In the Weeds

"In the weeds" definition: "A colloquial expression used when persons are near or beyond their capacity to handle a situation or cannot catch up."

It is one of those rare summer mornings when you get a break from the heat and humidity. It is Sunday so the neighborhood takes its time waking. As I sit outside on my patio enjoying the cool, dry breeze I hear only the whirring of insects and the occasional bird call. It is so cool, even the cicadas haven't started calling yet.

Apple tree losing its leaves, Aug. 26, 2018
(Margo D. Beller)

The apple and pear trees have been losing leaves for weeks, although the other trees are still leafy and green. A catbird quietly flies to the apple, perhaps curious about my sneezing. There have been no hummingbirds yet but the squirrels have been active. The rain-like sound I hear are pieces of acorns being dropped as the critters use their sharp teeth and strong jaws to crack into the nut. The squirrels are jumping rather acrobatically from tree to tree, searching. At some point they'll stop eating and start storing, and that is when I will find holes in my lawn.

But for now it is a solid carpet of green MH mowed the other day for the first time in two weeks. I am thankful he did it because he lopped off the weeds as well as the long grass. There have always been weeds in the grass, and over the years I've learned the names of some of them:  ground ivy, wood sorrel, crabgrass, locust seedlings pushing up from the long tree roots I know are spreading under the turf. But this year I have been finding other things I've learned to identify to pull them up before they spread: poison ivy, Virginia creeper, Rose of Sharon, many raspberry seedlings and even a few poplar trees, the latter particularly strange because there are no poplars in my immediate area.

As MH mowed, I completed my third straight day of weeding, taking advantage of the relative coolness and the decrease in humidity.

Ground ivy and other weeds (Margo D. Beller)

I don't know why I am compelled to bother. The weeds are everywhere, this year even more so because of all the rain. The trenches I dug last year kept down, but not out, the ground ivy but the Bermuda grass was everywhere. Bermuda grass, unfortunately, is a perennial and it is one of those weeds that you have to use a spade on if you have any hope of getting out the whole plant. Just yanking on the leaves won't help you get rid of the plant although removing the long foliage will allow you to see the other plants you want to keep.

You might ask, why not use weed killer? Because using such poison indiscriminately will kill your garden along with the weeds. And there are some good weeds. The clover and the marigolds draw bees. Sometimes I find a flower growing in a weed pile and dig it up and plant it elsewhere. Recently I pulled up a raspberry cane and put it near the compost pile to see if it will grow and give me berries, if I can get out ahead of the birds. (Canes are thorny, like roses, so deer shouldn't be a problem.) 

Flowering ornamental onions (Margo D. Beller)

I don't mind the weeds in the lawn. They keep it green in hot weather and the purple flowers of the ground ivy are quite pretty in the spring. MH will put down fertilizer for the grass, which is why we still have most of it in the lawn despite the weeds, but putting down poison that can run off in heavy rain down the driveway and into the storm drain just hurts the environment. I see neighbors getting their lawns treated - the company has to put in a flag to warn people to keep their kids and dogs off the grass - and yet there are still weeds. 

So I'm out there pulling.

Some weeds let you pull them out completely. On the first of the days I spent weeding, I was pulling out a type of grassy weed that comes back every year. I pull and it comes out easily, in large handfuls. I filled a pail going along the area between our yard and the next house, an area falsely called "the dead area." This dead area has all sorts of weeds, but removing this thin, grassy stuff allows me to see the wild strawberries and any fruits I can pick. These are not the large, cultivated, sweet berries in the grocery stores. These are small and dryer and not very sweet but quite edible.

This year's weeds atop the compost pile. (Margo D. Beller)

The next day, even dryer than the first, I pulled out weeds from the area where I have three ornamental grasses, many daffodils and ornamental onions including two plants that flower in the fall. I remove the weeds as best as I can so I can see the other plants and remove some of the competition for moisture. I also get an idea how much room I have in case I follow through with a plan to divide the astilbe that has not flowered for two years.

The last day, as MH mowed, my plan was to put the coneflower I'd bought into the ground. I did so, dislodging eight daffodil bulbs I then had to plant in front of it. Then I started pulling weeds from the plot and saw the encroachment of the Bermuda grass under the rhododendron. Then I saw it all over the plot at the side of the house, under the andromeda bushes and around the ferns. I had a bigger pail with me and it, too, got filled to the top as I worked my way along other parts of the back yard.

At the end of those three days my compost pile had a hefty pile of green on top. When more of the leaves fall and we start raking, a layer of brown will go on top of those weeds. But for now, with the return of summer heat and humidity forecast, I can take a break from these garden labors and wait for the next spate of cool weather to cut down what's done for the year and prepare the garden for winter.

But the weeds will keep growing and next year, as usual, I won't be able to keep up.

Update: Today, Aug. 29, the New York Times has announced, in its food section, that weeds are the new big deal in food and flower arrangements. Really? How nice of the Times to inform me of something I've known for years. I still find weeds a pain, however. 

Sunday on the Porch, With Junior

It is quiet on the porch this Sunday morning. Despite the rain I have windows open and it is cool enough to not need the fan to air things out. It is quiet except for the sound of the rain, the occasional call of a jay or cardinal or a car driving on the next street.

I am sitting with my coffee and trying to wake up after a long Saturday visiting with friends in the City. I turn my head and there is the immature ruby-throated hummingbird that has been visiting the feeder for the last couple of days. It is grayish green on the back with white on the front. Since this could be either a male or a female (and even be more than one bird) I have been calling this visitor Junior.

Juvenile ruby-throated hummingbird
(photo courtesy Birds of North America Online) 

This has been the wettest summer I can remember. Some of my plants have thrived - the tropical cannas, the peppers in their pots, the basil, the coleuses - while others have struggled. The joe-pye weed I grow near the hummingbird feeder has not produced many flowers or grown very tall, likely because of the nearly continual deluge of rain off the garage roof above it. The pink flowers of the coral bells and the perennial geranium are long gone. In a sea of green shrubs, the red feeder and the red ant moat above it stand out like a beacon.

And yet hummingbirds have been few in the backyard. Junior has only been coming the past few days. During the usual peak (for my yard) period of July I saw one. That might've been because of the heat. I can't sit long on the porch, even with the fan, when it feels like close to 100 degrees. Also, while the feeder is in the shade, the sugar water can still go bad if not changed after a week, and there were times I did not do that. (When a hummingbird hovered and then flew off, I knew it was time to clean the feeder.)

In July, the males, having mated and created the next generation, are gone or ready to leave. By August, the females have raised the young and shown them how to fend for themselves. Then the female adults leave. So by this time of the month the juveniles are what come to feed before instinct tells them it's time to head south for the winter. (When I say I have "peak" visitors in July it is females who need to fuel up as they seek protein food - insects - for their young.)

Canna flowers (Margo D. Beller)

What I need is a better garden of flowers attractive to hummingbirds and not attractive to deer. Right now the small yellow-orange flowers of jewelweed are blooming near streams, offering hummers a meal. Gardens with varieties of red - joe-pye, phlox, purple coneflowers, cardinal flower and zinnias -  I have visited in the last month have drawn anywhere from one to four hummingbirds at a time, fighting each other over the same flower despite all the food around them.

I do have more flowers that attract hummingbirds in the front yard. I just bought a purple coneflower, the light pink flowers of the Rose of Sharon are finally opening, the sedum are not yet ready to bloom but are close, there are the purple flowers of the butterfly bush and the bee balm and there are the red flowers of the cannas. Cannas are usually grown for their foliage but I like the flowers. One year I opened the front door and there, through the storm door, I could see a hummer at one of the flowers. It saw me, flew to the storm door, looked at me and then flew off. But I'm not always looking and most hummers are skittish and fly off at the slightest movement.

Soon summer will finally be over. I've already taken in my wooden wren house so it doesn't rot in the rain, and the house wren brood at the birdhouse next door are gone. (What I have seen is a lot of squirrel activity in the trees, gathering nuts. When one squirrel knocked the birdhouse, I knew the wrens must be gone because the parents would never have allowed a squirrel to get that close.) School resumes in a little over two weeks, and the daylight is noticeably shorter.

The leaves will fall, the flowers will be done and the hummers will be gone until next spring, when I hope for better weather conditions and more a more favorable environment to bring them to my feeder.

A Perfect Little Nest

I am not one to seek out bird nests during the summer. Others do. My brother-in-law knows where many of the breeders have nests on his woodlot, and he makes sure to avoid them when he drives to his lean-to on top of his hill in his heavy machinery.

I do not seek out nests for several reasons. The obvious one is the nest is usually in use and I don't want to disturb the parent or the young. The only times I have found nests when they are in use is when a parent bird directs my attention to it, like the hummingbird that flew in front of me to her nest at the end of a branch hanging over a brook. I would not have seen the lichen-encrusted nest without her. She settled on her eggs.

2018 wren nest, on compost pile (Margo D. Beller)

One year I was watering a shrub against my house and a catbird flew out to the nearby spruce. That made me curious so I looked behind and, sure enough, there was the nest with its four blue eggs. I made sure to check first before watering the rest of that summer. In later summers catbirds have made nests in the tangle of shrubs on the border between my house and a neighbor.

Other bird nests I've found have been titmice flying to and from a hole high up in a tree in a neighbor's front yard, the robin that built a nest in my pear tree but didn't stay long enough to incubate eggs and the redwing blackbird that flew from a bush surrounded by water at Great Swamp, leaving its young loudly begging for more food.

More often than not, I see the young birds once they leave the nest, loudly following their parents around the yard begging for food. I don't see the nests they've left until fall when the birds have taken off for the season and the leaves fall from the shrubs or the trees, revealing them.

The best nest I know, of course, is the one in the wooden box hanging from my apple tree.

A month ago the house wrens and their young took off. A week or so later, house wrens took over the box in the next yard, and I took advantage of my vacancy to bring down as many of the remaining apples as I could, no doubt to the tree's dismay. I had hoped the nest box would be used again. However, after what seemed like 200 days of rain and knowing the southbound migration period would come too soon for another brood to be created, I finally decided to bring in the wooden structure before the rain warped and rotted it, as I found it was starting to do.

After letting it dry on the enclosed porch, I took the next rainless day to walk the box over to the compost pile to clear it out.  It took some doing because it was packed full of twigs, which I expected. However, there were some unexpected items, such as a cardinal's red feather. I chuckled to imagine the little wren sneaking up on the much bigger cardinal to pull out its feather for the nest.

I turned over the mass of twigs I pulled and found a perfect little cup. According to the good people at Cornell University's ornithology school, "the cup itself is built into a depression in the twigs and lined with just a few grams (less than 0.25 oz) of feathers, grasses and other plant material, animal hair, spider egg sacs, string, snakeskin, and discarded plastic."

My picture of it is above. No snake skins, but you can see how well it would blend into the underbrush. 

The box is not very big, and I wondered at a four- to five-inch house wren sitting in there on several eggs (anywhere from three to 10, but in my box it is more to the lower end) and then those eggs hatching, the young eventually growing so big the parents must feed them through the box' small, round opening.

But they do get through it every year. It is tight quarters, but I'd like to think the hanging house is safer than a wren nest in the wild. And they must appreciate it, if such a thing can be said for a bird, because the wrens keep coming back as long as I put the house out.