Lettuce Plan Our Day in the Garden

At the bare perception of daylight this morning, my eyes popped opened. I tried to stay in bed and rest a bit more. But when the eyes open, a neuroreceptor triggers the brain and thoughts ping pong like Beatniks dropping acid.

Every bed in the garden is ready for planting. The lettuce in the new lasagna bed is growing neatly in rows and the arugula in the raised bed is showing in a crazed pattern from the scattering throw I made of the seeds some three weeks ago.

Yesterday, I planted yellow finn seed potatoes in cloth bag containers on the lower deck. I can't wait to see if my potato experiment will work. I come to potato farming genetically. My grandfather used to plant rows and rows of them up on the hill overlooking his farm.

Inside the tiny tadpoles are fattening up, growing broader in the chest and little nubs are forming where their arms and legs will emerge. Yesterday, two of them got tangled in the cardboard and cheesecloth construction that I'd made for the toads to crawl out on. The two had died. I scooped them out with a plastic spoon and felt great remorse for my stupidity. The paper bridge was replaced with a more suitable stick version. (Why I didn't think of that in a first place is probably the reason why I always got Bs instead of As in school.)

My friend, Molly, came over and we dug up irises, lilies, hostas, sedums and sage, which she carried off to her garden. And I acquired a new garden buddy, a little girl from across the street came over and helped me weed, pot plants and carry things from bed to bed. We visited and chatted. It was like having my own little girls back again.

Today, I'm reading of how others have planted their bedding plants and tomatoes and other tender annuals and I'm tsk, tsking at their gardening naivete, but secretly wishing to do the same. The temperatures are in the high 70s during the day, but they are dipping into the 30s at night. The week of high 80s was a fluke and we could well pitch down below freezing yet. The rule is not to plant until Mother's Day.

There is still yet some clean up that I could accomplish. The nasty honey suckle is emerging despite my best efforts to beat it back. We have Dr. George Hall to thank for this invasive. Hall brought the plant from Japan in 1862. He offered it royal passage and cared for it during its journey as if were a treasured artwork. Once unleashed however, the plants wicked tendrils have slowly woven itself into the landscape up and down the entire Eastern seaboard and choking out natives as it claimed its supremacy. I, who vowed never to use herbicides in my garden, made one exception this winter and squirted its base (where ever I found one) with Roundup.

But, as I plan to release my new toady friends into the garden, I'll have to retire the Roundup for fear that it will taint their environment. I heard a commercial this week from the Ortho company exuding the benefits of its herbicide products. Urging customers to apply the stuff into their grass to kill the clover. "Clover is over," the narrator declared, never of course mentioning the benefits of clover in your lawn. And then incredibly the narrative followed that once the grass was free of all broad-leafed plants, the lawn owner was going to build a pond in his yard. Good luck with that I thought, the chemicals will all drain into the pond and kill his plants and wildlife there.

The house is awakening now. Time to get my day underway. The Putterer

Clover For Saint Patrick's Day

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few. --Emily Dickenson

St. Patrick's Day is a good day for clover. I just placed an order for two pounds of Dutch white clover.

If you have trouble keeping your grass watered in late August when there's no chance of rain and the temperatures are hovering around 100, plant clover in your lawn instead. You'll be not only be luckier, but happier.

This is the the story of how the grass that we plant in our lawns was bred to become a mono-culture that requires too much water and too many fertilizers to thrive. It began around the turn of the century before there were lawn chemical companies. This was a time when people actually liked the look of clover in their lawns and mixed the seeds of Dutch white clover with grass seeds. The world was rife with mangy-looking lawns that were healthy and vibrant, thriving with multiple species of plant in them that lived in mutually beneficial harmony.

But then, (cue evil sounding music here), some guy working for a lawn chemical company invented an herbicide that killed the clover. The lawn company wanted to sell the product far and wide. So the company began a marketing campaign that labeled clover a noxious weed. And guileless lawn owners were sold on the idea that their turf had to be made up of single blade plants. And that is how we ended up with the lawn aesthetic that we have today. And clover, once praised by Dickinson and Emerson, was hexed.

A few years ago, I had a grass lawn that was gorgeously green and perfect in every way. A landscaper laid in the turf and the day that she drove away was the last day the grass ever looked good. That's when I discovered clover. Clover is a kind of fertilizer for the lawn. It's nitrogen rich and if you grow it and turn it under, you make your soil all the richer. In early March or late fall, if you seed your lawn with clover, it will grow in the spots where the grass won't grow. It will be green when the grass is dry and thin. It will grow flowers and attract pollinating bees to your garden. And, you don't need to mow as often, because clover doesn't grow more than a few inches tall.

As luck would have it, planting a lawn of three-leaf clover improves your chance of encountering one of the great treasures of St. Patrick's Day, a four-leaf clover. Because the chance of a three-leaf plant mutating into the lucky four-leaf clover is, I've learned, just 1 in 10,000. With a lawn of clover, there's every possibility a mutation is yours for the finding. And get this, I've also read that if a clover leaf is closed up tightly, that is a sure sign that a rainstorm is coming. The Putterer