Seedling Update with Feathered Special Guest Stars

The hoophouse seedlings are all growing like mad, despite some cold nights.  We took some pictures at the three-week mark today.

By far the heartiest are the brassicas, with Red Ursa Kale (above) looking the most impressive.

The heirloom tomatoes and peppers continue their slow and irregular progress (below: tomato seedlings).

Lots of other things are looking lovely - some of the lovliest are the Burgundy Amaranth (left-the photo doesn't do them justice) and various types of nasturtiums (below, with their magical droplet-holding powers).

Lettuce, squash, artichokes, okra, herbs, flowers, and all of the 4,800 babies continue to grow and thrive.

Brassicas busting a move

Various lettuce babies

Over the past few weeks, we have nurtured these little plants every day and some nights. We have fretted that they are too hot, or too cold, too dry, or too wet, worried about "damping off" and pests and whether we should have sterilized the flats before planting.  And the plants have grown.  

Seedlings are so strong, determined, and full of sheer green life energy.  Watching them grow, I have felt intimately connected to these tiny bits of plant matter.  Almost invariably I head to the hoophouse first thing in the morning, sometimes even before caffiene, to check on "the babies."  

And there have been all manner of greenhouse adventures.

For example:

This afternoon when CF and I went in to check on the babies, there were two sparrow-sized birds inside the hoophouse.  They were flying around back and forth up near the ceiling, and at first we assumed they had gotten in through the door and couldn't figure out how to get out.  

But we watched them for a few minutes, and it was clear that they were not trying to get out--they were hunting!  They were zooming back and forth through the air, feasting on bugs.  One of the birds flew expertly out the door and then right back in. They knew exactly what they were doing. They had discovered a big plastic bug trap that collects and holds live insect prey for them -- a bug buffet.

We watched the birds hunt and feast for a while, and delighted in the wonders of natural bug control in the greenhouse.  We were so excited about what they were doing that we didn't pay very much attention to what they looked like.  I do remember that they were stripey and brown and the size of a largish sparrow. Perusing Peterson's later in the day, I thought they could have been female finches, or any number of types of sparrows, or maybe if I was really not paying attention to things like tailfeathers, even wrens of some kind.  I looked up the eating habits of wrens, sparrows, and finches and discovered that all three eat insects, so that was no help.

In my googling, however, I did turn up a good article about birds eating insects and how to attract insectavorous birds to the garden. It starts out with this great teaser:

"Imagine a device that could kill 1,000 insects in a single afternoon without doing any harm to the environment. Unbelievably, such a device has already been devised and could be flying past your window right now."

Read the full article by Darcy Logan here.  I especially recommend Part Two of the article, which offers details about specific insect-eating birds.

So the moral of the story is that nature has everything under control. Special thanks to the feathered agents of pest control in our hoophouse. . .and onward to frost-free nights!

The beloved hoophouse, full of baby plants.

Guerilla in a Bright Red Dress: Sumac

Over the summer, Christopher took this photo (left) of sumac in bloom on our land -- if you click to enlarge, you'll see how beloved the sumac flower is by bees. Providing sustenence for pollenators is just one of the wonders of sumac, a woefully under-appreciated plant.  

Sumacs are a family of native plants that grow througout most of North America, and are widely thought of as a common weed.  Here in WNC, sumac grows along the highways and in trashed-out urban lots, among other places.  It's a tough plant.

I've heard sumac's growth habit described as rangy or scrappy, but if you look at stands that have been allowed to mature, the plants cluster together and take on a graceful, curvy, elegant form that I think is quite beautiful.  

In the summer, sumac looks like a bushy green shrub or small tree, eventually bearing huge yellow flowers.  In the fall, the leaves turn deep crimson and the flowers dry on the plant, becoming a gorgeous shade of red. After the leaves are gone, bright red fruit clusters remain on the tips of the long thin branches.  

Below: two photos of Sumac that I took across the river at Warren Wilson College today - neither of these shots captures the color but you can get a sense of the shapes of sumac trees.

Coming across a stand of sumac in the winter feels to me like witnessing a ritual of some kind. A mature patch of sumac with its branches bare looks like a gathering of lanky, sinewy women, arms and legs intertwined, reaching up to the sky.  In the winter the sumac sisters, those tough leafy warriors, shed their red dresses and stand still together,  their arms snaking throuh the air, holding up offerings of bright red fruit.  Magical.

Each red sumac pod is made up of a cluster of tiny bright red berries. Birds and animals feast on the fruits as long as they last--the fruit is a rare treat for wildlife in a winter landscape.  

Food and medicine traditions of many native peoples include sumac, and for good reason.  The dried fruit makes a deliciously tart beverage, and the tiny hairs on each of the small red fruits are jam-packed with vitamin C.  In addition to the high C content, sumac fruits contain potent natural antibiotics (Foster/Duke).  According to Peterson's field guide to medicinal herbs,  sumac was used to treat and prevent a wide variety of maladies in native traditions throughout North America.  For more on sumac's medicinal qualities, see this overview.)  

So back to our sumac.  In the fall, Christopher remembered that an old friend of his, Lalynn, used to make a tea from dried sumac heads to drink during the winter, and decided he wanted to harvest some for us.   So he picked some dried heads of sumac and we broke them apart and let them air dry inside (see photo above) before jarring them up.  We left plenty behind for the birds and other wildlife, and ended up with about a half gallon of dry sumac berries.  I snacked on the tiny berries as we processed the heads, and the zingy, tart flavor was so strong it sometimes made my eyes water.  This winter we'll use the berries to make hot sumac tea or steep and then cool and strain to produce refreshing sumac-ade.  

I appreciate sumac as food and medicine, but most of all because I see it as a plant that goes where others can't, takes root, and grows like wild.  Sumac is often found growing in neglected areas, along roadsides, in old railroad beds, and in places where woods have been recently cleared or there has been a fire.  

Above: Sumac and rivercane growing on a roadside in Swannanoa, December.

I see Sumac as a guerilla gardener of the plant world, with dandelion and mullien and other tough front-line plants, dropping seeds in wastelands and bringing bare earth back to life.  

Sumac is one of the first plants to come in as living systems begin to recover and regenerate.  It is drought-tolerant and can survive conditions that would kill many other kinds of plants, and it helps make way for a succession of plant and animal life gradually to renew and heal damaged places.  (See the US Forest Service's page on Sumac for more information on sumac's role in rehabilitation of damaged and disturbed land, as well as other interesting facts about sumac).  

I'm thankful to sumac for being one of the tough ones on the front lines of the healing of damaged ecosystems.  And for its beauty and healing power, and its tenacious presence as an ancient native medicinal plant.  

Long live sumac--graceful, strong, and powerful plant warrior adorned in flaming red!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

References:

Foster, Steven and James A. Duke.  A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern and Central North America, Second Edition.  Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Sunflower Birdfeeders

Late blooming Mexican Sunflower 10/15/08

The sunflowers that bloomed all summer at the northeast corner of our garden are way past peaked, and have collapsed into an unsightly jumble of stalks and blown-out flower heads. If you read my post earlier this year, you know we grew dozens (maybe hundreds?) of sunflowers from seeds we saved from last year's garden. And the birds gave thanks.

Now that the sunflowers are spent, I've been wanting to clear them away so that the Mexican Sunflowers that are interplanted will have a chance to do their thing before the cold weather sets in (see above, the doing of the Mexican Sunflower thing). However, the birds are still feasting like mad on the sunflower seeds from the peaked out brown sunflower stalks.

Hence: creative ways to offer sunflower seeds to the birds.

Teepee birdfeeder


















Cucumber trellis = birdfeeder
















Hanging bird treats from a bean trellis








In other fall gardening news, the marigolds, nasturtiums, and zinnias are having a resurgence, and the there are bursts of orange, red, and yellow everywhere (below: zinnias).

Christopher's Sunflowers

At the end of last summer, Christopher harvested hundreds of seeds from sunflowers -- wild sunflowers, Mexican sunflowers, and various of the ten or so cultivars that we grew last year -- and saved them all in a big mason jar over the winter to replant this spring. He planted a giant patch at the northeast corner of our main veggie garden.

Now there are sunflowers blooming to beat the band!

Here (photos above and below) are some of the blooms in the big patch that C. planted. Besides being beautiful, they're highly functional. Their roots are breaking up the soil in a spot where we'll plant vegetables next year, and once they're done blooming, they'll make great biomass for the compost pile.

AND, they attract a swarm of garden helpers. I've watched all kinds of birds and insects get very excited about the mondo patch of sunflowers. There's a bright yellow gold finch who especially seems to love them, and the bees are all over them.

We want our garden to be swarming with beneficial insects, pollinators, and birds, so setting a table of big, gold, heaping dinner plates for those of the bird and insect persuasion is a wonderful way to bring them in.

It's hard to take any of the bloom banquet away from the birds and bees, but it's just such a pleasure to bring a few inside (see below)....

I'm feeling so grateful to C. for saving sunflower seeds and planting them - especially since he's out of town for a week, at what appears to be the height of the sunflower sunburst. It warms my heart to have these sunny reminders of him around the garden and house this week!