concept. Planting seeds actually works. You can actually get a plant out of a seed.
This was inspiring, and this motivating sight, plus a strong pot of coffee in me, finally inspired me to move, and plant the other ten seeds I had.
Front lawn cleared of hemlock with small dirt patch for sunflowers
Here is the patch, I doubled it in space. I had taken down all the husks of the.. what was it called… why am I blanking.. POISON HEMLOCK. The poison hemlock turns out to be not only extremely toxic but also covered in literally thousands of burrs, which ended up sticking to everything I was wearing, covering me in hundreds and hundreds of little tenacious burrs. (I pulled some off of my washed underwear this morning, five days past.)
Remains of the dangerous and nefarious poison hemlock
Here are the poison hemlock remnants. I got a nice hornet sting in the process of pulling this all out of the front yard. It’s funny, I was ripping it up, knowing it was a toxic plant, apparently so toxic that it shouldn’t be burned or ingested, but Google says touching it was generally fine, and so there I was, in a no-sleeve shirt and with no gloves, standing deep in poison hemlock and slathering it all over my body for a solid hour, the entire time thinking.. I might really end up regretting this. Knowing that it was dumb. But I had no averse reaction, and the only thing that caused me pain and suffering was a hornet sting.
I haven’t been stung since I was a kid, and if you have forgotten what it’s like, as I had… Yeah. It hurts.
I hadn’t even thought about hornets or bee stings when I was reaching in and grabbing those plants barehanded, like a maniac. Well, I clamped my hand down on a hornet, and it reminded me right away why they are not to be forgotten. I knew instantly that I had just been stung, and I saw the culprit whiz right out of the bush, a large black hornet, and within seconds my palm, as it stung me right in the meaty meat of my palm, had doubled in size, and I was going, “Ahhhhh….. Tssssss.. Ahhhhh…….!” Making those sharp breathing sounds between your teeth.
The stinging animals have an incredible power with their stinging ability. After I got stung, I f***ed right off, and immediately ended my shenanigans for the day.
Anyway, that was about four days ago. Today I finished planting the rest of the sunflowers, during a noon bit of cloud cover, and now this is what I really want to share with you.
I began to pull up the clumps of grass, to clear more dirt patch for my planting. And when I pulled up the first round of thick, tall grass clumps, an amazing and unbelieveable sight met my eyes.
I had just unrooted an incredible, thriving ecosystem. Down in the soil before me, I saw literally thousands of organisms wriggling wildly in the soil.
Most of them were baby roly-polys. I could not believe the number of roly-polys I was seeing. Within a single square foot patch of this earth in front of my yard, there were so many, innumerable tiny beings living, and they were only what I could see with my eyes. I scanned the dirt, taking it all in, and I spied: adult roly-polys, baby roly-polys, earthworms, a large weevil, juvenile shieldbugs (stinkbugs), ants, millipedes (several various kinds, one that was extremely wriggling and lithe, with two long slender antennae, and it reminded me strongly of the worm dragons of Asian mythology), various snails, and wasps.
All of this was in the square 1×1 foot of earth that I had just torn up, ripping up those thick clumps of earth. Every centimeter of the earth contained some small living beings. And they were all scrambling madly, now having their world suddenly turned upside down. It was shocking to see.
I had just blown up their little town, completely ripped up their home, and I felt terrible.
I had not expected this to happen, of course. Not like this. This was a particularly prolific patch that I had torn up. I thought, is it worth for me to tear up all this grass, in the name of cultivating the earth, when clearly there is already a good amount of thriving happening here? Already an entire ecosystem is supported.
I had to step away for a minute and consider that.
Ultimately, I figured that this ecosystem could continue to flourish once some sunflowers and other flowers had been added to the mix, and would be even further improved. Wildflowers and other native plants were going to be better than invasive poison hemlock and whatever grass had been there, in the long run. So I continued with my planting. And anyway, this was an experiment, a small-scale experiment in the front of my little lawn in suburban Nashville, and so the stakes aren’t that high.
Seeing this flood of microorganisms in the soil today was a good reminder, that there are many things happening under the surface, down in the soil, that we are not seeing at all. Just below the grass, down in the blades and the bases, an entire ecosystem exists and is thriving, doing the heavy work of keeping the soil healthy and helping things to grow.
I plan next to plant black-eyed susans, zinneas, and shasta daisies. It’s probably not the best time for planting, in the middle of summer. I kind of have no idea what I’m doing. But I’m having fun and learning some things. I figure that’s the most important thing.
I wanted to share this picture too.
Now all green
This now totally green and flush space had just this spring been a patch of bare earth that I dug up to plant some nasturtiums. That was the first thing I ever planted. Three plants grew out of the nine or ten seeds that I planted, with me doing absolutely zero work of watering or weeding. What’s cool to see now is that within only a few months, this bare space of earth has been entirely populated by a variety of plants, without me having to do anything. That was prime real estate for many local plants, and they’ve scooped it up without hesitation.
I surveyed the plants in this space, and looked at all of the plants in the front yard here, and was wondering just how many species of plants there were in this small space. There is already a wild ecosystem here, even in this humdrum patch of weeds and grass, I’m learning.
It’s Saturday. We love that. Saturday is the greatest day of the week.
I already thought about breaking my 500 word cap but I’m going to stick to it. For the experiment.
I have been conducting various experiments that I want to share with you. They are all related to healthy living or healthy world. The first experiment is one that I have done for two years now: no mowing.
The first year I didn’t even know what would happen. This year I wondered if the same thing would happen, and it did in the back yard. The front yard we ended up cutting last year, but I think the same thing would have happened in the front yard as well. Let me show you the results.
Front yard
This part of the yard gets sunlight all day. A ton of sunlight. A lot of different things want to grow here. The large patch of brown plant here just went through a long period of blooming and attracted a ton of pollinators. I eventually looked up what it was and it turned out to be Poison Hemlock, so that was great. I’ll take it down soon now. The pollinators loved it though. It looked nice when blooming.
Quite a few random things are growing behind the Poison Hemlock here and I was able to successfully grow some Nasturtiums.
Back yard
As you can see the grass isn’t very tall. That was the most interesting thing for me. What happened both years is that the grass “bloomed” and that was the tallest it got, putting out stalks with seeds, and then that part of the grass dies and is flattened by a storm, and only clumps are left. So the grass stays low like this and you can easily walk through the yard. The dead brown grass you can see is the dead part of the grass, leftover from when it was blooming.
In the half of the yard with all the clover, no grass grows at all. It’s just clover, which doesn’t get very high, as you can see.
So there you go. That’s what happens when we let the lawn grow freely.
The point of this was mainly to see what would happen if you let a lawn grow. My neighbor let their lawn grow and they ended up having a huge clover patch with a lot of flowers. That was in their shaded backyard, similar to ours. Other neighbor let it grow for a month and they had a grassy situation similar to our backyard.
We haven’t used the lawn mower once. Saved ourself time and gas, good for the bugs and environment. Roommate has used the weedwhacker to trim the edges. Other roommate says once a year “we need to do something about the lawn” and then thank God doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t spend any time in the yard anyway. So it gets to be my project.
HAKUMUSU 