The Master Gardeners

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…”

The Neighbor’s Sunflowers

Not much writing here, I just wanted to share some shots that I thought you guys would enjoy.

After a very longgggggg time away… I busted out the macro lens.

I was surveying my neighbor’s sunflowers, at about 6:30 pm today, and there was so much action going on, I was really taking a good look and seeing everything. There was so much activity, so many different organisms (nearly all insects) making use of the great gifts of the sunflowers, and I decided, you know what? I’m going to do some macrophotography. The spider was really what made me decide to go grab the camera and the gear, because it was an interesting one, with incredible long front arms. I was excited to take some photos of these creatures, and I tried my best.

I was reminded, and especially after actually pulling up the photos on my screen, just how hard macrophotography is. Especially of moving targets. And not only were the bugs moving, but the sunflowers were often moving around, waving in the wind. You have to do alot of spray and pray, and even when the shot lines up, everything is right, nobody is moving, no wind, the target animal is not moving, still you have your hand movement, and you have to get the focus just right. These things are so small. You cannot capture the entire creature in focus, from too close up, because your focal plane is not big enough. You either have to back up, or choose a focal point, which you would almost always want to be the eyes. You can see that I had this trouble with the leaf-footed bug, because it was large. But the tiny ants, the incredibly tiny ants, the tiny ants in existence, I could get the whole ant in focus, from so close up, because the entire ant fits into the focal plane.

All shots were taken on 1/200 of a second, f5.0, ISO 800, a couple on ISO 200.

The Japanese word for sunflower is himawari (ひまわり). Isn’t that a nice word? Rolls right off the tongue. I think it sounds light and pretty, like the actual flowers.

(Below is an American Goldfinch photo I took at the same sunflowers last year, with my 400mm prime lens.)

Sunflower Sprouts and Soil Creatures

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.

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.

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.

Experiment: Wild Lawn

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.