Poo for You, Too, & The Beard of Jupiter

My good friend Patti says if you're a parent of very small children, your real job isn’t raising kids. It’s managing poop.  Specifically, keeping poop where it’s supposed to be (in the diaper or the toilet) and out of the places it’s not supposed to be, (the toilet seat, the bathroom floor, the carpet, the bed, the walls, the car, you name it). If the previous sentence horrified you, I’ll guess you don’t have children. Any parent who has seen a child through diapers and potty training knows exactly of what I speak. They’ve seen it, they’ve cleaned it, and then they’ve eaten a big plate of meatloaf afterwards. No sweat. New parents deal with poop.  A lot of it.

It goes without saying that when my twin boys graduated out of diapers, I believed that my days of being up-close-and-personal with poop were through.

I was wrong.

Whilst tucking new plants into the garden beds this season, I’ve had a realization about organic gardening. I see, now, what it’s really all about. You guessed it:  managing poop.

Now you composters out there will beg to quibble with me, and I get it. If you’re creating your own Gardener’s Gold out of kitchen scraps and grass clippings, then I commend you. And I envy you. Because you don’t have to deal with poop.

But if you’re like me, and you’re purchasing organic soil amendments and fertilizers at the nursery, then you’re dealing with the dirty stuff. It doesn’t matter what they call it: worm castings, bat guano, chicken droppings, cow manure. It’s all poop. And if you want to get your plants off to a really nice start (without chemical fertilizers) you’re going to have to get your hands in it. Or at least your gardening gloves.

Which is why, if you’d been eavesdropping on my gardening efforts recently, you would have heard me murmuring  the strangest  incantation as I christened some freshly-dug planting holes.  It went “Here’s some poo for you….and here’s some poo for you… and here’s some poo for you, too!” 

My favorite poo sources this year have been Gardner and Bloome Starter Fertilizer, whose first ingredient is “dried poultry waste.” 

(Though this product has little smell, if you leave it out in the rain, like I did, there is no mistaking what's in it. Don't try it at home.)

Then, to amend the soil I return to the hole-- because our soil in Northern Nevada contains lots of clay and doesn't drain-- I’ve used Kellogg All Natural Garden Soil (containing the powerful triumvirate of “composted chicken manure,” “worm castings,” and “ bat guano.”)

Both products above are OMRI listed (by the Organic Materials Review Institute) which means they are certified for use in organic food production.

So, what have I been planting since the yarrow and gaura adventure? Well, one of my favorites, actually. A fantastic perennial called centranthus ruber. Luckily, most people call it red valerian, or, even more poetic, jupiter’s beard. Here it is in all its cosmic loveliness:

Attributes? It’s fairly drought tolerant, for starters, though it does bloom more profusely with a bit more water. The blooms, as you can see, are large and showy. They're also long lasting, and boast a color somewhere between hot pink and cherry red (unless you get the white variety). Butterflies love them. Here is a photo I snapped of a lone, full-grown plant at a local restaurant:

Here it is growing with catmint in our former garden:

And here it is, cheerfully cohabitating with California poppy. 



from seattlepi.com

 
 My favorite thing about this perennial, if you must know, is its long, long season of interest. For you non-gardening types, that means it looks great for months. You see, there are lots of other summer bloomers that will put out nary a leaf until May around here. Jupiter’s beard, however, starts making a nice green mound around March, and is usually in full bloom by late April. Amazingly, the blooms continue through May, June, and even July and August if it doesn’t get too hot (as in, over 100 degrees).

Now, one caveat: you must deadhead, or remove spent flowers, to keep this plant blooming through the summer. Truth is, most plants simply won’t go through the trouble of making new flowers once their flowers have set seed. So your job is to thwart the seed-making process at every turn, snipping the flowers before they dry. Deadheading also prevents jupiter’s beard from spreading itself about your garden willy-nilly, which it is known to do. A jupiter's beard bloom is ready to snip when you start to see a lot of its yellow skeleton, which looks like this:




Those white fluffy things in the photo are seeds, so this bloom was probably left a little too long. When you snip, you'll notice the plant usually has two baby flowers waiting to put on a show once the parent bloom is gone (like kids throwing a party when their parents leave the house). Here is a picture showing the parent bloom and the two babies waiting in the wings.

This is how I positioned the three jupiter's beard in my garden bed before planting:

And here they are after I planted them:

(Ignore the little purple sage in the lower left corner, we'll get to him later.) Finally, let's return quickly to our garden map to see where we've arrived. Here is the complete plan:

And here are the three jupiter's beard within the scheme:

Here are the plantings I've posted to date, including yarrow (light pink) and gaura (white). Our water feature is in black.

And on we go.

Up next: designer roses.

Bayer and the Bees

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had a tremendous amount of luck luring good insects, or what garden-types call “beneficials” into my garden. Aphids? Got ‘em. Thrips? Absolutely. Earwigs? Check. But Ladybugs? Mmmm….not many. Green lacewings? Don’t think so. Tachinid flies? Nope.

My most recent issues of Garden Gate and Horticulture magazines both boast articles detailing the wonders of these elusive critters, and their ability to go munching through a garden, consuming vast quantities of bad bugs, while leaving your leaves, flowers and vegetables unscathed. Beautiful.

The only bug I’ve ever been able to entice en masse is bees (my favorite animal). And even on that score I have flopped in fairly dramatic style.

I blame Bayer. Yes, the company that makes the aspirin. They also happen to make gardening products like Tree and Shrub Protect and Feed, a systemic fertilizer and insecticide. The bottle I bought looked like this:

Now, my mother, who earned a Masters degree in marketing, always told me I was a sucker for advertising (to save my feelings she called me a “perfect consumer.”) Guilty as charged. I took one look at the Bayer bottle and my mind was made up: I wanted my trees and shrubs to look like the lush, right-hand side of the tree on the label, not the left-hand side. And if I failed to “Protect & Feed” my yard Bayer-style, I would end up with yellow, insect-ridden plants in return for my negligence. A shameless scare tactic on the part of Bayer, no doubt, but as a new gardener, I was powerless in the face of it.  I handed over a hefty share of hard-earned money, and took my new wonder product home.

The first indication that something was amiss came in the form of a raw, sore throat I developed after spending a good hour mixing the product in my watering can and sprinkling it on my favorite plants. A quick examination of the bottle showed the insecticide was called imidacloprid.

Afraid for my health, I did a bit of web research and discovered that, according to a report compiled by a team of universities, imidacloprid (a pesticide modeled after nicotine) is only “moderately toxic.” No cases of human poisoning had yet to be reported.

Somehow, I was only moderately relieved. It occurred to me that maybe, if inhaling the product bothered me-- a full-grown human-- then perhaps the earthworms I hoped were living in my soil would not survive having the stuff poured directly over their naked, wriggly bodies. If I had to identify the moment I began to shift my loyalties toward organic gardening, this was it.

But the real clincher came later, when my June 2009 issue of Horticulture magazine arrived. Inside was a brief piece on pollinators by an east coast Master Gardener named Peter Garnham. Discussing the colony collapse disorder (CCD) decimating the global honeybee population at the time, Garnham said “A combination of stress and the insecticides imidacloprid and fipronil is the likely cause of CCD.” More web research revealed that the jury was still out, but that some people, most notably French beekeepers, believed imidacloprid was responsible for the massive bee die-off in the mid 1990s, leading the French to ban the product for certain uses in 1999.
      
It was about this time I suffered my first bout of full-blown gardener angst. I couldn’t stop thinking about a rose in my yard that I’d treated with the Bayer product. It was a John Cabot climbing rose, and, at that very moment, it was absolutely covered in brilliant pink blooms. It was also, during most hours of the day, positively swarming with bees. This is what it looked like back then, in all its glory:

If there was one thing worse than the thought of cutting the blooms off my rose, it was the way I felt watching the bees, eager and oblivious, as they bobbed about the flowers, sipping the tainted nectar that might spell their doom.

So cut I did.  Wielding my beloved Corona bypass pruners, I lopped off every last bud and flower. It was a tragic, poignant, moment. You would have been on the edge of your seat. Imagine me, pruners in hand, while the mournful notes of Bohemian Rhapsody played in the background:
  

Mommaaaaa…..just maimed a rose.
Pulled my gardening gloves on,
snipped the flowers, now they’re gone.
(I was gonna stop there, but the rhymes just kept coming.

I know, it’s a gift)
Goodbye, little roses,

 I had to choose
 Between you and the bees--
 I can’t choose you!
(Stick with me, now, I’m going for broke)

 Bayer!  Ooooh oooooh  ooooh ooooooh

 Your noxious, nasty brew
 Now I wish I hadn’t bought it at all.
 Carry on!  Carry on!
 Let’s all go organic
 ‘Cause anyone can see
 The best way is organic……
 For bees.

Today, instead of Bayer’s fertilizer and insecticide, I fertilize using compost, along with a stinky brown sludge known as “fish emulsion”. I think it’s basically putrefied fish remains in the form of a brown, smelly sludge. In other words, I’m using the same trick the Native Americans taught the pilgrims to get their crops to grow (and shoot, the pilgrims were so impressed, they teamed up with their teachers to slaughter enemy tribes) But where was I?  Ah yes, fish emulsion from a bottle. The stuff makes my flower beds reek like a Red Lobster dumpster for two days, but it offends not one single worm or bee. (I can’t speak for my neighbors). 

I’m also poring over magazine articles about “beneficial” bugs and dreaming about getting in on that natural bad-bug-beating action. This year I’ll try planting more of the specimens they supposedly love (dill, parsley, coriander, daisies) and see if my luck improves. Stay tuned!