There are many good reasons to shop locally, preferably for local goods and services – you’ll keep your neighbors busy and happy and when it comes to food items you can be reasonably sure that the produce is fresh and free of such nonsense additives like the much mentioned “pink slime”. Taking it a step further would be to harvest your own food, something I’ve been doing on a regular basis for shellfish and fish. As for leafy greens, I focus mostly on native and invasive “wild” plants, and I have limited knowledge of growing and tending the core vegetables one finds on store shelves. So my contributions to the dinner table are limited in that realm. Fortunately, there are plants in my own yard that are so abundant they almost cry to be harvested, and so I did with hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta). The little plants are flowering right now, but the basal rosette of tiny leaves is where the action is, at least for culinary purposes. You can use it as a replacement for parsley or other fine leaved herbs in your dishes. The plant has a peppery quality that is most noticable when eaten raw. It is much less overpowering when cooked. Try it out while it lasts – hairy bittercress is an early garden resident and the leaves are much less appetizing when the little plant concentrates on producing seed in a few weeks. We had it today in a littleneck pasta dish, and it was delicious!
That is what I wanted to do last night… As I drove by the kettle pond at the end of my street I heard Pseudacris crucifer (spring peeper) in full orchestral mode. Last year they first started singing April 3, so they have a healthy head start, along with other animals and plants. But who would blame them – the temperature the last few days has been breaching high 60s and 70s, and off Cape they have seen high 70s and 80s… But there’s still time to pay the piper (even for the peeper) – spring can be fickle around here.
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I am estimating that the biological spring is some 20 days ahead of schedule this year. The bulbs are pushing through the soil and crocus and snowbell are flowering in the sun lit meadows and yards. Last year I did not start talking about spring like events until mid March… And it’s not just happening on solid ground, either – the Atlantic ocean and Cape Cod Bay waters are a good 3 to 4 degrees warmer than what one would expect this time of year. The Cape Cod Times reported on whales feeding off Provincetown just last week, and a friend of mine observed whales off coast guard beach a week before that… Climate shift? Anomaly? Cycle pattern? Who knows. In hindsight 30 years from now our weather experiences will be a chapter in some science book, or there will be nothing at all to write about. All I know for sure is that we can’t think about life and our planet in absolutes – things are changing and shifting all the time, as has been demonstrated in the distant past. And I’m starting to understand that changes can happen abruptly, sometimes without much forewarning. The dice are rolled and we deal with the aftermath – adapt or die. Nature is not some museum quality piece of art that we can hope to maintain in an artificial frozen state. For one, we are not mere observers, and we interact with it and invoke change. Secondly, “wildness” does what it will in unpredictable ways regardless of the buttons we imagine we can push. I could learn a lot from the two coyotes I observed late last night in the cemetery near route 28 and West Yarmouth Road. Survival has a lot to do with staying afoot, knowing your surroundings and making the best of ever changing circumstances. Too many of us have stopped paying attention.
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For once I kept to my every-so-oft promise of exploring some of the many walks and pathways we have on the Cape. I enjoyed Mass Audubon’s Long Pasture on this atypical (at least for late January) sunny day. Without the weekend walkers and dogs that one would normally encounter, I had a chance to enjoy the quiet of the leafless limbs and twists of the trees and underbrush.  Even with a harsh north wind blowing in from the bay  it is not hard to image the upcoming spring, especially with Symplocarpus foetidus (eastern skunk cabbage) emerging near the bubbling brook… Deer tracks are everywhere.  This does not surprise me as the old corn fields and farm lands have been reclaimed by brush and brambles, providing shelter and safety from the traffic on nearby 6A. A couple more weeks and the many bird houses will have new tenants, and the smell of burning firewood will have dissipated from the air.
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Television is dumbing down by the minute, and it’s embarrassing and annoying. Maybe as the stats say, everyone under 75 is getting all their news on the internet so I shouldn’t be too upset – but it is sad that today CNN had a huge background sign that had the word “Yield” spelled wrong. I am guessing it is all the under 30 year old employees brought up on IM and texting causing what I would call a national spelling crisis.
And the news is becoming a sick joke. The other night a news reporter said, I quote: “Luckily bats are suffering from ‘white nose syndrome’ so their populations are dying off.” Luckily?
This ignorant statement was in response to a case of rabies – the first in the state since 1935 – being contracted by a Cape Cod man from a bat bite. We know that the majority of rabies cases are caused by dog bites. Can you imagine the outcry if a newscaster had said “Well we won’t have to worry about those nasty dog bites anymore; luckily man’s best friend will be dead by 2012 due to a disease spreading rapidly among canines.”
To make matters worse, this moronic news report was accompanied by a video of a dilapidated home overrun with bats, crawling out of a broken window. Was this the rabies’ victim’s home? We aren’t told. But we are definitely given an impression that bats are dirty, deadly and should be destroyed at all costs.
I would probably be freaked out if bats took over my house. With any wild animal living in close proximity to humans – like squirrels or raccoons – they shouldn’t be living in our homes. They do carry disease. This should have been addressed, that perhaps the man did not have anyone to look after him or his home so it became dangerously overrun with bats. However, the manner in which this report basically said “bats carry disease and it’s a good thing they’re dying off in droves” was irresponsible, erroneous and upsetting.
This Boston Globe article from last year explains what they are happy about: (There is) “a 99 percent chance of regional extinction of little brown bats within the next 16 years. If mortality rates continue to slow over time, that timeline could stretch out, with a greater than 90 percent chance of regional extinction within 65 years. Researcher Winifred Frick said, in 2010: “This is one of the worse wildlife crises we’ve faced in North America.â€
These same people are going to complain when we’re overrun with all the insects these little guys eat. We have very little ecosystem left, it is ridiculously out of balance. We should be working to reclaim wildlife habitat where at all possible so animals aren’t forced to seek shelter in our homes, not rejoicing in their demise. “(Insect-eating) bats are of considerable value to forests, fields, and to agriculture by suppressing insect populations, but they also sustain cave ecosystems,” says BU researcher Tom Kunz. “Bat guano is often the only organic input to caves†and helps support salamanders, fish, and other species in them.
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The year has barely jumped the gate, but I already have tons of ideas that will add luster to my garden. Additionally, there are some things I want to do with the blog as well. They say that penning things down is a necessary first step toward implementation, so here it goes.
Spring tasks for the yard:
- Prepare the pathways – remove root systems from brambles, and prepare for seeding (by April).
- Seed the pathways with native grasses – natives are more resilient than store bought. I like the idea of a grassy path to walk on, and it is much less labor intensive than constructing a stone path. Last year I built such a path with flat river rocks, and it was a backbreaking experience.
- Saw the remaining limbs of the fallen trees, and store those for firewood.
- Cut back tree limbs that might interfere with the powerlines.
- Cut back the bush honeysuckle bushes (Lonerica morrowii). I am fortunate to have very few pesky invasives in my yard (I have no bittersweet, count my lucky stars), but the bush honeysuckle has thrived. Here and there the plant has become part of the landscape, and I will keep those plants for now, but everywhere else it needs to go.
- Cut back the brambles and other pricklies.
- Order and plant native understory bushes and trees. I want to create an environment of fairly dense undergrowth under the canopy of white oak and scrub pine. The following plants are on my wish list:
- Corylus americana (american hazelnut) – should do well on the edge of the woodland and will provide food for the critters.
- Viburnum dentatum (arrowwood viburnum) – provides shelter and food for birds
- Sambucus canadensis (elderberry) – more delicious berries
- Cornus racemosa (gray dogwood) – white flowers followed by white berries that provide nourishment for birds
- Cornus alternifolia (pagoda dogwood) – a nicely shaped small tree with flowers for insects and berries for our feathered friends
- Ilex verticillata (winterberry holly) – the female plant produces red berries that remain during the winter (unless consumed by birds)
- Ilex opaca (american holly) – I have a few of these already, and I am looking forward to some additional evergreen in the understory during our long winters
- Acer pensylvanicum (striped maple) – endangered in Massachusetts – it has the most interesting bark
Blog ideas:
Last year, I was able to blog about half of the plants in the yard, and I will try to capture the remainder this year. Additionally, I want to add more pictures of the plants, not only in their peak moment, but at different stages of their life cycle. Too often we don’t know what we have until we see a flower or seed pod.
Another idea of mine is to start a section on beach plants, or discuss those in a separate blog. I live in the woods, but I spend ample time on the Cape Cod beaches and wetlands. The plants may not be as “useful” to our landscaping needs, but they are beautiful and important. I’m hoping to learn more about them as I go along this spring and summer.
I may start offering some of my services. My own yard, although never done, is starting to mature and I will increasingly be able to offer seed and cuttings. I would love to help others with ideas, plant selection, and some hands-on work. I need to figure out what would be the most effective way to go about this… stay tuned.
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I decided to clear out some of the brambles out back of my property, as well as re-use the wood of the fallen black locust. this particular area is usually populated by pokeweed, jewelweed, catbrier and goldenrod. I intend to open the space up a bit, by adding walkways that will eventually meander to the woods out back. I’ve opened it up in another way by seeding and planting several species of milkweed, purple coneflower, cardinal flower, and butterfly weed. The diversification of the native plants is not the only goal, mind you – being somewhat practical minded and wanting to live off the land to some degree I have carved out a little plot for herbs and berries (chives, mint, lavender, parsley, blackberries, raspberries and blueberries) -not enough to live on in any significant way but sufficient to add color and flavor to meals during the growing season.
This area resides “under the wires” and it pays to be proactive, which means I will clear the new trees that have encroached upon this land over the last 4 to 5 years. Leaving it up to the likes of NSTAR may prove to be heartbreaking, as so many cape cod residents have experienced in the wake of last year’s storms. Precision cutting is not something exhibited by the utility crews, and unless you want part of your property to look like a bomb hit, you need to go out there yourself.
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Just a week or so after my last post where I had the outlandish idea that someday we may find out that paper wasps are able to differentiate human faces as well as pheromones, New Scientist came out with a story that these wasps indeed can recognize their own faces. “Despite having a brain less than a millionth the size of ours, queen paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus) can recognise each other’s faces.” I knew something was going on in that little head of hers.
A super cute photo of the wasp (as well as some more menacing ones) can be found here.
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Here we are, December 20, encroaching on the shortest day of the year and winter solstice – something we can reliably expect to happen (at least until this time next year when the Mayan calendar ceases). What’s less expected is that we’ve barely seen any winter weather. Granted, today and yesterday were cold. But we’ve seen 40s, 50s and 60s for pretty much all of the fall season – it almost seems we’re living in the Carolinas. Tomorrow, we’ll be back in the 50s. The mild weather must play havoc with the internal clocks of animals and plants alike. Just this week one of the foamflowers (Tiarella cordifolia) and an orange coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida) displayed a blooming candle and a solitary flower, respectively. They’re in for a rough awakening when old man winter decides to show up.
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Time flies, they say. I can’t believe it’s been a year since we launched this blog. Activity has been rather sparse the last month or two – fall brings a natural tendency to quieten things down, with colors turning to brown. There are no new plants to talk about this time of year, although we are making plans for 2012: We’ve successfully collected seed from several natives and it will be interesting to see how they fare with a little human intervention and planning. We’ve been doing some work on the clearing behind our house and have added some paths and native plants – all part of the 10 year master plan… Lots remains to be done still in the yard – we’re still catching up from the effects of first Irene and a later fall Nor’Easter that brought down limbs and branches everywhere. Add to that the leaves… While in the midst of fall cleanup, there have also been some human world activities and crises we had to attend to. Not an excuse to write less, I know, but a reality nonetheless. We’ll pick up the slack over the next few weeks and share some of our ideas for next year…
Until then – happy Thanksgiving and a safe Holiday season to all
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