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| The Mother of All Crepe Myrtles was surrounded by Buckwheat for a time, but the first frost slew the intrepid Buckwheats and their seed. |
We had enough cold nights to change the leaves of the trees and start them falling. But now we have warm days and a long steady rain.
Noting our weather and still-soft soil, the gardening companies are sending me frantic messages to buy their plants at Great Depression prices. However, the bloom is off the rose, as they say, and the urge to plant anything remains dormant in me... for the season.
Instead, I am looking for ways to build the soil throughout this season and winter. One way is to let the deeply rooted plants and weeds continue reaching down and branching out. Hog Peanuts are green and robust - let them store more fixed nitrogen in the soil and add their organic matter by growing.
Ornamental bushes look ragged and need a trim, but I do not want them to start growing, becoming vulnerable to the freezing nights. Instead I rake and collect leaves from the neighbors, for the empty spaces. I even have a group of cardboard boxes among the tallest Butterfly Bushes, where they will soften and soak into the soil over time.
People rake up leaves and throw them away - so I can recycle them. God lets them serve as mulch everywhere. When it comes to gardening, always bet on God's methods for renewal and fertility - not man's. The bags of peat moss say I should rototill the material into the soil, but the soil amendment can easily be spread like mulch and pulled down by soil creatures.
The sound of the street cleaner alerted me to the piles of crushed and soil-enhanced leaves stuck in the street. As everyone knows, the mower reduces leaves and allows them to decompose faster into the soil. One neighbor wisely does this for his lawn. Tires crush leaves the same way, condensing them while turning them into dusty fragments. Those are free fertilizer for the Mother of All Crepe Myrtles, which now has a pyramid of leaves and washed-off topsoil, resting under the drip line.
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| Buckwheat is like bagpipe music - great in small doses. |
Drip Line
And what is the drip line? Gardeners call the area under the branches of a tree or bush the drip line. Most of the roots will be found there, near the surface and deep below. In a sunny location, the drip line is where shade-loving plants thrive. Each year I put Caladiums under the Crepe Myrtle, with leaves matching the CM flowers. One neighbor burst into smiles talking about the matching CM and its carpet of bright leaves below.
We enjoy driving onto our cul-de-sac in the summer and seeing the Crepe Myrtle glowing with dense flower clusters.
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| Organic farming and gardening used to be called farming and gardening. |
The Rain Reminds Me
Whenever we have days of rain, the blessed event reminds me of how quickly we take Creation's bounty for granted. Our rain-barrels are full from the last rain. The new plants are getting ideal rain already, and the barrels overflow, so I take it for granted. During our drought season I was watering everything and hoping for a two-day rain.
As Luther said, "The Gospel rain moves on." Years ago, everyone took traditional congregations for granted. Whether someone attended an LCA, ALC, LCMS, ELS, or WELS service, the liturgy used the same Biblical wording and the same Creeds. Hymns were slanted toward one tradition or another, but the classic hymns were always sung. The ministers gave sermons - instead of coaching talks (Church Growth) or harangues about saving the world through the latest Left-wing methods (ELCA and "enlightened" Lutherans).
Now this Biblical, liturgical, hymn-singing, credal congregation (with sermons) is a rare bird. The above sects, which were once united in the basics, are divided by their frantic printing of new hymnals and new Bibles, which are terrific money-makers. Bibles and hymns are like owning mints, so the numbers of bad ones multiply. Fidelity to the Word gives way to Mammon. The shepherds sheepishly fall in line.
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| God has created many plants with long-lasting colorful leaves. Caladiums love the shade. |
Invest in the Rainfall with Organics
The rainfall, so easily taken for granted, can be captured and held by encouraging a larger biomass below the surface. Gabe Brown has shown that in farming by his use of cover crops. He captures large rainfalls without flooding and waste; he stores spare rainfall without crop failures.
Plant roots add most of the organic matter to the soil, and that feeds the soil life - fungi, bacteria, protozoa, earthworms, slugs, mites, sowbugs, spiders, and moles - to name just a few classes. Something alive has moisture, stores and uses water to live. If the biomass is considerable larger, the water and nutrition stored is also exponentially larger.
Many books present the soil as something inert and neutral, like the stuff they use when potting plants for sale. Therefore, anything else is an intruder. But that is utterly wrong. The soil teems with life, a complex Creating engineered to renew itself, even under the worst conditions.
The ideal garden enjoys a thriving biomass beneath, where the basic chemicals - like nitrogen - build proteins and pass on as waste, to be used again to build protein. The fragile fungal networks collect and distribute all these components - with water - to the plant roots, which pay with carbon credits. Is this not a miracle of Creation and engineering? - The fungus must have carbon to grow, and the plants have carbon to share for the components they need. A given fungus may work its magic with several plants at once and send out feelers for that rotting log resting on the soil, the sheet of bark forming a toad shelter, the dead bird in the tall grass.
Naturally - or Creationly - the garden with a thriving biomass below has an equally populated one above - insects, birds, butterflies, hawks, and bats will feast because the garden is toxin-free and left to the very creatures designed and managed to do their jobs.
John Sebastian was the gifted lead and composer for the Lovin Spoonfuls. I could not stomach the TV show, but the theme that he wrote and sang for it fits today's post.
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| Norma A. Boeckler graphic |
The Birds Left - Even the Squirrels - Welcome Back
During this warm season at the end of summer, not really autumn yet, when the birds are almost absent. Even the hungry Mourning Doves are barely to be seen. Squirrels - they stopped using the feeders too.
We had the new cold spell and rain, so I believe the birds who are here for the winter began coming back. I spotted a male Cardinal yesterday, and a solo baby squirrel showed up to eat most of the day.
That is another wonderful part of the dreaming season, when nothing is planted but the spring catalogues start arriving. The worse the weather gets, the better the bird-watching becomes.
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| Cardinals - by Norma A. Boeckler |
