Gardening

It’s not bad enough that Lake Shitticaca shows up on my driveway every time it rains, reminding me of the Upcoming Great Retaining Wall Explosion Get Your Own Now Only $75,000 event, but we had quite a downpour yesterday and I could see just how quickly the bare ground, exposed by my overenthusiastic neighbor when he weed-whacked my blackberries (without asking), is going to wash away. Scary.

So I got a hook thingie and using all the muscle I’ve built this year pulled out from the trailing-blackberry cover the spring’s clematis prunings, which are conveniently wrapped up in bird netting, hauled the whole mess over to the naked area and plopped it over the worst part, hoping it will provide at least partial protection until I can get with a neighbor who has a pickup and go get 10 or 12 bags of mulch to cover it, and some jute cloth (ideally, but it seems to be hard to find locally) or more bird netting to anchor it to the ground. That ought to work, except that it looks as if one of the drainage channels is going to go from neighbor’s side of the property to mine, and I don’t want that At All. I may do some judicious dirt rearranging to make sure that doesn’t happen. His foundation goes down to bedrock, so his house won’t be floating down the ravine if all that dirt goes away; mine, as far as I know, has no footings at all. Of course. Having that shored up would probably be another $75,000 project. I don’t even want to know.

Neither of these has been good for the Anxiety Monster, who’s been feeding on them very happily and making my life a living hell. Acupuncture this a.m. helped a lot, but the effect starts to wear off after seven or eight hours, which is frustrating.

Good news is that I went to a readers’ theater group today and we ran through two old radio-show scripts from “Suspense,” and it was a lot of fun. And they let me in and were nice to the new kid and everything.

The “landscaping for erosion control using native plants” class I’m taking is going to be much more comprehensive than I really want, but I learned a lot in Monday’s class and the teacher said we’re starting on erosion control tomorrow. I’m surprised that the five-hour-per-day class exhausts me, but it does. Monday’s included about two hours in a local nature reserve that has about 100 native plant species. I discovered that I have a few red elderberries along with the sword ferns (which I will protect with my life, since they do extremely well with soil retention), a bunch of not-terribly-helpful bracken ferns, enough trailing blackberries to stock a nursery (which I’m sure everybody else has, too), and of course the big, non-native, invasive Himalayan blackberries (the huge, bushy ones that cities have to cut back every year and have thorns the size of a football field) that I have learned do a very poor job with soil retention. It’s not going to be pleasant trying to figure out how to get those things out (if I do) and put other, more suitable things in, and even less pleasant actually doing it.

So there’s my current life: one fresh hell after another.

Thanks to the erudite Paul and Toni on my gardening list, I have identified Lazarus as belonging to the Kalanchoe family, species blossfeldiana. As per here. Or maybe pinnata. The pinnata photo looks more like it; this one shows the little plants growing out of Leaf Mom. Apparently, if I don’t kill it, it will bloom this winter. If it has lots of 14-hour nights. Which shouldn’t be difficult this far north.

A couple of weeks ago, Arvin gave me a cutting from an odd little plant whose name he couldn’t remember and I didn’t know. He said that if you take a leaf off it and place it on dirt (or anything else), it will as it dries out start producing first little roots, then tiny little eensy leaves as it clones itself. The main cutting is still in a glass of water, but of course I had to pull off a leaf and drop it into another pot, in which I was rooting a couple of philodendron cuttings, to see what would happen.

Here it is, after two (maybe three) weeks:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? The leaves are so tiny it’s hard to see what they look like, but a closer view shows they’re going to look just like their parent:

That’s a little blurry; it’s a dim day and my sensors don’t want to focus on the part I want them to focus on. The following has been sharpened to within a millimeter of its life, and it’s pretty noisy, but you can see the leaves a little better:

Isn’t it cute? I think I’ll name it . . . Lazarus! Now, can anybody figure out what its formal name is? I’ve tried searching, but can’t seem to hit on the right approach to get useful results. And I don’t have a succulent resource book. (I don’t see how this could not be a succulent of some kind.)

I’ve tried several times to describe what I’ve been working on to stick up over the bookcases and serve as a shade for some lights, which I will also stick up there. So far, I’ve not done real well, which is really frustrating since I deal in words for a living. But as they say, one picture is worth a thousand of those unsteady commodities. Here, then, is a shot of the first section, which I finished and stuck up there just a few minutes ago. It’s not properly in place, which is why the edge of the bookcase sticks out a tish; it won’t when it’s up for real:

I went outside this a.m. to water stuff (it’s been hot) and was reminded that two allegedly annual plants have become trees in my back yard. Unfortunately (but typically), neither of them is one I want to hang around for a long time. This one is Osaka mustard, which is pretty tasty but hot and tends to get awfully big. It’s at least two years old and survived a very cold winter this year.

It’s already bloomed and made seed, so I’m figuring that after tossing it down the coulee, it’ll spread all over the place. I’ve found half a dozen baby mustards around already. Probably from last year.

And this one just kills me. It’s a celery plant. It’s survived at least two winters now, and this last one entailed at least a week of 9 deg. F. temps. Though I should probably respect it for its tenacity and toughness, it scared me this a.m. when I walked past it; I heard it chuckle “bwa-haa-haaa” as I passed, so I knifed it down and pitched it down the coulee, too.

It was about five feet tall (yes!) and looking exceedingly malicious, and I didn’t want it to hang around long enough to develop A Plan. I wouldn’t feel safe at night.

In other plant-related news . . . I’m thinking that the only way to guarantee that any given plant will grow is to dislike it. Couple years ago, when I threw out a whole bunch of beet seeds, every one of the dang things sprouted and grew. This year, when I carefully planted seeds from three varieties, I got nowhere near that percentage germination, and one variety (Rote Kugel) has been a serious flop–I don’t think there’s a single one out there.

I guess what I have to do is go outside and snarl and grouse at the seeds that I really want to grow: “Don’t you dare sprout, you rotten chunk of green manure!” And even I would feel silly doing that.

Finally, finally, finally, I seem to be getting closer to the end of this bleedin’ yard project. After coming home from the 42 Months art installation this a.m., during which I wore myself to the bone herding a bunch of Grannies and a couple of very nice volunteers, I finished putting in the weedcloth, staked the four-bys and laid the bricks in very roughly. (They’re nowhere near level and probably won’t be even after I futz with them; if not, I shall simply declare that the result can be blamed on many years of frost heave. So there.) I intend to have another level of deck put in where the murkled-up ground in front is, though that will probably cost $2000. Everything does. Or more. Then there won’t be much I have to mess with.

Meanwhile, having missed three hours of sleep as well as run myself ragged for four hours, I’m whipped. It’s to the knitting chair for me for a while!

Holy strangulation, Batperson! I flopped onto the porch swing this a.m. after shoveling half a yard of dirt out (yes, out) of the big raised bed, and barely escaped with my life.

The kudzu vines of the North—wild blackberries—have started to take over the deck and are seeking a way in the back door. Most of those on my hillside are the fairly well-behaved native variety, which tend to crawl quietly along the ground rather than growing thorny canes big enough to build with, but my proximity to the woods (which you can see, definitely dark and deep, on the right side of this shot) means they’re always trying to get in. Or out. Of the woods. Or somewhere where they’re not!