Tag Archives: gardening

My Life With Spiders

Caught In Charlotte’s Web

It is still too dark to check on her.

Last night, I watched helplessly as she rushed to bundle up her home in the failing light, as rain lashed down and the wind blew. She hadn’t quite succeeded by the time I closed the blinds, but she was huddled up in a relatively safe and protected spot.

As dawn finally breaks over the eastern ridge, I hazard a peek through the blinds. Her home is immaculate, and she is perched comfortably in the center, her head down and waiting. I see the beginning haze of a cloud of gnats rising from the stinking laurel shrub below, and I am relieved that she will not go hungry today.

I call her Charlotte, for the obvious reason that she is an orb weaver spider, and I was one of the many children in this world who cried over E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Her home is a web that she has spun across the outside of my dining room window, mere feet from where I sit and write most days.

Autumn in the Pacific Northwest is aptly named “spider season” by the locals.

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Mad for Mould

A love letter to an unsung garden hero

Winter brings with it a green carpet. The November rains return in earnest to tell us winter is on her way. The grasses, dry and brown from summer heat, come alive in the cool dampness. Moss creeps over bare earth, ensuring every footstep is cushioned by emeralds.

Along with the green comes the leaves, tumbling down to land like jewels upon the lawn. Yellow, red, orange, and tawny brown compete for pride of place. Those leaves that still cling to skeletal branches stand out beautifully against the cold, grey skies. It is like a treasure has been spilt upon the ground from the benevolent heavens above.

In fact, it is the lawns and not the streets that are paved in gold. For the gardener, each leaf is more valuable than one would dare imagine.

It is my task on this late November day to collect the leaves.

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Our Food Choices Can Define Our Resilience

A recipe for community and self reliance

By 6 am my feet are always on the ground. Mornings are my siren song, and I begin my day with the birds — sometimes earlier in the winter months. When I was younger, this was a burden. Now, in my middle years, it is a delight.

On this late September morning summer has finally come to a crashing halt. The sound of rain against the window announces the arrival of fall more surely than the yellowing bigleaf maples.

The bronze orbs of ripening Asian pears catch my attention from my neighbors yard. We share 12 acres with our neighbor. In his yard is a small fruit orchard featuring pears, plums, and two apple trees that need a bit more TLC to produce well. An orchard he doesn’t harvest or care for, so he has granted us permission to treat it as our own.

I thank him with apple cakes and plum preserves.

Taking the day in hand, I glance at my phone. There is a message alert from the Buy Nothing app. My request to pick apples has been answered by someone with an apple tree in their yard but no need for the fruit. Their house is on the same street as one of my gardening clients, so stopping to pick a bucket or two won’t detract much time from my day.

In fact, it takes far less time than driving to the grocery store and buying apples. Even less time than earning the money that would otherwise be needed to purchase apples.

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The Myth of the Patient Gardener

Garden lessons are life lessons

All great things start small. Photo by Filip Urban on Unsplash

Gardeners aren’t patient people.

Oh, it may appear to the uninitiated that gardeners are patient. How else do we wait so long for a seed to grow into a sprout and a sprout to grow large enough to produce a tomato? Who else can play a long game and plant a tree today knowing that it won’t provide shade enough to host a teddy bear picnic for at least another decade?

Yet, I still stand by my statement — gardeners ARE NOT patient people.

Nowhere is this more evident than in a new garden, particularly a new ornamental or cutting garden. All too often, in an effort to make the garden look full and established, small perennials are planted nearly on top of their neighbor.

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It’s Time to Let Go of the Brown Thumb Myth

Your thumb has nothing to do with your gardening ability

Photo by Katya Ross on Unsplash

“I have a brown thumb,” Jan said apologetically, “I mean, it’s so bad that even silk flowers curl up and die.”

The rose bush I had planted a few weeks earlier was dropping its leaves and looking a bit yellow, but it wasn’t dead. I knelt beside it and dug my fingers into the soil. The roots were still firm and there was no sign of slime. We weren’t too late.

I smiled at Jan in an attempt to put her at ease. She had hired me because she had always dreamed of being a gardener, but she didn’t know the first thing about gardening. My job wasn’t just to install plants, it was also to teach her how to garden.

“You don’t have a brown thumb, just a heavy hand with the watering can.” I couldn’t help but chuckle, “You’re loving this poor rose to death!”

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The Day I Spared Peter Rabbit

Beneath dead earth new life arises

Photo by Davies Designs Studio on Unsplash

I was wading knee deep through the fallen soldiers in a wasteland of death. The skeletal remains of heather, a sword fern, and countless other shrubs and perennials that could no longer be identified crunched underfoot.

Someone, in the not-too-distant past, had tried to eradicate a horsetail problem by dousing the entire garden border with a broad-spectrum herbicide. The only living things that remained were the prehistoric green fronds of the horsetails themselves.

I levered my spade underneath one of the heather remains and pushed it upward. A frantic squeaking accompanied the severing of the plant’s roots. I quickly stepped back and surveyed the scene before me.

With the heather gone, I could clearly see a small burrow with a lining of soft brown and white fur sticking out.

Oh no. Bunny nest.

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