Extension News: August 2006 Archives

With my busy schedule, it’s hard to find time to do the things that keep me sane. One of the most important things is having time to write. Sometimes I have to get up at 4:00 a.m. to make it a part of the day.

I love mornings and I love writing, but I hate getting out of bed. Lately I’ve had a little friend helping me, a song sparrow I call Freddie. He starts singing shortly after my alarm clock gets mauled into silence.
 
Freddie likes to sit on the duck house that sits right next to my vegetable garden. That’s how he and I became acquainted in the first place. I was sitting barefoot in the sun-warmed dirt a few weeks ago, fussing around my tomato plants. He was making the rounds, broadcasting from all the best perches in his range. How could I ignore this gorgeous little man-bird, singing?

He throws his head back, open mouth to the sky, puffs out his stripey little chest and sings with such gusto you think he might burst. In the middle of one song in particular (he has several variations on each of about five different themes), his little throat pumps like a piston with each note. Sweet Sweet suh-suh-suh-suh swinger…he sings, and then one of the neighbor birds might sing to answer. If he starts a song buck buck buckee, but hears another bird, he stops short and listens. Then he might sing: “I’m singing on top of the duck house”, or “I’m singing in a rose bush in the field.”

Freddie sings from one end of my day right through to the other. Lying in bed the other night, my eyes were scrunched shut against the lingering summer sunshine, but my ears couldn’t shut out Freddie. I began to realize that I could identify the base song, and when he switched to a different one. (It’s not as easy as it might sound. He may sing the same base, but with added notes, a chopped ending, or variations in the middle. They seem classifiable by their beginnings. I’ve transcribed the Do-Wah series, the Do-Wee series, the Buck-Buckee series, the Sweet-Sue and the Sweet-Sweet series.) 

First, he would sing one song 20 or so times, then switch to another for about the same amount of time, then another. Sometimes he would sing each only a few times before switching, as if unsatisfied with the results. At one point though, he stayed on one in particular, which I transcribed Do-Wah Do-Wah sh’bop sh’bop Ringo-o-o-o-o. He sang it almost identically over and over and over again. I wondered if he were having a bit of a border dispute with a neighbor, vocally duking it out. 

It amazes me that simply paying a little attention to one small brown bird can open my ears to so much more in the world. When I first realized I was hearing his songs as something with meaning, without trying to transcribe them or understand them, it was like I’d been touched with a magic wand. Suddenly I felt like scientist and shaman all rolled into one: I had listened and taken notes and watched and listened some more, and I could tell when something was up out there. Fred could actually startle me by singing something out of the ordinary.

More than that though, Fred has given me Song Sparrow Awareness. Weeding a garden 20 miles from here, I hear a song sparrow on his perch and without thinking I note when he switches songs or continues with the same one for an extraordinary length of time, and when he moves from perch to perch in his territory.

I’m going to miss Freddie when he leaves for winter. I wonder if he’ll be back next year. Will I recognize him? Yesterday and today he has been behaving very differently. He has sung only infrequently, and not once in two days have I seen him on the duck house. Early this morning, picking hornworms from my tomato plants, I saw him on the split-rail fence. There were two or three other song sparrows within a few feet of him. I’m guessing this means Fred’s young’uns have fledged. With them gone, he has far less motivation to risk his tail-feathers singing at the top of his lungs on the most visible perch around. I guess I’m going to have to get myself out of bed.

By Kate Goodin, UNH Cooperative Extension NH Outside volunteer                               

08/16/06

For more information call the UNH Cooperative Extension's Family, Home & Garden Center's Info-line (toll free) at 1-877-398-4769 or send us an email. Volunteers are available to answer your questions Monday through Friday 9:00am to 2:00 p.m.

Some gardening tasks I can almost say I enjoy because of their contemplative, even meditative qualities. These are chores I do over and over, and while I do them, I can put my mind on automatic pilot and just go.

Doing these tasks in the early hours of the morning, even before the sun has popped up, makes for a calming, focused start to my day. At that hour, the bluebirds chirp, the turkeys and their flocks of young walk by, grazing on insects; crows stop to search for grubs, and the early commuters drive by with that curious Puritan work ethic we prize, but try to forget when we are practicing garden Zen.

One task that qualifies as garden Zen for me is deadheading the daylilies. Letting the old flowers hang and dry always reminds me of dirty old socks—not a pretty sight. Growing daylilies means flowers in bloom all season long. I have early, mid-season and late daylilies. They’re in my dooryard border, my raised perennial beds, my old-time, original-to-this-homestead beds, and my backyard-daylily-and-nothing-much-else bed.

In other words, I can find daylilies to deadhead most of the summer and into the early fall. To deadhead I either attach a basket to my belt to hold the spent buds and use floral scissors to clip the buds, or just use my fingers to pick them off and return them to the ground below to decompose.

Deadheading lilies can get messy, as the spent flower buds are sometimes spongy and give off excess liquid. The task also requires a deft touch, a perfect snap, to avoid taking unopened buds by mistake as I remove the flower and its now-pollinated seed pod. I like to get this done early in the morning to clean up the display and show it off all day.

I don’t forget to stop and smell the flowers, as some daylilies are fragrant, such as lemon daylilies and the hybrids developed by a local nursery owner, which have a delightfully fruity fragrance. I have to remember to check my nose when I’m finished. It may be pollen yellow!

Another job I consider Zen-like is picking the Japanese beetles and rose chafers off plants they use as launching pads to the rest of my garden. In my yard, the beetles launch primarily from the asparagus and rhubarb beds, which are both substantial. (At a former house, grapevines and green beans were the preferred stopping off places. I try to forgive and forget, but perhaps there’s also a hint of revenge involved in my beetle-picking activities.)

I can pick beetles easily at dusk and in the early morning hours. The beetles are in a torpor at those times. Simply putting a can under a beetle-infested plant seems to be enough provocation to send many of the pests plunging to the bottom of my Italian tomato can with a satisfying “plink.” I hold my hand loosely over the top, but few beetles make much effort to escape. I shake the can to make sure they remain at the bottom and every now and then walk over and feed the contents to the chickens that have been standing by their fence anxiously pacing.

Chickens love beetles. I find that by picking this way, I can prevent a lot of the damage to my roses and old-fashioned hollyhocks while they are in bloom. I need to be especially vigilant about collecting beetles during hot weather, when they are most active. Thus, I prefer the early morning and dusk for the coolness those hours provide.

I keep a couple of caveats in mind while picking Japanese beetles: 1. I try to make sure as I reach out to grab a beetle that it isn’t a bee. Bees working the asparagus collect highly visible orange pollen that builds up on their bodies. Two Japanese beetles mating look about the same size as one bee. As I get into the picking mode, I may relax too much as I reach out to grab a beetle. I haven’t grabbed a bee yet, but I can see it as a distinct possibility. 2. I wear an insect repellent or netting. While so intent on the beetles, I may not be able to avoid a sneak attack by mosquitoes, black flies, deer flies, or gnats. Either possibility can end the state of calmness I’m trying to cultivate.

Depending on which time of day I’ve selected to perform my chores, I may now be ready for a shower or an early morning cup of coffee. I relax and enjoy. The only thing that matters is the here and now.

By Helen Downing, Master Gardener, UNH Cooperative Extension

08/08/06

For more information call the UNH Cooperative Extension's Family, Home & Garden Center's Info-line (toll free) at 1-877-398-4769 or send us an email. Volunteers are available to answer your questions Monday through Friday 9:00am to 2:00 p.m.

There’s a field along my route in a town not far from where I live, a place where I’ve always watched the seasons change. First a snowy expanse, next a field with mud puddles, progressing to a newly planted cornfield, then a field of tall corn waiting for harvest, and in fall, a field left with a stubble of cornstalks.

 As that cornfield evolved through the summer, I would watch its progress from May through September. As the corn grew and the symmetry of its rows shimmered in the heat of the August sun, deer might be visible from the road as I passed, or turkeys gleaning insects and corn that had dropped to the ground during harvest. On clear nights, the moon, stars and northern lights provided the only illumination. As winter approached again, geese flew over in raucous V’s.

Then suddenly, all that changed. The owners of the field, who were not from here, sold it to be used as the site of a big box store. The sale meant the death of the field. Corn no longer grows there. I’m not sure who planted the silage corn, perhaps the family-operated dairy right across the way, victim of escalating land values, rising costs, and decreasing milk prices.

Now the field waits. It waits for planning boards and corporations; it waits for excavators and bulldozers; it waits for star-obscuring bright lights and security guards; it waits for pavers and for the shoppers who will inevitably arrive.

This field lies near a river. A river that at one time allowed silt to build up on an ancient floodplain. When Native Americans traveled on the river highways, they used this open space as a stop-off point to camp, hunt and fish. When European settlers came along, they cut the trees and pulled or burned the stumps to begin farming in the river valley. These intrusions on the land provided shelter and food to ensure their families’ survival. And the land gave.

Although corn no longer grows there, the field still provides a quiet, constantly changing beauty. In the spring, the field was green with grasses and sparkled with wildflowers. Now, in mid-summer, it stands poised to explode into the brilliant fireworks of goldenrod and purple New England asters. Deer still appear, turkeys roam, hawks soar and circle over a pastiche of emerald and constantly changing color, not far from a river just out of sight to humans, but known to the deer, turkeys and hawks. The river is their life force, providing them with water without which they couldn’t exist, close to the field in which they forage.

I will miss this field. The heat from blacktopped parking lots, neatly planted with trees that will never mature, and the bright lights that will block out the Aurora Borealis will never replace the spirit of that field.

As we humans travel through this valley, the natural beauty of the foothills of the White Mountains overwhelms us. The opportunity to watch a natural place through its changing seasons, a place where no one has built or paved or changed the topography, is increasingly rare. These types of spaces are endangered. They’re why I live here. They’re what give this valley its beauty and uniqueness. People travel from major cities to see them.

Such irrevocable changes in the nature of the land result from the decisions of a few. The ties we forge with our past are the ties that help us see the future. What do you want to see?

08/03/06

For more information call the UNH Cooperative Extension's Family, Home & Garden Center's Info-line (toll free) at 1-877-398-4769 or send us an email. Volunteers are available to answer your questions Monday through Friday 9:00am to 2:00 p.m.