Extension News: March 2007 Archives

The sharp, raspy call introduced a certain harshness into the otherwise peaceful solitude of an early November afternoon. I had been enjoying the stillness as I sat on my patio, neatly tucked into the space where the floor of the sun porch met the rear wall of my Cape Cod-style home.

The call came again…chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee. I directed my eyes to the arbor on my left and looked up into the yellowing leaves clinging to the hardy-kiwi vine. There on the vine, perched in a defiant stance better suited for a larger, more intimidating bird, the black-capped chickadee once more sounded the call, which seemed directed solely toward me and which seemed to be chastising me for having failed to perform some duty.

Just behind the chickadee hung the brown, metal bird feeder. “It’s empty,” I thought. “I put out the last load of black-oil sunflower seed before the end of March.” Could this bird be one of those who spent a good part of the past winter feeding here? If so, he (or she) must remember and realize that I am the person responsible for filling it.”

I scanned the area for other chickadees, thinking perhaps that this one was calling to family members, rather than actually trying to influence me. But he was alone and none of his species, or any other species, responded to the call.

“Very curious,” I thought. “I’ll have to remember to pick up some more seed.”

Days went by. I completed several shopping trips without remembering to pick up food for my avian neighbors. But the chickadee, being considerably younger and hungrier than I, persisted.

A week later, we replayed the scene on the patio. I sat and he complained. Of course, I assumed it was the same individual bird, though it could have been another. To me, chickadees look and sound alike, and their quickness and smallness make it difficult to spot any unique characteristics. However, the message was clear: if I didn’t refill the feeder soon, there would be consequences.

In all seriousness, I didn’t fear the wrath of a lone chickadee. It was more compassion than fear that motivated me to respond to the threat. Besides, the black-capped chickadee is such a loveable creature. Most New Englanders admire these creatures for their daring, precision and crowd-pleasing antics.

Necessity found me at the store the next day, and the bird-badgering had occurred recently enough to joggle a few brain cells into recalling the need for sunflower seeds. I managed to get the 25-lb sack into the car and back to the house where the empty bird feeder hung. The seed, being bulky and not immediately necessary, sat on the passenger-side of the front seat for a couple more days. Then, once again I was reminded by the tiny-but-vocal bird, with a black patch appearing like a perfectly-aligned toupee, that it was time to act.

It was dusk before I found it convenient to fill the feeder. The following afternoon, I glanced out the window in the kitchen and noticed a significant amount of avian activity at the feeder. The chickadees would flit in, grab a seed and retreat to the kiwi vine. The finches tended to secure the perch and remain on the feeder, selecting seed, until forced off by more aggressive individuals.

I wondered how the word spread so quickly that there was now food at the site. Who discovered it, and how was the discovery communicated to the others?

Later, I assumed my customary post near the feeder on my patio chair to catch the fleeting warmth of late afternoon sun. I’d put on thick socks under my open-toed sandals to protect against the cool cement surface of the patio slab. I crossed my legs with the right ankle resting on my left knee, admired what remained of the autumn foliage, and contemplated the stack of cordwood in the yard.

My reverie was disturbed suddenly by a flutter of tiny wings as a lone chickadee dropped from my roof and flew directly toward me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him approach and land directly on the tip of my large toe. He perched there for several seconds, seemingly aware that I was alive and not a mere statue.

At first, I felt pleased to share this moment with such a loveable creature, sure that he was honoring me for having supplied the life-sustaining seed. Then suddenly, it became clear to me that my status as master over the lowly chickadee was being called into question.

Could that look in his steely, dark eye convey more than simple appreciation for my kindness? Perhaps the chickadee meant to deliver a warning that future neglect might result in punishment—a sharp peck on my toe, for instance.

This episode will give me something to ponder as I dutifully fill the feeder during the frigid winter days ahead.

Robert Powell Hughes, UNH Cooperative Extension Community Marine Docent

For Christmas my grandsons (with some help from their Dad) made me a bird feeder. The design is simple: an open frame about a foot square with a screen on the bottom, suspended from the four corners by cords that attach to a loop about two feet above the frame.
           
We hung the feeder on a small branch of a young beech tree, high enough so we could just reach to fill it, high enough (we hoped) to be out of reach of the deer, and far enough from the trunk to discourage the cat from exploiting the situation. The south-facing windows both upstairs and down provide a front row seat for observers. We poured a couple of quarts of sunflower seeds onto the screen and awaited the verdict of the intended beneficiaries.

In no time a flock of finches arrived. They mobbed the feeder, and those who couldn’t get the first bite waited impatiently, an unruly crowd pushing and shoving, a flying dance among the branches. The tree, in midwinter, sprouted feathered leaves, flying off all at once for no apparent reason, only as far as the adjacent maple. Soon they were back, twittering and competing for a place at the banquet.

Chickadees and tufted titmice hang around, taking a turn when the finches depart for a spell. Occasionally a nuthatch visits, although he seems to prefer the fancier and less crowded feeder outside the kitchen window.
           
Watching the finches is endlessly fascinating. On my window is a small feeder, only large enough for two or at most three birds at a time. Sometimes one will decide he is king of the castle and aggressively defend his throne, even sacrificing opportunities to feed as he fends off interlopers. But eventually he also flies off, and another, and yet another take his place. The little feeder requires frequent replenishment.
           
Winter is a special time on our hill. When the leaves drop in October, the view changes markedly. Sunrise, masked in summer by the foliage, can be dramatic, and it comes late enough that 7:00 a.m. risers like me can enjoy it. The distant hills and small lakes become visible. The lakes, blue before they freeze over, later appear as white, open spaces.

We who love winter are thought a bit odd by those who complain endlessly of the cold, snow and ice. But the changing seasons are a source of constant wonder. No other season offers anything that compares with the brightness of a moonlit night on fresh snow. Shadows of the bare trees create a chiaroscuro on the open field. The structure of the landscape is visible from the road—stone walls, icy streams, boulders. The fields of 19th century farmers reveal themselves, although most are overgrown now, often with mature trees.
           
A true sign of spring, in mid-February, is activity in the sugar bush. A warm sunny day brings the sap up in the maple trees, and sugar makers get ready for the year’s first harvest. Deer trails course through the forest, reminding us of the constant life that inhabits what may seem a dead landscape.
           
The goldfinches, mobbing my feeders, begin to discard their drab winter plumage for their yellow garments, in preparation for spring rituals. The chickadee whistles his spring song, sometimes even on a warm day in January. The piliated woodpecker loudly declares his territory with a persistent drumbeat and occasional screech. Neighbors report flocks of robins, and even a bluebird is heard by the beginning of March.
           
Last year’s cold, snowy March brought January (and the mobs of finches) back in earnest. But it brought the sun, brighter and warmer, shining through the south facing windows, giving the furnace and wood stove a rest four several hours during the day.

I know the snow will melt, the skis will return to the basement, and the streams will awaken, roaring through the sugar bush. Making an expedition to check the sap lines becomes an adventure with a sometimes soggy interlude.

Spring birds will return in earnest, and the finches will find food in the forest, while newcomers, the red-breasted grosbeak and the oriole, will honor my offerings, joining the ever-present chickadees and nuthatches and the charming tufted-titmouse.

By Carolyn Baldwin, UNH Cooperative Extension Wildlife Coverts Cooperator

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.

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They began arriving in the mail before Christmas—mail order seed catalogues with their lavish photographic displays. The catalogue writers use superlatives: “biggest,” “best,” “largest,” “sweetest,” to describe perennials, annuals, fruits, and vegetables. Every tomato has that “old-fashioned flavor.” Corn has “mouth-watering” sweetness. Potatoes grow “as big as your hand.” Which catalogue holds you spellbound and dreaming of a bountiful garden this year?

Every winter as I study these catalogues, I try to weed the misinformation from the catalogue descriptions. Despite these efforts, the catalogues lure me into trying new products and varieties.

Over the years, I’ve discovered heirloom tomato varieties—Brandywine, Zebra, Purple Cherokee. Their incredible flavor puts newer varieties to shame, even though most heirloom varieties have little disease resistance, and some produce oddly shaped fruits.

My curiosity also drew me to Sugar Snap peas when they had just come out. I’ve grown them ever since, as they require little effort to grow or pick, and they taste delicious. My inclination to try new vegetables also added sugar-enhanced corn varieties to our table and delicious, hardy Asian greens like mizuna and bok choy.

Here are some of the vegetables I’m dreaming of for 2006:

“Micro Greens”: Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of these, neither had I until just recently. Micros are the first delicate seedlings of vegetables and herbs: beets, cress, kohlrabi, celery, pea sprouts and spinach. In just a week or two after planting, you clip the young seedlings and use them as garnishes, as the main ingredients in a spring salad, or as a base for a roasted vegetable like grilled fennel or roasted beets. Obviously, this will require intensive succession plantings as with mesclun mixes. I may try creating my own blend from leftover seeds from last year, or look for specialty blends in catalogues.

Delfino cilantro: This herb earned recognition as an All America Selection for its flavor and fern-like appearance. Ready in just four to five weeks, this is another plant that deserves succession planting. People I’ve talked to seem to love it or hate it, but it could become a staple for salsa-holics. When cilantro goes to seed, it’s called coriander. I plan to harvest good crops of both leaves and seeds to use as seasonings.

Big Mama tomato: The supplier suggests “fire-roasting” this indeterminate paste tomato on the grill and using it to make bruschetta to spread on thick slices of fresh Italian bread. Yum!

Purple Haze carrot: This sounds like a great conversation veggie, purple on the outside, orange inside. The catalogue tells growers to serve Purple Haze raw to retain its color. The kids in my life are going to love me for this one!

Ruby Queen sweet corn: Can you imagine? Sweet corn that turns red as it ripens! Some catalogues recommend steaming to retain Ruby Queen’s color. I can hardly wait for this one.

In addition to new vegetables, I want to try more ornamental grasses in my perennial border and elsewhere. They are a great way to make sure the garden has something to please the eye after frost shrivels the heat-loving annuals, and snow begins to cover the perennials.

Miscanthus sinensis “Graziella” is an ornamental grass I’ve heard will spread, and I certainly hope it will in my garden. I planted a pot of this cultivar in a raised bed last summer, and it still looks great. Now in the middle of winter, it is a beautiful shade of golden beige against a background of snow. The tall feathery plumes, or culms, of Graziella are as graceful as its name.

Although I spend many pleasant hours curled up with my seed catalogues, come spring, I also like to visit some of the excellent nurseries in my area. My idea of a good trip is to drive off with a large plastic tub in my trunk in search of new and different plants I can add to my ever-increasing garden or put into patio containers.

My only caveat: Remember each plant or packet of seed you purchase is going to mean time on your hands and knees. Those tiny little transplants become big in no time, and often we have weather in New Hampshire that prohibits early planting. Finding space to hold these new plants while you wait for warm weather can become a problem especially as they grow larger. Often, a few new plants provide more than enough satisfaction in the long run, and less frustration in the present.

So, get those catalogues out, brew a pot of tea, pull a blanket over your knees, and dream and plan. After all, spring is just a few cold days and a whole mud season away.

By Helen Downing, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

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.

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Fishing poles in hand, my brother and I startled as the chunky, dark bird flew from beneath the black spruce forest. “Mark, it’s a spruce grouse!” I said, awestruck by the beauty of the rare cousin of the ruffed grouse, a popular game bird. “That’s the first one I’ve ever seen.”

When we entered the woods on a brook trout fishing expedition in the summer of 2001, that part of the forest hadn’t yet been conserved as the Connecticut Lakes Wildlife Management Area, nor had anyone conceived the notion of an action plan to protect the state’s wildlife. Looking back on that fishing trip, I realize how far we’ve come since then toward protecting many of the wildlife and habitats that are important to me and to the ecological and economic well-being of our state.

Two years ago I was asked to co-coordinate a New Hampshire Fish and Game Department team that would create the New Hampshire Wildlife Action Plan. On the way to developing that plan, our team created a list of wildlife species and habitats in need of conservation attention—some of which I’m sure many of you have enjoyed over the years: eastern brook trout, wood turtle, purple finch, American woodcock, mink frog, and bobcat, to name a few.

While the federal government mandated and funded this mammoth project nationwide, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department made our Wildlife Action Plan truly New Hampshire-specific. Biologists scoured the records to make sure we knew as much as possible about where our critters live so we would start with the best available information.

Then Fish and Game contracted with experts from many conservation organizations and agencies to help write specific profiles on our wildlife species and key habitats. More than natural history, these profiles contained an assessment of the risks to the species and habitats, and listed actions that could help ensure the long-term viability of each one. They presented assessments of the current condition of New Hampshire’s wildlife habitat as a baseline against which we will measure our progress over time.

Our team pulled together all the species and habitat profiles and looked for continually reoccurring risk factors. Biologists then wrote descriptions of these most prominent risk factors followed by conservation strategies that would help New Hampshire reduce those risks, thereby improving conditions for wildlife.

While the writing was hard enough, getting the job done will be much harder. The Fish and Game Department recognizes that, and put forth an implementation plan that includes descriptions of the next steps to take, emphasizing the importance of the work of individuals, communities, regional planners, conservation groups, state and federal agencies, and many others.

The bottom line? Fish and Game can’t do it alone. They are counting on many partners to come together with the common cause of keeping New Hampshire beautiful and ecologically sound. Wildlife is truly a public resource and each of us has a stake in ensuring its long-term protection.

I hope someday to take my three sons on that same fishing trip to the Connecticut Lakes Wildlife Management Area, where perhaps they will have the same awe-inspiring experience of seeing a rare spruce grouse, and perhaps even catching an eastern brook trout or two.

Click here to view the New Hampshire Wildlife Action Plan on the Web.

By Darrel Covell, UNH Cooperative Extension Wildlife Extension Specialist

When Shakespeare penned his famous lines: “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” he must have been on his way to a marketing meeting. Statistics show that gardening is the number one hobby in the United States; nearly 70 million households participate annually.

Even more staggering is the variety of plant life gardeners have to choose from, and new cultivars are hitting the market all the time. From “Barbara Bush” roses and “Snow Queen” hydrangea to “Big Boy” tomatoes and “Tom Thumb” popcorn—who comes up with these names?

Learning the language of identifying plants in the world-wide botanical community would probably earn you about three credits at any Land-Grant university. Centuries ago, folks with an interest in flora and fauna recognized the need for a global means of identification. Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish fellow, developed a system using Latin as the root to naming all plants, which has become the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.

The rules are very specific for proper identification. Every tree, shrub, vine and flower that has been found around the world has a unique botanical name, but few of us garden hobbyists refer to a summer squash as a Cucurbita pepo. We remember their common names like the names of old friends.

As it turns out, a rose isn’t just a rose. Like people, roses have defining characteristics and personality traits. We personify them with names like “Ronald Reagan,” “Graham Thomas” and “Barbara Streisand.” And yes, in 2000, plant breeders introduced the “William Shakespeare,” one of the David Austin “English” shrub roses.

And it’s not just roses. “Princess Diana” is a dahlia, “General Eisenhower” a tulip, and “Fat Albert” a blue spruce. Plant breeders have great hopes for plants like “Rock Star” pumpkins, “Queen of the Night” morning glories (yes, they bloom at dusk!) and “Dinnerplate” dahlias.

Back to the original question, “Who comes up with the names?” Sometimes it’s the researcher, who may be a university professor or a home gardener, but often it’s a marketing person. UNH plant biologist Brent Loy told me he’s produced hundreds of experimental pumpkin, squash and melon hybrids. Most of his varieties that made it into commercial production were named by the seed companies, although they did like his choice of “SnackJack” for the snack-seed pumpkin he developed.

I contacted seed companies popular with home gardeners to ask how they name new plant varieties. Flannery Higgins, media relations director for Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine told me they have no formal naming process. Researchers often choose names but occasionally the company hosts contests among employees. A researcher named the new specialty melon “Serenade” while listening to Mozart’s Serenade No. 13. (Perhaps the “Bolero” carrot has a similar history?) The “Diva” cucumber, named in an employee contest, went on to become a 2002 All-America Selections Winner.

Burpee Seeds in Pennsylvania works similarly. Don Zeidler, Burpee’s director of direct marketing, told me the story behind the company’s popular “Big Boy” tomato. One of the breeders in the field exclaimed to David Burpee, “Who's the big boy with the tomato?” The toddler was Burpee’s son Jonathan. That was more than 50 years ago, and “Big Boy” is still a top-seller.

Plant names often give conspicuous clues about a plant’s color, appearance or flavor. Examples from Johnny’s catalogue include “Tendersweet” cabbage, a thin-leafed variety, and “Tom Thumb” popcorn that grows on 3½-foot plants. Burpee has a tomato called “Fourth of July,” which is ready to pick by Independence Day, and sunflowers called “Sunforest” that grow 10 to 15 feet tall.

While many plants are named to honor individuals, others are labeled for the folks who developed them. The New Hampshire farmer, Tom Fox, for example, cultivated “Tom Fox” pumpkins. Countless more may be named after relatives, lovers or, perhaps, just wishful thinking. I found a pea named “Payload,” a tomato known as “Mortgage Lifter,” and Brussels sprouts called “Prince Marvel” (maybe that one has a better chance of getting past your kids’ noses).

As it turns out, a home gardener developed “Mortgage Lifter” in the 1930s. Burpee offers the heirloom tomato and, according to the story in its online catalogue, the fellow grew four of the biggest tomato varieties he could find. He cross-pollinated them over six seasons and bred a cultivar that was not only immense, but tasty, too. The name came from his success at selling the plants for a dollar apiece, and in six years, the garden hobbyist paid off his mortgage.

Perhaps I’ve piqued your curiosity about the variety of plant names you’re finding in seed and nursery catalogues and garden centers across the region. If you are looking for a specific plant, however, your best bet is to learn its Latin name. Several plants sometimes share the same common name.
For more information about the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, visit the web site of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden at www.bbg.org.

By Jackie Bower, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

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.

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“You’ve got a bad attitude,” my husband said, that cool autumn day last year as we started to prepare our shrubs for winter weather. He was right. Since moving north from Concord five years ago, I’ve created a pleasing landscape in this old pasture, but I struggle to keep it alive during the harsh winter months, and it makes me grumpy.

The desiccating winds and cold temperatures at 1800 feet above sea level have killed two evergreen trees, a PJM rhododendron, five peonies and several daylilies. We’ve learned to cover the shrubs with particleboard teepees and burlap jackets, leaving us with an ugly yard for six bleak months and no guarantee that our landscaping investment will survive. Last year the wind blew so strong it transformed my creative stake-and-burlap bungalows into tattered flags beating in the crisp winds.

Yes, I had a bad attitude. I love sunshine on my back and warm air lifting my hair. I love the bluebirds, hummingbirds and tree swallows that delight me with their colors and playful flights. I actually saw the tree swallows catch insects in the air this summer. Reducing the insect population by birds rather than mechanical contraptions pleases me, so I planted more trees in our field this year. I hope they will slip into dormancy with adequate water and minerals to help them survive the drying winds and cold winter chill.

Yes, winter challenges my adaptability to North Country living. Every other season brings a feeling of joy and contentment. I am delighted when a grandchild helps to plant the garlic in September, or enjoys a fresh string bean from the vine in August. In October they seek out the biggest pumpkin, and I’m always thrilled when a child likes to ride in the wagon I tow behind my little red riding lawnmower. They giggle, say “cool,” and I feel a touch of machismo. Yeah, I am a strong, cool nana!

But as my plants face another winter, I am filled with concern about my ability to provide proper care for the landscape. The soil freezes so solidly around my granite steps and planters that entire root systems freeze. Two years ago I lost five peonies.

“Peonies don’t freeze,” the catalogues say. “They have centuries of hardy ancestry to help them tough out the cold, even in Siberia or Manchuria.”

“They die in my yard,” I whimper.

I’m reminded of the need for flexibility in life, so I replace dead plants with hardier ones. Canadian growers have developed a hardy climbing rose, with which I replaced two dead clematis (hardy for Zone 3, but not in my yard). The first William Baffin grew with vigor in the warm summer sunshine. Last fall, I covered William’s roots with a foot of good loam after tacking his climbing canes to the ground with landscape staples. The special protection was so successful I added another rose this summer. Was it truly a warmer winter last year? Will the pair continue to thrive?

After making holiday wreaths in November, I covered the ground phlox, thyme and dianthus with a light layer of evergreen boughs nailed to the ground with landscape staples to prevent them from blowing away. That also seemed to work successfully around the painted daisies.

This spring I planted tiny members of the dianthus family called “steppables,” They bloomed with bitty pink carnations in late summer. I hope they’ll spread around the granite walk. They’re rated to survive temperatures to 40 below zero!

Perhaps I’m beginning to recognize the importance of gardening responsively. North Country winters require me to be more mindful of their intensity. If I want to garden here, I must respect the requirements for survival. I remember the warning to prepare adequately for a hiking trip in the wilderness, and I do so without hesitation. I remember the need to water the vegetable garden and all the new plants consistently in the summer sunshine to achieve adequate growth. I am reminded that a successful life is tied to preparedness.

It’s almost time to cover the yard again. I’ll try to have a better attitude this year. I’ll exercise in our new indoor community pool, or force myself out into the bright winter sun on a pair of cross-country skis. I’ll remember the joy of working outside in my gardens, and I’ll begin to prepare for next summer. I’ll remember the real reason I love to garden is the smell of the good earth, the warm winds, the bright sunlight, and the magnificent colors dotting my hillside from each beautiful flower.

And I’ll remember, “To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to reap and a time to sow.” But most especially, a time to be grateful for my little section of this great earth and the good health to till it.

Brenda Tibbetts, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

Photo courtesy of Grand Traverse Conservation District

A pair of white ducks appeared in our neighborhood pond in August. Each time we drove by, we saw them reveling in their element, bottoms up foraging for food or just swimming around unimpeded in the pond.

It was obvious that these were not wild ducks, accustomed to the seasonal comings and goings of nature’s cycles. They were domestic ducks, unable to fly or to defend themselves from predators. Still, they survived happily in the pond in late summer.

As fall approached, several of the neighbors joined us in concern for their fate. My grandsons, with their mother, brought food and the ducks welcomed them and even seemed to anticipate the children’s visits complete with handouts. These ducks were used to human beings. No doubt they had been adorable, fluffy ducklings at Easter time. But by the end of summer, the charming babies had grown to full-grown ducks, perhaps a bit aggressive, and needing accommodations that some suburban family could not provide. Were they then abandoned to fend for themselves, without thought for their ultimate fate? Did parents persuade their children, and perhaps themselves, that the ducks would live happily ever after in our neighborhood pond?

September passed, and then as October moved on, the neighborhood became increasingly concerned. The ducks themselves grew more dependent on the children’s provisions. We all knew that if we did nothing these two could not survive once the pond froze over. They would become dinner for someone, if not for Mr. Fox, then for the coyotes or a fisher.

So, one day the children and their mother arrived at our barn with the ducks in the back of the Subaru. The female had been easily captured, but the drake was skittish. The timely arrival of a neighbor saved the day and the pair came to their adopted home in a pen by the barn.

We wondered how they would get on with our ancient Chinese geese—noisy creatures but otherwise harmless. A single Indian-runner drake shares their pen. (His mate succumbed to a weasel last winter—I found her headless carcass in the pen one snowy morning.) What would they think of these new arrivals?

As it turned out, the ducks were welcomed and moved in without incident. They may have missed the freedom of the pond, but they were glad to have food and shelter as winter approached and the cold intensified. Each morning I broke the ice in their water pans, and all drank gratefully.

No sooner had the days begun noticeably to lengthen, in late February or early March, than a white egg appeared in the shelter. Every day, through the spring and early summer, Mrs. Duck produced a single egg. We used them in various ways—they are rich and tasty. We saved a half dozen for the nearby Montessori pre-school that likes to hatch some chicks or ducks each spring in their incubator. Some of these orphans come back to our farm, either to lay eggs or to find their way to the freezer in the fall.

Sure enough, after 28 days of incubation, the duck eggs hatched, producing four fluffy ducklings. School was over, so home they came to our “nursery”. When they outgrew the small nursery pen, we introduced them to the ducks and geese at the barn. Mrs. Goose decided on motherhood, so enthusiastically that she crushed one of them. Another succumbed to her over-protective instincts—she was too big and her size overwhelmed them. The others were returned to a safer pen, and after a few weeks we tried again to integrate the little flock of water fowl. This time the Indian Runner drake proved such an ardent lover that the poor ducklings were tattered and thoroughly intimidated by his attentions. So they are back in a safe haven for now, and we shall have roast duck in the fall.

Such a responsibility we assume for our fellow creatures—even if we will eventually eat them! And the parent ducks, rescued from the pond, will survive another winter to produce eggs. The children at the Montessori school can again experience the miracle of tiny ducklings emerging from their shells. We’ll make egg salad of the rest.

By Carolyn Baldwin, UNH Cooperative Extension Community Tree Steward

Black, barren earth with patches of dying grass spread out across the front of our church in Derry when the snow melted last year - not the image we wanted to project for the season of life, growth and rebirth, but a sight commonly found in lawns during the springtime.

The landscaping committee wanted to change that image fast. Some of the committee members suggested using a strong pesticide as a quick way to get rid of the grubs that had killed the grass by devouring the roots, as well as the skunks that tore up the soil rooting around for the grubs.

A meditation garden sprawls around the higher points of a wetland that sprawls below the hill. I worried that pesticide runoff might harm or kill some of the fish, amphibians and other wetland creatures. Wetlands are the cradle of new life for frogs, salamanders, toads, turtles and insects. I love the song of the spring peepers as I leave from an evening church service. The peepers are one species among the many creatures that add something to life and our experience. For me they herald the hope of spring and warmer days. I’d read that frogs, salamanders, toads, and other amphibians absorb chemicals through their skin, making them particularly vulnerable to the pesticide our committee wanted to use.

I called the Rockingham County Extension office to learn more about the grub control pesticide. Nada Haddad, the agricultural resources educator, informed me that only state-licensed pesticide applicators can treat public spaces with pesticides. She also warned that the pesticide might contaminate neighboring wells if it wasn’t applied in strict accordance with label directions.

I agreed to take on the task of finding an alternative to the product the committee wanted to use. Time was getting short. We had two weeks to find an alternative before the window for the pesticide application would close.

I wracked my brain. During my training as a UNH Cooperative Extension Community Tree Steward, I’d learned that native plant species are typically better adapted to cope with pests. That got me to thinking that perhaps we could solve our problem by replanting the lawn with hardier, more pest-resistant grass species.

Then I remembered a flyer in which the N.H. Department of Transportation (DOT) talked about using tough, low-maintenance grasses and plants in highway median strips.

I called the DOT and talked to Guy Giunta, the department’s landscape specialist supervisor. He told me the DOT uses something called Highway Mix 45—a mix of species that resists salt, doesn’t need watering and needs minimal maintenance.

Minimal maintenance would certainly be a plus for the church. The few dedicated people who water and mow the grass and do other landscape maintenance for the church neither want, nor have the leisure, to spend all their time caring for the lawn. It takes a generous person to interrupt a beautiful summer day to run over to water the church lawn.

I learned that Highway Mix 45 is durable—the indoor/outdoor carpeting of lawns—and available through a local garden supply center. Its one drawback: it doesn’t make a nice, soft lawn you’d want to picnic on. That was no problem for us, though, because this lawn was near the road where no one would want to picnic anyway. The church just wanted it to look nice, and it came up a nice, solid green.

Last spring I heard the peepers, who reminded me spring was coming after such a hard winter. In the fall, I walked with my son in the meditation garden and sat listening to the birds. When we came out of the woods, we met Bob Lehmankuler, the head of the landscaping committee, who told me the grass was growing fine and that the muskrats and butterflies loved it.

The front of the church now radiates new life and growth. There is also new life and growth in the wetlands, and safe drinking water in nearby wells. We solved our pest problem without resorting to pesticides because people were willing to seek out a creative alternative. People were willing to listen to each other, ask questions, and compromise.

The obvious solution isn't always the best.

By Bonnie Barlow, Community Tree Steward, UNH Cooperative Extension

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.

Have you ever wondered how fields were opened when you see the thick stands of trees growing around them? I always have.

Folklore and history books tell of the labor involved with digging and dragging away the many stones and boulders left behind by the glaciers to build walls and the foundations of barns and homes.

Except for the few old pictures of two men at either end of a large saw cutting away at a large tree, we don’t seem to have the whole story. In the last decade I have been privileged to watch the clearing of a field as it actually happened.

Loggers clear-cut a large tract of a neighboring field—more than ten acres—for timber and firewood. Only the stumps and some tops remained. I expected machinery to come and “stump” the land to prepare it for plowing and seeding. But come early spring, just the rocks and sprouting stumps were there. A spring-fed stream ran down along one side of the tract.

Shortly after, someone set out a pair of cattle there, as well as a few sheep and goats. It was a pretty sight as the animals traveled over various areas, eating as they went. Some stumps sprouted new growth, which the animals soon chewed down.

The goats and sheep seemed to prefer to play among the rocks and boulders. At times, the cattle would roam over the far side of the field; other times I’d see them near the fencing along the road.

Some grasses grew as the summer progressed, and the tree stumps sprouted anew. Every night the animals went to the barn for grain and hay. When winter came, they all got penned inside. The field lay quiet under the snow.

The next spring, the pattern of animal activity continued, but some stumps didn’t seem to have the growth of the first year. It certainly didn’t look like the cultivated fields I had seen where the soil was exposed, with mud puddles developing. The tree sprouts continued decreasing, until only one or two trees per acre remained, having escaped the foraging animals. As those trees grew, the grasses responded to the occasional shade, and some wild daisies and asters found a home.

This cyclic pattern of three seasons of animal grazing and winter rest continued over the next four to five years. The field continued to supply forage for the animals, the few trees gave some needed shade to the grazers, and the sporadic wild flowers added to the charm. It seemed to me an answer to my wonderment.

The tools used to cut trees—from axes, to saws, to power machinery, and whole-tree harvesting equipment—have evolved over time. The stories of strong men with horses and oxen and stone boats, rolling, tugging or lugging boulders and building walls are evidenced at every turn on our back-country roads.

Machinery can dig out stumps and push boulders into walls in a few days, but the new walls will lack that unique ‘man-made’ look. Many tracts of open land remain open because they are “improved.” But here I have watched a different style of land management: one where nature takes the major role.

The logging operation opened up the area and produced a crop for sale, giving the ground a new lease on life. The animals roamed freely on securely fenced acreage. Some trees continued to put up sprouts which nourished the animals. But the majority of the stumps were stripped enough and often enough that they were unable to continue growing new sprouts. The resulting field had the look of having been there since time began, as though no human hand had played any part at all.

Time changes all things. The animals are gone now. Without their activity, nature will again reign. The seeds of “pioneer” tree species, such as poplar and birch, will self-sow over the grasses and some will find conditions hospitable and begin to sprout. The pioneers will gradually give way to red maple, oak, and pine—the so-called “mid-succession” species. These, in turn, may eventually yield to what foresters call the “climax” species: sugar maple, hemlock, and beech.

Once again the forest will stand until man strips the land of its trees and the field appears again.

by Judith A. Kraemer, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

Gardening is and always has been my source of emotional nourishment. The locations, tasks and companions have changed over the decades. The motivation has not.

While I was growing up, no one in my family was interested in the yard, let alone gardening. My father was busy supporting a family and my mother considered yard work something someone else should do. My mother’s way to pacify her active girl toddler was to place her in the yard with a spoon.

The year I entered grade school, my father built a ranch house on the site of an old asparagus field, flat and stripped of any landscaping. Once the ranch was complete, he decided it was time to put in a lawn. Not to be outdone by other lawns, he set out to locate the perfect pile of manure to fertilize the yard.

We went to an old dairy farm in town. The farmer showed my father what appeared to be a modest pile of cow manure. Dad told him to deliver the load and spread it on our small yard. The next day the entire front yard was covered with two feet of cow manure. It seems Dad had seen only the above-ground part of a manure pile stored in a pit five feet deep.

Dad attempted to till the manure into the ground, but the tiller tines weren’t long enough to reach the soil. He solved the problem by adding new soil on top of the manure and planting grass seed. It took weeks for the manure to settle enough for us to walk on the lawn. The neighbors weren’t pleased with the smell. The following years, our lawn produced crop after crop of beautiful mushrooms.

There were formal gardens and yards to view as I walked to and from school. I extended my walks to include more roads or paths just to see the gardens. Once during such a walk a wonderful elderly lady welcomed me into her garden. Her house was old, as were her garden ornaments and plants. We had a chat, she gave me some marigold seeds, and I became a gardener.

I began to dig garden areas around my house and used my allowance money to purchase more seeds to plant. The garden became a place of escape when emotions became volatile. Tending it was a chore no one ordered me to do, but the one I liked the most.

My high school guidance counselor lived next door. Of course she’d had direct sensory exposure of our well-manured lawn and for years had watched me gardening in my yard. My preference for the world of plants and insects led the counselor to place me in the agriculture education track at school. Insulted to have their daughter placed in the agriculture track, my parents sent me to various private schools that became my home over the next five years.

College brought glimpses of my future as a gardener. I visited the home of a professor, an old house with gardens visible from the windows. The home’s rough interior mirrored the struggle for survival outside. The place was comfortable and welcoming. Sitting at the kitchen table, looking out the kitchen windows, I watched the professor’s birdfeeders and noticed how flowers in his wife’s gardens fed wild visitors.

My first husband came from a farming family. This relationship began a 10-year foray into the “back to earth” phase of my gardening experience. A small farm supported us with goats, chickens, geese, rabbits, and a three-acre organic vegetable garden with a roadside stand. Life was a cycle of planting, harvesting, birthing and slaughtering. We counted our riches in good weather and health. It wore us out.

When that man and the organic farm were no longer part of my life, I found I still had the need for a home with a space to garden. Another marriage and an old home on 10 acres allowed for the space; however, years of career building and graduate school kept any extra time for gardening to a bare minimum.

The years since then have brought me to my present stage of semi-retirement and a back yard of small gardens located so I can view them from the windows in my old home. Now I spend many days on the back porch, lulled by the heirloom flowers in my backyard gardens. My husband and I discuss other forms of entertainment—boating, kayaking, motorcycling—but no one moves.

I no longer plant vegetables in my gardens. To do so would make the critters and insects enemies to be controlled or defeated. There are plenty of small farms around to provide us with fresh produce. Instead, I plant mostly old-fashioned flowers chosen for their hardiness in this location and soil.

Only what survives stays. I keep what the insects and birds enjoy. The colors, forms, smells, sounds, and the feel of these spaces produce the emotional nourishment I’ve sought from gardens all my life.

By Stephania Pearce, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

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.

It’s leaf-peeping season in New England, a time when visitors and locals alike visit farmstands for pumpkins, gourds and corn stalks, or tramp nearby fields and roadsides for weeds and berries to decorate their doors, porches, and mailboxes.

You may still find fat bunches of oriental bittersweet hanging with the Indian corn and bunches of upside-down strawflowers at farmstands. Or you may collect some from your favorite spot near the railroad trestle where the vines grow lush and thick with yellow-orange berries.

But if you’ve ever spent your summer weekends trying to eradicate this scourge, you probably won’t be tempted to decorate your home with it.

Oriental bittersweet, Celastrus orbiculatus, imported from Asia in the mid-1800’s, was widely planted along new railroad beds to prevent the soil from eroding. Gardeners quickly adapted it, training the vine to climb garden trellises. It quickly became established from Louisiana to Maine. Its bright orange berries and twisting stems make it a natural choice for making wreaths and sprays that decorate New England doors each year.

How could such a charming ornamental plant become such a problem? In its native Asia, bittersweet dominates lowland slopes and thickets. Here in North America, oriental bittersweet is extremely successful in almost every habitat, from floodplain forests to dry, rocky slopes.

It poses a serious threat to other species and to entire habitats because of its ability to twine around and grow over other vegetation. In addition it has a high reproductive rate, long-range seed dispersal, and the ability to produce new plants from its root system.

Bittersweet has an affinity for forest edges, where it has an opportunity to twine around and grow over other plants, while also receiving the light it needs to flourish and set fruit. It often strangles the trees and shrubs it climbs by twining around their trunks and branches, eventually constricting the flow of water and nutrients to their leaves. Trees girdled and weighted down by bittersweet vines growing up into their canopies also become more susceptible to damage by wind, snow and ice.

Birds and other wildlife that eat the bright orange fruit in winter disperse its seeds in their droppings. Unfortunately, we humans also spread this invasive plant by decorating with the beautiful berries, then tossing them into compost or brush piles or other outdoor locations.

To make matters worse, oriental bittersweet readily hybridizes with its native cousin, American bittersweet, Celastrus scandens, which occurs in similar habitats. Hybridization may ultimately destroy the genetic integrity of the native species.

How do you tell the difference? Both varieties produce waxy orange berries, which burst out of pale yellow seedcases as they ripen in the fall. American bittersweet sets its berries in clusters at the end of a branch while Oriental bittersweet distributes its fruits evenly along the stem. The oriental species also has a decidedly more rounded leaf than that of American bittersweet.
           
Because of these characteristics and the threat this plant poses to native plant communities,
in 2004, the N.H. Invasive Species Committee placed oriental bittersweet on a list of 18 invasive land plants now prohibited from sale, transport, distribution, propagation or transplantation in New Hampshire.
           
If you have an infestation of oriental bittersweet, how do you cope? The most effective way is to watch for and remove new small plants. Larger plants will require cutting combined with herbicides. If you have only a few small plants, you may be able to control them mowing or cutting the vines and pulling the roots. Weekly mowing will eventually kill plants, but less frequent mowing (fewer than three times per year) will only stimulate root-suckering. You can treat older, taller bittersweet plants—vines can climb 60 feet or more, with stems growing several inches in diameter—by cutting vines and immediately treating cut stems with the herbicide triclopyr.

For more information on invasive plants in New Hampshire, download the N.H. Department of Agriculture, Markets & Food’s Guide to Invasive Upland Plant species.

By Margaret Hagen, Director of UNH Cooperative Extension Family, Home & Garden Education Center

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 used to be a magnificent, stately pine tree in front of our house. It was tall and straight with symmetrical branches gracefully spreading across the stone wall. The house faces south and the tree was a feature of the view from our dining table, across the pasture to the hills beyond.

Last winter we had it taken down. It took several years for us to come to that decision, and still I sometimes miss the big pine. In summer it provided shade; in winter it was a welcome splotch of green in a gray-brown or white world. But in winter it blocked the warmth of the low winter sun. When the sun passed behind the tree, in mid-day, the chill in my house was palpable, and by the time the sun had moved west beyond the influence of the tree, it was too late in the afternoon for the weak December sun to warm us.

When spring arrived, flowers under the tree struggled pathetically—an azalea, daffodils, a mountain ash, a couple of rhododendrons. None could thrive, so overwhelming was the tree’s influence on all in its shadow.

We built our house 40 years ago. The pines were waist high, entangled in a jungle of juniper in the overgrown orchard. We pulled up the juniper and cut some of the pines, but those that were left grew—and grew. At last their presence dominated the area.

Without regret we had our logger cut several scraggly specimens behind the house, although they had provided some brake on the cold northwesterly winds. Once, the logger miscalculated the fall of a monster and it took with it two smaller trees that held a swing our small grandsons loved. It was our delight to watch from the kitchen window while their dad pushed them.

But back to the big, perfect tree. What of the decision to remove so great a presence? Eventually it would have matured and, like all living things, returned to mother earth in its own good time. Meanwhile, it served to dim the light and warmth of the sun and discourage new growth where it cast its shadow. We chose to intervene in nature’s course.

All this from the demise of a single tree, which blocked the sun and dominated its surroundings. So it seems that anything so overpowering must, sooner or later, give way to allow others to grow and flourish. This spring I watch as newly released shrubs lift their heads. Gradually, over several seasons, they too will thrive. Will one of them become too overwhelming and have to go in order to allow others to flourish? We shall see.

There is a lesson in this: living things do grow. Eventually it is necessary to let go of something admired, even revered, in order that new life may emerge. Clinging to a dominating presence too long stifles that which struggles to come after. Sometimes we can take a hand in the process. But eventually the natural world will do it for us, regardless of our preference.

By Carolyn Baldwin, UNH Cooperative Extension Wildlife Coverts Cooperator

Birch trees beautify our landscapes while providing food and shelter for wildlife. We use birch wood for a variety of products, from furniture, flooring, and fuel, to toys, kitchen utensils, and Popsicle sticks.

Birch trees offer another valuable resource that remains untapped here in the Northeast—their sap. The sap that flows up through birch trees in early spring is as sweet and tasty as maple sap. Europeans are bottling birch sap, Alaskans are producing syrup from it, and one New Hampshire Master Gardener is making beer.

There are plenty of birches scattered throughout New England, so why aren’t more enterprising Yankees tapping their birches? Hillsborough County Cooperative Extension forester Jon Nute told me he thinks it’s tradition. Sugar maples are plentiful. We’ve established a nice niche in the maple industry. Birch syrup might be a tough sell. Perhaps all we need is a little education.

Making birch syrup has emerged as a cottage industry in Alaska, which has no sugar maples, but plenty of birches. Alaska is also full of adventurers willing to try something new. Within the last decade, a handful of hearty souls have developed a commercial operation that’s producing 1000 to 1500 gallons of birch syrup annually, marketed as a unique Alaskan delicacy.

Tapping birch trees is much like tapping maple, but the similarity between the two ends there. The biggest reason New Englanders may be less than enthused about producing birch syrup may lie in the fact that the actual sugar content of birch sap is about a third that of maple. To make one gallon of birch syrup you need around a hundred gallons of sap, while maple syrup requires only forty.

Ninety-nine gallons of water is a formidable amount to extract to get a single gallon of birch syrup. Boiling works, but it takes a lot of time and fuel. Dulce Ben-East, one of the early Alaska birch sap entrepreneurs, told me reverse osmosis technology works best, but the equipment is expensive—another drawback for thrifty Yankees.

The typical birch season doesn’t last long, either. Birch sap tends to spoil more quickly than maple, so rising daytime temperatures may necessitate more frequent sap collection from buckets. Plus, as soon as those buds begin to break, birch sap gets cloudy, the flavor deteriorates, and the season is over.

For all this trouble, you must be wondering, “Why bother?” The obvious answer would be taste: Describing birch syrup, Ms. Ben-East says, “The flavor is deep and velvety, caramel-like; somewhat richer to me than maple and not quite as cloyingly sweet.

Curious New Englanders might choose the path New Hampshire Master Gardener Diana P. has taken, which requires far less sap and minimal effort. Diana has a keen interest in edible plants and medicinal herbs and takes advantage of any opportunity to learn more.

After attending an herb conference workshop on healing beers, she decided to make some using birch sap. Using Stephen Harrod Buhner’s book Sacred Herbal Healing Beers for her recipes, Diana tapped a couple of the birches on her property: one golden and one white. She gathered about two-and-a-half gallons of sap, which she boiled for an hour, for no other reason than to kill bacteria.

Diana added honey, allowed the liquid to cool, added yeast and nutrients, and waited for the mixture to ferment. After a couple of weeks, she bottled her brew and waited a few more weeks. She pronounced her results delicious, and says the beer got even better with age.

Any variety of birch can be tapped for its sap, although golden and black birches have a more distinct “wintergreen” flavor. Using the rule of thumb for tapping maples, tap birches that are at least 10 inches in diameter, adding additional taps for each five inches of girth—though you’ll be hard-pressed to find many birches that size in our region.

For more information about birch trees and the birch syrup industry, tap the resources of the Internet. The University of Alaska in Fairbanks has an especially useful eight-page publication titled, Birch: White gold in the boreal forest, which offers recipes for birch root beer, malt beer, and wine, as well as an extensive section of tips for making birch syrup, including a best practices fact sheet.

For the fascinating story of an entrepreneurial young Alaskan couple’s venture into birch syrup production (and more), visit the Kahiltna Birchworks Web site <alaskabirchsyrup.com>.

By Jackie Bower, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

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.

Date

The ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Celts brought evergreens into their homes at the winter solstice as symbols of life’s enduring triumph over death. In the late Middle Ages, Germans and Scandinavians brought evergreen trees into their homes or set them outside their doors to represent the hope of new life in the coming spring.

Our modern Christmas tree has evolved from these earlier traditions to become a dominant symbol of our winter holiday season. It provides more than symbolism. The Christmas tree trade earns more than $6 million annually for New Hampshire growers.

Decorated and lighted, a Christmas tree engages not only our senses of sight, touch, and smell, but also our sense of tradition, hope, and goodwill. But once this festive season has passed, what will become of your Christmas tree? Consider one of these recycling options:

• Use your tree to create a natural bird feeder. Place the tree in a corner of your deck or in the yard and hang orange slices, balls of suet and seed from the boughs. Rolling pine cones in peanut butter, then in bird seed, can provide a wonderful activity for children and adults. Suspended on wires from the tree branches, the pine cones will provide food throughout the winter months for birds of all types. The dense boughs also create a protective covering that will reduce the wind chill on cold winter nights and provide an escape when nearby hawks or cats threaten.
  
  
• If your tree is adorned with UL-approved outdoor lights, leave them on the tree and place it in the yard for all to enjoy.
  
  
• Clip off the branches and use them to add extra insulation around plants that should remain dormant all winter, such as a semi-hardy perennial or any recently planted tree or shrub. Leave the boughs in place until spring arrives, then cut them into small pieces and add them to your compost pile.
  
  
• You could use the trunk as a garden stake next spring or cut it into lengths and let it dry for use as firewood. If you do decide to burn it, be aware that fir, spruce, pine, and other evergreen species burn hot and fast, and the resin will bubble and pop as the wood burns.
  
  
• Place the tree on its side in a woodsy area to serve as a hiding place for rabbits, moles, and other small animals. Place the tree where any wildlife encouraged to take up residence won’t become pests later.
  
  
  
• Feeding branches of your tree through a wood chipper will produce a nice, organic mulch to use around trees and shrubs or to mark trails and pathways. We commonly hear the question: “Isn’t pine mulch toxic to plants?” The answer: No, but you should prepare and use it carefully. Let fresh chips age for at least three months, and spread them around older, well-established trees and shrubs that won’t be sensitive to the nitrogen-depletion that can occur as the microorganisms that help decompose the chips temporarily tie up available soil nitrogen.
  
  
• Christmas trees can make effective sand and soil erosion barriers, especially on beaches and along riverbeds. Sunk into private ponds, evergreen trees can also provide substrate for water plants to grow on, and provide cover for minnows and other small aquatic creatures. Make to get permission from the pond owner to before you sink a tree. How do you sink a tree safely? When the ice has thawed, tie the trunk to a cinder block with a short, stout rope, and toss it in. You may want to mark the location with a bleach-bottle buoy attached to the tree with twine, so you will know where the fish are next summer.
  
  
• Strip the needles from the branches of the tree and use them to stuff a sachet to freshen your pillowcases, drawers, or bathroom.
  
  
• Make a Christmas-scented potpourri by mixing equal amounts of balsam or pine needles, bayberry leaves, and tiny pinecones with orrisroot, a fixative that absorbs the scent. The scent of the season will prevail for many weeks. As a rule of thumb, add two tablespoons of orrisroot to every five or six cups of dried materials. A few drops of pine-scented oil will give the potpourri an even more fragrant scent. You can find orrisroot and scented oils at herbal shops, craft stores, and many pharmacies.
  
  
• Many New Hampshire communities recycle Christmas trees. Check with local officials to see if your town does.

Whatever way you choose to recycle this year’s Christmas tree, you’ll cut waste, exercise your creativity, and establish a “re-gifting” tradition that brings closure to the winter holiday season.

By Rachel Maccini, Coordinator, Family, Home & Garden Education Center, UNH Cooperative Extension

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.

A few weeks ago, my garden looked as if something green had rained on it overnight. The soil around the tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers was blanketed with thousands of tiny seedlings that, upon closer inspection, I easily identified as purslane. The fleshy stems are reddish in color and the dark green, paddle-shaped leaves grow in pairs along the stem. This succulent plant doesn’t grow very tall but spreads quickly and can form a dense mat.

Who peppered my garden with this interesting but annoying weed? As it turns out, I did! A little research revealed I had unwittingly gotten good at all the methods for propagating purslane: seed broadcasting, root division, and stem cuttings. That mid-July morning, my garden looked like I was going for the purslane plant record in a single plot.

Portulaca oleracea , common purslane, also known as pusley, pigweed, fatweed, and little hogweed, is an herbaceous annual that’s found in most corners of the globe. Some folks call it a vegetable or an herb since it’s a common item in their diets. Americans often blaspheme it as a weed, probably because it is so prolific. Purslane will grow just about anywhere, from your lush, well-composted flowerbed to the gravel on the edge of your driveway. Although it does like plenty of sunlight, purslane isn’t picky about soil conditions

For those on the weed side of the argument, mulching is probably your best bet for eradicating purslane. Its season runs from July until the first good frost, as sunlight and warm soil temperatures are critical to seed germination. Because purslane emerges so much later than most other broadleaf weeds, early application of pre-emergent herbicides may be ineffective.

Purslane is easy to pull out by the roots when the soil is wet. It has a taproot with lots of secondary rootlets and, if you break the root, it will regenerate a new plant (a propagation method botanists call root division). If you’re trying to weed when the soil is dry, you will likely end up with a handful of plants and roots that remain firmly anchored in the ground. Use a tool that will help loosen the soil so you can do the job right the first time.

Like me, perhaps you use weeds to fight weeds, by adding weeds to the mulch you use to smother other yet-to-emerge invaders. But toss purslane plants back onto the dirt or an existing mulch cover and even broken stem pieces will find a way to take hold all over again. Even if conditions are dry enough that the foliage eventually shrivels up, chances are the plant will have used its moisture reserves to develop more seeds. Bottom line–remove purslane plants from the area you are weeding.

Purslane’s amazing ability to produce seeds, even on death’s doorstep, is the reason this plant is so prolific. It produces a single, little yellow flower at the ends of its stems. The blossom remains open only briefly, but the resultant seedpod is filled with tiny seeds that can remain viable for decades. The seeds germinate close to the surface when soil temperatures reach about 90 degrees Farenheit. You may eradicate your current crop by hoeing, only to find that your hoe inadvertently pulled seeds to the surface that had been too deep to germinate. Those seeds are minute , so don’t expect to see them. You’ll know you brought seeds to the surface if you have a new crop of seedlings in a few days.

Despite its reputation in this country as a pest, there is some good news about purslane: It’s edible. Purslane is often compared with spinach and used similarly. It’s been on menus in other parts of the world for about 2,000 years, but not many Americans are tossing it into their salads and stews. On paper, purslane looks like a highly nutritious vegetable, high in potassium and magnesium, as well as vitamins A and C. It also contains higher amounts of Omega-3 fatty acids than any other plant. However, like parsley, chives, spinach, and rhubarb, purslane is also high in oxalic acid, which binds with prevents the body from absorbing calcium and other minerals. So, if you do enjoy purslane’s mild, tangy flavor, use it in moderation.

Native to India and the Middle East , purslane has spread around the world. Cooks in many cultures use its tender, succulent leaves raw in salads, cooked alone and or with other vegetables, or added to soups and stews. It has a slight mucilaginous quality that helps thicken stews. Latin cultures call it verdolagas and frequently cook it with eggs. Some cooks actually pickle the thick stems.

If you like the looks and ground-covering habit of portulaca oleracea , several seed catalogues carry cultivated varieties. Apparently the leaves are larger and more lush, but the plant is equally invasive.

by Jackie Bower, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

One definition of “herb” is any useful plant. For years, creative individuals have studied plants and their varied parts to see what raw materials can be derived from them. Some are used in cooking, medicines, crafts, and even as dyeing agents for fibers and fabrics.

Using plants for natural dyeing is an ancient craft that dates back to before people began to spin yarn and weave cloth, when they used plant juices and colored earth to stain the skin. The ancient Picts used a blue dye from the woad plant to frighten the enemy. Native North American tribes used plants called puccoons to draw decorative red patterns on their skin. Europeans used walnut hulls to darken the skin for traveling into unfriendly territory.

Most dye plants were discovered thousands of years ago, as humans investigated the natural world around them and, through trial and error, discovered many uses for plants. Necessity required early people to harvest food, medicines, and building materials from the wild. Their observations and experimentation also taught them to use plant fibers for weaving and spinning, and pigments for dyeing.

Through tradition, certain colors became cultural symbols of religion and class status. The garbs of kings and priests were dyed with the choice, rare colors, such as blue and purple that were costly and difficult to obtain. Through centuries of tradition, colors have continued to symbolize events: red and green for Christmas, orange and black for Halloween, pink for baby girls and blue for boys.

Dyeing became a skilled and valued craft among the ancient Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans. Textile makers during the Middle Ages, started professional guilds, which involved much rivalry and some thefts of dyers’ trade secrets. Trained craftsmen who had learned their skill in European dye shops continued the dyer’s trade in colonial America.

By the 19th century, synthetic dyes came into use and commercial dye workshops used large vats to handle long bolts of fabric. Although many rural women continued to collect plant materials for dyeing their own homespun yardage, those who could afford to would purchase finished fabric.

Few people in this day and age attempt to dye their own fiber or fabric. I recently had an opportunity to interview a New Boston woman with years of experience in natural dyeing. Cheryl came to my house with samples of hand-dyed wool, some of which she had spun herself. She had cards with pieces of yarn tied to the edges in many colors and shades, with notations on how she had obtained each color.

Cheryl once worked at a farm museum in Michigan where she gave instruction on natural dyeing. She harvested plants from the wild, and heated them to extract the desired colors. Dressed in period garb, she worked over a wood fire, dipping wool into a cauldron of prepared dye and explaining the details of plant dyeing.

Dyers add mordants (mord meaning “to bite”) to the dye bath to help penetrate or “bite” into the fiber. The most popular mordant is a combination of alum and cream of tartar. Many mordants are metallic in nature such as copper, tin, iron, and chrome. Vinegar can heighten the color, especially reds. Ammonia has the ability to draw the color out of the plant materials, especially grasses and lichen. Different mordants used with the same plant material can obtain a different shade of the same color, even in some cases, a totally different color.

Wild-crafted materials used in dyeing include herbs, flowers, grasses, lichen, berries, bark, and even insects. Shades of red can be obtained from sumac, mountain cranberry, pokeweed berries, madder, blackberries, lichen and cochineal (insects). Yellows and golds are available from cosmos, coneflower, yarrow, coreopsis, onionskins, and rhododendron leaves. Carrot tops, as well as evernia (a lichen), using copper sulfate as a mordant, produce a nice green dye. Blues are the most difficult colors to obtain, with woad and indigo being the main sources.

I was amazed at all the different shades of yellow, gold, green and rust as well as all the variations in color produced by different mordants. Mother Nature has provided us with quite an extensive palette of colors.

My chat with Cheryl earned me an invite to her next dyeing party, where her spinner and weaver friends experiment with different plant materials. Her enthusiasm was contagious and I’m anxious to meet some of her friends. After all, they are a dyeing breed.

By Maddy Perron, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

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.

Date

Vines with trumpet-shaped, pale pink and white flowers and deep green, heart-patterned leaves wind up around the lilacs at the edge of our garden.

“Morning glories,” my wife calls them.

“Bindweed!” I reply.

Farmers who see the plant twisting around a struggling corn seedling might say, “Devils-vine.” It’s just a matter of perspective.

Discerning botanists will tell you that even the most noxious invasive plants often have a few useful, redeeming qualities. Not one to try and categorize plants as either good or bad, I like to look at it as a realtor might, as a matter of “location, location, location.”

Whether you think of a plant as a welcome abundance or a noxious infestation, it’s important to know just what kind of plant/weed you’re dealing with. For plant-hunters with an urge to do botanical identification, this time of summer is ideal. That’s because many plants are now showing distinctive reproductive structures (flowers, fruits and seeds) that make the task simpler.

A working knowledge of botanical structures and terminology is helpful. Many with whom I’ve walked Coös County meadows have been subjected to the old rhyme, “Sedges have edges, rushes are round, grasses have nodes from the top to the ground,” as a way to distinguish the stems of these quite-different plant types. Then, for the graze-able grasses there’re those auricles and ligules (little ears and tongues) we need to know about.

Old botany texts can often be bought inexpensively at library book sales and flea markets. A reasonably-priced book I used when teaching a botany course a while back is Botany for Gardeners by Brian Capon. It’s still readily available and an easy read as well.

A well-illustrated plant identification guide is also a must. My most-used, dog-eared reference, usually somewhere in my pickup, is Cornell Press’ Weeds of the Northeast by Uva, Neal, and DiTomaso. First published in 1997, it quickly became an essential tool for practicing botanists. Along with a photo of the plant in full bloom, the book also includes photos of seedlings, seeds, leaf details, and other key features. Accompanying descriptions detailing end-of-season characteristics, similar species, and habitat add to its usefulness. It seems I’m always adding more botanicals to my book collection.

An understanding of a plant’s preferred habitat can tell us a lot about it and the land itself. For instance: buttercups in a field or moneywort in a garden typically indicate wet soils and poor drainage. Conversely, yellow and orange hawkweed, or rabbit-foot clover indicate droughty, low-fertility ground. Check with your local County Conservation District office for soils maps, which will detail the physical characteristics of soils in your area.

With practice, these references can help plant enthusiasts identify the families most weeds (or interesting specimens) belong to. Are they annuals, biennials, or perennials? Broadleaf weeds or grasses? How do they spread? Answers to questions like these will give you some clues about how best to manage troublesome weeds.

Cultivating (mechanically or with a hoe) seed-reproducing annuals, such as purslane may eliminate them. Not so with weeds such as perennial quackgrass, which will sprout from the pieces of the rhizomes you spread with your hoe or cultivator. An agronomist I know calls quackgrass “the grass that sews New Hampshire soils together,” in tribute to its aggressive root system. (Note: some people still call it witchgrass, but there’s also an annual witchgrass—one of the problems arising from the use of common plant names, versus their Latin names. The Latin name for quackgrass is Elytrigia repens)

Conflicting or duplicate plant names, along with the difficulty of precisely identifying their genus and species, make foraging for wild edible plants risky business. Over-confidence can prove deadly. A family of very familiar plants—the Umbelliferae , or carrot family plants, are a good example. This same family that includes the edible garden carrot, parsnip, and parsley also includes the deadly poison hemlock, an infusion of which Socrates drank to commit suicide. Can you tell the differences between poison hemlock and Queen Anne’s Lace, the wild ancestor of the garden carrot?

For identification of potentially toxic or injurious plants to livestock, a good reference is Poisonous Plants of Pennsylvania, published by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Livestock owners should have a copy of Merck’s Veterinary Manual on hand. In addition to plant descriptions, it offers information on symptoms, poisonous principles, and more. I’m often surprised at how many plants cause problems for livestock.

My general outlook on pasturing animals safely is to look at ways to improve the stands of cultivated grasses and clovers necessary for proper nutrition, discouraging anything else in the field through good management practices.

If you’d like to see how one farmer has worked hard to accomplish this, join us up here in Coös County Wednesday, August 10, for an afternoon-in-the-field Pasture Meeting. Call 788-4961 for more information.

by Steve Turaj, UNH Cooperative Extension Agricultural Resources Educator

I joined an elite group this year: Roadies. Roadies with a cause. I trained with my local high school cycling team to meet the New Hampshire Firefighters Challenge of biking from the Canadian border to the Seacoast: 250 miles the last weekend in June. It’s a fundraiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and a personal challenge for the individuals who participate.
           
Traveling on the edge of New Hampshire roads by bicycle is a challenge all by itself, a challenge for neither the faint of heart nor weak of knee. First, there’s sharing the road with motorized vehicles; a major intimidation. Next, the condition of the roads. Riding on two thin wheels means paying close attention to the details. And finally, the geography. We Granite Staters are more likely to use the term “flat” to describe a paint texture than our terrain: “Would you like that Mountain Moss in semi-gloss or flat?” Elevation changes continuously and often significantly.
           
The need to keep a close watch on the road somewhat negates enjoying the scenery. Riding on the edge, I become acutely aware of the condition of our roads. Perhaps this year is even worse than usual because of all the rain. Dirt washed onto the road makes conditions slippery for bikers, and dirt washed away from shoulders leaves us no place to go. Everybody using the roadways notices uneven and broken pavement, but drivers are less likely to spot the cracks that run parallel to the edge and spell certain disaster for any cyclist who catches a tire in a narrow opening.

Aside from the physical conditions, there are plenty of other hazards along the road. I’ve seen things I probably wouldn’t have noticed from my car, but that forced me to move quickly to avoid them on my bike. Small rocks, broken glass, strips of metal, bolts, bent nails, and even tools can lead to flat tires if hit. Other debris includes trash, tree branches and road-kill. Sadly, one of the few rabbits I’ve seen in New Hampshire lay flattened on the edge of the road.

Speaking of dead animals, cycling is an olfactory experience. The smell of the air can’t be missed when you’re speeding through it. For the most part, it’s pleasant. Honeysuckle is one of my spring favorites, followed by lilacs and wild roses. Fresh-cut grass and fabric softener remind me of chores left back home, and the smell of back-yard barbecues helps me pedal faster toward supper. Then there are the olfactory assaults: freshly-fertilized farmland, recently battered skunks and burning cigarettes.

Those of us “sucking air” as we ascend steep terrain end up tasting some of the things we smell. The acrid taste of exhaust from rapidly accelerating vehicles is particularly unpleasant. Dust and dirt are probably the most common things we roadies ingest. We also take in our share of insects.

What do bugs taste like? I try to spit out the intruders or swallow them immediately if they’ve gone to the back of the throat. However, I attended a workshop recently where the instructor mentioned that he chomped down on a fly once and he thought it tasted like blueberries.

What with poor soil, automobile pollution and winter salt, only the heartiest plants can survive along the edge of the road. My favorites: violets, buttercups, Queen Anne’s lace, daisy, black-eyed Susan, daylily, forget-me-not, and chicory, to name a few. Their colors run the spectrum of the rainbow, decorating the otherwise drab corridor of pavement. As I pedaled through Sugar Hill during the MDA bike ride, I remembered the town’s reputation for lupines and, sure enough, I saw some lovely blue ones along the road.

The plant I notice most while riding, perhaps because it causes me the greatest anxiety, is poison ivy. I have seen vast tracts of lush, green, healthy plants, growing in full sun and dense shade. The leaves may be quite large or rather small; some are shiny, others dull. Poison ivy grows close to the road, up trees and along fences. I’ve seen an enormous plant arched across a guardrail so close to the road that an unknowing pedestrian or cyclist trying to stay clear of traffic is likely to have brushed by or pushed the poison ivy out of the way.                                                                              
Insects cause a few problems for cyclists beyond the inhalation and ingestion factors. Like any sweaty, warm-blooded pedestrian, when we stop, we become magnets for black flies and mosquitoes. Unlike the other biting insects, deer flies are exceptional drafters and sprinters, tough to outpace. I can’t resist the urge to swat and have nearly tumbled off my bike on many occasions trying to whack a deer fly. The only times I’ve succeeded in nailing one is when it’s already bitten through my pants.

As a Master Gardener, I need to volunteer at least 15 hours a year to maintain my active membership status. I fantasize that the volunteer coordinators will accept my swatting, rolling over, inhaling and swallowing these insect pests when I bike as service to the community.
                                               

By Jackie Bower, Master Gardener, UNH Cooperative Extension

07/26/06

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.

I sat down and waited for the magic. The grass was pushed down from previous visits, and I leaned against a large, solitary white pine. My muscles and tendons soon relaxed. My body sank softly into the cool earth. The grasshoppers and crickets hummed and sang and lulled my mind to a quieter state. The south sun warmed us all—the insects and birds, the plants and trees, the rocks, and me.

To my left, a dragonfly sunned itself on the siding of the house. A yellowjacket whizzed by quickly, looking for the last flowers and a morsel of food. I took off my glasses to see the true colors and shapes surrounding me. I removed my shoes and socks and let my bare feet rest on the cool grass and pine straw. The feeling from the earth soothed them. I rolled up my pantlegs. The sun shone brightly, warming my bare skin and a passing fly who stopped to bask. I grew sleepy. My body wanted to lie down, but that would be an invitation for Sam, the barn cat, to curl up on me and scare away the magic.

Birds sang now and again. I heard some kind of warbler and a male chickadee with his fee-bee song. Did the warm sun fool them? Did they think it was spring?
           
A bee—or was it a jellowjacket?—flew to a lone yellow flower, a fall dandelion. I put on my glasses and crawled over. A fuzzy-eyed Apis mellifera. Where was its nest? Where is your honey, honeybee?
           
I strolled over to the garden, careful to keep my body language carefree like a child’s, so as not to cause any bird alarms. So much life still left in the little garden. Broccoli, carrots, and beets. Edging of long, thick grass that escaped the lawn mower’s reach. Scores of crickets and grasshoppers. A few flies. My garden is a cricket’s jungle. That’s why the turkeys walked through each morning, I imagined—to eat crickets and grasshoppers and spiders. I wondered what would be left in December. Would a few plants, hidden under frost and snow, still cling to life and the color green?
           
I wandered slowly back to my pine tree and sat down. I took off my glasses and listened. Listened for the faint warning of a junco or the bold cry of a jay. Watched for movement out of the corners of my vision. I heard the wind before I felt it. A roar flew in from the north. Suddenly the trees and plants rattled and shook. Then the wind died down and left us again.
           
Still I waited, resting. I quieted myself until I became a small part of the rhythms dancing around me. Sometimes the magic comes quickly and surprises me. My favorite kind of magic: when the golden crowned kinglets decide I am one of them and swoop around my shoulders, close enough for me to reach out and touch them.

Sometimes the magic takes a while to show itself—like when the doe, who has never decided I am a deer, brings her fawn out to graze in the pasture. However, one time I did manage to convince a group of feeding deer and their accompanying lookouts (a group of juncos) that a small group of 10-year olds and I were also grass grazers and no threat at all. But that’s another story. Whatever form it takes, the magic always comes, if you wait joyfully, quietly, and long enough.

A truck rumbled up the long, winding driveway and stopped next to the house, disrupting the peace around me. I peeked around my tree, spotted my husband, and smiled.

Well, I thought, maybe not today. The cattle and pigeons around the barn had straightened up and stared for a moment at the intruder to ascertain the danger. And the close-by songbirds had stiffened and become alert, which then would have tipped off the mice and squirrels and deer to stop everything and watch out. With a ripple effect, an intruding human alarm spread from our house outward in all directions. Which meant the magic was now wary.

Then I spotted it. High in the sky and flying from the north. White on its body? No. Dark, curved wings. Narrow tail. A falcon? It soared southwest, not pausing much at all, and disappeared over the hill. Ah! If you’re patient, the magic always comes.

Sam the barn cat strolled sleepily around the corner and brushed against my leg, looking for attention. I stroked his warm, black fur, then stood and walked inside. Tomorrow, Sam, we’ll wait for the magic again.

by Mary Doyle, UNH Cooperative Extension Volunteer NH Outside writer

To many people, the favored portal to the natural world in New Hampshire is the extensive network of trails and footpaths found in the state. Trails allow us to move at a pace that encourages close up views of the natural world while hiking, snowshoeing, or cross-country skiing. Unlike bushwhacking through the woods, using a developed trail allows us to concentrate on where we are, rather than on how we are getting to our destination.

Trails offer the added benefit of having features such as a summit viewpoint or a lake or pond as their destination. When designed properly, trails also lead hikers past the most significant and most interesting parts of the landscape they travel through. We expect all of these things from our trails, but few of us have an appreciation for the effort behind creating and maintaining them.

In 1819, Abel and Ethan Crawford used axes to create the oldest continuous-use footpath in New Hampshire, the Crawford Path, designed to carry tourists on horseback from their inns to the summit of Mount Washington. As increasing numbers of summer tourists came north from Massachusetts and other parts of southern New England, innkeepers began to cut trails to other mountain summits.

The boom in trail construction in New Hampshire really took off after the Appalachian Mountain Club was founded in 1876, and the following fifty years were filled with exploration, mapping, and trail building in New Hampshire’s White Mountains Region. Trail building was so successful that the crews who built the Appalachian Trail had to cut only one eighteen-mile link to join existing segments and complete the Trail in New Hampshire.

Other trail and outing clubs, such as the Dartmouth Outdoor Club, Randolph Mountain Club, and smaller local clubs, also built and maintained trails throughout the state during the same period. While the original trail-building boom has passed, those organizations remain integral to the work of protecting and maintaining the trails in use today.

The White Mountains Region alone contains more than a thousand miles of hiking trails; the U.S. Forest Service maintains 670 miles of those trails, with volunteers adopting sections of trail and performing much of the routine maintenance work. The Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) also maintains more than 260 miles of trails there, using professional crews, volunteer trail adopters, and weeklong volunteer trail crews led by AMC staff.

Terry Robinson, the AMC North Country Volunteer Coordinator, guides the work of nearly 150 Adopt-A-Trail volunteers who donate their time with three or more work trips each year to perform basic maintenance on trails. The volunteers, each responsible for a section of trail one to three miles in length, clear and repair water-bars and dips that keep the trail’s tread-way from eroding. They also brush the trail by trimming back vegetation and maintain the blazes that mark the route. Interestingly, Terry said that, while 45 percent of AMC’s trail adopters come from New Hampshire, one-third are Massachusetts residents who continue the long tradition of trail work in our state.

While volunteer adopters perform basic maintenance, AMC paid professional crews and volunteer trail crews spend their time performing heavier maintenance, such as building rock water-bars and rock steps or bog bridges. The rock steps are placed in particularly steep sections of trail where erosion is a serious concern. The steps are placed with such care and skill that most hikers aren’t even aware that they are hiking on an improved surface. The twenty- member pro crews also cruise every section of AMC-maintained trails in late spring, removing the blow-downs caused by winter storms and winds.

Even with the donated time of volunteers, the cost of maintaining trails is high. Andrew Norkin, AMC White Mountains Trails Manager, says he budgets approximately $320,000 for AMC trail maintenance programs each year. About $80,000 comes from Forest Service cost sharing and other grants, leaving the remainder to be raised from AMC members and donors. He also said that dedicated volunteer crews based at Camp Dodge pay participation fees of about $20,000 to help fund their own volunteer work.

New Hampshire’s temperate climate and ample rainfall are great for growing trees, and it takes only a few seasons’ neglect for a trail to be lost to the closing forest. Hikers and other users should be grateful to all the clubs and organizations that maintain our trails.

One way to express that gratitude would be to join volunteers at AMC or any of the local trail maintenance organizations. National Trails Day and New Hampshire Trails Day also provide a perfect opportunity each summer for people to get involved and learn about trail maintenance. Contact your local hiking club or visit the AMC Web page for more information about how you can help.

Larry E. Ely, UNH Cooperative Extension Wildlife Coverts Cooperator

Swimming to Christmas Tree Island is a rite of passage at Bear Hill 4-H Camp, complete with certificate. It’s been a tradition there at least since I was a camper in the late 1970’s and probably since the camp started in 1936. Since 2001, I’ve worked at Bear Hill as a volunteer swimming instructor.

When the campers come back from the swim they carry themselves with renewed pride and self-confidence. Changes in self image can be phenomenal. I’ve seen campers with behavioral problems learn that they can set a goal and reach it with hard work and determination. Reaching Christmas Tree Island is physical proof.

It isn’t easy to jump into nine feet or more of water. You can’t see the bottom and the water has spots of pond weed. We swim among nature’s creatures: fish, snakes, turtles and frogs. A Polish counselor who had just finished the swim confided that it is scary because it involves “jumping into the unknown.” It takes a lot of courage to face your fears of the unknown and to believe you can make it across the pond and back on your own power.

We do everything possible to help our campers succeed, and we take every precaution to ensure their safety. We swim at a leisurely pace. Life guards and swimming instructors watch the swimmers closely for any sign of distress.

During swim classes throughout the week, swimmers have trained their muscles and cardiovascular systems, while improving their stroke technique by swimming laps of different strokes: crawl, elementary backstroke, sidestroke and back crawl.

During the week we watch and evaluate swimmers to make sure they can accomplish the final ritual swim to the island. The campers often don’t realize what they have learned and how much they have improved their fitness until they take on this slightly scary challenge.

Everyone feels good after a leisurely swim in the pond. We usually go on hot, clear, sunny days. To help the children enjoy the experience and overcome their fears, we point out the trees, the sky, the sunlight glinting off the water. We show them the bubbles from fish and other wildlife.

Gasping breaths are out of place in this place of peace and beauty. So I wondered why one young woman, a competent swimmer, was having such a difficult time with the swim to Christmas Island .

With wide, fearful eyes, she worked hard to draw her next breath. I offered her the red rescue tube I was trailing and she took it. Relieved I wasn’t going to have to rescue a panicked swimmer—a physically hard and dangerous situation—I asked if she was okay. She said she’d lost her breath. I towed her on the tube to the island so she could rest. That she wasn’t able to make it to the island surprised me. During class she had swum much further distances at a much faster pace.

After reaching Christmas Tree Island, the camper I’d towed told me she had a reduced lung capacity that day because an unusual amount of pollution had affected her asthma.

She knew this, she said, because she was involved in INHALE (Integrated Human Health and Air Quality Research), a study the University of New Hampshire was doing at the camp with children affected by asthma and allergies. Every morning at breakfast, a graduate student researcher measured campers’ lung capacity to study the consequences of bad air quality.

This particular day was one of the ten “bad air” days that New Hampshire has on average during the summer. On these “bad air” days, public health officials warn that even the average person should avoid outdoor physical activity, while young children and the elderly should remain indoors with air conditioning. I saw first-hand the effect it had on one of my swimming students.

According to Dr. John Spengler of the Harvard School of Public Health, air pollution causes 60,000 deaths nationwide each year. But the deaths are only the tip of the iceberg.

Air pollution causes increased visits to the hospital emergency rooms, more inpatient admissions, more use of medication, and losses in workplace productivity.

When we think of air pollution, we tend to think of smog clouds hanging over Los Angeles , not a forested camp in New Hampshire . Learning that New England is known as the “tailpipe of the nation” shocked me.

Dr. Jeff Salloway, a UNH professor of health management and policy, heads the INHALE project. Salloway says asthma rates in the United States have increased 1000 percent in the past 30 years. More than 11 percent of New Hampshire children have been diagnosed with asthma at some point in their lives.

Even though we may think we live in a pristine environment here in New Hampshire, two weather systems funnel pollution from the Midwest and the entire Atlantic seaboard over New England before it moves out to sea. Salloway says that toxins carried in the polluted air—ozone, sulfur dioxide, and oxides of nitrogen, and others—cause asthma and other

But the news isn’t all bad. By gathering this data from projects like INHALE, researchers and weather reporters can help us change the situation.

Dr. Greg Carmichael of the University of Iowa said in an interview with PBS’s Online News Hour that the weather person may soon begin reporting, “here’s the snap shot of what the air quality will be tomorrow. But here’s what the air quality would be if 50 percent of the people decided not to drive.”

We can have some control over our environment. In some New Hampshire communities, people can take free rides on public transit systems during “bad air” days. The rides are paid for by a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency called Ride Free Breathe Free.

We can choose to carpool. We can choose to drive smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. We can contribute less to overall air pollution by walking or bicycling to work or school on “good air” days.

Preventing illness, saving lives, and maintaining our quality of life means recognizing the problems, knowing what to do, and making choices to change our behaviors. We can’t get lulled into believing we have no air pollution because we live in a rural area. Appearances can be deceiving.

Editor’s note: Look for the INHALE Web site which should go live in a few weeks.

For more information

UNH graduate student Tom Lambert, who studies the effects of air quality on human health, offers these links for air quality forecasts and real time air quality data:

• New England air Quality Forecast
• Local Forecasts and Coditions
• National Weather Service Air Quality Forecast Guidance
• University of New Hampehire’s AIRMAP air quality forecast

By Bonnie Barlow, UNH Cooperative Extension Community Tree Steward and 4-H Volunteer

Three great things about riding a bicycle: It gets you fit. It gets you outdoors. It actually gets you places under your own muscle power, occasionally even faster than you could get there by car.

Best of all, it lets you accomplish all three things simultaneously.

On the fitness front, riding a bike burns calories, builds impressive lower-body strength, and improves aerobic (heart-lung) capacity. Riding a bike for a couple of hours doesn’t really feel like work, either—to me at least—compared to, say, running or swimming laps for the same amount of time.

As for getting outdoors, cycling has brought me breathtaking scenery, the scents of pine woods and lilacs, backyard barbecues and just-mown hay, the sounds of rushing streams, raging surf and, once, a whinnying horse who galloped the length of long field alongside me, matching my pace as I rode by.

Cycling brings me the familiar sights of landscaped grounds, green pastures, old barns, stone walls, forested hillsides, laundry swinging from the line, children playing on the lawn. Pedaling along, I’ve seen my fair share of the odd and unexpected, too. Riding home one day in a stiff breeze, I saw an old barn collapse into a heap of boards. Another time, I rode by a tiny girl dancing on the lawn in a pink tutu, holding a black umbrella against the rain, while her family watched from a row of white plastic chairs.

I’ve had many encounters with wildlife. Once, I had to stop to allow an albino porcupine shepherd eight little babies across the road. Another time, I swept down a hill and around a corner and barely missed colliding with a bull moose as he charged from the woods across the road.

As for actually getting me somewhere, since the day I left George Issa’s bike shop in 1984 with my first real bicycle, I’ve cranked tens of thousands of miles over hill and dale on a succession of road and mountain bikes. I’ve done the great bulk of that mileage simply commuting to and from work.
 
I approach bike commuting with a no-nonsense attitude: Pump the tires, fill the water bottles,
climb on the bike and start pedaling. Once a week, I bring a couple of changes of work clothes and hang them in the supply closet at the office. I keep a towel and a bar of soap in my desk drawer for quick sponge baths in the ladies’ room. I carry my lunch, wallet and hairbrush in a backpack.

A few essential tips:
 
Wear the helmet. Twice in 22 years I’ve crashed badly enough to send me to an emergency room. Both times, the ER physicians told me my helmet saved my life.

Buy a helmet with a SNELL or ASTM sticker indicating it meets the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CSPC) safety standards. To protect you, your helmet must fit snugly and sit squarely on your head, with the inner band of the helmet resting just above your eyebrows and the chin strap pulled as tight as you can comfortably wear it.

Don’t wear the helmet again after a crash, even a minor crash. Even the best-designed, most expensive helmet will protect your head for only a single impact. Don’t buy a used helmet. You can’t tell by looking at it if it’s gone through a crash.

Buy local. Unless you do all your own mechanic work, it makes sense to buy your bike, most of your gear, and your service from a local shop. You’ll want and need to form a long, trusting relationship with your shop’s mechanic(s). The folks you trust and rely on deserve your money, too.

Get your bike “fit” and have it tuned annually by a professional. “Fitting a bike” means setting it up and adjusting it to accommodate your body, your intended use of the bike, and your riding style. A proper fit will help you avoid injury, improve your comfort, and boost your energy efficiency. Have a professional tune-up each spring to check the bike for safety and replace worn parts.

Train up. Especially if you haven’t cycled for years, start with a few easy miles and work up gradually. Rather than risk knee injury by grinding away in a high gear, learn to “spin” fast in a low gear. Polish your shifting, turning, climbing and other skills with practice runs on a traffic-sparse road before moving onto a major roadway.

Follow the rules of the road. If you ride on paved roads, ride assertively, but courteously, with traffic. Ride single file. Use appropriate hand signals (but avoid rude gestures. You can’t win against an enraged driver).

On long rides, pick your pit-stop locations with care. Once, my biking partner and I ducked into some secluded woods in the middle of nowhere, she on the right side of the road, I on the left. A few seconds later, I saw three or four gun-toting guys in camouflage gear running toward the spot where my friend had disappeared into the underbrush. Then I saw her, running out with her hands up, shrieking, “Help! Don’t shoot! I’m a civilian!”

Turns out, we’d answered nature’s call in the middle of a paintball field.

By Peg Boyles, UNH Cooperative Extension Writer/Editor

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.

You don’t need a rototiller to make a new garden. We used a no-till method to create a 17' x 8' oval flower garden on the northeast side of the Alexandria Historical Society building. If you have a few of the right items, a little time and a little labor, our method will work for you, too. In the process, you’ll improve your soil, minimize soil compaction, discourage weeds, improve water retention, and create an inviting environment for beneficial soil microorganisms.

First, pick out the site. Knowing the exposure to sunlight over the growing season will allow you to choose the best plants for the environment. To get an idea how much of each type of plant you will need, mark and measure the size of the plot you plan to develop.

Now gather a supply of newspaper large enough to cover the entire garden area with a layer six sheets thick. Collect the black print pages only, no shiny inserts.

Have access to a large amount of composted manure or other finished compost. If you don’t make your own, you can purchase it bagged from a local garden supply center, or in bulk from a nearby compost facility. The UNH Cooperative Extension fact sheet Purchasing Compost contains a list of New Hampshire composting facilities. Many New Hampshire towns produce leaf-and-yard-waste compost at their local solid waste facilities and give it away to residents.

Finally, you’ll need a layer of topsoil (any ordinary dirt will do) and a two-inch layer of organic mulch: pine needles, shredded leaves, grass clippings, or shredded bark. When you’ve collected all the above items and have a nice day with rain expected overnight, it is time to start the new garden.

If the grass has started to grow, mow it very close. Then lay six sheets of newspaper over every speck of the ground. The paper will block the light and prevent the grass or any weeds from growing. Wetting the paper as you go will make it stay where you put it.

Then spread two or three inches of the compost over the damp newspaper. On top of that goes an inch or two of dirt, topped off with a layer of mulch.

Now just sit back for a month and let nature take over creating a ready-to-plant garden. The time is essential for the earthworms and other organisms from the soil and compost that live in the ground to begin decomposing the various organic items. While you are busy planning what to plant, they will be working to prepare your planting bed.

Whether you plant annuals for season-long flowers, or perennials for long-lasting structure, having the plants in mind and knowing their requirements before you go to the garden center to buy them will ensure a better outcome.

Although annuals are easy to raise from seed, with a new garden it makes more sense to start with plugs or transplants. Use a plant catalog or book to find out how big your plants will become, so you’ll give them enough room and so you don’t buy too many.

Lay out your design beforehand. Set tall plants in the back if you’re planning a border garden, or a garden that will be seen from only one side. If your garden is along a path, placing small plants in front will allow taller plants behind them to be seen. Just try to imagine how you want it to look.

When the month has gone by, your new garden bed should be ready for digging. Use your small spade to make the three-inch-deep holes to receive your transplants or plugs. (Plugs are what the little started plants are called. You “plug” them into the soil and they grow into a big plant.)

Make sure to give your plants enough space to allow them to grow. Wait until any chance of frost has passed in your area—in central New Hampshire that typically means after Memorial Day. Covering tiny plants with newspaper or old sheets every night to protect them gets tiring quickly, and you risk losing everything to a frost.

After preparing our garden plot, we laid out our plants like a braided rug: nine bright pink geraniums in the center with 18 dark coleus plants circling them. An outer circle of 30 yellow French marigolds completed the rug effect. The colors were effective, the plants were happy, and we were able to over-winter the geraniums for the next year. When the frost threatened in the fall, we removed the plants and put in daffodil and crocus bulbs. It gave a great start to the garden the next spring.

So, give a new garden a try. Almost any color or type of plants will work. Just consider how much less work your garden can be if you let nature help you do it without a rototiller.

By Judith A. Kraemer, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

The branches of deciduous trees have so many different patterns to display when they no longer wear their foliage wraps. Lying on the forest floor on a warm November day allows me to see all that lies between me and the sky after the leaves have fallen or blown away.

The autumn sun reflects off of smooth, young bark in a way I see only at moments such as these. The conifers stand resolute, and remind me that green always returns. Ahh! I pause and drink in blue sky, billowy clouds, fresh air and sunshine that still warms the ground beneath the trees.

Soon these will change too, replaced with autumn’s cold rains, sleet, and even snow, next up in nature’s unending march through the seasons. I try to get up to my viewing spot twice each fall, first when the maples glow with vivid orange and red, then again when all of the leaves have vanished. Magic moments.

Last summer, I had the good fortune to rise early one morning after a night of rain and see a flock of 10 turkeys just outside my bedroom window. Sitting on a large boulder drying themselves in the sun, they spread their wings in mock flight as the steam rose from their feathered forms. The feeling of seeing something that others might never enjoy made me want to share it even more. So I woke my husband who, at that early hour, resisted the moment. One person’s magic.

Not all magic moments happen in sunlight. On a cool, gray Labor Day morning, my grandson Liam and I headed across the highway to open up the chicken coop. Liam commented, with the wide-eyed ingenuousness of an 8-year old, “Look Nana, the clouds look like they’re stitched to the top of the mountain. It’s Grandma Nature’s quilt!” he added, tongue-in-cheek. Liam had captured the picture in words perfectly. The mountain we and everyone in this community lives or drives within sight of, looked like a well-loved appliquéd quilt. Shared magic.

One day in late winter, as I tramped on snowshoes along the edge of our woods, I found pockets of smooth, silky ice that transformed large hollows at the base of several large pasture pines into pools of solid silver. I continued to go out each day to watch as they shrank slowly by sublimi, a process that causes solid ice to change to a gas without melting. The ice pools’ transient nature made me appreciate them even more. I must admit, I couldn’t pass up the satisfying crunch of punching through one of them, only to discover any ice or water below had disappeared. I‘ve looked for those icy creations in winters since, but haven’t yet seen the same combination of events. Magic moments don’t always repeat.

One spring we watched every day for a pair of foxes who frequently hunted in our field. Early in April, a trio of fox kits began appearing in the field, frolicking under the watchful eyes of whichever parent babysat while the other hunted for food. One gray afternoon, I looked outside our backyard windows to see those three small red fox kits sitting in a drainage ditch. Apparently told to stay there by their mother, they waited for her return.

As time went on, they began to tumble and roll over and under each other. As they played, I leaned out our window and took digital pictures. Eventually, two of the kits wandered off to explore the rest of the backyard. One remained alone, looking forlorn and worried. It finally settled down and took a nap, but when it awoke, it continued to watch the woods for its mother.

Time dragged on and I began to make plans to call the Fish and Game conservation officer regarding abandoned fox kits. Just as the sun began to go down, Mother Fox appeared at the edge of the woods and the dutiful kit darted out of the ditch to reunite joyfully with its mother. Meanwhile, the wandering pair returned, looking guilty. The look she gave them spoke volumes. Then, forgiveness dispensed with a poke of her wet muzzle, off they went, a family once more. Another magic moment for my collection.

By Helen Downing, Master Gardener

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.

Many New Hampshire residents enjoy living in a heavily forested landscape where they can live close to the natural environment. Suburban house lots often contain manicured lawns surrounded by woodland, or are adjacent to large tracts of forestland.

Despite this closeness to the natural world, we often try to tame and domesticate nature around us. I am reminded of this tendency when I see piles of brush and limbs stacked on the roadside after each spring cleanup, or rows of bagged leaves in the fall, all bound for municipal composting facilities.

New Hampshire prohibited the disposal of leaf and yard waste in landfills or incinerators in 1993, and many towns created municipal composting facilities to comply with that law. As a result, many residents bag leaves and stack brush for recycling at the municipal facility. Yet it seems foolish to spend tax dollars to haul away these valuable natural resources from our land.

Since the last glacier receded some 12,000 years ago, the soils in New Hampshire are being constantly replenished. The slow, ongoing natural processes that build soil will continue as long as we don’t interfere.

Pennsylvania State University Professor Richard Yahner has estimated that as much as two tons of leaf litter per acre can accumulate in a mature forest during a single season. Fortunately, naturally occurring bacteria and fungi, along with a large number of other organisms, decompose the material and return nutrients to the soil.

Someone walking through a deciduous forest for the first time and observing the deep carpet of fall leaves might think the forest would eventually be buried under the accumulation. From experience, we know the mass of leaves will have mostly disappeared by mid-summer. Nature’s recyclers will have finished their work and returned to the soil the nutrients vital to the growth of all plants in the forest.

But it isn’t only falling leaves that return nutrients and energy to the forest. Falling limbs, branches, twigs, and even whole trees add to the process. In his book, The Trees in My Forest, Bernd Heinrich summed up this whole dynamic process by writing: “The tree’s decaying body releases the resources collected throughout its life, passing them back into the forest.” All living things in the forest, not just plants, benefit from the recycled energy.

Leaf litter is important to many species of wildlife that inhabit the forest floor. Shrews and rufous-sided towhees search the leaf litter for invertebrates that are one of their primary food sources. Hollow logs on the forest floor are favorite den sites for up to seventeen species of mammals in New Hampshire. The coarse, woody debris is used as habitat by 30 percent of the state’s mammal species, 45 percent of the amphibians, and 50 percent of the reptiles.

One of the amphibians, the Eastern Newt in its “red eft” (terrestrial) stage, lives in woodlands under rocks and logs on the forest floor for up to seven years before returning to water and transforming into an aquatic adult.

Downed logs and woody debris also provide habitat for insects and other invertebrates, as well as mosses, fungi, and lichens. The larger the log, the more value it offers to a wider range of species, but all woody debris on the forest floor has value to some species.

When we recognize the value of these natural resources, we might change how we view woodlands. We have become conditioned to looking at woodland around our homes as an extension of the lawn, to be kept neat and manicured. But nature is not tidy,

If the woods in and around your home landscape seem messy and you cannot let nature take its course, then go ahead and clean things up: break fallen branches into smaller pieces and spread them on the forest floor, limb fallen trees so they lie on the ground, and create brush piles in a hidden corner of the woods. The piles provide tunneling space and cover for wildlife and are easy to build. On their Web site, the National Wildlife Federation offers detailed instructions for constructing a brush pile.

Consider raking your leaves from lawns and spreading them directly into adjacent woodland, which is much less labor intensive than bagging them. If you don’t have woods nearby, create a compost pile, simple or elaborate to match your ambition.

Reduce the size of your lawn by allowing surrounding woodland to expand into the yard and by using the fallen leaves to define the new border. Instead of a lawn that may require a significant addition of nutrients, pest controls and irrigation water, the natural woodland will maintain its own health, returning nutrients to the soil through natural processes.

Live with nature, don’t fight it.

by Larry E. Ely, UNH Cooperative Extension Wildlife Coverts Cooperator

The natural world heals, nurtures and sustains me. When I am tired or cranky, a walk in the woods restores my spirits. A vigorous swim in the ocean relaxes and invigorates me.

My father had a love of the outdoors, and some of my happiest memories are about doing things with Daddy outside. Until I was 12 years old, we lived in a suburb of New York City. A happy memory of being outside was raking leaves and burning them in the backyard…this was the New York suburbs in the early 1950s, and burning leaves in the backyard or at the curb was sanctioned, probably even encouraged so the municipality wouldn’t have to dispose of them.

We’d rake leaves in the evening, after Dad had come home on the train from Manhattan. I made small “campfires” of carefully crossed sticks and added dried leaves. I’d come inside, smelling of woodsmoke and take my bath in the old claw-foot tub before getting into bed.

I was an extremely active child—they didn’t use the term “hyper” back then, but I was. In elementary school, we had physical education three times a week—my salvation. We spent time climbing on thick heavy ropes suspended from the ceiling. I learned to wrap the rope in my feet, and using hand-over-hand technique, shimmy up to the ceiling and back down in no time.

So my father hung a rope from a large oak tree in the backyard for me to play on, a heavy rope with a wooden bar attached at the bottom, which kept me entertained for hours. I’d hold onto the bar, run, and swing high from side to side. Often I’d hook my knees around the bar, and swing upside down, my arms free. It was exhilarating and liberating.

My father, mother, and two sisters would go up to Ragged Mountain, in Andover, New Hampshire, for two weeks each summer. We stayed in a rustic cabin, and we three girls slept on a screened porch overlooking Mount Kearsarge.

I loved the freedom of being at Ragged, where we could play and explore. I had a secret path down to the lower ridge, which emerged near my best friend Susie’s house.

Dad taught me to swim in the spring-fed, salamander-rich pond at Ragged Mountain. He would do a flying dive off the dock, while the rest of the adults would walk in. Most impressive! I too always went for the dramatic dive off the dock into the water. You’d have to do a flat racing dive, as it was fairly shallow. That only added to the fun.

I had to prove competence by swimming out to the raft alone. What joy: swimming to the raft, climbing up the ladder, jumping off, then doing it again and again and again. Remembering that total joy gives me a hint of the bliss a golden retriever on a scent must experience.

My father and I were always awake and up before everyone else. It was quiet and no one else was around, and we’d often go fishing for trout in the pond. He taught me how to fly-fish—keep the elbow close to the side, and let the rod do the work of casting the line. He showed me how to gently place the fly on the water so a hungry trout would take it. It was such a thrill to catch a fish, and in the pond it was always a trout. We’d bring the trout home and Dad would clean it, fry up bacon and the trout, and carefully pull the flesh off the bones for my breakfast.

My father also taught me how to row an old-style, heavy wooden boat with wooden oars and open-top oarlocks. Rowing taught me how to pay special attention to pull on the oars so they wouldn’t pop out of the locks and send the rower abruptly backwards; how to keep the rowboat going in a straight line, by focusing on a tree on the horizon in the direction I was facing.

In many ways, my present life is a continuation of the lessons I learned from my father. In 1973 I moved to New Hampshire with my husband John. We lived in a teepee while we built our modest home in Epsom. Soon afterwards, with infant Robb in tow, we moved to Wilmot and started a cross-country ski center. John designed and cut the trail system. I taught skiing and led moonlight tours.

I also developed an interest in vegetable gardening. I put in a huge garden around the time our daughter Jessie was born, “put up” garden veggies, and learned about harvesting wild herbs for healing, making my own tinctures and salves.

I became a Master Gardener and now I teach others to take care of plants and the Earth, and started a garden design business, designing, installing, and maintaining flower gardens for area clients.

Dad died this April at the age of 93. As I look back, reflecting on his life and my own, I realize how much my father shaped the life I lead. We’ll stay connected through the love of the outdoors he so generously shared with me.

Thanks, Dad.

By Nancy Schlosser, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

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.

Date

I put a woodpecker to bed every summer evening at Big Dan Hole Pond. As the daylight begins to fade and the pond quiets to mirror the lavender sky overhead, I can hear the “Pick! Pick!” of the hairy woodpecker as she wends her way through the trees along the shoreline to find her nighttime sleeping cavity.

She usually appears from the east, probing loose pieces of bark for insects on the birches, maples, oaks and beeches that grow within the nearest twenty feet of the shoreline. As she hitches from one tree to the next she gets closer to the gnarled, partially hollow core of a beech tree that stands about fifteen feet away from the shoreline and within view of my cabin.

The hollow beech is riddled with holes and pockmarks and has long since lost its top. Although it looks as if it’s about to fall over, a curious push from me one afternoon proved its worthiness to stand up to a few more winters. When I knock on it, I can hear the hollow ringing inside, slightly muffled by whatever contents wild creatures have stashed inside its cavities. It possesses about ten or eleven holes, most of them on the eastern and southeastern side of the twenty-foot high ghost of a beech tree.

Visitors have often asked me, “Going to clean up that mess?” as they nod to the old beech. “Nope,” I reply. “That’s where woodpeckers make their homes.” Sometimes people look at me strangely, but most often they ask more about the woodpeckers and where they live.

Most people understand that woodpeckers raise their young in tree cavities, but few understand that woodpeckers live in trees all year round and depend on us to keep their homes from destruction. The lakeside along my property on Dan Hole Pond is festooned with naturally made woodpecker houses, and the undeveloped shoreline provides habitat for bullfrogs, duck families and snakes, as well as for woodpeckers.

And woodpeckers recycle their homes. What starts out as a flicker cavity, for example, may be taken over another year by a pair of noisy Great Crested Flycatchers, magnificent yellow and green birds who raise their young to the sound of their policeman’s-whistle call and adorn the insides of their tree holes with snake skins.

Other large woodpeckers, such as the Pileated, will use a tree cavity for a few years, and if it is nearby a large standing pool of water like a stream or pond, it will be taken over by a wood duck to incubate its young. Once hatched, the ducklings make the long drop to the water and safety on board their mother .

Small rotting birch stubs will be excavated by downy woodpeckers and chickadees for raising their young. On winter nights whole family groups of chickadees will crowd down inside a cavity to sleep warmly inside. Once the rising sun hits the tree and warms it, the inhabitants will emerge, sleepy and dopey, to begin their daily rounds for a breakfast of insects.

Downy Woodpeckers don’t normally roost communally like chickadees. But one frosty winter morning I heard the muffled calls of Downy Woodpeckers and watched in fascination as three Downies sleepily emerged one by one from a birch cavity into the sub-zero dawn

I like watching this female hairy woodpecker go to bed at night. As she lands on the beech, she circles a few times, all the while exclaiming, “Pick! Pick!” And then nearly quicker than the eye can see, she will disappear into the tree cavity. Muffled “Picks!” follow for a minute or two, and then all is quiet. The woodpecker sleeps safely for another night.

By Cynthia A. Melendy, UNH Cooperative Extension Lakes Lay Monitor

After breakfast, she
Sends me outside to harvest
Poems from the land.

This poem introduces Jack Kraichnan’s just-published book of short poems, Winter to Winter: a year of seasonal change in the Monadnock foothills (Snow Brook Press, 2005).

Trained as a naturalist, Kraichnan takes his daily exercise outdoors and on foot. In late 2002, he committed himself to producing a certain number of poems during each walk, using the three-line, 5-7-5-syllable meter of traditional Japanese haiku as his form. Winter to Winter incorporates the best of the haiku Kraichnan wrote during and after walking the same five-mile loop through Dublin from mid-December, 2002, to mid-December, 2003.

Kraichnan says he didn’t intend to write a book, but simply to use haiku as an interior discipline to complement the physical discipline of walking. “I wrote the poems as a sort of journal,” he says. “They contain both what I observed and what I associated with those observations. Diane [Kraichnan’s wife] read them, liked them, and organized them to create the book.”

Kraichnan encountered all types of weather during his year of daily walks. “In our increasingly developed and engineered world, weather is one of the last forces of Nature left wild,” he writes. “Being outside in it for a year was a gift.”

Writing within the rigorous demands of the haiku format “forced me to distil my thoughts,” writes Kraichnan. “I was rigorously honest in recording what my senses perceived, and resisted altering reality even slightly to accommodate an easy turn of phrase.”

On their surface, haiku report some observation or experience of nature. The best of them invoke deep emotional and spiritual resonances that readers experience directly, without the mediation of figurative or explicitly symbolic expressions. My favorite from Kraichnan’s Winter to Winter collection:

Beneath snow and ice
In dark of pond’s still water
Turtles are waiting.

I love this idea of combining physical activity with a writing discipline as Kraichnan has done. Over nearly four decades, including 18 years as a serious competitive triathlete, I’ve walked, hiked, run, biked, snowshoed, and swum thousands of miles, almost all of it across the familiar woods and roadways near my home, in the little pond just outside my kitchen window, or in the half-acre vegetable garden I’ve planted, tended and harvested for 37 seasons.

Like Kraichnan, I’ve learned that our “seasons are not as clearly defined as I had thought,” with each season offering as many micro-seasons as I have encounters with the world outside my walls.

I’ve also learned that the same piece of terrain never looks sounds, feels, or smells the same from one encounter to the next. The feeling of the ground under foot or wheel changes perceptibly as the seasons advance. The scents on the air change, as frozen ground softens to mud, lilacs bloom, a neighbor mows his lawn, a dead woodchuck rots by the roadside in the August heat, fall leaves accumulate, a hard frost stiffens the ground. On my walk today, I heard the groans of frozen trunks and limbs in the winter woods and the rattle of beech leaves still hanging on their branches; tomorrow I’ll hear the whisper of uncut hay in the field, the voices of crows in my compost pile, and the squeals of children playing tag in my neighbor’s yard.

Like Kraichnan’s, my outdoor excursions have provoked me to write many poems, most of them marking rites of passage for me and for loved ones.

When my daughter turned 18 and left home for college, I presented her with a poem titled Rock and a small rock I picked up in our backyard vegetable garden to go with the poem. I spent three months writing Rock, laboring over each word and image, in part because I wanted my child to remember where she came from, but mostly because I needed to work through my own grief and summon the considerable strength I needed to let go.

It snowed the day I received Jack’s book in the mail. Returning home from a long walk, I went to the edge of my small pond. A rim of ice had formed around the edges. A sparrow flew down as if to land, then flew away, leaving me with this poem:

First snow dusts thin ice
Of backyard pond, too thin
For that small sparrow.

Kraichnan writes in his preface, “I offer this book to those who may be trapped inside too often.” Getting outside to exercise and explore can open us to new awareness of body, mind, and spirit.

Making poems about those excursions involves another level of “getting outside.” Committing to the discipline of putting words on paper helps the poet escape the received notions and old frames of reference that also keep us trapped inside.

Yesterday turned cold, windy, and sunless. I took a lunchtime run up Route 4, and came home with this poem:

Dry beech leaf rattling
Across dead, frozen asphalt
Takes wing on the wind.

By Peg Boyles, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

“Dot, what are we doing that for?”

“Dot, why do we need to make the fuzzy white stuff on the pumpkin leaves go away? Can I spray the milk on their leaves?”

“Dot, how long do we need to do it for? When we get through doing this, will we ever do it again?”

A teacher pipes up from across the garden, “Evan, wait for Dot to answer the first question before you ask another one.”

 “Dot doesn’t mind. She always answers them,” Evan replies, and he starts right in again with his questions.

When I was approached about working on a children’s gardening project in the summer of 2002, I tackled the task by looking back into my own childhood.

I grew up on a vegetable farm, so gardening was integrated into the fabric of daily life. I asked myself how I learned what I know and soon realized the truth of the old adage “we learn by example.” A lot of what I learned came from countless hours just watching a loved adult do a job, while we talked about something entirely unrelated.

“Nana, Peter isn’t sharing the wheelbarrow. What are you doing?”

Nana, who was always doing something that needed to be done, answered my question without stopping her chore. “Tell your brother I said to share with you. I am thinning the radishes. If we leave them too close together they won’t get nice fat radishes on them.”
 
Of course, it would take two or three visits back to Nana to make Peter share the wheelbarrow, and in that time I continued to ask questions and watch what she was doing.

At some point, I’d try thinning radishes, or whatever task was at hand, and, voila! I could do it myself!

On a family farm, all members are needed to get things done. Just being with adults I loved and joining their activities at what ever level I could manage gave me a great sense of accomplishment, a feeling of being a part of something important.

It didn’t matter what the job was, I was recognized and made to feel as though I’d made a difference. For example, when I was little, I was notorious for squishing the strawberries when I picked them. Although I hated that I was taking so long to learn to do it “right,” I always knew those squished berries were important.

How? I would bring them to my grandmother, who would turn them into jam. When I arrived with the squished berries, she’d put both hands on her cheeks and exclaim in Italian, “How special these are! I know how much love is in each one.”

Growing up on the farm, I loved the sizes, shapes, colors, textures, and smells of the natural world. I loved hiding in the corn, looking at stuff under rocks and boards, building fairy houses out of sticks and stones, having tomato fights with my siblings, and making figurines out of corn husks that I dyed with plant juices.

Statistics tell us that 90 percent of the 43 million elementary school children in the United States, are two or three generations removed from the farm. How will our children develop an appreciation for the natural world if they have no memories of it? How will they make sound decisions about our natural resources? Why should they care about nature if they don’t love it?

Plant-based education is a way to change this situation.

In the summer of 2000, the ”Growing a Green Generation” project got underway as a collaboration among three UNH units: Cooperative Extension, the Plant Biology Department and the Child Study and Development Center (CSDC). Our goal: to develop a curriculum that any caregiver, teacher, or parent can use, regardless of their level of horticultural experience.

The CSDC involves UNH undergraduates studying early childhood education, so this project focused on the question, “What can young children learn down a garden path?

We’ve learned together that children can learn to read, write, and communicate down a garden path. They can hone their gross and fine motor skills. They can have positive interactions with their peers and the adults around them. They can observe—and even consume—their natural surroundings through touch, hearing, smell, taste, and sight. They can experience joy in their environment by letting the juice of a ripe tomato run down their chins, and by sitting in the shade of a sunflower house or a bean teepee. And when the world is going too fast, a garden can offer solitude.

Human development experts tell us the most lasting lessons are learned in the first five years of life. I have no doubt that my early experiences on the farm “grew me up green” and enabled me to raise my own children green. I hope the body of gardening activities provided in our “Growing a Green Generation” curriculum will foster in other children the same fond, lasting, positive connection to the natural world. Look for “Growing a Green Generation” at the UNH Sustainable Horticulture Web site.

By Dot Perkins, UNH Agricultural Program Coordinator

The volunteers of Great Bay Coast Watch (GBCW) call them “bad guys,” scientists call them harmful algal blooms (HABs), and the press and public generally use the term “red tide.” But whatever the name, the worst bloom of toxic algae in decades arrived in the spring of 2005.

Since June of 1999, GBCW volunteers have been sampling coastal waters to capture, examine, and identify the renegade single-celled algae that create these toxic blooms, whose presence may necessitate shutting down shellfish harvesting operations to protect public health.

This spring, data collected by GBCW volunteers gave a heads-up about an emerging bloom to New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) Shellfish Program personnel. Ideally, volunteers find the toxic algae cells before shellfish ingest enough to become toxic; however, this spring’s HAB arose so quickly and at such high concentrations, volunteer sightings coincided with elevated toxin levels in shellfish tested at the state NHDES laboratory.

Good things in small packages
Phytoplankton, the common term for single-celled marine algae, provide the ultimate example of a “good thing in a small package.” Cells are so small that they are invisible to the naked eye, yet so exquisitely beautiful artists have copied them in stained glass. Individual species take several forms, among them: opalescent ovals punctuated with thousands of tiny holes, pill-box-like chains with protruding spines, and plated-and-grooved “spaceships” with flickering flagella. (See figures 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6).

Millions of phytoplankton can exist in a single drop of sea water, inhabiting a tiny world all but invisible. Through the process of photosynthesis, microscopic “meadows” of single-celled plants sustain the entire food web of the oceans. The lives of all animals that live in the sea depend on phytoplankton for energy and minerals. Phytoplankton photosynthesis is a key element of the global carbon cycle, which regulates the temperature of our planet and produces life-sustaining oxygen. Perhaps no other group of organisms plays such a major role in maintaining life on Earth.

Toxic “blooms
A “bloom” happens when conditions allow algae to multiply very fast and accumulate in dense, sometimes visible patches. Blooms of toxic algae (HABs) are what GBCW volunteers look for.

Like handsome strangers wearing black hats, the presence of toxic cells spells trouble. Scientists don’t know why these “bad guys” out of an estimated 20,000 different phytoplankton species produce toxins. When toxic cells are abundant in the water, filter feeders like shellfish will consume them and concentrate the toxins, which can then be passed along the food chain. Humans who eat the now- contaminated shellfish can get sick or even die.

Of the six types of potentially toxic cells that GBCW volunteers look for, Alexandrium species are always toxic and are the culprits that caused this spring’s event.

People who eat shellfish harboring elevated levels of Alexandrium-produced toxins can suffer Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP). PSP symptoms range from tingling of the lips to, in rare cases, respiratory system arrest and death. Coastal states spend millions of dollars annually to identify HAB-contaminated shellfish before the shellfish can be sold and endanger public health.

Volunteers as early warning system
Using volunteers to act as an early warning system for HABs began in California in 1991. Theorists opined that since it was possible to train citizens as enemy plane spotters in WWII, it was also possible to train people to use simple methods (e.g., plankton net and field microscope) to identify incoming toxic cells before the filter-feeding clams and mussels became contaminated.

In 1999, supported by a grant from the New Hampshire Coastal Program and with training provide d by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, New Hampshire became the third U.S. coastal state to use volunteers as citizen scientists to collect data on harmful algal blooms.

Many people briefly harbor a desire to be a scientist and “go where no man has gone before” or travel the seas as Jacques Cousteau did on the Calypso. Few pursue it because they think scientists are smarter, braver, or somehow different. The GBCW phytoplankton program allows all its volunteers to be scientists. The work is exacting and sometimes tedious, but rewards volunteers with small discoveries and, on rare occasions, a breakthrough. Comrades work side by side looking for the” bad guys.” Weeks and months go by without an observation—then there is a tidal wave of sightings and everyone becomes recharged.

Training volunteer phytoplankton monitors
Training volunteers to collect water quality information, fill out data sheets, and use microscopes to identify the six toxic or potentially toxic cells out of the thousands possible presents challenges. For some, just looking through the eyepiece of a microscope and seeing more than their eyelashes is the first step.

GBCW trains all its new volunteers first in the classroom at UNH’s Kingman Farm, then in a cooperative training, then with their Maine counterparts in April at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, Maine, and finally in the field.

Although the process may seem intimidating at first, most volunteers quickly learn identification methods and develop an eye for spotting anything unusual in their samples. One of us (Cooper) has developed photo-ID sheets to help in the process.

Each volunteer then becomes part of a team assigned a sampling site along the New Hampshire coast. Each team collects data weekly and sends it to the GBCW office at Kingman Farm. Potentially toxic cells observed are immediately reported to the coordinator, who relays the information to the N.H. Shellfish Program personnel ultimately responsible for the management of shellfish beds.

GBCW communicates with other scientists and with the public
During this year’s substantial HAB event, GBCW established daily communication and shared observations with scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Water Resources Administration monitoring team, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Maine Department of Marine Resources, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Office of Seafood Safety.

GBCW also seeks to educate the public about marine issues. The world of phytoplankton is a wonderful means of introducing students and adults to ocean food webs, the impacts of coastal pollution, and the use of satellite imagery to determine ocean productivity. Home-schooled students hav e become monitors; other students have used their phytoplankton data for science fair projects. Phytoplankton monitoring has been offered as a school enrichment activity. GBCW volunteers have for three years presented programs about phytoplankton to all the fifth grade students at the Portsmouth Middle School and to other school groups through Cooperative Extension’s Marine Docent Program.

You can learn more about the dangers of HABs from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

By Candace Dolan, Phytoplankton Monitoring Program Coordinator, and Steve Cooper, GreatBayCoast Watch volunteer.

Phytoplankton photos by Steve Cooper; at 400x magnification. Other photos by Candace Dolan.

The Great Bay Coast Watch(GBCW)
The Great Bay Coast Watch (GBCW) was founded in 1990 as part of the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension/Sea Grant citizen outreach and education program. More than 100 adult and teenage volunteers work to protect the long-term health of New Hampshire ’s coastal environment through volunteer water monitoring. Additional program funding and phytoplankton project support is provided through grants from the New Hampshire Coastal Program (NHCP) and New Hampshire Estuaries Project (NHEP).

NHDES Shellfish Program
Since 2001, GBCW has been helping NHDES manage a paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) sampling site at Star Island, Isles of Shoals. Since blooms of toxic Alexandrium species tend to move in from offshore waters, the Star Island site is ideal as it is six miles from the NH coast. Because there are few easily accessible mussels at the island, volunteers collect mussels from the plentiful mussel beds in Hampton Harbor and place them in mesh bags that are transported out and left to hang from the Star Island docks. Left to filter-feed for at least a week, the mussels collect whatever toxins may be present. Volunteers then collect and transport the mussels to the NHDES laboratory in Concord for testing.

Phytoplankton Photo ID
Identification of phytoplankton species is difficult, especially using portable field microscopes. The images aren’t as sharp as those of lab equipment, and field scopes are subject to harsh field conditions.

Two years ago, the only field aids available to GBCW volunteers were marginal black-and-white photos and small line drawings, both vastly different from the images one sees in the field. Today, volunteers have full-color, lifelike photo-ID sheets that make their job much easier.

These sheets, developed by long-time GBCW volunteer Steve Cooper, evolved slowly. According to Cooper, “In 2003, I was involved in a UNH project that required volunteers to analyze once-per-week ocean samples by determining plankton species and quantities in a fixed amount of seawater. I began taking photographs in the lab to help identify many off-shore species I had never seen before. It soon dawned on me that this concept could be useful for our coastal samplers.”

Cooper combined photos taken in the lab with others he took in the field using coastal samples. He used these photos, along with a few from other sources, to design a pictorial document to be used in the field.

The fun part? “It soon became a real quest to get good photos of all the species that the volunteers see,” Cooper says. “Sort of a Peterson’s Guide to Phytoplankton. Even better is the thrill of seeing beautiful phytoplankton structures under the microscope. Such diversity—the intricacies and beauty embodied in nature never cease to amaze me.”

The trees haven’t yet donned their autumn foliage, but already we are surrounded by color—field after field of bright goldenrod yellow. Sadly, most of us aren’t overjoyed by the splendor of nature’s golden paintbrush, steeling ourselves against the beauty of the goldenrod flowers and unjustly accusing them of causing hay fever. While stuffy noses and watery eyes are undeniably a problem at this time of year, little of the pollen causing these symptoms comes from goldenrod.

Hay fever sufferers are at the mercy of dry, dusty pollen blown about by the wind, which comes mostly from others plants also now in full bloom, such as ragweed. But ragweed flowers are so small and drab most of us don’t even notice them.

We have little to fear from goldenrod flowers. Goldenrod pollen is too heavy and sticky to be blown about by the wind. Instead it is carried about by the countless insects who visit the goldenrod plants to feast on the goldenrod’s abundant pollen or nectar, or—in some cases—each other.

Goldenrod blossoms teem with insect visitors. Many types of beetles feed on yellow pollen grains. As these beetles scramble about, the pollen clinging to their bodies fertilizes the goldenrod flowers, helping, rather than harming, the goldenrod. Unfortunately, one of these beetles, the innocent- looking black-and-yellow-striped locust borer, lays her eggs on black locust trees. Her larvae chew tunnels in locust branches. Infested trees often die outright or become so weakened they may snap in a windstorm.
 
Bees, butterflies, and moths also visit goldenrod. Beekeepers find their beehives filling with dark goldenrod honey this time of year. Southbound orange-and-black monarch butterflies pause frequently along their migration routes to sip the high-energy goldenrod nectar. You’ll need to look closely if you want to find a goldenrod stowaway moth feeding on the goldenrod nectar. This moth is small, and its orange-streaked yellow wings blend well with the yellow flowers. However, you’ll find the equally small, black-and-yellow lichen moth easy to spot.

Natural predators abound on goldenrod. Oddly shaped, yellowish-green ambush bugs wait patiently, hidden among its golden blossoms until an unsuspecting insect comes into reach of their powerful front legs. In the blink of an eye, the ambush bug has seized its prey, rammed its sharp-tipped, soda-straw mouth parts into its victim’s body, and begun sucking out the body fluids.

A much daintier predator is the little, pale yellow goldenrod spider. But don’t waste your time looking for a goldenrod spider web; this spider is a hunter, not a trapper. The goldenrod spider moves sideways, crab-fashion across the goldenrod flowers stalking its prey with all the stealth and cunning of a lion hunting in the jungle.

I find the gall-makers the most fascinating of all the insects found on goldenrod. The inch-long spindle-shaped galls commonly seen on the upper half of goldenrod stems serve as home to tiny moth caterpillars. The more rounded stem galls contain the young of a tiny fly. The young insects spend the winter inside the galls, surrounded by food, sheltered from the weather, and hidden from most predators.

But their lives aren’t worry-free. All too often other tiny insects move in to share the gall makers’ snug homes and may even eat the defenseless gall-dwellers. Also, hungry birds may tear open the galls to get at the tasty insects inside.

A less familiar but very common gall is caused by a tiny fly who lays her eggs on the very topmost bud in a goldenrod flower cluster. When the egg hatches, whorls of stunted leaves and flowers overlap and clump together around the immature fly forming what is called a goldenrod bunch gall. While unsightly, none of the galls seems to be harmful to the goldenrod plants.

Now that goldenrod hybrids have been returned to the U.S. by the English, why not consider planting at least one? Plant breeders have developed many new varieties. Once you plant some goldenrod, you too will be able to watch the fascinating array of insect life visit your garden.

By Janet Schmidt, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

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.

Date

I can’t dispute the wisdom of Winnie-the-Pooh’s creator. Potatoes, especially when harvested small, before their natural sugars turn to starch, are a humble delicacy known for their rich, distinctive flavors.

The “sweet corn” of the potato world, many of us remember “new potatoes” fondly as an essential ingredient in Grandma’s famous creamed-peas-and-new-potatoes, served alongside a piece of poached salmon on the Fourth of July.

Digging through my potato references to prepare for a workshop on growing small “gourmet” potatoes, I couldn’t help but be impressed with this mundane vegetable’s remarkable history.

In New England the potato’s chronicles began in 1719 with plantings by Scotch-Irish immigrants in what is now Derry, New Hampshire. Potatoes adapted to our soils and cool climate. By the 1880s Coos County farmers were producing 3,000 acres of potatoes, mostly to supply starch used in spinning mills. Throughout much of the 1900's table-stock potatoes provided a valuable cash crop for the county, one that fit well with dairy farming. The potato’s history, of course, goes back a lot farther.

It’s generally agreed that potatoes originated around 400 B.C. in the high mountains of South America, where indigenous farmers preserved the tubers by mashing them and spreading them on the ground to producean early freeze-dried product they called chuno. Along with corn and beans, potatoes were staple foods of the Incas long before the arrival of Spanish conquistadores in the 1500s. Recognized for their nutritive value, potatoes were soon introduced into Europe by the Spanish. By 1573 potatoes were used to feed hospital patients in Seville.

An odd-looking underground vegetable that grew suspiciously from “roots,” rather than seed, the potato had a checkered European experience. Most considered it a food fit only for the poor, those of low birth, and animals. Frightful maladies of that era were also attributed to this possibly poisonous plant, leprosy, syphilis, and madness among them. Like tomatoes, which had similar market resistance, potatoes are members of the deadly nightshade family. (Curiously, tobacco, also in the Solanaceae family, didn’t seem to have that problem.)

Perhaps the potato’s reputation had something to do with a banquet once held for the local gentry by Queen Elizabeth I. Instead of using the unwholesome-looking tubers, the chefs cooked up and served the plant’s toxic tops. Banquet-goers promptly became deathly ill and potatoes were thereafter banned from court.

Flummery (wheat cooked in spiced milk) and fruenty (boiled oatmeal and bran) might have remained a dinner-table mainstay, rather than evolving into today’s breakfast food, if not for A.A. Parmentier. Botanist and soldier, Parmentier was captured by the Prussians several times during the course of the Seven Years’ War. While in prison, he was fed and apparently developed a taste for potatoes (German peasants having been forced to grow them by Frederick II since 1744).

Returning to France, Parmentier convinced Louis XVI to let him use a sandy plot of land, where he established a lush potato plantation, which he kept under constant armed guard. (Removing the guards at night encouraged curious thieves to run off with the tubers and replant them elsewhere.)

Parmentier also convinced Louis and Marie Antoinette to wear potato flowers on their clothes and in their hair, starting a fashion trend soon imitated by other aristocrats. Potatoes, now served at court, became upscale. Herbalists further helped their popularity, heralding potatoes as a health food that could cure diarrhea and tuberculosis, although the plant also acquired a reputation as a dangerous aphrodisiac.
 
In America, both Ben Franklin, who once attended a dinner at French court where 20 potato dishes were served, and Tom Jefferson, were early proponents of potato culture. Jefferson may get the credit for inventing French fries, which he served at the White House during his presidency.

And so, the simple tater’s influence can be traced through history. As a staple food introduced to prevent starvation, potatoes themselves, or near-total reliance on them, helped cause the Irish Potato Famine in the mid-1800s, when a fungal disease destroyed entire crops.

During the Alaskan Klondike Gold-Rush miners thought potatoes worth almost their weight in gold, because of their high food value and rich Vitamin C content. Potatoes also became the first vegetable grown in space by NASA, in experiments intended to feed astronauts on long voyages or in extra-terrestrial colonies.
 
What’s next for the humble pomme de terre? Inventor Henry Ford once said there was enough potential ethyl alcohol fuel in an acre of potatoes to power the machinery necessary to cultivate it for the next 100 years. From the looks of gas prices, I think I’ll be planting more potatoes this spring. No, I won’t be turning them into tractor fuel. But I figure the more food I produce for myself, the fewer trips I’ll have to take to the grocery store.

By Steve Turaj, UNH Cooperative Extension Agricultural Resources

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.

Date

The cat, Miss Jane, knows about flying squirrels. She eats some of those that winter in the wall of the house. My closest encounter occurred when I was proposing to clean out what I had thought of as a bird house. Nose-to nose-with an equally startled squirrel, I changed my assumption of occupancy and my plan. Miss Jane knows intimately certain aspects of squirrel behavior and physiology, but I’ve begun reading.

I’ve learned that flying squirrels are extremely common, though we seldom see them due to their position on the night shift of squirreldom. There may be two species of flying squirrels here in Bradford. Northern flying squirrels prefer the conifers and southern flying squirrels take the mixed deciduous. Although similar in appearance, their habits vary somewhat.

A brief column doesn’t provide nearly enough space to describe the flying squirrels’ large, night-vision eyes which, like the eyes of all rodents, are set far apart for a broad field of vision. This gives the squirrels a better chance of evading the owls and Miss Jane, but poor depth perception. Appearing wracked by indecision, they bob and weave nervously before leaping. In fact, they are triangulating, trying to get multiple visual angles on the proposed landing site. I regret not having enough space to describe why their eyes shine orange at night.

A single column offers barely enough space to include these facts about flying squirrels: They have very long whiskers, charmingly called “vibrissae.” They carefully notch an acorn to fit their small mouths before carrying it aloft to a cache hole in a tree, there to pound it in place with their incisors, producing a sound that might carry fifty feet. They roll their babies into balls to transport them from nest to nest, which they do frequently. They have a large vocal repertoire. Our northern flying squirrels grow fur on the soles of their feet in winter. Less territorial than other rodents, they aggregate in numbers in house rafters and hollow trees in winter for communal warmth and Olympic games.

All squirrels are fairly adept at falling out of trees unharmed. The principle is simple—stick your arms, legs and tail out to provide as much surface area and control as possible then hope for the best. Flying squirrels have taken this elementary parachuting a good bit further and possess a singularly wonderful body part known as a pataguim. This is the furry vestment that drapes from wrist to ankle on each side of the flying squirrel’s body.

No mere flap of extra skin, the pataguim contains a complex arrangement of muscles. Thin, flat muscles lie within the gliding skin and serve to control the direction of flight. Ropelike muscles along the outer edge hold the air foil taut. Additional muscles help stabilize the outstretched legs. They don’t “flap their wings.” Yet another set of muscles holds the pataguim close to the squirrel’s side so as not to impede them when they scamper afoot.

An added feature is a cartilaginous rod that extends from the wrist in flight to further open the leading edge of the gliding surface. At rest, the rod lies flat along the forearm. Imagine a stiletto knife that appears at the touch of a cufflink in some dreadful movie.

With all this specialized equipment in place, a flying squirrel glides silently through the night woods, spiraling down or making right angle turns as necessary. The initial powerful leap is usually followed by a short, step dive to gain velocity for glides of 20-60 feet on average. Glides of 150 feet are not unheard of, and down-slope distances of 300 feet have been recorded.

A flying squirrel may pancake to the ground to forage on nuts, seeds, and insects, or abruptly swoop upwards at the end of a glide to land on another tree. Its patagium billows to reduce speed, its tail wings upwards, its landing gear thrusts forward. After scaling this tree, it may leap again, speeding through the night forest.

One final note: a mother flying squirrel lies balanced on forehead and feet over her blind, naked offspring and spreads her furry pataguim like a blanket to keep them warm. Sounds delightful on a 10-below night.

By J. Ann Eldridge, UNH Cooperative Extension Wildlife Coverts Cooperator

Does the sharp climb in heating oil prices—already above $2.20 a gallon, with no end in sight— have you dusting off that old wood stove in the corner or researching the latest wood stove technology?

 If so, then you’ll also want to spend some time contemplating where you are going to get your firewood. As a rule of thumb, a cord of dry hardwood fuel yields about the same usable heat as 200 gallons of heating oil, a ton of hard coal, or about 4000 kilowatts of electricity. By comparing the cost of other fuels with cordwood, you can figure out the savings you’ll realize by burning wood to heat your home.

Don’t expect to go out in the backyard when the weather turns cold to cut down a few trees to saw up and throw into the new stove. It takes time to cure and dry firewood. Burning green firewood is very inefficient, and it can be unsafe. The moisture content of green wood averages 60 percent to 80 percent by weight, depending on when it was cut.

Evaporating all that water in your stove will use as much as 15 percent of the potential heat in your firewood, so you are better off letting nature do it for you by air-drying your wood before you burn it. Burning green wood also promotes a buildup of creosote in the chimney, increasing the risk of a dangerous chimney fire.

It will take about six months to air-dry a cord of cut and split wood to 30 percent moisture content and a year or more to reach 20 percent moisture content. So if you haven’t started cutting and splitting your wood pile, you won’t catch up before cold weather arrives this fall. That means you’ll probably need to buy dry cordwood this year and plan on using any wood you cut now during the 2006-2007 heating season.

If you haven’t bought a cord of cut-and-split firewood in a few years, you might be surprised by the prices. A quick perusal of your local weekly newspaper or “shopper” will show advertised prices exceeding $200 for a cord of dry wood.

Don’t be too quick to assume the high price of dry firewood is a reaction to the sudden surge in demand. The firewood business is labor-intensive and requires a lot of transportation. During the 1990’s, when oil was cheap and firewood profits where thin, most large firewood dealers started to automate the production of firewood through the use of firewood processors in an effort to stay competitive. These processors are designed to cut and split log-length wood (16-foot logs).

In response, many firewood dealers started to buy in log-length wood by the truckload from local loggers. This strategy worked well until demand for hardwood pulp surged two or three years ago. Suddenly, firewood dealers who were used to paying $30 to $40 a cord for log length had to pay $80 to $100 per cord for the same wood. They had to pass these costs along to their customers. Add surging prices for insurance (especially workman’s compensation) and fuel to run the equipment, and the old standard of $120 to $140 cord of firewood quickly rises to $200.

If you’re still balking at paying $200 a cord for firewood, don’t delay too long, because prices are bound to increase as winter gets closer and supplies disappear. Dry firewood has been very difficult to purchase the past couple of winters because demand exceeded supply.

If you’re in the market to buy three or four cords of dry wood for the winter, I suggest you look in your local newspaper or “shopper,” or ask your neighbors and friends about dealers they might know. Be sure you are buying dry wood. Ask the dealer how long the wood you plan to buy has been drying since it was cut and split. Learn the species mix of the dealer’s wood, too. The denser the wood, the longer it will take to dry. Oak, for example, may take more than a year to dry to 20 percent moisture content.

Be sure to clarify what measure of wood you are buying. By state law, a cord of wood is 128 cubic feet of air, bark, and wood. That’s a pile of wood 8 feet long by 4 feet high by 4 feet wide. A vendor may legally sell a fraction of a cord, but must represent it accurately as such (e.g., a half-cord). Remember that stacking a cord is an imperfect skill, so the cord will vary in slightly in size every time it is stacked.

It’s a good idea to meet the delivery truck before the load is dumped to make sure you are satisfied by the mixture of species and cleanliness, and to tell the driver where you want the wood dumped. Most firewood dealers don’t want to return to your house to reload their truck.

Unless you’ve arranged otherwise, it’s up to you to restack the pile. Stack it outside in a well ventilated area off the ground (used pallets make a good platform if you don’t have a woodshed). Don’t cover your stacked wood until about a month or so before you begin to use it, to encourage natural air circulation to drive the moisture from the wood.

Even if you’re buying your firewood, the work of stacking it, loading your stove all winter, and removing the ashes will enable you to understand the old adage “wood warms you twice.”

One final note:    Please download our fact sheet Wood burning Saavy to review or improve your knowledge of how to burn wood safely in your home.

By Tim Fleury, UNH Cooperative Extension Forester

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.

Date

As soon as the first few inches of snow falls, some New Hampshire landowners begin thinking about putting out food for the deer.

Don’t! You’ll do more harm than good, both to the deer and to their habitat. Research and experience have shown that the negative effects of winter feeding outweigh any benefit deer might get from being fed.

Two factors primarily determine deer survival during winter: the availability of high-quality food in the fall, and softwood (e.g., hemlock, spruce, fir) cover during winter.

Deer must store body fat for the winter. The amount of body fat a deer has when it enters the winter directly determines if it will survive until spring. Deer accumulate body fat by increasing the amount of food they eat in September and October, when high-quality foods, such as acorns and beech nuts, are abundant. By November, most deer have accumulated all the fat they will need to survive the winter.

During September and October feeding, fat accumulation in adult deer results in a 20 to 30 percent increase in body weight. Fawns, on the other hand, accumulate only about half as much fat, because they use most of the food they eat for growing muscles and bones.

Beginning in November, deer in the Northeast voluntarily begin eating less. They continue to reduce the amount of food they eat each day until around late February, when they are eating about 50 percent less food per day than they did in September. Throughout the winter, deer compensate for their reduced food intake by relying on their stored fat for energy. An adult deer may get as much as 40 percent of its daily nutrition during winter from fat reserves.

However, to maintain this level of stored fat use, deer must conserve their energy by reducing their activity (e.g., by traveling less) and by spending most of their time in softwood cover, where it’s warmer and the snow isn’t as deep. These energy-conserving behaviors are especially important for fawns because of their lower fat reserves.

Although deer can eat to reduce the amount of fat they burn, natural foods only slow the rate of fat loss; they don’t stop it. This is where some people begin saying, “That’s why people need to put out grain for the deer!”

But research has discovered that even deer feeding on nothing but grain lose weight during the winter. Even captive deer that have access to as much high-quality food as they want still reduce the amount of food they eat beginning in November, and they continue to lose body fat through February.

That’s because deer have evolved a survival strategy that involves eating as much food as they can in autumn, to put on as much fat as possible before winter. Once winter comes, instinct tells deer to eat less, move around less, and seek the protection of winter cover.

Research also shows that large, dominant adult deer fill their bellies first at feeding sites, which means that smaller and weaker individuals, including the vulnerable fawns, will have wasted valuable energy traveling to the feeding site, where they may get little feed. Over time, feeding sites attract more and more deer competing for the same food supplies, leading to over-browsing and degradation of the natural habitat around a feeding site, as well as wreaking havoc on homeowners’ ornamental plantings.

Wildlife biologists also worry that deer feeding might help spread Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), which affects deer and elk and is always fatal. To date, CWD has been found in 14 states, including New York, although it hasn’t been found in New Hampshire.

Although biologists don’t know exactly how this disease spreads, they believe its transmission requires close contact between animals. When humans put out food for deer, they create a situation where an unnaturally high number of deer become concentrated in a small area.

In fact, some states have banned winter feeding of deer to help stop the spread of CWD. Feeding deer because you just like to watch them is a selfish reason for placing our deer resource at so much risk.
 
So, what can you do if you want to help deer during the winter? You can work on your property and with your neighbors to create and maintain quality deer habitat. This includes working in stands of oak and beech to increase the amount of nuts available in autumn, working in softwood stands to maintain and create dense winter cover, and working in hardwood stands to increase the amount of woody browse available to deer. Together, landowners, hunters, and wildlife enthusiasts can ensure there will be enough habitats to sustain many generations of deer in New Hampshire.

By Matt Tarr, Educator, UNH Cooperative Extension Forest Resources

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.

If you decorate your home with greenery for the coming holiday season, chances are you’ll include a few sprigs of Ilex, popularly known as holly, among the trimmings.

The custom of decking our halls with boughs of holly dates back to the Druids of ancient Britain and Gaul, who hung holly over their doors at Yuletide as a shelter for woodland spirits. The Druids believed the spirits would take shelter in the holly and bring good to the household during the year. Later, Christian symbolism included the belief that the spiny leaves and red berries were a reminder of the crown of thorns and the blood of Christ.

The early English settlers brought the custom of decorating with holly to the New World. The native American holly was one of the first plants sighted by the Pilgrims. Native Americans planted evergreen hollies, their symbol of courage and eternal life, around dwellings for protection. Today, when holly decorates our homes during the winter holidays, we associate it with celebration and good cheer.

Unfortunately, over the years holly has been typecast as a symbol of the Christmas season. That’s a shame, for holly is a plant we can enjoy in the landscape year ’round.

Hollies come in many forms: trees or shrubs, deciduous or evergreen. Mature hollies can range in height from less than three feet to more than 30 feet. Holly berries come in shades of red, white, yellow and black. They all prefer a soil that is neutral or slightly acidic.

More than 300 varieties are found worldwide. Here in the U.S., we grow American, English and Japanese hollies most commonly, but not all of them are hardy in New Hampshire.

One of the hollies commonly used for winter decorations—Ilex aquifolium, the English holly with dark, spiny green leaves and clusters of red berries—isn’t hardy in New Hampshire. It is usually grown and shipped in from the West Coast.

The so-called “blue hollies,” however, will survive our winters. These were hybridized by Kathleen Meserve in the 1950’s on Long Island. World-renowned for her work with the blue hollies, Meserve crossed English holly with the prostrate Ilex Rugosa holly to produce a cold-hardy plant.
Blue hollies are dense plants with glossy, blue-green foliage, red or yellow berries, and purplish  or chartreuse twigs. Commonly available cultivars include Blue Prince and Princess, Golden Girl, Blue Maid, China Girl, and China Boy.
           
The native hollies Inkberry (Ilex glabra) and Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) are both hardy. You’ll frequently find these hollies growing in swampy places. Inkberry is an evergreen shrub with black berries. Winterberry is a deciduous shrub (loses its leaves each fall) with showy red berries that hang on the plant into January and attract birds. Winterberry cultivars Afterglow, Winter Red, Red Sprite and Sparkleberry are noted for their abundant berry production.
           
Other hollies hardy in southern or coastal New Hampshire are the Japanese crenata and American opaca. Hardy to zones 6 and 5, respectively, these do best in more protected locations. Japanese varieties can withstand a root temperature of 26 or 27 degrees F before damage occurs. The blue hollies, on the other hand, can tolerate a root temperature of 12 degrees F.
           
When growing hollies, remember that they bear their male and female flowers on separate plants. If you want berries, you’ll need to plant a male holly nearby for bees to pollinate female plants, which produce the berries. One male plant will usually suffice to pollinate an entire hedge of female plants.
           
One of the nicest aspects of hollies is that most are moderately fast-growing. That means that normally you should be able to prune off some holiday decorations in December without ruining the shape of the plant.

By Margaret Hagen, UNH Cooperative Extension Agricultural Resources Educator

Natural resources play a huge, often unrecognized role in our communities. Many people living or working in cities believe that natural resources lie outside of the city, and that they have to go to into rural areas to experience the natural world.

In my work, I help people understand the importance of the natural resources in their own backyards, along their downtown streets, in neighborhood parks and cemeteries, and in small patches of forestland. These street trees, landscapes, community gardens, and pocket parks can change people’s lives.

Research backs up our experience that natural resources such as trees, shrubs and flowers in our communities can:
 

• reduce crime in neighborhoods
• increase property values
• save energy
• improve air quality
• and even improve human health by reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, and speeding up the healing process

So if trees and other plants really can improve quality of life, how do you get people who are worried about school budgets, parking problems, or high taxes, to care about them?

One way to get people caring about natural resources is by building partnerships. For example, because of my membership on the Board of Intown Manchester, a group mostly made up of influential developers, I connected with the president of Families in Transition, which provides temporary housing for homeless families, and we’ve begun working on several different landscaping projects with the residents.

Another contact, a local developer, approached me a couple weeks ago at Intown Manchester’s annual meeting. He’d heard that I was the person to talk with about putting plants on his roof. Installing a “greenroof” in Manchester is a goal I have been working on for the past four years!

I’ve found it’s important to involve as many people as possible from the beginning of the project. A great example of this is seen at the townhouses on Cedar Street. Back in 1995, I began working with Manchester Neighborhood Housing Services, which provides housing for low-income families. Working with the residents of new townhouses we helped develop a landscape plan, then plant and maintain the landscaping.

If you drive by today, 11 years later, you’ll still see the pride these residents have in their landscapes, because they created them and continue to watch over them.

As a result of the neighborhood pride that developed, the Manchester Police reported that the number of calls in the Cedar Street neighborhood dropped in one year from more 800 to just 64, a fact featured on ABC National News highlighting how trees benefit people by helping reduce crime.

Another example: the Pine Street Community Garden, which grew literally out of the rubble of an old garage foundation. Working together with community members and AmeriCorps volunteers, we developed the plans, gathered the materials, and built the Center City’s first community garden, which now serves several multicultural families.

Extension educator Julia Steed Mawson now oversees the garden. Julia brought in the 4-H Green Thumb Team, whose members grow food for the Salvation Army’s Kid’s Café, which serves hot meals daily to many children who would otherwise go without. The Green Thumb Team also grows food for the N.H. Food Bank. Through many partnerships, the garden has grown over the years and has become a keystone in the Center City.

A vacant lot on Cedar Street was a former crack house site. Residents of Cedar Street remember how afraid they were. According to resident Cathy Howland, “[The crack house] was only about six feet from our apartment. Its windows were aligned with ours, so we could see the drug dealers and they could see us. We couldn’t let the kids outside without an adult being right there.”

Many frightening incidents occurred as people came and went at all hours of the day and night. Beyond the fear of living next to drug dealers, residents had to live with the huge neighborhood eyesore of the house and yard, with trash everywhere and the house itself beyond repair. It was a wonderful day in the neighborhood when Manchester Neighborhood Housing Services purchased the property and took the crack house down.

The community came together to plan and build a new park. The residents helped create the landscape plan, and, in two days, more than 40 people including N.H. Community Tree Stewards transformed the vacant lot into a beautiful green space. Neighborhood children dug holes, planted shrubs, and spread mulch. Finding the remains of the old foundation while digging, one of the kids shouted, “This used to be part of the crack house. Let’s get it out of here!”

By Mary Tebo, UNH Cooperative Extension Community Forestry Educator

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.

The miraculous ability of leaf and flower buds on trees and shrubs to survive the deep cold and howling winds of our harsh northern winters amazes me. Because we have a few peach trees, I know that blossom buds can die, usually because of extreme temperature fluctuations in early spring. Once the hard, protective covering, what botanists call the “bud scale,” breaks open, a sudden plunge in temperature can kill the flower bud.

Like seeds, buds are dormant embryos packed into a protective outer scale. The period of winter dormancy lasts several months, and most native N.H. plants will not break dormancy during a fleeting January thaw, a clever survival trick. Tree seeds need the same dormant time period that prevents them from sprouting too early.

When present in high-enough concentrations, a hormone called abscisic acid, found in both seeds and buds, switches off all metabolic activity in the bud. In spring this hormone becomes increasingly dilute, losing its inhibitor capacity, so the buds and seeds burst open.

Buds form during late summer at the base of the leaf stem, unnoticed until the leaves fall. Inside the bud is miniature leaf or flower, ready to explode the following spring.


Here in the north, with short growing seasons, this “head start” system enables woody plants to grow rapidly in the spring and to complete their annual growth cycle before the next winter.

To discover more about this phenomenon, I checked out a few buds on my plants around my home. I marveled at how different they all are. There’s a unique bud design for each species. I picked a few shrub twigs for closer inspection: a fat rhododendron flower bud, a slender and delicate blueberry twig, a sturdy lilac twig. Some different tree species also caught my eye for the striking appearance of their buds: birch, beech, sasafrass, hickory, dogwood, and some peach buds.

The huge rhododendron flower buds are at least twice the size of the plant’s leaf buds and easy to distinguish. I found few, indicating that I won’t have many blooms next summer. I sacrificed one flower to science and cut it open to see what was inside. I cut the bud in half crosswise and inspected it with my 16x loupe. (This is the small, inexpensive magnifying glass that field scientists hang on a cord around their necks and hold close to their eye in bright sun for fantastic magnification).

I saw pale greens and cream shades, outer scales surrounding folded and curled-up flower petals. What a beautiful kaleidoscope design! This fat bud had air pockets between the many layers of embryonic flower tissue—a  layering system providing protective insulation. Skiers and winter hikers keep warm the same way by dressing in many layers to trap air.

I also noticed the big, fuzzy buds of the hardy star magnolia that look like pussy willow blossoms. Another winterizing strategy! The fuzz traps air that helps insulate the flower buds from the cold. Happily, the magnolia is loaded with flower buds I hope will erupt in a stunning display next April.

I studied a few unusual tree buds, including the sharp-pointed beech tree bud that resembles a needle. Birch trees also have similar, but smaller, pointed buds located on opposite sides of delicate, slender, zigzaggy twigs making a graceful line against the snow.

Depending on the type of plant, flower buds may be separate from leaf buds and open at a different time, or the flower and leaves may be combined in a single bud and open together. The distinctive “button” flower bud of my dogwood trees is quite different from the leaf buds. I see that I will have a beautiful display of dogwood blossoms in the spring.

It’s easy to identify buds in your own yard when you know the kind of plant you are looking at. But amazingly, experts can identify trees and shrubs in winter without the leaves. Clues from the buds, leaf scar, twigs and bark, as well as the overall form and structure of the plant help provide the answer.
 
Buds may grow directly opposite each other on the twigs, or they may alternate from one side to another. Many shrubs have opposite bud placement, but only a few trees do. You can easily remember them by the acronym MAD Horse: maple, ash, dogwood and horse chestnut. A tree’s branching pattern, easy to see in winter, is the same as that of the buds: opposite or alternate.

The buds themselves provide many more identification clues: they differ in shape, size, texture, color, and even the way the bud scales are wrapped around the bud. Some buds are so small they are hardly visible and are actually imbedded in the twig.

Next time you venture into the winter woods, take time to inspect one of nature’s subtle miracles, and the winter landscape will come alive.

By Anne Krantz, UNH Cooperative Extension Community Tree Steward and Master Gardene

An exuberant weasel lives under my garden shed. I saw it first in winter. Sleek and glistening, with creamy white fur and a black nose, eyes and tail tip, it scampered from the garden shed to disappear under a planter. It was dressed for winter as an ermine, the creature whose short tail once edged the robes of European nobility. It came back in summer, drenched with rain, dressed in trench-coat taupe.

The bobcat who lives on the ledge above us chases away feral cats. This occurs at midnight and sounds like a shrieking catfight in an alley between tall brick buildings. The sight of long striped cat legs on the front deck is startling.

Our road wanders through hill, ledge, and wetland, probably tracing the same path the colonists walked and the magnificent Concord stagecoaches traversed a century later. Coyotes and a black bear with two cubs live across the road, a named and numbered state highway. In the beaver bogs, moose and great blue heron feed. The wild turkeys usually fly across the road in the winter, but, in the summer, the two toms stand on the berm with the harem behind them, and wait for cars to stop. Those of us who live here do.

My urban colleagues at work enjoy reminding me that I live in the "Nature Conservancy," which encompasses the wetland at the bottom of the hill. Before we became politically and environmentally aware, we called them "swamps"- breeding grounds for mosquitoes, black flies and such, and thus to be shunned, or worse, drained or backfilled. Now, we're grateful that the wetland filters and purifies the water table and shelters the dragonflies, frogs, salamanders and other wild life.

The acorn and beech mast harvest was light last fall, so I saw four red squirrels in the bird feeders. I have a friend who criticizes my winter bird feeding as environmentally undesirable. As a gardener, my defense is that the chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and turkeys feed their babies insects in the summer, so I want them to live here year round and diminish the bad bugs in my garden. Yet even I doubt that chickadees distinguish between the beneficial garden bugs and the destructive ones.

Who knows what the deer on the hill ate last winter. They often go for my hostas and azaleas. I don't intentionally feed deer, and the landscape plants I chose came mostly from the lists of last resorts for deer, but I lean toward native plants as first choices, and when deer are starving, they eat everything and anything. The local deeryard is on my land, an accident of topography, so deer will be here when the temperatures drop and the wind howls. That same hemlock ravine that shelters the deer hosts the precious red-breasted nuthatches I adore. I encourage local hunters who prefer venison and practice rifle and archery safety.

Chickadees are so socially charming and entertaining when I'm out pruning, shoveling snow, or cutting dinner table flowers. The beat of their wings whistles. The puff of air in my face displaced by those wing beats still amazes me with its force. The chickadees eat some hollyhock seeds among the millions in the garden. I can share with chickadees and nuthatches, but not deer, red squirrels or woodchucks. I wonder what that says about my character.

The last woodchuck to move here dug a burrow under a lilac tree. Every morning, he stood on his hind legs and scratched his back on the corner of the garden shed, just like the meerkats in the "Lion King" or the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

His fourth day out, the woodchuck ate all the lilies in the garden. When the gas can tipped over during a groundhog exercise session in the shed, my husband cleaned and loaded his rifle. He claimed he hit the woodchuck, but we never found or smelled the carcass, so maybe it just moved elsewhere. Maybe the bobcat prevailed. I forgot to fill in the hole with rocks and soil come fall, and the next spring, half the lilac tree failed to leaf out. I'm fairly certain the weasel lives there now.

The mice are gone from the potting shed. A few clay pots are scattered and broken. Whether the hole in the spilled bag of perlite came from the mouse, the scampering weasel, or both, perlite is easy to sweep. The potting soil no longer sprouts sunflowers from mouse seed caches. The lilac tree recovered when pruned. I'm hoping for another glance at the ermine.

By Cheryl Grabe, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

When I installed a water garden in my backyard, I was expecting the presence of water to attract various forms of wildlife. I designed the pool with straight sides to keep raccoons from eating the snails and fish I planned to add. I constructed a waterfall with eddy pools of the optimum depth for the bathing birds I wanted to attract by the splashing of the falling water.

Frogs and dragonflies would find their way to the water with no help from me, though I dreaded the arrival of turtles, having read about the havoc turtles could wreak on waterlilies.

Once I finished constructing the pool, I anxiously awaited the arrival of wild visitors, especially the frogs. I started counting the frogs daily, inspecting the size and color of each new arrival, reporting the results of my observations to my mother in the mornings and to my husband at the end of each day. I became a miser, gleefully gloating over my wealth of frogs, fish and dragonflies.

An unexpected wild visitor appeared in my pool one Sunday morning. I was working on the patio adjacent to the pool, enjoying the sound of splashing water in the background, when suddenly the splashing stopped. I had visions of a clogged pump or thrown circuit breaker to explain the lack of water, but, as I studied the waterfall, I realized there was no mechanical problem.

Lying in a sensuous curve across the lip of the fall was a lovely brown garden snake. Its sleek body was acting as a dam, its narrow head spilling over the waterfall’s edge as it enjoyed the view. No one would believe this! I ran inside to get a camera, but when I returned to the pool, the snake had abandoned the area. Or so I thought.

Going back to work on the patio, I looked up from time to time, hoping to spy the snake returning for a photo-op. After a few minutes I noticed one of my frogs emerging from a small cavern beside the waterfall. This frog came out of the cavern very slowly, as though he had weights tied to each foot. First the head, then the right front foot, a few moments later, the left front foot. I waited for the rest of the frog to appear, but when it didn't, I went in for a closer look.

As I neared the frog, he seemed totally oblivious to my approach, and I realized that every muscle in his body was straining to pull his hind legs out of the hole. I reached down and gave him a tug. He didn't budge. The snake had him by a hind leg. I could just make out the edge of the snake's mouth in the shadows of the cave.

This was ridiculous! The frog was ten times the width of the snake's mouth; no way was this snake going to be able to swallow that frog.

I picked up a twig and tickled the snake's nose. The frog continued straining to escape. I tickled the snake some more. Finally it opened its mouth and the frog erupted as though shot from a cannon—out of the snake, out of the cave, and into the water. He appeared none the worse for his ordeal and settled down into the grasses growing on the bottom of the pool, out of harm's way.

The snake wasn't ready to call it a day, though. It slithered out of the cavern and onto the water. Six inches, eight inches, one foot of snake suspended on the surface of the pool, and still its tail was not in sight. It rested its head on a floating plant and waited for another chance at a meal

I felt guilty for disrupting the course of nature, and went back to work on the patio. When next I looked, my unexpected visitor had gone.

This time of the year I become impatient for that first bit of fresh green or bloom. Since I know I’ll have to wait another month or more for Mother Nature, I usually try to do something to push things along. Most years, in addition to forcing spring-flowering bulbs in my refrigerator, I help some branches come alive before their time. I like to try many different species.

My basic strategy involves hoodwinking the branches I’ve cut from nearby trees and shrubs into thinking spring has come, by providing the warmer temperatures and longer hours of light that trigger the flowering response in spring-flowering plants. Known as “forcing,” this process requires very little time and effort. At this time of year, almost any material can be forced to flower in three to four weeks. The closer to the actual outdoor blooming date, the shorter the time necessary for indoor forcing.

I’ve found a host of flowering shrubs and trees suitable for forcing. Horse chestnut, pussy willow, shadbush, redbud, Cornelian cherry, spicebush, flowering quince, forsythia, spring witch hazel, bridalwreath spirea and magnolia produce the most spectacular displays. Fruit trees such as apple, plum, cherry, pear, peach and apricot also make lovely bouquets. The branches of almost any shrub or tree, including oak, birch and maple, are interesting to watch as they develop leaves and flowers indoors.

I wait until outdoor temperatures rise into the mid-to high 40’s before collecting my branches. I choose branches full of plump buds and prune them on a slant, cutting lengths of up to three feet long. Formed last summer, these buds are ready to burst into bloom. Flower buds are often fatter, rounder and sometimes a different shape than leaf buds. Flower buds also tend to be more numerous on younger wood.

For easier arranging later on, I choose stems the thickness of my little finger, using sharp pruning shears for a clean, quick-healing cut. Although pruning branches in winter won’t harm the plant, I try to prune evenly to retain the plant’s balanced shape.

After a winter like this one, I may not get as many blossoms as I’d like. The balmy weather of December and early January will have stimulated the buds of some woody plants to break dormancy and lose some of their winter hardiness. The long and bitter cold snap that followed in February and March may have killed the flower buds on some species. Even if I don’t have flowers, I know I’ll at least get sprays of foliage for my efforts.

After I’ve collected the branches I want, I bring them indoors and immediately plunge the stems into a deep pail filled with water; sometimes I even put them in the bathtub with a few inches of tepid water. I leave them submerged for a few hours—even overnight—so the stems and bud scales can take up as much water as possible. This makes the process of bud unfolding much easier for the flower.

Next, I place the branches in a bucket of water, adding a flower preservative to help them last longer, and set the bucket branches in a relatively cool place (60-65 degrees F) to develop. Higher temperatures will cause the buds to develop rapidly, but size, color and quality may be sacrificed. To keep the water from smelling bad, I change it once a week. I occasionally mist the developing branches with water from a spray bottle.

Branches need light for forcing, but not direct sunlight. Heat from direct sun is too intense, and often drying. I try to keep in mind the springtime conditions that promote flowering. “Thinking spring” helps boost my spirits, too.


Witch hazel and forsythia can take as little as one week to bloom; flowering fruits such as apple and cherry can take up to four weeks, and lilacs can take five.
When the flower buds have developed enough to show color, I remove the branches, arrange them in vases and put them on display just as the flowers begin to open. Arranging the branches with other spring flowering plants, such as daffodils and tulips, or with green foliage, provides a stunning contrast. The flowers and leaves will last longer if you can move them to a cool location at night.

So, why not bring the first breath of spring into your home as you watch a few slender branches burst into leaf and flower while snow still covers the landscape. It will help replace those still-fresh memories of frozen water pipes, non-starting cars, and extra layers of clothing with the hope of certain spring.


By Margaret Hagen, UNH Cooperative Extension Educator, Hillsborough County

3/14/07  

Cranking away on my bike trainer one evening after work last week, I got to thinking about the indoor activities I do throughout the winter that connect in some essential way with the outdoor life I lead in the warmer months.

I’ll begin with the bicycle. I set my road bike up on the trainer in the little alcove off my living room sometime in October. I hop on a few times each week, not just for exercise during the months when short days make outdoor exercise difficult to fit in, but to maintain the muscle and lung conditioning I’ll need when I once again start commuting by bike in late April.

My indoor winter riding serves another purpose, too. I read—actually skim—a lot, propping my book, magazine or newspaper up against the aerobars that extend up and out from my handlebars. I keep a little sheaf of Post-it tabs handy to stick onto pages or paragraphs I want to return to for closer reading when I’m no longer puffing and panting.

Two or three times a week from November through April, I hit the Concord YMCA weight room. I don’t go there to “trim 'n tone,” but to push big weights that help maintain my strength year-round. An aging body can’t simply pick up that seasonal grunt labor where it left off a year ago. I’m talking about shoveling paths and walkways after a mid-winter blizzard, swinging that eight-pound splitting maul to work up my winter firewood, and the hundred other tasks of a self-reliant, semi-rural life.

Weight training does more than build strength. It helps prevent injury. It improves balance and grace by training the body’s proprioceptors, the little spindle cells embedded in muscle tissue that help the body orient itself in space and deliver information about the relationship of the various body parts to each other. Heavy weight training also helps develop a single-pointed focus in both mind and body, an awareness that translates well into other dimensions of my life. 

Because we heat our house exclusively with local wood we cut, split and stack during the warmer months, our indoor winter activities involve a lot of wood-lugging, stove-feeding and ash management. And because we don’t have an electric clothes dryer, we use the woodstove’s heat to dry our clothes, which, in turn, humidify the dry indoor air as they release their moisture. It takes less than five minutes to hang a large load on a wooden rack set up in the living room in front of the woodstove. The clothes typically dry in about two hours.

Another benefit of air-drying: energy savings. Project Laundry List (motto: “We are changing the world through clotheslines—one household at a time.”) claims that clothes dryers consume between five and 10 percent of total residential energy.

In mid-March, I’ll move the bike trainer to the spare bedroom and lower the shop lights, fitted with full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs and currently suspended near the ceiling of the alcove. Then I’ll set up the large plywood table that fills the alcove and use this space for starting hundreds of seedlings that will become part of my big backyard vegetable garden: onions, leeks and lettuce first, then cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and the hardier annual flowers. Around the second week in April, I’ll sow the warm-weather crops that don’t get transplanted until early June, tomatoes, peppers, basil.

Pretty soon after that, the ground will have thawed enough to spread my dry wood ashes in the garden and plant peas, lettuce, and spinach directly in the ground. The snowbanks will have melted enough so I can get to my clothesline without snowshoes and the light will last long enough to dry a load of wet clothes outdoors. And then I’ll get a day that allows me to pull the bike off the trainer and take a spin to the corner store for the Sunday papers. I’ll be ready!

Writing this, I notice two common threads that connect all these activities, winter and summer alike. They rely on human, instead of mechanical, power. And they turn me into an active co-producer, rather than a mere consumer. But pretty inconvenient for a busy modern life, eh?

Well, yeah, at least according to conventional wisdom. But then, in light of a growing number of inconvenient truths: global warming, the volatile global energy situation, rising rates of obesity and chronic disease, the alarming incidence of foodborne illness—staying fit on the bike, raising my own fruits and vegetables, burning local wood for heat, and hanging my laundry—make my inconvenient life feel more convenient every day.

By Peg Boyles, Writer/Editor

3/8/07