Totally Zen Insanity

During this time of year in the nation's heartland, every garden store and nursery should be required to display a large and inherently noticeable warning sign, saying something to the effect of "Beware!  Winter Ennui Helps Us Empty Your Pockets!"

Like other Flint Hill and Midwestern gardeners, I've taken to browsing local centers regularly, drawn irresistibly to find those early seed-starting supplies, house plants, and bird-feeding supplies that allow me to pretend I'm doing something for the garden in the dead of winter. And of course, also like other gardeners, I have the ulterior motive of needing to make sure that others don't beat me to those first few packets of seeds that arrive in the stores, lest some rare and treasured find disappear before I can purchase it.  

At such times, I'm unfortunately at extreme risk of impulse purchases, a realization that was reinforced recently when, on a trip to Omaha, I visited what has become my prime source of statuary.  There, I simply was unable to resist the Totally Zen Frog pictured to the right. Although this errant-Methodist youth does not practice meditation or Zen, I've always had some admiration for those who do, as well as a soft spot for the quiet calm of the philosophy.  Therefore, forgetting that my garden really does not have any other whimsical focuses, nor that I really don't appreciate of whimsy in any form, garden or otherwise, I was sure that this Zen Frog was meant specifically to live in my garden.  That belief was hardly weakened when I found that this particular identical statue sells all over the Internet and probably lives in thousands of other gardens. 

If you sense I'm a bit disappointed in myself, you would be correct.  Until now, I've successfully resisted adding pink flamingos, TraveloCity Gnomes, and other cliches to my garden.  Okay, there is one of my rabbit statues that is dressed in a suit like a gentlemen caller, but I swear that all the other rabbits are strictly natural in form.  Then along comes the Zen Frog and I fall, hook, link, and sinker.  The webbed feet got me.  Please don't tell Mrs. ProfessorRoush because I slipped it into the garden with all the furtiveness of a philandering husband.  The Frog has been in my garden over a week and she hasn't asked about it yet.  By now she probably thinks of these hunks of concrete collectively as "his statues," perhaps with a slight indulgent smile, and she has hopefully stopped counting the statues and the money spent on them, so there is a chance she'll glance over it.  And if a little more time goes by before she sees it and a few bird droppings adorn it, I might be able to successfully convince her that it has been in the garden for years.   

For now, I've placed it on the bench in the center of my "formal" rose garden on a bench, surrounded by the melting snows, but I doubt this will be a permanent spot for the creature.  I've got a vision of it placed on a pedestal across from a meditation seat made for myself from two large flat stones (one for the seat and one for the back).  A sort of a mirror meditation spot in my garden where I will perhaps be enticed to sit, relax, and enjoy the garden, hidden from the neighbors who'll think I've gone senile.  Sitting is about all I'll do, however, since I'm getting to old to make it into the Lotus position and further experential enlightment is probably a hopeless quest for me.  Besides, I'm not sure that the smug smile on the frog's face is conducive to my inner tranquility, especially since I'm also not convinced that the frog isn't giving each passersby, or me, "the finger."

Teaming with Information

In my reading pile lately was a book I purchased with a Christmas gift card (somehow, friends and family have realized at last that a prime Christmas gift for me is a gift card to a book store).  I had previously glanced through Teaming with Microbes, published recently in a revised edition by Timber Press and authored by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, but I had never bitten the bullet because the book appeared, well, a little too dry and scientific.

Was I ever wrong--and yet right at the same time! Teaming with Microbes is a book that every gardener should read.  Yes, it can be a little dry to read in the first section titled "The Basic Sciences", but the photographs are so perfectly amazing that I can't begin to describe how it will open your eyes.  Each chapter discusses how a specific organism, bacteria, fungi, nematodes, algae and arthropods, lives and interacts to form your soil's food web.  Okay, okay, okay.  This first section is interesting and well-written and filled with statistics but didn't ring my bell just yet.

But the second section of the book, "Applying Soil Food Web Science to Yard and Garden Care," is where the corn and potatoes core of the book resides.  I finally "get it," much better than ever explained by my Extension Master Gardener courses, why some plants prefer some soils, how acid pH and alkaline pH soils differ in nitrogen type and availability, and how plant succession mirrors soil development.  Did you know that some plants prefer their nitrogen in nitrate form, others as ammonium?  That the number of bacteria per gram of soil doesn't really differ between garden, prairie and forest soils, but that the number of protozoa and fungi are logarithmically increased in the latter?  That nitrogen-fixing bacteria don't function well at acid pH's and that fungi increase the acidity of the soil?  Why aerobic compost teas are necessary?  That mulches of different materials support different microorganisms?  How to increase protozoa in your soils?  Teaming with Microbes will convince you that half of what you think know about or have been doing to your soil is just flat wrong.

Therein lies the downside to this excellent and readable text.  It makes it harder and harder for a professional organic gardening skeptic to stand secure in his ignorance instead of teetering on his biodegradable soap box. I've already eliminated insecticides and fungicides from my garden (except during my annual battles with the dastardly squash bugs).  This year I might have to try some areas without artificial Walmart-purchased fertilizer as well.  What's left?  Except for the evidence of a coming Ice Age outside my window, will I to be forced to start considering the possibility of global warming?  Naaaahh!  Ain't going that far! 

Ode to Oothecae

I discovered a surprise in my garden last weekend, and with a little research and a little more searching of the garden, my surprise has turned into pure delight.

Delight, I have found thee, and thy name is Ootheca.

As I was walking around the garden with our Brittany Spaniel, or more accurately as I was being pulled around the garden by our manic Brittany Spaniel, the bright winter sun caught the structure pictured to the right just enough to make it sparkle and catch my eye.  It was attached to a cane of the winter-bare red stems of  'Therese Bugnet', one of my longest-grown rugosa hybrids. I was examining the rose closely to see how its structure was revealed by its temporary lack of leaves.  And there it was, a pale brown, misshapen honey-comb-like structure that looked like it would flake away weightless at the slightest touch. 

Isn't it marvelous that, on a visceral level, all gardeners will instinctively recognize this thing, this unplantlike structure, as something related to or made by an insect?  What otherworldly factor does it have that says "not mammal," "not plant," and "not natural," and leaves us at "insect"?  That single certitude was enough to start me off in the right direction to investigate and determine to my joy that it was an ootheca, an entirely new term in my vocabulary. "Ootheca" (pronounced ˌō-ə-ˈthē-kə) is derived from the latinized "oo", meaning egg, and Greek "theca", meaning cover, literally translating to an "egg case."  From my brief research, I quickly learned that only a few creatures, primarily cockroaches, the praying mantis family, and mollusks, create proteinaceous oothecae to provide protection for the embryos of the next generation.  And since I was not near a stream, nor did I feel it likely that a cockroach would have climbed up my rose bush to lay this thing, I concluded that it must be from one of the 1800 worldwide species of the Mantis order, best known by the collective "praying mantis" moniker.

Now, the question might be, which Mantis?  There are websites available to aid in the identification of these egg capsules, but with literally hundreds of possibilities and complicated by the fact that I don't have a PhD in insect identification, I'll probably never know the exact species present on my roses.  It is enough for me to know that they are present, biding their time, in my garden.  To a gardener, finding evidence that future generations of praying mantis will inhabit and protect your garden is a blessing equivalentto finding gold flakes in a stream in your backyard.

After searching more rose bushes and then over the rest of my garden, I found numerous other examples of oothecae around the garden. One of the more curious is the smaller and more symmetrically neat structure pictured at the left and below, found perfectly placed in the ear canal of a concrete greyhound statue.  Another mantis species, or something else?

Despite finding Internet instructions to raise the little critters by hand however, my curiosity does not extend to trying to hurry along Mother Nature.  I'm quite content to await the chitinous inhabitants of the garden as they appear in their own good time, secure in the knowledge that it's all part of the life cycle of my garden.