Nature is Never Spent

This spring, I thought I'd try growing pumpkins. That's one thing we've never grown on the farm. We had squash and melons coming out of our ears until the squash bugs got bad and my dad gave it up and decided to let the soil rest for awhile. (Awhile turned into fifteen years.) But I had just cleaned out a raised bed on the west side of the house. It has one survivor of a rose bush that has been there for at least a decade without a single bit of attention, even water. In spring there are Star of Bethlehem. Later it's just ants and weeds. I figured with some decent mulch and TLC, we could grow vines there. It's the top of the driveway and it gets a lot of strong sun. My dad put in ornamental sweet potato vines, and I planted some pumpkin seedlings I'd started in cups of worm castings that I dug out of the ditch at the edge of the woods.

The pumpkin vines just took off. With it being such a hot and dry summer, we've watered them, but other than that they didn't need anything. Just three plants turned into a fifteen foot by five foot patch of driveway covered with giant, prickly leaves rising off of fat pithy vines. And the blossoms! Big, yellow-orange, pointed petals like a melon or squash blossom should be. Lots of them.

But as the months went on, I noticed there were no fruits forming when the blossoms withered. With zucchini, for instance, every blossom turns into a squash and you can't stop them if you try. When the squash is ready, the blossom petals dry up and fall off. I figured pumpkins would be like this as well. But I did some research and learned that pumpkins are not nearly so successful. They have male blossoms and female blossoms, and of course the twain must meet for a fruit to be produced. The male blossoms come right off of a straight stem and the female blossoms have a little swelling at the top of the stem below the blossom.

I went out and inspected my blossoms. There were many male blossoms, probably twenty at the time, and among them I only found two female buds. Apparently farmers often have to hand-pollinate these. The problem with my pumpkin vine, and it seems this is not uncommon, was that the male blossoms were all fully open, their pollen easily accessible, but the females were not mature enough to open yet. If the male and female blossoms don't open at the same time, the ants and wasps (or the farmer) can't successfully pollinate. Also, the blossoms are only open in the morning. I had no idea pumpkins were so fussy!

So far, I've only seen one actual baby pumpkin, and a week after we noticed it, we couldn't find it anymore. So I'm not sure we're going to get any produce from these vines, but they've sure been impressive to look at in any case. This summer, it's a wonder when anything is still alive.

Last week I mentioned that it was time to plant. When you get your seeds from the grocery store or department store, they come in glossy paper packets with beautiful photos on the front and instructions on the back for how far apart to plant and what the hardiness zones of the plants are, and inside the packet there's about a gram or less of seeds.

When you get your seeds in bulk from the feed store or farm supply store, in small amounts they come stuffed into rough paper packets with a check mark next to what you bought, and maybe a quick hand-written notation of how much you bought, so the clerk at the front of the store knows what to charge you. When I was a kid, to get to the bulk seed section we wandered past a glorious array of horse tack and udder creams and tools, and on the way out, we could choose a paper bag of horehound or lemon drops. If we went in on the right week, there might even be flat, hole-punched boxes of baby chicks cheeping in the back of the store.

I picked two more tomatoes today! There are still viable blossoms on the plants.

There are a few purple coneflowers blooming at the zoo. The Latin name of the coneflower, Echinacea, is the name that's used when the plant is used in herbal medicine. It's believed (but not conclusively proven) to stimulate the immune system, and it has been used for centuries, if not thousands of years, as traditional medicine. I do drink echinacea tea when I'm feeling run down, because I don't think it will hurt. But all I know for sure is that it's darned pretty. The coneflowers we see in the wild around here are usually pale-purple coneflower, which has impressively droopy petals.



There's also definitely some gorgeous mathematics in nature going on there.

I realized today that if things keep going the way they have been, I may have blooming coleus, blooming mums, and a ripe tomato in my garden all at the same time.

It's deliciously cool, overall. A bit chilly in my jacket in the mornings, and by mid afternoon the sun is just about too hot. (I can't promise to stop reveling in this weather anytime soon. It's such a joy, after the summer, it almost makes me want to dance.) However, even though they are not losing as much moisture due to heat evaporation, my balcony plants still need to be watered from multiple trips with a 1 1/2 gallon bucket, or they'll wilt. It's terribly dry.

Eight little green baby tomatoes have joined the first on my two tomato plants, with at least twice as many blossoms following them, but I don't expect to get ripe fruits. Once it gets cold at night and doesn't heat up much during the day, the tomato has a hard time ripening. I'll leave them on until the first frost, though, and then pick them pre-emptively and have some fried green tomatoes. It's what we always do.

Everything else that was alive at the end of August is still alive. The velvety red cockscomb are still tall and fuzzy and strong. The Shasta daisy I planted in the spring put on a few more leaves, but never showed any sign of blooming. I wonder if it needs another year? I'll try to keep it though the winter and see. The silver mound, on the other hand, has grown beautifully and been quite drought-resistant, to boot. It's soft and silvery and pouring over the edge of the pot in a lovely fashion.

When I stood out on the balcony this evening, the hem of my robe (worn for warmth) brushed the mint leaves below and released a scent up to me. I should harvest herbs again before frost. I think the mums, in the same pot with the coleus, should bloom in the next couple of weeks.

And there are crickets, still singing their hearts out under the trees below.

Cotton is ripening now, over in the east in the plantations. The zoo has a little demonstration plot of the state's main four agri crops: rice, soybeans, sorghum and cotton. (In the western part of the state, beef cattle, chickens and lumber are the main agri industries.) It's interesting to be able to see them developing up close, instead of from a car window on the highway. Cotton starts with a frilly bud, then a lovely pale yellow blossom, then a fat, hard green boll develops and finally splits open to reveal the cotton. It really feels the same as what you get in a bag of cotton balls (if they're not synthetic) except it's full of little dark brown seeds. If you leave the cotton on the plant, by January the plants will be brown and brittle, but the cotton will still be there.





When I was very young, my family lived in a residential neighborhood on the edge of a city not too far from this one. The end of the street jutted right up against a cotton field. One night after the cotton had been harvested, my parents were away and my babysitter took me out into the field and we gathered cotton that had been left behind by the harvesters. I was astonished that we could gather something pretty and useful like that right from the ground, outdoors. That may have been my introduction to the origin of natural products.

Last year before I left my apartment for two weeks in August, I went out and bought a stack of plastic pots and a bag of mulch. I fitted my potted plants into pots one or two sizes bigger, packed mulch between the two pots and soaked the mulch with water, stood some of the smaller pots in bowls, put mulch on top of the soil, and then watered them all again within an inch of their lives.

And it rained most of the time I was gone.

This year, I was not so prepared. I watered everything very well, moved the smaller pots under the eaves so they wouldn't dry out, and with my two favorite plants I placed glass watering globes.



Of course, there was no rain. I should have known, based on the previous months of this season, which has been unusually hot and unreliably wet, even for a summer in the South. Here's the status of my balcony garden.

Plants that were unaffected by the drought: baby pine trees, the larger of the baby elm trees in a moist pot, Dallas fern, shasta daisy (which hasn't grown much or bloomed since I planted it in April), oregano, volunteer millet. Some of these were okay, I think, because they were in deep shade.

Plants that revived fully after a watering, none the worse for wear: mums, coleus, cockscomb, mint, four-year-old maple tree.

Plants that suffered a lot, lost leaves, but will probably survive: tomatoes, willow trees, basil, possibly sage. (I list the sage here because although it looks completely dead, those suckers have been coming back in the spring, without replanting, for five years.)

Plants I have probably lost: baby elm trees in a small pot, two-year-old maple tree in the sage box, lavender, rosemary.

I was prepared to lose the tomatoes, basil, and sage, since they're past their prime and they struggle in the heat of August whether they have water or not. But the lavender and rosemary were the two I gave special treatment to with the glass water globes. I'm particularly sad, fighting off guilt, about the rosemary, which I've had for three years now, even taking it to the farm with me and tending it carefully for two winter breaks so it wouldn't die of cold in my empty apartment.

In August, tending a garden, like staying alive, is more than a labor of love and a partnership with nature; it becomes a fight for survival. You can't let down your guard, and even then there are no guarantees.

I went out to visit my balcony plants this evening, listen to the cicadas for as long as I could stand it. I was lovingly fondling the tomato plants, as you do, when I noticed some bare stems.



My first thought was "That darn squirrel!" The stems were chewed off at the end, and all the little leaves along them had been stripped as well. It was a branch that would have been accessible to an animal balancing on the railing. But then I noticed another bare stem, and another, and several larger branches where just the youngest part at the tips had been denuded. Some of those branches looked like the would be out of reach of a squirrel, either from the railing or the boards. Insects was my next thought, but I couldn't imagine what little bugs could take away whole leaves like that. And so many, in just a day! If this went on, my tomatoes would be bare in another day. Cutworms?

There was nothing to do but go inside wondering. As soon as I shut the glass door, though, I noticed a hummingbird had come up right behind me and was hovering in the middle of the balcony, below the feeder. I stopped to watch it, and when it zipped away, my eyes refocused on the tomato plants. There was something odd... like a large wad of rolled-up leaves. So I hurried back out to investigate, and sure enough: the culprit.

(pause for suspense)

A tomato hornworm! A huge, fat, gorgeous green caterpillar with a sharp red hook on his bum and white diagonal stripes along his body. He was munching happily away on the nearest tender tomato leaf. He was so magnificent, at first I couldn't decide whether to take him off the plant or leave him alone. As an experiment. I could just watch and see what happened.



But the thought of sacrificing my lovely tomato plants made me sad. So I put on rubber kitchen gloves (I didn't like the look of that horn), grasped the big guy gently, and tried to pull him off the stem he was working on. His little legs were stuck tight. But I finally got him off -- as the feet detached it felt like a series of little suctiony pops -- and he lay immobile in my hand. Maybe his defense is to freeze. I checked out the mouth: tiny but such an efficient machine! Then I chucked him as far away from the balcony as I could, into the sweet gum tree. Maybe he can find another plant of the nightshade family to pillage. Fortunately, I decided to search my plants thoroughly in the failing light, and I found one more specimen. Bye bye, wormie!

The tomato hornworm or tobacco hornworm is the larva of the Carolina sphynx (Manduca sexta), a big, ugly, mottled grey moth in the hawkmoth family. I found a gardening forum in which a newbie was panicking about the caterpillars on some tomato plants, but one fellow, a biologist, was going around asking people to mail him the caterpillars. "I want those big cats!" he told the nervous poster. I don't blame him. Fascinating!

P.S. I apologize, squirrel, for jumping to conclusions about your guilt!

One of my patio tomatoes is ripening!



Every year, my dad has a friendly competition with one of the nurses at the hospital to see who can grow the first ripe tomato. I don't have a competition, but I'm always very pleased if I get to eat one of my tomatoes by my birthday in the middle of June.

A summer first I noticed yesterday: lightning bugs. I can never decide which I'm more comfortable calling them: fireflies or lightning bugs. "Firefly" is prettier, flows better. But "lightning bug" is folksy and has a kind of drama, and I think it's what we usually called them when we were children.