At Midsummer

If you consider summer to start on June 1 rather than May's Memorial Day weekend, we are currently in midsummer. Today, a rare not-so-humid day, I took a walk around my yard to see how things are doing.

The early spring flowers are a distant memory. The azaleas, irises and rhododendron have bloomed and busted, the lily flowers gone while the stems remain.

I put seeds from three different types of plants into a pot, and only the zinnias are growing. I had collected the seeds from a friend's plant last fall, and will do it again this fall with these flowers once they are done.

Hummingbird-attracting canna flower (Margo D. Beller)

The purple coneflowers have finally started to open. The midseason goldenrod is in flower. Rose of sharon shrubs are blooming purple in neighbor yards but the pale pink flowering type I have are just starting to bud, as are the succulent sedums protected by the deer fencing. Some of the potted cannas have put up long spikes of red flowers that, witnessed at least once by my husband, attracted a female ruby-throated hummingbird. (I hope she gets to the backyard where the feeder hangs waiting for her.)

The house wren young are now so noisy when a parent comes to feed them that I can hear their begging through the closed windows of the porch, even with the fan on. They are so big the parents feed them from outside the box, except when they squeeze in to remove poop. I expect that, like the brood earlier this summer, there are three birds in the box and they will soon be enticed to leave and follow their parents, learning to feed themselves. If they survive they'll head south and the box will come down for the year.

The humidity has affected me more than usual this year, starting with the heavy spring rains. I used to wonder how those living in New Orleans could survive the humidity. Now I know - you close the windows, put on the air conditioner, close the curtains against the sun and stay inside as the air dries along with my skin, just as it does in the winter when the furnace is continually running. And don't look at the electric bill until absolutely necessary.

But at least the gnats are gone from my porch. Unlike last year when I didn't start noticing them until August and found they had infested the open bag of bird seed, they have nothing to breed on. The seed is in a locked container. Old plastic pots are gone. Soil is off the porch. What ceramic pots I've kept are covered with plastic. If a gnat was desperate enough it would visit the yellow sticky strip, where there are already a number of corpses. My hope is the wrens and other baby birds are eating the overflow.

This month the cicadas started calling during the day, the fireflies have been out in the evenings and soon there will be night choruses of katydids and crickets.

In the cooler early morning I have been hearing a number of different types of birds, besides the resident house wrens. I hear families of titmice and chickadees. Mockingbirds harried a pair of fish crows that seemed interested in nesting in my trees. (They left.) A catbird sang for the longest time atop my yew hedge in the mornings, but now its young are gone and the bird has moved on. It is not yet August but already some birds are heading south for the winter feeding grounds, such as the shorebirds that stop off at some of New Jersey's shore empoundments (along with the nasty, biting, greenhead flies). 

From 2020, a house wren feeding young from outside the box.
(Margo D. Beller)

Warblers are starting to move south. They won't be as colorful as in spring and won't be singing their territorial songs. They will be harder to find.

Leaves are already falling from some of the trees, but not the apple tree. Cutting off that rotted limb seems to have done it some good. The dogwood I saved two years ago is showing green fruits that will eventually redden and, I hope, draw robins and cedar waxwings before the squirrels can get at them.

Back-to-school ads on TV tell me it will soon be time for the kids currently on vacation to hit the books (and their after-school activities) again. It is already darker in the early morning. Soon enough it will be dark in the early evening, too.

I'll put the garden to bed and the seed feeders out for the cardinals and other birds hanging around my yard during the winter. Then another year will end, as it inevitably does.

 

An Exercise in Futility

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.

--Simone de Beauvoir

The author of "The Second Sex" was not a gardener. If she was she would've said "weeding" instead of housework.

I, however, am a gardener. With a three-day holiday weekend all but assuring me of lots of people on the trails I walk to listen for birds, I took one of those days to bring my pail, bench and spade to the ornamental grass garden to get at the weeds that have run rampant thanks to heat, rain and lack of attention from me.

An assortment of weeds including milkweed, wild strawberry, 
ground ivy, oxalis and others I can't identify.
(Margo D. Beller)

Weeding is the last thing I want to do on a hot summer morning, but this holiday weekend was blessedly less humid and a tad cooler, allowing me to gird myself for battle. And battle I did.

I can identify many, but far from all, of the weeds I was pulling. There are strawberry vines, a clover-like plant called oxalis, my old nemesis the ground ivy, wild violets, dandelions. There is also lawn grass that has gone feral and moved into the plant area. 

On another cool morning I had spent several hours pulling oxalis that had grown so tall it was obscuring the plants in the sunny front plots. This time, however, the oxalis was more spread out, in some areas almost like a vine, somehow growing behind the tall ornamental grasses in much less sun.

Milkweed has shown up in this area, but because it doesn't get much sun it hasn't grown the flowers that benefit monarch butterflies. But the plant spreads through underground runners, so pulling up what is above the ground doesn't stop what is below.

The sharp blades of ornamental grass.
(Margo D. Beller)

I have to tip my hat to weeds and their methods of survival. Oxalis and the other weeds I was pulling from behind and beneath the ornamental grasses get only a small bit of sun, usually in the early morning and late afternoon, but it is enough for them. With a spade oxalis comes up easily but it is also fragile and will break. You grab a handful, pull it out, then see you left some behind. Even if you get these there may be more under the soil surface.

Some of the weeds I pulled were growing next to stones, which makes the plants hard to get with the spade. They also grow next to plants I don't want to uproot, which means I have to be careful with the spade not to take out a lily of the valley, for instance.

If the weed has a taproot, like the dandelion, I can dig down but rarely pull up the entire root. Usually some is left behind, assuring more to come later. One of the weeds I can't identify could grow into a small tree if left alone, so I try to pull it out or at least take off the foliage to slow the growth.

Ornamental grass (right) and prickly yew (Margo D. Beller)

In this particular plot, there is no netting. That is because I put in plants deer don't tend to browse, in this case three large ornamental grasses that grow after the daffodils are finished and shelter some smaller plants including a bleeding heart. So the weeds grow among the grasses and get wonderful protection. I have to be careful not to get cut by the knife-like blades as I move next to and beneath the grasses.

Also, there is a yew - taxonomy unknown - that sprang up from someplace else, filling a space when several scotch broom shrubs died from the effects of too much snow and too much cold wind one winter. Deer don't eat this yew, unlike the yew hedge nearby, because the leaves of this particular yew are prickly and have a strong scent. I can tell you these leaves scratch as much as the grasses.

Perhaps the greatest protection the weeds have is their sheer number. Eventually, they wear me down. I fill two loads in my large pink pail for the compost pile, and then I look at what is left and feel despair. 

I try to comfort myself by thinking, well, I heard lots of nice birds - house wren, catbird, chipping sparrow - and spent time outdoors in nice weather. I tell myself that at least I made a dent in the weeds - though deep down I know that by disturbing the soil I have created space for more of them to later take root.

And in the end, it's all compost. (Margo D. Beller)

It is only later I feel the mental and physical exhaustion and find the bites from insects that didn't like having their homes uprooted.

Saving the Apple Tree

I hope she forgives me.

The apple tree and I go way back to when we moved into this house. I've been here over 30 years and I estimate that, based on the size of the tree, it was planted about decade before. So it is an old tree.

The apple tree now. You can see where
the cut was made on the right. (Margo D. Beller)

A few days ago the boss of the lawn service I use came over with his chainsaw and cut off the rotting branch of the apple tree. He also, on his own, took off two smaller dead branches, saving me climbing up my ladder with my handsaw.

The result does not look so bad ... from afar. Once I paid the man and he left, I went out to look at the cut. I was horrified to see a large hole, and carpenter ants coming to investigate - or scurrying around after being disturbed. If carpenter ants were in the tree it wouldn't have much of a chance. If the ants didn't dig it out from within a hungry pileated woodpecker would start excavating from the outside to get at the ants. Either way, the tree would soon die.

I immediately drove to the local big-box store and bought limb sealant to cover the wound. 

Once I cleared the sawdust I sprayed the cut and into the hole.
(Margo D. Beller)

When half the dogwood died a few years ago, I had it cut back. The cut was clean, there was no rot in the center of the wood. But I wrapped the bottom of the trunk where pieces were starting to fall off. I must've done the right thing because the tree has survived, leafed out and even blossomed. I have gotten used to the way it looks when I am sitting on the porch. It is only when you go out and look at what was cut that you can get an idea of how much more there used to be.

The apple tree situation is different in several ways. For one, there was that big hole. So I sprayed into that hole to protect what I could reach. 

Another difference - I had the dogwood planted in 2007 at the same time as Spruce Bringsgreen, the blue spruce. So both trees are teenagers compared with the apple tree. 

The apple has survived my cutting down three overgrown, deer-attracting apple trees on the property, and one small apple tree that was killed by too many young bucks rubbing the velvet off their antlers. This remaining apple tree has survived sapsucker drill holes, a gall at the bottom and a hole in the trunk big enough for a chipmunk to hide in. It has produced apples every year, especially after it has been pruned. It has abided the squirrels and the house wren nest box that hung there for 10 years until it was moved to the dogwood. It has forgiven me for walking around with my long pole to whack the branches and bring down enough apples to use.

But I'm not sure it will forgive me this time.

The apple tree in 2023. 
(Margo D. Beller)

Last year, thanks to climate change, we had a severe drought starting in the summer and lasting into spring of this year, at which point we were inundated with an overabundance of rain. The apple blossoms appeared as usual, and then suddenly one-third of the tree went black. The squirrels and I had apples but they tended to be smaller. The apples were done by June 30 and the rotting branch was cut off that day. I should not have been surprised by that hole in the tree, but I was.

"I felt her pain, even though I do not have the problems an apple tree can have," Spruce told me after it was done. "But it was hard to watch."

The apple tree has been stoic. Her leaves are still green and, even with one-third of her gone, she doesn't look misshapen. But she isn't talking to me at the moment.

I hope she lives.