Note: I said a while ago that I was going to take a break from writing, but one thing has led to another and I am now writing and commenting at least as much as I did before. Part of this is that I’ve been reading more instead of listen to the news so I get ideas about essays, and part of it is that what news I listen to makes me very angry and often sad and I wind up commenting. My apologies for this, but I really intended to cut back a lot. I guess I’ll just fade away eventually.
"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley" — Robert Burns
Many years ago (at least 60) I earned spend money as a yard boy in Yuma, Arizona. I mowed, trimmed and weeded for mostly well established women, with one exception. My first job was with a Mr. Loeffler. At the time I was being paid $1.00 an hour and at least once he paid me off in silver dollars because he only had what he had won in Las Vegas! His daughter visited occasionally and she had a very friendly full sized Alaskan Husky that could rest his paws on one’s shoulder. I had one accident working at his house- I drove a spike from a date palm I was trimming into my ankle. He took me immediately to a doctor who gave me a tetanus shot. I worked for Mr. Loeffler for several years and picked up several more clients where I mowed, trimmed oleanders (a very nasty job), weeded and watered. I also learned some hard lessons, as one time I was fired because the divorcee I worked for hired a muscular pool boy who then replaced me as the yard boy! As she had never complained about my work I had my suspicions! I also had a few other experiences that taught me that people were not always fair or trustworthy, but in most cases the experience was good for me. Meanwhile my mother had a garden for a while, which I often tended. During the awful period that I was with my parents, along with my trips to the desert, gardening gave me some semblance of sanity. I especially liked the two species of Night-blooming Cereus my mother had at one of our rented houses. I’m not sure where she got them and was never able to get their like again.
When I married my wife I knew that I had married a hard core gardener. She had stacks of Organic Gardening magazines, which later filled an entire trunk! Our first rental house had little space and we had little time, but we had a hard pear tree in the backyard and discovered a plant that produced almost intoxicating scent — the Night-blooming Jasmine (Cestrum nocturnum). We had some plants at the trailer we bought during our second sojourn in Florida, where I tended a small collection of orchids and bromeliads. My favorite was a very consistently blooming Cattleya, that produced two blooms twice a year. The blooms were white with a purple throat and quite large and scented. I had picked up the plant when my postdoc director stopped at a orchid nursery. They had this plant, which was of uncertain parentage, and sold it to me at a bargain price. When I left Florida for the last time I donated it to Kanapaha Botanical Gardens.
As soon as we had the chance, we started a actual garden and that became permanent when we bought a house in Mesilla Park, New Mexico. We both pretty well despised lawns, so our garden was relatively disorganized and nowhere near a formal one, but we had a bit of land, and we soon filled it with plants. The gardens continued for 25 years! There is something that grips a person when they are working with plants and soil, and I do believe it is happiness.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
One thing my wife was absolute on was growing heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes, but she also planted cherry tomatoes peas, beans, and occasionally other crop plants. I grew corn and developed a sort of wildflower garden. I say sort of, because some of the plants were not exactly native to New Mexico. But I also planted some native cacti in one corner. I regretted one of these as the cholla cactus was very agressive, and extremely spiny, and pruning it was pure misery.
Her tomatoes were almost her children. She started them from seed using a warm, wet paper towel and after sprouting she transferred the seedlings to first toilet paper rolls and then to pots and finally to the ground. Then we both worked to set up the tomato towers, to support the future rampant growth. She was very proud of the results!
Our vegetables were very successful as my wife usually planted two dozen tomatoes, fearing failure, and they usually always survived, producing so many Cherry, Big Boy, Brandywine and Cherokee Purple — all sun ripened and delicious- that we could give some away. Her peas (Wando) were so delicious that they seldom made it to the kitchen, and my corn, although a very limited sized crop, was almost indescribably sweet (SE Hybrids) and very quickly steamed and eaten. We also grew tomatillos, but as they came up on their own after the first planting, we never had to replant them. My wife raised other, smaller, crops, sometimes just to demonstrate to our daughters just where their food came from. Thus she planted a small crop of wheat, ground it and made a tiny loaf of bread. She raised some spinach and tried to raise squash, but the later always got eaten by squash bugs, This was our only failure, but we still refused to use much in the way of commercial chemicals. A couple of times I used pyrethrin against Grape Leaf Skeletonizers because they were decimating the grape vines we had planted, but finally settled on yellow sticky traps during the adult flying period. (Note: the color blue is dangerous to pollinators, yellow less so, and red not much at all, as can be demonstrated by using plastic bowls of these colors filled with soapy water. Blue bowls will take a much larger amount of parasitoids, bees, and wasps. I used this technique a few times when doing outreach to demonstrate insect color sensitivity!)
I also added a number of ornamental plants- several palms, a few Chinese ground orchids, a passion vine, salvia, corn flowers, cosmos, Flanders poppies, cone flowers, chocolate flowers, Tithonia (Mexican sunflower), several hybrid tea roses and a ancient variety- Rose of York (that bloomed in mass every year) sacred Datura and Datura metel, needle and thread grass, rosemary, and for a while Jerusalem artichokes, as well as regular artichokes. I also planted a bulb garden on the side of our lot, including Darwin and lily-flowered tulips, large and small trumpet daffodils, hyacinths, and grape hyacinths. My wife planted sunflowers, which grew to huge height. All of these brought many butterflies, bees, parasitoid and regular-sized wasps, mantids, Black-chinned and Rufous Hummingbirds, Lesser Goldfinches, Inca, Mourning and White-wing Doves, plus Northern Mockingbirds, and the Cooper’s Hawks that occasionally knocked off a few of the smaller birds. Occasionally at night we would hear a Great Horned Owl hooting as it passed through. We discovered a Ornate Box Turtle, some Couch’s Spadefoot Toads and some larger Woodhouse Toads in the garden area. We had so many insects and other arthropods that I wrote three articles featuring my part of the garden as an insect garden, published in the British online journal Micscape.
Main Garden in June, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Garden in August, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Mousenik in the garden, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Emerson in the side garden, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Woodhouse Toad in the garden, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Gulf Fritillary in garden, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Bumble Bee on Tithonia in garden, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Passionflower, side garden, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Flanders Poppies, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Rose of York, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Bletilla orchids, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Now I am alone, but I still planted a small series of gardens beside my apartment. These include many natives and a few exotics. Because my area lacks much sunlight, these have to be shade loving plants for the most part.
Voodoo Lily, backyard garden, Edmonds, Washington.
Pacific Trillium in garden, Edmonds, Washington.
Western Sword Fern, garden, Edmonds, Washington.
As usual, the photos are by me.
