Sow There!

A garden is a place for many things.
For some, it is an extension of their home — a place to serve food, take a nap or talk over the fence to a neighbor.
Other times the garden is a hobby, where it’s just plain fun to experiment with how efficient one can be at killing snails or growing the biggest cucumbers.
Often, for me, the garden is a place for contemplation. Usually it is in the morning and after work that I take the little garden stroll, letting my mind be distracted by whether the peat pots need watering. My garden is quiet and for a few minutes I am distant from the rest of life’s goings-on.
Often it is here that some of life’s big decisions are made or epiphanies received.

The 14, or more, seasons
Maybe I’ve been thinking too much about this lately, but there are many subseasons throughout the year for a gardener.
Of course there is winter, which is filled with waiting, and is pretty dull except for the holiday get-togethers.

Then comes winter preparations, which involve leafing through catalogs and buying seeds on the clearance rack in the gardening section.
Mid-winter, at least for me, involves tentative preparation. I’ll plant the earliest of seeds in the windowsill, carefully watching over them each day to make sure I’m not somehow jeopardizing their life-cycle.
Then comes February and March, which is late winter.
Late winter involves anticipation. I’ll visit those early daffodils and tulips as if my daily visitation is the only thing giving the plants the will to bloom.
By the official start of spring in March, it’s about patience — wanting to get out there and get my hands dirty, but knowing there are still several weeks to wait until there’s no chance of frost.
I was chatting with my friend Chanin recently. She has a new baby so now she is home and has time to get her hands dirty.
She lives in Forest Ranch, so the climate is slightly cooler than the temperature in the valley.
When we had those nice, teasing days of 70-degree weather, she was excited and planted a mom-mobile worth of plants in her garden.
The date of last frost in this area is technically near the end of April. But it always seems like that LAST frost never comes.
Chanin, like many of us, had taken for granted that the fact that she was wearing a sundress meant it was safe to get started on the gardening season.
Those cold nights caught many off guard. I had already packed up my electric blanket on my bed and put it in storage.
This brings us back to mid-spring, a time for yet more patience.
Needless to say, Chanin lost most of her plants and feels that she should have known better and waited.
I’m fortunate not to have made that same mistake, but only because I was too lazy to put my young plants in the ground.
Thanks to Laurie at work, I have resisted the unbearable urge to plant zinnia seeds outdoors. Laurie said she always waits to plant zinnias until May 1, which is right about the official date of last frost.
Soon, most gardeners will shift into mid-spring mania, where the flood gates are opened and most gardening books will give the go-ahead to unleash all those clearance-rack seed packets.
This is followed by early summer, when it is fun to go out every morning to see that there are two zucchini to harvest.
By mid-summer, it’s fun to see how many zucchini can be picked to share with friends.
By late summer, it is too hot and pitiful outside to care whether the zucchini plants need watering. And who would care anyway because there are 28 zucchini the size of motor homes ready to harvest. By then you will have already brought zucchini to everyone you know who doesn’t have zucchini plants at home and who isn’t allergic to them.
By late-late summer, your zucchini are so large they could be carved out and used as canoes.
By early fall, there is a frenzy of pent-up gardening as garden tragedies and triumphs are tallied and plans begin to unravel for next spring.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m planting a boat-load of zinnias this year and I’m not going to apologize for it.
One thing about gardening is that there are a bazillion different approaches.
Some gardeners get bored with the more pedestrian plants and scour obscure gardening catalogs for the newest or strangest or most odiferous plants.
I applaud them.
In fact, I have one plant in my yard, an orange fizz geranium, that I bought purely for the novelty. When friends visit my garden I take them over to the plant and have them tickle the leaves, which emit a fragrance much like a $10 umbrella drink in an outdoor Hawaiian bar.

There is a time and place for all of that. However, I’m tired of having plants die when I go away for a three-day weekend, keel over with the slightest dip or rise of temperature or only bloom for two weeks.
I’m going for more bang for the buck, which zinnias provide.

Originally from Mexico, zinnias bloom in the colors we would imagine from a hot climate — bronzed yellow, burnt orange and blazing red.
Some writings about the plant state that the flowers were once called “poorhouse flowers” because they were so easy to grow.
Another example of this type of snobbishness is the term “freeway daisies,” which refers to daisies that perform so well with so little fuss that Caltrans opts to plant them on the side of the road.
Just because a plant is easy doesn’t mean it should be shunned.
They plant agapanthas, coreopsis and periwinkle in shopping mall parking lots because they do well despite being deprived of most nutrients and drizzled with warm Gatorade people dump out the windows of their cars.
Maybe I have a chip on my shoulder because I was named Heather — a plant, sometimes considered a weed, that grows in acid soil and in bogs.
Zinnias aren’t the most dainty. The flowers don’t wow you with delicate petals or gentle hues. They’re much more brazen.
Plus, butterflies flock to them.
My current love affair with this plant came last year. My gardening partner cleared a big new swath of soil in a back portion of the yard that was previously occupied by some gangly shrubs.
In one of those “I don’t give a hoot” moments, I took a really ancient packet of seeds I had received from a friend who was cleaning out her seed closet.
Thinking the seeds likely wouldn’t grow, I dumped the entire packet into a one-foot area.
What grew was a four-foot-tall mess of zinnias that out-bloomed everything else in the yard.
If trimmed right above the next set of leaves on the stalk, zinnias will rebloom after cutting.
I’ll also keep you posted as to whether the dried seed heads will produce flowers when planted this year.
We also came across a bonanza of seeds in the hidden clearance rack of a grocery story last winter and bought about 10 packets of zinnias (as well as other things) for 25 cents a pop. I’ll follow last year’s program and stuff them under some soil and allow nature to do its thing.

Teacher’s pet
Several months ago I received a mass e-mail from a company in Beverly Hills that sells the Pooch IQ Kit.
The kit, www.poochiq.com, has a variety of tests for the pet owner to determine if their dog is above average in intelligence, or just the lovable mound of fur the owner already adored.
The kit, now on sale for $50, plus shipping and handling, offers 15 tests that measure your dog’s abilities in short-term memory, persistence, problem solving, etc. The order includes a bundle of doggie toys.
When I got this e-mail, I cracked up and loudly voiced my opinion. A couple of my co-workers perked up and said they’d be interested in quantifying their pet’s superior mental abilities.
The Web site for the canine assessment also has a companion site, brightpup.com, where you can post photos and brag about your dog.
Problem is, what if you fork over the money for the test and then find out that your dog is, as your neighbors have long suspected, dumb as a dog biscuit?
If my best friend’s dog is any indication, I think I can already judge its intelligence by the fact that it has been known to eat nylons and plastic bags. Once he ate a cassette tape and ran around the yard with the magnetic tape unspooling behind him like kite string.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Very few things happen instantaneously. At any moment in time, what we see is the result of different choices, circumstances, mistakes, serendipity, dumb luck or force of will.
In the case of my garden right now, what I see is the result of prolonged and systematic favoritism to purple.
The other day I was looking around my small patch of earth and smiling smugly at the performance of the spring garden.
It won’t always look like this — young and fresh. By the time summer comes along, I’ll be cranky and dragging the hose like a mercenary aid worker, trying to keep as many plants from withering as possible.
But right now, the plants are giving more reward than the nurturing I have given them.
Recently I was out in the yard in my bathrobe and Tommy commented, “Do you think we could plant something other than purple?”
I had to laugh, because of course he was right.
We could.
But why?
My yard is very small, so it didn’t take long for the purple plants to bully their way into the color scheme.
Plus, part of it is Tommy’s fault because he bought me purple plants for Valentine’s Day.
Nemesia is one of my favorite plants right now. We bought a one-gallon plant last year and it has spread to about a four-foot-wide clump. (Note: This power-plant also comes in other colors).
If it was some other plant, I might think it was greedy and needed to be hacked back just to keep it in place.

Perhaps I simply picked the perfect location for it, but I can’t remember the plant not blooming since I put it in the ground.
A little research on nemesia: It turns out it is treated as an annual, except in our climate.
Bonus.

(Nemesia. This is exactly what it looks like in my yard).

Other purple performers include the newly-planted Bacopa, which also comes in white.
About 60 purple bearded irises decided to bloom at the same time this year. Other plants in the plethora of purple include lavender, sage, lilac, rosemary and alyssum. A few of the purple tulips are still hanging in there.
I named my purple rose bush “Hollywood,” because we planted it on top of where I buried my beloved cat. That rose is just now in bud stage.
However, it’s not as silly as it sounds. There are other colors in my yard that have not been completely bullied out, but you wouldn’t realize that right now.
Monochromatic gardens aren’t anything new. Many frou-frou garden design books will have a chapter dedicated to gardens where one color dominates. Usually these feature white flowers, such as the one at Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent, England.
However, gardens like this usually come about more intentionally.
Other writers also praise the idea of having one section of a patio with potted plants of the same or similar colors.
Some people will choose plants in all pastel shades, so one corner of their yard looks like rainbow sherbet.
According to various Web sites I needed to research for this important topic, purple is the favorite color of about 75 percent of adolescent girls.
Who knew?

Posted by Heather Hacking at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While looking on www.photobucket.com for a lovely picture of the escargot in the blog posting below, I came across these delightful photos.

You can also see some giant snails squirming on someone's arm via this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtM0Y3YihAU.

If you're really intrigued, you can find some yummy snail recipes here: http://members.tripod.com/snailsonline/recipies.htm.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If you’re like most people who garden, an occasional garden snail or an army of munching mollusks are a menace to your plants.
I have no compunction about killing garden snails.
First off, they’re not native.
That’s wonderful that snails are an excellent source of protein and taste yummy when smothered with butter and garlic.
However, I don’t think that justifies importing snails from Europe for food without thinking of the countless future generations of gardeners.
I can think of a handful of other things that are even more delicious when smothered with garlic and butter, and those things don’t nibble on my plants.

If you’re interested in learning more about the art of escargot, you can order a booklet on home snail preparation from the Embarcadero Home Cannery: www.ehcan.com/snailsasfood.html.
But if you’re like me, you’re interested in ridding your garden of those wet-day garden gobblers.

Miracle in the rain
Last week there was a light rain, and Tommy and I went for a walk in the evening. I had just plunked down my entire tax return on car repairs and was about to embark upon a semi-sensitive discussion about money.
In a deft act of deflection, Tommy spied a parade of snails on the moist, gray expanse of the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue and Laburnum and completely distracted me from my topic.
Soon, Tommy began rummaging through the landscaping finding me more snails to crunch.
The planting beds in front of the medical office provide a rich breeding ground. Snails especially like ivy, which I call the “love shack” for snails.
The thing about snails, is they are hermaphrodites and are perfectly capable of procreating even if they are the last survivor on an island.
The snails that day were pretty easy picking, although after about 15 minutes we had to be more crafty to dislodge the snails that were clinging resolutely to the strappy leaves of the agapantha plants.
We must have looked a little strange that day, with Tommy bent down and tossing me mollusk after mollusk.
Perhaps like a lot of things — such as germs, gray hairs, loose change in your purse and Salem witches — you don’t always see snails unless you’re looking for them.
After a couple dozen crunches, I decided to start counting.
I started thinking about the snails who survived our onslaught and how in a year or so the surviving few would sit around the equivalent of a snail campfire and reminisce about the Heather/Tommy snail massacre of 2008.
When we were done, we had tallied 204.
I was excited to get home and visit my own garden within the last 10 minutes of daylight.
I was surprised, but not displeased, when we returned home and I could only find one snail in my yard.
The lack of snails inhabitants can be directly linked the power outage in June 2006.
That day we were joined by the then 8-year-old next door who made a rare appearance in our yard due to the lack of electricity flowing to his Xbox. After a bit of reluctance, the kid joined Tommy and I in making snails pretty much an endangered species in my yard.

Poison takes the fun out of it
The combination of these two snail events really made me think about “organic control.”
When I first started gardening I would read the garden books that recommended hand-picking of snails. I thought this was a bunch of bahooey and somehow uncivilized to hunt at night with a flashlight.
But now I realize that poison snail bait (even earth-friendly iron phosphate), copper barriers, tuna cans filled with beer, lines of salt, keeping ducks or chickens, applying nematode powder, are all a waste of time and money.
These snail fighting tactics deprive people like me the joy of hunting and splattering, as well as a good way for Tommy to avoid uncomfortable conversations.

Maybe we can turn this past-time into a lucrative side job ... “snail hunters for hire.”

Posted by Heather Hacking at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)