Writing Workshop

Call it synchronicity or just the ability to pay attention to the threads the run through your life, sometimes it sure seems like someone is trying to tell you something. My friend Janine absolutely believed that we all have a unique purpose and that life acts as a sort of herding dog running around us pushing us closer and closer to what we are supposed to be.

When I wrote about the Sit Spot challenge put out by the Wilderness Awareness School a few weeks ago, I wasn’t thinking at all about the writing workshop that I had signed up for at the Burke Museum. I was just reporting on an interesting item I had discovered on a site I check out sporadically.

Last weekend, as I drove over to the University for the Environmental Writer’s Workshop at the Burke Museum, I had no expectations other than to spend the day with other people who are interested in writing about the environment.

During the afternoon I took a session given by Lynda Mapes. I switched to her session because I was impressed with the organized and entertaining way she presented her biography [I was] and because she spent her youth in the same part of the country I did having many of the same experiences. [Another interesting bit of synchronicity, this the second time recently that I have been reminded of those days running wild in the green spaces of the Northeast.]

Janine would tell me, and I can hear her still though she’s been gone for almost five years, that I was meant to be in that session because Lynda had us do an exercise she called immersion reporting. The basic activity is to go somewhere in nature and let “nature do the talking”. At its core this is the Sit Spot exercise. The only real difference is that because the purpose it to report on what you observe, note taking is an important part of the activity. We actually practiced for an hour in the Union Bay Natural Area.

As with many experiences, the learning continued after the exercise was over. Just today I managed to tease out one insight that has been niggling at me since the class. I have been feeling a subtle pressure to turn more of my yard over to food production. Some of the pressure is very real and comes from a neighbor who is creating a real urban farm in her yard. Next to her organized vegetable and fruit beds and simple cut flower beds, my yard is exuberant and overgrown.

With the downturn in the economy the local version of keeping up with the Joneses has moved on from authentic Arts and Crafts remodels to self-sustaining agriculture. I do have a little bit of the yard, outside the back door, dedicated to vegetables and fruits. But the primary purpose of my garden has been to provide backyard habitat.

As I left for work this morning, some bird was thrashing around in the wild back corner where my little writing table is surrounded by a nearly impenetrable ring of native trees and shrubs. Back there the plants need no supplemental water even during the hottest days of the summer and maintenance is simply turning leaves and twigs into the dirt. It is my own little wild place where I can be in nature when there just isn’t time to get in the car and get away.

Real Estate for Birds

When I was getting ready to buy my first house, I took a class in home buying at a local continuing education program. As first-time home buyers most of the students were concerned with financing and inspections. The instructors spent considerable class time teaching us how to evaluate the finer points of a potential purchase. How much traffic went buy at various times of day, which rooms get the morning sun, do the neighbors put out their garbage at night or in the morning?

To create a tempting house for wildlife you can’t just get the structure right.  You must imagine that you are a bird or a bat or a frog. I tried to do that when I put up the bird house I received as a gift. I selected a sturdy protective tree and hung the house so that the opening faced the back of the yard away from the house. I figured that having their entrance away from the activity of the yard would feel more secure.

Bird house relocated

I hung the house in late winter and as spring approached I put out a basket of twigs, bits of string and dog fur to provide a ready source of nesting material. Sure enough, a few weeks later, I saw a pair of birds flitting in and out of the opening. A few weeks later however it was empty. Over the summer I puzzled over the problem. What had caused the pair  abandon their work and move on?

While reading the message boards on a garden site, I may have found my answer.  My back yard is south of my house so I had positioned the bird house with the entrance facing south. The prevailing winds in Seattle blow almost exclusively north so whenever the wind picked up, it was blowing right into the house. I could definitely see where that might be a problem trying to sleep and even worse for fragile eggs and nestlings.

In February  I  brought the house down. Pivoting the disc in the back  to expose the clean-out , I dumped out the old nesting materials and made sure that nothing else had taken up residence. Then I went back up the ladder and found a secure place to hang the house with the opening pointed northeast.
The other day when I got home from work I noticed a bit of twig in the doorway. Today it wasn’t visible. I will be watching over  the next few weeks to see if new residents are setting up house.

Mindfulness for Naturalists

Two years ago I did an 8-week program on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction [MBSR]. It is a great program, the core of which is a daily mindfulness meditation practice. Once it was over, though, I never did any actual meditation again. I just couldn’t find time to commit yet another daily activity. The while checking out one of my favorite web sites today, I found a mindfulness program for those of us who would rather be outside in nature. Wilderness Awareness School is running a 30-Day Sit Spot Challenge from April 10 through May 10.

Sit Spot is one of the core pieces of their Kamana Program. The Kamana program is an intensive program to become a naturalist. Like learning another language or really learning to play guitar, it is something I would dearly love to find time for. Unlike learning French, it doesn’t really have a 10-minutes a day program or so I thought until I found the Sit Spot Challenge.

The idea is simple. For one month you commit to going to a spot in nature and just sit there for twenty minutes observing. It is just like MBSR except instead of focusing on the breath, you focus intensely on one spot in nature.

While their ideal spot is someplace wild, it seems to me that for those of us trying to create a little bit of wild habitat in our own yards, this gives us the incentive to sit back and really pay attention to the wildness that is there right now.

To make it easier to stay motivated, the school will be sending daily reminders to those who sign up. They also have a forum where people can discuss their experiences with the challenge. To find out more or sign up go here:

http://www.kamana.org/categories/20100301

If you sign up, put a comment on this post. I would love to hear about other people who are doing the challenge.

Going Underground

There’s a clump of zebra grass planted at the corner of my patio directly in front of the basement door. It screens the storage area under the deck and prevents people attempting the large step up to the patio at a place where the unwary are likely to smack their head on the corner of the deck. Each year the zebra grass grows to its summer height of eight feet or so and every spring I cut it back. In between fall and spring, it sheds foot-long strips of beige leaf that blow around the yard. When the mood strikes me I gather up a handful and toss them into the compost pile.

Last Saturday with the dog finally winding down from a long session retrieving, I starting to pick up the bits that littered the area around the back door and found myself in a tug-of-war with the earth. I yanked a piece up and went for the next one. Same thing. So on the third I crouched down to see what was up. One end of the blade was embedded in the packed dirt. Taking a small shovel I scraped around the edges. The piece of grass went straight down like a knife blade plunged into the ground. Digging some more I couldn’t find any sign of the responsible party though my guess is ants.

Ant Work

One shorter piece was bent and pulled into the ground right in front of a cobble area by the house. Since every stone that gets regular sun seems to have ants hanging out beneath it, I am sure there’s a whole colony there. I am going to leave that one piece alone and see how long it takes to get pulled fully under.

More of the grass was strewn around the raised bed beside the patio. The leaves there had been moved as well but the responsible party was much more obvious. The grass was  vanishing into the same holes the snails return to each morning as the sun is rising.

When I added the bed to the patio it was meant to add a decorative touch and to discourage people from stepping off the downhill side of the patio. What I didn’t know, and what the landscaper who installed it didn’t think to tell me, is that cinder block walls surrounding fertile dirt with a southern exposure creates an ideal snail condo.

Snail Condo Entrance

In the cool damp mornings of late spring, after we’ve shifted the clocks forward and darkness has taken over the dog waking hour again, I need a flashlight to walk along that side of the patio. Otherwise I inevitably step on at least one of the mollusks making their way back home after a night spent feeding in my garden.

The discovery was a reminder of something that we learned in the backyard habitat workshop. One simple way to invite wildlife into your yard is to leave it just a little messy. The health of any habitat is dependent on all its denizens being healthy. At the lower end of the food chain that means that the same cycle of death and decay that takes place in great piles of debris on the forest floor, also needs to happen on a smaller scale in our own yards. If it also gives me an excuse not to stress when I don’t finish that last bit of clean-up, so much the better!

Honeysuckle

It was such a little bit of spring green that I might have overlooked it. In the almost two years since I planted the eight-inch stem of Orange Honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa) behind the Oceanspray, I had given up looking for it to climb the shrub the way it does in the wild.  The vine didn’t die or even look particularly unhealthy, it just remained a small wisp of vine clinging to the willow stake it came tied to.

First spring leaves

Now in February, leaf buds were opening on a pale vine twining around the trunks of the oceanspray to as high as four feet off the ground. I know that perennials grow slower than annuals. The longer lived plants take time to establish a healthy root system. The last two summers have been usually hot for longer periods of time and then last winter we had more snow that is usual. Perhaps those conditions conspired to slow the plant’s development. Or it could be that two years is the typical time for native honeysuckle to establish itself.

Pacific Northwest Native Honeysuckle

According to Pojar’s the name of the plant in several Coastal Salish languages translates to ‘ghost’s swing’ or ‘owl’s swing’. Perhaps this summer I will discover from watching my own plant what led them to give it that name. If not at least there will be hummingbirds joining the butterflies in that bit of the garden.

Composting

A number of years ago I took the city up on their offer to purchase a worm bin at a discount. I picked it up on a Saturday afternoon. Monday went to Elliott Bay Books to purchase a book on composting. The book, claiming to demystify “the art of composting” , was a slim 111 pages not including the glossary and index.

I skimmed the handout from the city and set up the bin with wet bedding and some food scraps. My plan was to spend the next few weeks reading the book in my spare time. The city literature assured me that if I created a welcoming environment the red worms would find my bin. The project was derailed when my labrador retriever, eight years going on six months, injured her knee. After consulting with an orthopedic Veterinarian it was clear that she needed surgery and then an extended rehab. Suddenly 111 pages of instruction seemed like a lot. I didn’t have time for high maintenance worms when I was going to have to keep the crazed one quiet enough to heal without blowing out the other knee.

Fast forward a few years. Thanks to the city, I have been collecting food scraps in a copper bucket in my kitchen to throw into the yard waste bin. With the garden show coming up, I decided that I would give the worm bin another go. Instead of leaving the fate of my compost to whatever worm instinct would get them crawling out of the ground and into my bin, I could buy a box of red worms from Seattle Tilth.

After reviewing the instructions for setting up the bedding, I gathered up some of the copious output from my paper shredder, mixed in some of the leaves mulching my garden bed and pulled the bin  out from where it had been sitting under my deck for all those years. Pulling off the lid I discovered a pile of rich dark dirt! Apparently the worms had indeed discovered my bin and eaten their way through my original  bedding and food scraps. When there was no new food forthcoming they moved on.

I mixed up the dirt with the materials I had prepared. Since I was going to the garden show anyway, I did get a box of worms. They have been safely bedded down in the bin for a week now. They haven’t fled so I must have the basics right. Someday I will probably make my way through that compost book. In the meantime, I have a rambunctious new lab puppy and a bin full of hopefully low maintenance worms.

Watching

I recently read a fascinating book called “Wesley the Owl” by Stacey O’Brien. It tells the story of how O’Brien adopted an infant barn owl and cared for him for the rest of his life. The logistics of living with an owl make living with a dog or cat seem simple.The story is at turns entertaining and poignant.

What stuck with me when I was done reading the book is how elegantly O’Brien balanced the triad of work, enjoyment and study. There is much for the gardener to learn in her story especially if you have a scientific bent.

O’Brien was working as a biologist in a raptor center at a University when she adopted Wesley.  Taking an owl into her home meant that for the next two decades every aspect of her life revolved around the bird.

How many times have I found myself thinking that my garden has taken over my life?  Sometimes I look over the yard, make a mental list of the things that need doing and think that the garden could easily be a full-time job. It takes a visitor, asking about the lovely scent on my front steps, to remind me that the vanilla plant is in bloom and that I should take a few minutes to go out and take a whiff myself.

Then there’s the science. While caring for Wesley and enjoying his antics, O’Brien remained at heart a biologist. From the description of his minutest feature to keen observations on his behavior, she recorded in intimate detail how a barn owl interacts with and reacts to its environment. She tracked the owl’s development, seasonal changes and behavior over time.

There are so much to be learned by watching our gardens with the same intensity.

When I put a new food source in, be it feeder or plant, it takes time for the birds and other creatures to actually partake of it. Does it take time for them to discover it? Many of the creatures have fixed habits going to the same plant or part of the yard at the same time every day. Alternately, it could be that they are immediately aware of something new but caution prevents them from approaching until the new thing becomes familiar.

To know for sure I would have to spend time, probably sitting quietly at some safe distance, watching.  I would need to recognize the signs that a particular animal was aware of a thing and how they react to those that are familiar and those that are not. I could spend hours over many days at this.

Plants require even more patience. When I was in Colorado in October, my brother mentioned that it was a bad year for foliage because it had been so hot. With all the deciduous trees and shrubs in my yard, I have never really paid attention to when they change color.  Nor do I know how that varies from year to year though I have a vague sense that it isn’t the same every year. The colors also change. Some years there is good color, rich vibrant color that lasts for days. Other years the leaves barely change at all and turn brown before falling off the tree.

Surely I would know much more about the various life forms in the garden if I watched them as closely as the resident the crows and jays watch me. I know this because if I put food out, one or the other is inevitably snatching at it, waiting just long enough for me to retire to the house.

A Little Death

The sun was out but still the day felt more like January than March in Seattle. The swollen brown buds on the ceonothus and the red-flowering currant clearly said spring.

Standing on the patio, I did a half circle trying to decide what area needed work the most. A small brown wren tussled the moss beneath the smoke bush. Winning a clump it flew off carrying its size again in stringy green stuff to pad its nest. Definitely spring.

I was just about to attack some weeds when I heard that unmistakable sound. There was something not quite right about it. I turned just in time to  watch the little green creature fly behind me. Pirouetting, I saw it struggle to rise over the cedar fence atop the wall that binds the west side of my yard. Horrified I watched it fail to make the height, smash into the fence and fall down into a tuft of grass between the black railroad tie that tops the wall and the fence beyond.

Tip toeing over so as not to startle it, I leaned over to see behind the grass. It seemed to stand on its tail, wings spread, chin rested against the rough wood with its long narrow beak pointed to the sky.

White downy feathers shook with the force of its breathing. I thought of rescue – sugar water and warmth. Inching forward I saw the the reason for its weakness. In the center of the little forehead was a single red-rimmed puncture. There was nothing on the fence that could have caused such a wound. The creature had been in obvious distress before it connected with the grey cedar.

So I leaned there against the wall. After a number of minutes the rapid breathing slowed and then finally stilled. And I stayed there with the little hummingbird until it died.

Later, discussing the incident with a bird scientist while watching a banding demo, I learned that the wound had probably been incurred during a fight with another hummingbird. Despite reading about how territorial the birds are, I have never actually witnessed a fight, just the aftermath.

Things That Creep

I slid the edge of the box along the rubber mat in the tub and he scuttled towards the drain. There wasn’t room to cut him off so I angled the box closer to the drain. He switched direction and headed for the side. Moving cautiously, freak them out and they damage themselves, I slid the cardboard up and under him and he did what I wanted, jumped to the edge. When I tipped the box upright he slid neatly inside. I released him out back near the border of the driveway hoping he wouldn’t end up back inside the house.

By fall standards he was a little guy, maybe  a centimeter long in body with similar leg extension. Often the quarter size spiders show up inside this time of year. The larger they are the less likely they are to survive a relocation attempt. For something that so many people are terrified of, spiders are remarkably fragile.

I confess, I don’t try to relocate every creepy thing that shows up in the house. But I try to when I have the time. Similarly, when working outside I exercise some caution. When bags of compost leaning against the wall have small snails stuck to the hidden side, I pick them off and set them on the ground at the base of the wall.

Digging up weeds or holes for new plants turns up worms and ground spiders. Knocking the soil surface with the trowel sends the later scurrying away. I pick up the worms and put them in a shady are beneath a plant where I am not working.

Gardening makes you aware of the allies you have in the smaller creatures. Whether its composting, aerating the soil or eating other less welcome bugs, those tiny things do some heavy lifting.

I still get the creeps when one of the those huge spiders goes streaking by. How is it that they are always in your peripheral vision, never right in front of you? But I have learned to check my fear reaction to many things.

After getting stung as a child I had a pretty extreme fear of bees. The fear worsened when I lived in first one place infested with carpenter bees [not actually likely to sting but the things were two inches long and when they thumped on the windows it sounded like a hand] and then in another place with attack wasps.

The native bees in my garden have taught be differently. They fly from bloom to bloom and are more than happy to maneuver around me when I am in the way. One flew over my head and down into its hole in the dirt right next to my trowel. [I left a few weeds there so I wouldn’t disrupt its home.] Even better, as their numbers increased with the number of blooming plants over the years, the number of wasps has diminished. They used to build nests all around my back deck. This year there was only one small nest.

Many creatures who are the protagonists in horror shows are now things of wonder. Last Halloween I spent an hour standing guard over an orb weaver during an event at the zoo. I explained to the visitors that she didn’t need glass around her because she never leaves her web, that the only reason for glass would be to protect her from us.

That’s why last summer when I needed to remove a yellow jacket nest from a deck chair, I waited until the cool of night and then went out with a long pole to knock it off. I still ran for the door as they buzzed angrily on the deck. But as I slammed the door behind me in case I had been followed, I knew I hadn’t taken out any friends with pesticide.

Plant Problems

Anyone who has spent any time looking up plants, online or in books, is used to finding information about the problems you might experience with them. Roses, for example,  are notorious for the long list of problems gardeners have to be prepared to manage including black spot and aphids.

Not red-flowering current. Look up Ribes sanguineum. All the native plant sites practically wax poetic about how easy the plant is, how universally lovely it will be, how it loves sun and is drought tolerant. A suggestion to plant them in a sunny location with well-drained soil is the only advise on how to care for them.

Over the years I planted three of them in my yard. The first currant, one of the first native plants I put in the yard,  I planted in full southern sun in the back yard. A few years later a second went into a partially sunny location in my front yard. The final one I planted in the back but shaded for the later part of the day by a large ceanothus. That one receives the least amount of direct sunlight of the three.

All three leaf out and then bloom profusely in spring. The hummingbirds visit morning and evening moving from one to the next. Come summer, it’s a different story. As summer progresses, more and more of their leaves brown along the edges giving the shrubs a worn look. Up until this summer it was limited to the outer edges of the leaves. Then this summer, the oldest one died. When some leaves turned completely brown and fell off, I tried several things to save the shrub. More water, less water, fertilizer. Nothing worked.

The remaining ones are holding their own but I am worried. Ribes is supposed to be a long-lived plant. I would like to know what is causing such stress each summer before I lose another. Searching on Ribes yields nothing but expositions on how care-free these shrubs are. Put the word “problem” in the search query and you will get a page describing how some other plants has problems while currant has none.

I am not the only one experiencing trouble. I power walk the hills in the neighborhood a few times a week and as I do so, I inventory the native plants along the way. Ribes is a popular plant locally because it is one of the native species that is easy to obtain. Every specimen along my route has the same brown-tinged leaves by mid-summer. Not one resembles the verdant images in Pojar or on the King County Native Plant site.

It is interesting that the two survivors are not in the sunny spots the plants are supposed to love. Both get sun but are shaded for the hottest part of the day. However the one that died is probably in the best drained soil of the three. The back yard has a high quantity of sand in the soil whereas the front yard has a lot of clay. Yet the one in clay survives.

Over the winter I will continue my research in the hopes of finding a solution. Meanwhile I am happy that there are two left as those red flowers are the first to lure the hummingbirds into the yard in the spring.