My Own Personal Jungle

I have never had difficulty in dropping large sums of money on plants. Even when renting homes, I couldn’t seem to pass the first month and suppress the need to rework the landscape, usually just to make it livable. Now, I am a place with no end to the room in which I can plant. And plant I will, starting with 314 plants, a mix of native shrubs and trees, fruit trees, and berry bushes.

My focus will be lake and garden. In and around the garden will go a host of fruit trees and various berries, some of which I’ve never heard of before but seemed tasty enough in the catalog:

The medlar is one of my experiments. The soft, brown fruits are described as having a custard apple flavor, almost too good to be true I fear. Seaberries are touted as a common berry in Europe that produces a profusion of golden fruit high in Vitamin C; couldn’t turn that down.  The blueberries were chosen for their tolerance of moist soils and will go to exploit an otherwise neglected area by the garden.  The other berries will be distributed in various places around both garden and barn as their cultivation requirements demand.  They will go well, I hope, with the wild Southern cherries that my father grew from North Carolina seed 30 years ago, and the equally aged grape arbor that I recently pruned up.

The rest are mostly natives, which will be tucked into various locations about the property with emphasis on the lake.

The natives are courtesy of the Pierce County Conservation District, whose annual plant sales offer excellent deals on bareroot stock. The remainder are from either Burnt Ridge Nursery in Onalaska, or One Green World in Molalla, Oregon.

Today’s Morning News Tribune included a small item on the White House garden. It is apparently flourishing throughout the icy Washington D.C. winter with the help of plastic fixed onto hoops. I immediately felt guilty for having abandoned my own 10’ x 6’ winter garden after the relatively minor setback of having my goats eat it down to nothing.

The winter garden before the goat attack

After looking into the cost and effort of building a protective structure to keep the goats and frost at bay, I set my sights on rehabilitating the greenhouse. After a year of being used as a storage facility by friends of my father, the owners of the stuff finally cleared it away and I decided to take the opportunity to put the greenhouse back into service.

 The greenhouse

Reminiscing on my Costa Rica experience and the lettuce box that I observed there, I have begun creating a similar setup.  My materials are simple and my methods easily replicated. Using scrap wood, a chop saw, and 1 ½ screws, I cobbled together three boxes about 18” wide, 8” deep, and 4’ to 5’ in length and lined each with clear, thick plastic using tack nails. I then set up two wooden crates that I’d acquired from a tile store, each of which was about 36” x 48” x 30” , and placed two 12’ x 6” boards on top to form a bench sturdy enough to support 200 pounds of wood and dirt.

My next steps will be to fill the bottoms with a few inches of pea gravel followed by a loose mix of peat, vermiculite, and potting mix. Into this I’ll plant the veggies that I started last August in my winter garden:

Cabbage – Early Jersey Wakefield

Kale – Red Russian

Onion – Evergreen Hardy White Bunching

Radish – Relish Cross Daikon Hybrid

Beets – Boro Hybrid

At present, the greenhouse is unheated in part due to the cost of the electricity that it would take to keep it warm. I am contemplating low cost heating systems such as small wood or oil stoves that would maintain it around 55 degrees Fahrenheit, but in the meantime I’ll probably insulate the plants with an additional cover of plastic. So far, the weather has been on my side with persistant rain and lows around 45 degrees.

The larger plan is to use the greenhouse to grow both winter vegetables and starts for the summer garden. Hopefully, with about 0.25 acre in cultivation I can produce enough for year ‘round home consumption plus extra for sale. I will also need to set up a propagation area to grow the large number of ornamental and native plants that I will need to acquire to complete my landscaping projects.

En route to the greenhouse, I passed my Helleborus foetidus with expectant green buds,

and the three, six inch high Sarcoccocca confusa loaded with tiny white blooms, well worth getting down on my knees to smell.  

These small things do not yet fill my garden in the way that I wish they would, but then every journey must start with a single step.

The drab moth had been on my bathroom wall for several days before I poked it to determine if it was really alive.  It was pressed flat to the tile, approximately 2 inches across, and marked with a distinct pattern of brown waves and scallops on its forewings with a thin white border of white on the edges.  The color and complexity of the pattern rendered it compatible with pine bark, but noticeably out of place on blue-and-white bathroom tile. Yet, I’d seen these kinds of moths many times before, and learned to call them ‘miller moths’ in accordance with my southern mother’s terminology. 

I pulled out my thin paperback moth guide, Macromoths of Northwest Forests and Woodlands (Jeffrey Miller, Paul Hammond USDA Forest Service, FHTET-98-18, 2000) and flipped through the pages until I found something closely resembling the specimen at hand. It was, I concluded, a barberry looper moth (Coryphista meadii), with a caterpillar revealed on bugguide.net to look just like the gray and white loopers with red heads that I had observed on my Berberis thunbergii Crimson Pygmy planted in June shortly before it became a network of defoliated twigs.

It was an ah-ha moment. We had had no barberries on the property before this, and yet suddenly here was a moth that looked like one I’d seen all my life suddenly taking on a new aspect completely unbeknownst to me. I’d never even thought of what its caterpillars looked like, but now I knew its life cycle and suddenly, it affected me and my ambitions. Presumably there might be other plants in the family Beriberidaceae on the property that might have harbored them, or perhaps the eggs came in from the nursery supplier, for of the four plants that I bought, only this one was eaten by loopers.

I am reminded of the song about the hole in the bottom of the sea, where sat a frog on a log, with a bump and a wart and a hair and a flea and so on until the microscopic world had been achieved on that one frog. Then the kids singing the song gave up for lack of ideas beyond bacteria. How little did I realize when I was a child that I was singing a song that celebrated biodiversity. 

The other day, while removing the plastic clips that hold electric fence tape from a series of fence posts, I noticed that nearly every clip harbored a tiny, pale brown spider.  The little beasts were flattened to where they could lie almost two-dimensional on any surface, and apparently liked the narrow space of the clip designed to hold the polytape because of the shelter it offered. As I worked to pull the clips off one set of posts to move them to another, I witnessed a tiny arachnid paratrooper dropping from nearly every clip. Every other clip seemed to hold a small white package of spider eggs. I had created habitat in spite of myself. 

Of course, both moth and spider were probably here long before I was, and my surprise was merely that of my own unexpected discovery. Still, everyday that we open our eyes to the variety around us, we are richer for it. From mushrooms, to moths, to spiders, I am sure that this property has untold thousands of species I’ve yet to discover. But they don’t need my knowledge of them to validate their existence. They have every right to go on, even if they encroach on my world now and then.

Gardens generally don’t include a consideration of mushrooms. Nurseries offer a lush supply of perennials, shrubs, trees, groundcovers, bulbs and annuals, but I’ve yet to find a sign for the ‘fungi’ section. Mushrooms find you. They come with the territory for only they seem to know what conditions best suit them. Since I’m usually focused on the Plant Kingdom, my encounters with them are quite by surprise.  Today, for instance, I spied a large white mound in a place where I had nothing planted.  My radar registered it as garbage, until I got closer and realized it was a beefy-looking mushroom listing over on one side like a whale emerging from the waves. I don’t think it had been there two days ago, but here it was now, fully formed and even a bit past its peak, judging from the nibbles that had been taken out of it. Several others had also emerged from the leaves in the back ground forming a little white pod of ’shrooms prancing through my developing woodland glade.

Last week, I found what I believe to have been a shaggy mane mushroom that had emerged next the hose cache. There it was, already half-eaten, and I’d never even seen it before. Besides that, there were no others with it, just this four-inch tall white matchstick-shaped fungus jutting out of the earth. The following day I found but a fallen white stem that I would have mistaken for a stick except that I recalled the mushroom growing there from the previous day.

Sometimes, as I’m weeding or planting, I’ll notice threads of white or yellow mushroom hyphae clinging to the soil particles for dear life. Fungal mycelia have invaded my pile of woodchips and bark pieces, now four months into rotting. In September, a cloud of little white button

mushrooms covered the back of the pile, then vanished, but when I dig, I find the bark pieces clumped together by fragile white fibers. Thanks to action of these fungi, the wood pieces break down into into a richer and more nutritious mulch than what I started with earlier in the summer.

I’ve seen at least 10 different types of mushrooms so far, starting as far back as August when a rainshower brought them forth from the ground. I’ve heard that fungi-loving gardeners can now obtain fungi plugs that can be placed into pre-drilled holes in stumps and logs to create a personal ‘shroom garden. Now, your own chicken-of-the-woods crop is within reach. Given my ignorance, I’m still a little gun-shy though. Photographing these ephemeral creatures in their many forms is enough for now.

*** For those amateur mycologists who know mushrooms better than, please feel free to step foward and identify the ’shrooms that I could not!****

Places to acquire edible mushrooms for cultivation: 

http://www.fungi.com/plugs/plugs.html

http://www.gmushrooms.com/Plugs/index.htm

http://www.thymegarden.com/site/561124/page/2353037

http://www.groworganic.com/browse_384_Mushroom_Growing_Kits__Plugs.html?welcome=T&theses=6244736

OK, we’re not Vermont, but if you squint your eyes on a gloomy day in Western Washington, you can find color out there besides green. Anyway, with some artistic contributions to the garden, you can certainly make the best of it.

Witch hazel (Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’)

Cherry leaves

Eastern cherry trees in the garden

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)

Himalayan blackberry (Rubus discolor) 

Red dahlias

Pyracantha koidzumii ’Victory’

Japanese blood grass (Imperata cylindrica ‘Red Baron)

Big leaf maple (Acer macrophylla)

Campanula and Japanese maple leaves