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. 

Best Garden Blogs and Fine Gardening Posts

This brief message is different than my usual blogs, but I wanted to make regular readers aware that I've been added to the Best Garden Blogs site with THIS POST and that I posted two pictures of my "Kon Tiki" head on Fine Gardening's winter picture contest HERE.  I'm pleased to be able to participate at both sites!

Social Marketing

I got quite a shock recently when a friend, who knows that I write a garden blog, asked me "how much money is your blog making?" Money?  It is to laugh. 

If you, yourself, blog, then you are well aware that almost all of the 1000's of gardening blogs out there on the web have no more reason or reward than whatever the inner motivations of that gardener are;  whether altruistic, educational, or egotistic in nature, or if the blog is purely a mode of relaxation for the individual gardener.  There are only a few gardening blogs in the Netosphere that I suspect provide any monetary gain at all;  those that have paid advertisers (few and far between) and those that have a blog that are associated with a business, for instance a nursery or a gardening magazine.  And the latter commercial group may only see a return on their investment in time and resources if they see an increase in sales coming via the blog, a very iffy proposition and hard to measure.

I, myself, have seen only one instance so far of a direct tangible benefit from garden blogging.  A few months after beginning this blog, I received a random email from a CobraHead representative, a marketing genius obviously well on top of the social media trends, asking me if I'd like to try a sample of their product. Lo and behold after my reply of "yes," I received one in the mail within a week or so.  Now, I've got to give this astute individual a lot of credit. There was no quid pro quo requested. They did not ask me to promote the product on my blog, they did not ask for the placement of an advertisement, they simply probably saw that my readership had gone over a few thousand individual views and likely thought that a subtle product placement might be worth sending me a free one.  In fact, it was a perfect hidden ego stroke; "hey buddy, we like your blog and think you might gain enough readers that you might help us promote our product."  There, my friends is confidence in your product.  The CobraHead folks don't know if I'm going to like it or what I might write about it, but they have faith.  It's been in my hands now for several months, unfortunately coming too late to try it out last year, but this spring I will give it a workout in good faith and report back here. 

CobraHead "head"

If you don't write a blog yourself, then you should know that the writers of your favorite blogs covet every little crumb of positive reinforcement over a well-written piece, and that many measure success or failure by readership comments.  Many of us, in fact, are sitting on the other end of an invisible Internet fiber, starving for feedback and friendship.  So please, visit your favorite garden blogs regularly and support them by occasionally commenting on a blog or passing the link on to a friend who might like it. And if, by chance, you can help me increase my readership and other manufacturers are listening (hint, hint), I'd love to report on how a nice portable garden debris shredder has improved my compost pile.     

Too Much Mulch

As I sit around on my hiney this winter, staring out at the bleak Flint Hills landscape covered by snow and thinking about changes that I need to make in the garden next year, one change the I know that I need to make is to use less mulch in certain parts of my garden.

"WHAT?" the avid mulchers and composters scream, "BLASPHEMY"!  The xeriscapers dryly ask "What are you going to do about conserving water during the arid, hot Kansas summers?"  And the weeping organic gardeners query "What will happen to the soil structure?" 

Calm down everyone.  I said "in certain parts of my garden."   You see, it finally occurred to me that, by keeping the entire plethora of my garden beds heavily mulched, I've eliminated the self-seeding of many annuals and short-lived perennials that I've enjoyed in the past.  They are slowly disappearing from my garden over the years, or they survive up close to large roses and shrubs where the mulch isn't quite so deep.  My pink-salmon Poppies, descendants of a strain given to me by a friend years ago, are popping up less often to delight me with their surprise locations. My beloved blue and purple Columbines, that I have carefully monitored to weed out any pastel or pale interlopers, are dwindling away. My self-spread, unknown-origin Brown-eyed Susan's are fewer and farther between.  Beds with six inches of cypress or prairie hay mulch are now barren of these lovely flowers. 

   

So, I'm going to reinstitute some haphazardness into my garden.  A few areas of ground left bare here and there, scuffed up to improve the germination of the Papaver somniferum and Rudbeckia hirta clans.  Some shady, lighter-mulched areas to encourage the Columbines.  Perhaps an entire garden bed lightly raked and thinly mulched in the Spring to encourage the self-sowers to proliferate with Darwinian abandon.  And overall, less of the expensive, imported cypress mulch and correspondingly more quicker-degrading home-grown grass clippings that will allow sprouting annuals to reach both soil and the sunlight.

I'm already looking forward to the chaos.