The land – Page 36 – Into the Woods

Winter: Greener than I'd imagined

I was away from North Carolina for 17 years, so I’d forgotten that the local flora is by no means completely dead during the winter. We’ve had a series of warm, wet days, but we’ve also had many nights with lows in the low 20s, with the lowest temperature I’ve recorded so far 16.3F. Not only has a lot of my new grass stayed green during the winter, it’s actually grown a little.

Peppermint can’t be beaten down.

Clover slows way down in the winter, but it winters over, green.

Exuberant grasses

I don’t know what this is, but I have a lot of it, and it thrives during the winter.

In this spot, two bales of straw that defended a raw ditch this spring are now melting into the grassy soil.

Past one of the arbor vitae trees (planted in March), something wicked this way comes.

The straw covers the area where the final grading around the house was done in late October. This newest grass planting has made slow progress all winter.

In the ashes of burnt construction scraps, grass thrives.

Dang, what a big bird

A great blue heron (Wikipedia)

I got out of the Jeep in the driveway in front of my house earlier today, and the biggest bird I’ve ever seen lifted off from the front gable of my house and lumbered out over the woods like an overloaded 747. It was huge, with a five-foot wingspan or more. It almost certainly was a great blue heron. If a stork on one’s roof is a sign of good luck, I believe I’ll assume that a heron is good luck too.

I have a lot of work to do learning to recognize bird species. A few days ago I saw a pileated woodpecker. They too are an impressive bird, and they make a wild, gooney-bird sound in the woods.

It speaks well of the health and variety of the local habitat that such a wide range of species can be seen here. I was amused, listening to Bill Moyers interview Michael Pollan recently, to hear Pollan say that in areas where there is an overpopulation of white-tail deer (like here), hunting them and eating them is good food policy. From bears to foxes, we’ve got them here. The little streams seem healthy, with plenty of minnows and tadpoles this spring.

The heron left a heron-size poop streak on the roof of the house.

Winterscapes

The winter sky soon after sunrise on Dec. 1. A rainy front from the Gulf of Mexico is being pushed away by cooler, dryer air.

Christmas wreath with woodpile

The woods behind the house

The house, from the woods behind the house

Even though 1.3 inches of rain fell in the last two days, only a tiny trickle of water is flowing in my little stream. This is good, really. The water is clean — no runoff. Most of the rain soaked into the ground. Not until the ground has been saturated, I guess, will the stream start flowing again. The summer of 2008 was not as dry as the summer of 2007, but more rain would be nice.

A stumpscape. This is in an area below the house where I removed old pine trees but left the stumps in place. I’ll let this area return to the wild, as part of the transition from woods to meadow.

Sonnet XXXV

Clearly my ruined garden as it stood
Before the frost came on it I recall —
Stiff marigolds, and what a trunk of wood
The zinnia had, that was the first to fall;
These pale and oozy stalks, these hanging leaves
Nerveless and darkened, dripping in the sun,
Cannot gainsay me, though the spirit grieves
And wrings its hands at what the frost has done.
If in widening silence you should guess
I read the moment with recording eyes,
Taking your love and all your loveliness
Into a listening body hushed of sighs . . .

Though summer’s rife and the warm rose in season,
Rebuke me not: I have a winter reason.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Cicada

A cicada perched on a limb of the poplar tree above my trailer

There seems to be a healthy balance of insect life on my newly cleared acre. Several types of bees including honey bees work the wildflowers, of which there are surprisingly many for the first season after clearing. I see lots of lady bugs, grasshoppers, and butterflies. To my surprise, I’ve not been bitten by a mosquito all year. Gnats can be bothersome when the humidity is high, but they don’t bite. On up the food chain, the critters that prey on insects also are in good supply. Each evening at dusk the bats come out. There are lots of spiders, including a black widow near the wood pile. And of course there are lots of birds.

One of the many reasons I want meadow rather than lawn is to support the insect life, and, along with the insects, the higher-order critters that depend on them for food. So far, Lily, my four-month-old kitten, has been content to torment the bugs and leave the birds alone.

Lily, photographed through the screen door, a blur as usual. She never stops. I got the slingshot to try to pop the butts of the deer that were stealing my tomatoes. The deer are sneaky, and I never got a shot at them.

The wildflower season changes

It’s impressive how, abused as my spot of land is from the removal of the pine trees and the stumps, it’s struggling to produce. In early September, a whole new wildflower season begins. I call it the yellow flower time of year. Unfortunately I’m low on yellow flowers. I have only one small stand of black-eyed susans. But I certainly will attend to that in future years. Above: a morning glory

I planted the cosmos. Everything else volunteered.

See the bee?

I have no idea what this is. Maybe my sister knows?

Apparently this poor guy just held on and died.

The sky is so hard to photograph

I’ve mentioned before how difficult it is to photograph the sky. Conditions have to be just right, and better equipment than I have really helps. But the color of the light at yesterday’s sunset was so unusual that I at least had to try to capture it. There had been storms all around before sunset, though unfortunately most of the rain missed me.

Another batch of seeds takes hold

My sister gave me about a dozen packets of flower seeds this spring. I mixed all of them together and flung them into an area where the soil seemed more productive. I saw the first results this morning. This is a cosmos flower.

David 0, Nature 962

Nature abhors a vacuum. I suspect that nature also abhors farmers. I have thrown massive amounts of labor, fertilizer, lime and seed at the acre I cleared of old pine trees back in February. I was desperate for ground cover. Though some of what I planted took root and grew some, once the rain begins to fall, nature proves that she is way better at this than I am. Some people would be ashamed to have so many weeds. I am proud of every last one of them. As rebellious children often do, the weeds have succeeded where I have failed. Above: a common weed.

A common weed

Baby mimosa. It’s a weed here.

I planted this! Peppermint.

A common weed

A young morning glory. I have lots of them. I have no idea how they got here. They could not possibly have been here before, because they’re growing in what was formerly deep, and deeply shaded, pine mulch.

A young scrub pine. There are lots of these. I’m sorry to say that, like the sawbriars, they won’t be permitted to stay. Their day is over, at least while I live here.

A common weed

Surprise surprise. The baby clover likes the compost that I put out for the squash.

The corn struggles in still-poor soil. I’m starting to understand what the soil needs, so next year it will be richer.

A squash bloom

A cucumber bloom (I think)

My first baby watermelon

A common weed

Flowers in the ditch

The ditch has been transformed. Back in March it was an ugly gash left by the bull dozer. The logging operation had ruined the ditch, so it had to be opened again to drain the roadway. For reasons I don’t completely understand, the ditch has healed much more quickly than any other area after I took out the pine trees.

Flowers in the ditch. Actually, this is a common briar. This year, us likes briars.

Runners from a bold briar sneak out of the ditch and try to take over the roadway. I say go for it.

The jungle in the ditch

For something like 50 pounds of clover seed, so far I have seen something like two clover blossoms. Two! But the rain has caused the clover to make another stand, so who knows what the future holds.

The clover tries again in July, having not done too well in April.

I believe this is a wild strawberry. It volunteered on the bare bank above the newly made driveway, the area that I have found most difficult to get anything to grow.

Baby peas. I planted these.

I’m not sure what this is. It’s in an area where I put a variety of heirloom seed, but for all I know it’s a volunteer weed of some sort. I guess I’ll find out after I see whether it produces anything I can eat. [Update: I have it from two experts — my sister and my friend Gavin — that this is okra. So it’s an heirloom variety of okra that I’d forgotten I planted.]

Looking down into the same bloom as in the photo above

A baby poplar tree makes a stand near the new pumphouse. Around here, poplars and maples are the first hardwoods to appear in the succession of species that leads to the recovery of a hardwood forest. This poor baby has relatives all around, and it probably came back from an old root rather than from a new seed.

Ready to be turned into supper…

I’m so excited you’d think I was the first person to ever have a little garden. By the way, when green tomatoes have some sort of blemish that makes them look like they won’t survive until they ripen, just pick ’em and cook ’em. I’m still waiting for my first fully ripe, fully proper summer tomato. The two tomatoes here are just cherry tomatoes. When I get that first tomato, I know exactly what I’m going to do with it. Photo to come in a week or so, I hope. Hey, it’s not fancy San Francisco Chronicle food photography, but it makes you hungry, doesn’t it?

Herbses

A friend tells me that I should clip my herbs before they bloom. Oh well. I’m learning. Here are oregano, sage, and catnip. I’ll dry the catnip and give it to some cats I know. I have a good stand of basil, and from that I had my first fresh pesto a few days ago.