Aphids Abounding

I don't often intend for the Garden Musings blog to be a basic garden instructional blog, but my finding of aphids among the roses in the K-State Rose garden, and my subsequent Iphone picture capture of said aphids, shown at left, was too good to leave untold.

For those who have never visited, the K-State Rose Garden is healthier this year than I've ever seen it, and I'm all a-quiver for the blooming days to come.  I stopped by a couple of days back to check on the results of the EMG's recent pruning efforts at the garden and to assess if any current work was needed.  In among the healthy bountiful budding roses, were a few buds or leaves with apparent growths of seething green hair, aphids (also known, appropriately, as "plant lice") which did not then, nor should they ever, send this gardener into a panic.

If you see them, and have not run across such creatures before, DO NOT reach for your bottles of synthetic or organic poisons.  Aphids seldom cause extensive damage on roses in an outdoor garden, and they can be easily controlled by squishing them off the buds (which I accomplished here by rolling the buds gently between my fingers), or by blasting them off with a brisk spray of water.  Both methods of control are satisfying and enjoyable, at least if you don't mind a little bit of green insect stain on your fingertips.  Cackle in an evil manner while squishing, if it suits your fancy.  I knew, even while brushing off a few aphids here and there, that in a few days these bushes will be swarming with aphid-eating lady beetles who will be most happy to rid the garden of the problem all summer long.

Imagine, for a moment, how a lady beetle must look to the poor soft-bellied aphids.  I'll bet that aphid mothers (who are parthenogenetic, thankfully unlike the vast majority of human females in history), have a hard time convincing aphid larvae to sleep at night, fearful as they must be of the red and black-spotted monsters in their closets.  Aphid mothers also probably make their children behave in supermarkets by telling them, "if you don't be good, the lady beetle will eat you."

Great picture, huh?  So good, in fact, that I added the source onto the picture, knowing that this one will probably spread out over the Internet and be used elsewhere.  I don't usually "watermark" my pictures, not really caring if anyone uses my pictures from this blog, as long as they're not making money off of them, and I'm not the world's greatest photographer anyway.  Please feel free to use this picture to educate others, just as you can any of my pictures.  I would appreciate it, however, if you acknowledge the source for pictures because in the long run, it'll bring people back to this blog.  I don't make any money from blogging, but I do get paid in readers, the only currency I care about.

eCollege Blogging Nominated!

I just found out this morning that Garden Musings is nominated for eCollege's Top Garden Blogs Award.  As an amateur gardener and blogger, jousting away at the Garden Gods out here in a "flyover" state, it is warming to know that somewhere, sometime, one of my readers considers this effort entertaining, if not actually worthwhile.

eCollege asked me to provide my number one tip for the aspiring gardener and here it is:
 
Photograph your garden often, and then write about it.

It's one thing to garden.  It's another entirely different thing to photograph your garden, because that helps you see your garden, or your garden composition, or that honeybee, through the eyes of another gardener.  And then it is a completely new level of gardening to write about your garden, in a personal diary, a webblog or a book, because writing about it (preferably for consumption by others), forces you to THINK about your garden.  I would encourage all of you to try a blog of your own because you are free to do anything you want with your own blog. Writing, I found again by blogging, is just a whole lot of fun if you start out without a specific endpoint in mind.

As I wrote in the first post, of July 28, 2010, I'm a veterinary surgeon and university professor who turned back to writing for some respite from my normal daily grind.  I wrote my first book of gardening essays, pictured below, just for me but it was enjoyed immensely by the other three people who found and read it.  I blog now so that another three or four people out there can enjoy the blog in the same way. The majority of my blogs are about garden philosophy, garden writing, or simply surviving the brutal gardening universe of the Kansas Flint Hills.  I spend a lot of time writing about roses because I'm an avid amateur rosarian, and I often feature my wife, Mrs. ProfessorRoush, in bone-dry humor pieces  because she's a convenient non-gardening muse.  I write for release, and I write to provoke my readers to think, and I write for love of gardening and writing itself.  If I happen to write about a garden topic from which you accidentally learn something useful, then that's just gravy on the mashed potatoes.

For the students who participate in eCollege, I'd appreciate your support for Garden Musings and I hope you find it both informative and fun.

New Leaf, Writer

I am "draft post" crazy right now, stacking up a number of post ideas after the drought of the last two winter months.  Pictures of the early garden blooms are running my SDcard over and demanding that I honor them with a blog.  But at the same time, I'd be negligent to my purpose of celebrating garden writers if I didn't blog on my latest read, A New Leaf, by Merilyn Simonds.

I'll state it flat out;  this is the most delightful garden read I've had all year, maybe the best for several years.  Ms. Simonds is, by reputation, an established fiction writer, new to the genre of garden writing, but her previous experience shines throughout this book of garden-focused essays.  I marveled over and over, and was humbled to my core, by the wonderful use of language, the phrasing, and the vivid descriptions, heedless of whether her subject was daffodils, hollyhocks, or fungus.  Lord, how I wish I could write at her level.

Some examples:

All my gardening life, I have wanted to grow in swaths...But I have not always had the luxury of landscape.

The beds that seem so sedate in April, and maybe even May, spiral out of control in June.  The self-seeders are getting it on like teenagers home alone.

I have always thought of peas as too much work: all that popping and thumbing of pods and for what?

People come to the garden....at the same time they come to the psychotherapist's chair:  when they reach the halfway point, when the number of years that stretch ahead are no more than what's behind.  The summer solstice of a life.

Daffodils are, to my mind, the very best of Spring bulbs.  They don't ask for much more than a bit of April sun and rain to rise golden into the air.

See the point that I was feebly trying to convey?  Despite  a self-described reputation as a voracious reader, I am rarely tempted to repeatedly slow down and enjoy the feel and flow of the language.  Ms. Simonds, in A New Leaf, took me beyond the garden into a fresh garden of words and pages.  A garden that blooms in phrases and imagery every bit as well as the physical garden it describes.

I wait now, Winter biding time for Spring,  hoping that there is another set of garden essays coming from Ms. Simonds in the near future.  And I'm challenged by her example to write better; to set garden images in words instead of digital pictures; to churn the soil in words as effortlessly as with a spade.

The Last Daffodil

Here it is, the last new daffodil to open in my yard this Year of Our Lord, 2012.  All the others, the Trumpets, the Large-Cupped, the Small-Cupped, the Jonquils and the Species, have given me the gift of their bloom and moved on, leaving behind only their grasslike foliage to wither, die and litter my garden beds at leisure.

I find myself a trifle melancholic at the thought of these cheery faces withdrawing to their soil homes for summer recuperation.  I don't begrudge them the rest they are so well and truly due, but I do regret that my time with them is so short, my admiration of their perkiness so fleeting.  I treasure daffodils above the other bulbs here in the Flint Hills, for only they are strong enough to survive the prairie unassisted.  Tulips live short lives and constantly need replenishment.  Crocus peek above the brown buffalo grasses but are instantly whipped to shreds by the winds.  Scilla provide me with calm induced by their sky-blue presence, but they lie too low to the ground to impress visitors, and they require the extra moisture of a mulched garden bed to flourish.  The daffodils alone endure.

Daffodils harken me to Spring with their jovial yellows and oranges and creams, impervious to late freezes and unappetizing to deer.  They laugh at the winds of Spring, keeping perfect form and color through rain and storm.  They carry the hope of the prairie gardeners, giving form to our long Winter expectations and filling the promises of our optimism.

As they leave us, plunging head-long into hibernation away from the harsh rays of Summer, the memory of their friendship stays behind in the gardener's heart, a kernel of Spring locked away to tide us through the next winter.  The daffodils are gone, but they've promised to return with the next warming soil.  And we garden on madly alone, through irises and roses and daylilys, mums and grasses and asters. Waiting all the while for the next perfect daffodil to fill the promise of the resurrection of Spring.