Fun Creation Gardening Projects

 Butterfly weed blooms a long time and attracts butterflies.

Given the revelation that the Word created all things, it makes sense that there is an complex cooperation among all living sources and the rest of Creation - rain, snow, minerals. If the soil is poor, poverty grass will grow. If the ground is rich in microbes and soil creatures, sweet corn will flourish.

If pests invade the vegetation, beneficial insects and birds will reduce their population and build  restaurants to keep the destruction down and the babies fed. Beneficial creatures can detect the horror of pests destroying good vegetation. The beneficial population is dependent upon the pests, and they grow and recede in numbers to fit the occasion.

Your favorite sports team - like Notre Dame - has a second and third string? The beneficials have a second, third, and fourth string. A rose will have tiny flies waiting to plant their eggs in or near the pests. Various spiders hunt for food in the garden and build webs that block pests from the blooms, trapping them for food. Meanwhile the birds keep watch and nab fat, juicy pests for their children - pause to dab eyes - and themselves.

My first-aid kit is all natural, plagiarized from Creation. I capture rainwater in various barrels to build up and nourish new and favorite plants. I use wood mulch to keep moisture in the soil while encouraging soil creatures to frolic in the damp shade of the plants. I feed the birds, who love to spot the vegetation moving from the activity of pests. Starlings will march through the garden and suddenly flip mulch to find something to eat. They leave some fertilizer behind.

Wild strawberries look just like the plants we buy at the gardening center - only tinier. The strawberries spread on their own but also use FedEx Ground  and Air Freight (rabbits, squirrels, and birds) when the berry seeds have to be there immediately. Wild strawberries bloom early, even in deep shade, to begin staking out their property.

One of my major contributions to the rose garden was tree stumps, which encourage birds to rest on a watchtower, look for food, and pounce on insects. 

Wild strawberries are just a fraction of a sliver of God's Creation working in harmony.

The Starving Monarch Butterfly: A Parable of Creation

Adult Monarch Butterfly

Some people feel much better about Creation if the six 24-hour days are stretched out to six epochs. This allows a blending of Creation and evolution. Many have felt this was an ideal solution, but I have found a terrible flaw in their reasoning.

Of course, as any world religions professor (atheist) would be glad to propose, there are endless versions of Creation, some of them gross and disgusting. How this clarifies the situation is beyond my comprehension, but it is often said, to justify a modern mytho-poetic counterpart to what they call the Creation myth.

The foundational flaw is naturally the power and efficacy of the divine Word, which is not dependent upon time or the approval of man. Addressing Creation with science is like pounding tent-stakes with a manual lawmower. It can be done, awkwardly, but why even try?

I was planning a butterfly garden for myself and others when I went over the basics in my mind. When my mother lived with us in New Ulm, she spotted milkweed growing nearby and snagged some caterpillers for us to watch. We obtained a large glass jar, installed the caterpillers on a stick, and fed them milkweed leaves daily. The following shows what happened.

The ever fatter caterpiller weaves a jade coffin with golden nails, far more beautiful than the photo above. Here is a close-up -

 The so-called golden nails really look metallic.

He turns into liquid and reconstitutes himself as a Monarch butterfly. The wings show through and he emerges, ready to lay eggs on milkweed, the only food for the babies to eat as they grow.

Here is his problem with hybrid Creation. Lacking milkweed, the eggs hatch with nothing to eat. Some butterflies can use various plants for their young, but not Monarchs.

Monarch Notes:
Q. What do monarch butterflies eat?
A. Adult butterflies eat nectar and water. Sometimes liquid from fruits. Larvae eat only milkweed.

Thus the Monarch life cycle requires milkweed immediately available.

But, the rationalist objects, God would have created the milkweed first and the butterflies second, taking millions and billions of years.

Then we have hundreds of thousands of other objections, since all life requires other life-forms above and below them on the food pyramid. 

No, this does not prove Creation, which is revealed by the Word. But we can reverse engineer Creation - in a feeble way - and see these hundreds of relationships before our eyes.

The Monarch's life cycle is a miracle and that is God's work. We may see it any summer day, anywhere, but it is still astonishing to watch:

• Egg
• Caterpiller
• Tent-maker
• Goo - where the caterpiller turns inself into liquid!
• Butterfly.

Milkweed pods

 Milkweed in bloom

 Butterfly Weed is closely related to Milkweed, but not appealing to Monarchs. However, BW does attract other butterflies and is just as colorful as this photo shows.

Creation on Display in the Rose Garden

Pest-killing bugs swoop in to protect roses.
I am anxious to have a variety of hosts for these beneficial bugs - Daisies, Mints, and Borage.

When the Buckwheat was taller than the roses and the Japanese beetles were destroying blooms, I thought of renting a renting a bulldozer for a minutes. But no - Creation rights itself rather quickly.

Some local helpers came in with weed-whackers and leveled the Buckwheat and the invasive Bermuda grass. The season for Japanese beetles was over and rain came. On Sunday, three inches of rain fell.

The flowers on the Sunday altar were needing a home, so I took them to my favorite basic English class. They already had copies of Creation Gardening and Angel Joy, so they knew my perspective. Most are future nurses, plus one future doctor.

Everyone was quite excited to enjoy the fragrance of Mr. Lincoln, Easy-Does-It, Veterans' Honor, and other roses. Twelve students are women, three men. I talked about cause and effect - how to get good roses without spending much money. I knew beneficial bugs would lose them, so I talked about using fungicides when fungus was the single most important part of healthy, productive soil. "So why pump fungicide all over the roses when fungus - overall - is the best thing for them?" They decided I should bring roses to every class, which is easy at the end of the long growing season here.

 Bow before Empress Wu.

In the spring I was asked to buy the largest Hosta, Empress Wu, at a sale price - for fall delivery. I kept wondering about where that went. Yesterday the box came.

My ground-cover strategy for next year is to use beneficial bug plants like Mountain Mint to fill in large areas among the roses. Hostas are Hummingbird plants, which was proven when Mr. Gardener's plants in the backyard gave us regular visitors - the hummers even checked out the birdfeeders.

An ad for Hostas amused me, claiming the plants loved deep shade and semi-shade. That is a good example of selling for the empty spots in the yard - such as under the trees. In fact, Hostas are like roses. They love morning sun and afternoon shade. Like many plants, Hostas sleep in the first year, grow the second year, and leap in the third year.

Hostas will bloom in the deep shade and seem quite content there, but few people visit the back of our home. Those Hostas will move to the rose garden, with parent plants staying behind to produce more.

A Moliner who loves the outdoors has cautioned me to grow native plants, and I am one who likes to help the Monarchs. They need plants for their babies, so I am increasing the number of Butterfly Weed plants. Another great butterfly plant is Joe Pye Weed, which is more like a convention center for butterflies. Both are easy to grow and attractive plants.

Butterfly Weed is quite attractive and easy to grow.

All the ingredients are there for the Creation Gardener to use. Plant it and they will come - beneficial insects, butterflies, Hummingbirds, and many delightful animals.

 Joe Pye can be found in a taller form, which I like among the roses, and a smaller one - Baby Joe.

Butterfly Weed - For Monarch Butterflies, Butterflies in General. What I Learned in Crafts - Jackson Mulch Style

The Butterfly Weed is not related to the Butterfly Bush, except for the first name of the plants.

Instead, Butterfly Weed is related to milkweed, the mother's milk of Monarchs. As a relative, it is also food source for the Monarch larvae when they hatch,

I like most weeds, because each one has good, useful qualities, but this one is badly named. It does not have tiny flowers and is not an obnoxious pest (unlike Giant Hogweed).

It is really a perennial wildflower that many grow in their butterfly gardens.

I obtained three plants and some seed. The plants arrived yesterday, fairly dried out.

The previous night's rain provided two barrels of rainwater, so I first soaked the plants in rainwater for an hour. Immersed, not sprinkled.

I found a prominent spot where they would get water and sunlight and attention - near the Bee Balm.

The row was already mulched, so it only took a stab into the wet soil to open a place for all three.

Planting them was no chore, but I wanted them distinguished from the rest of the growing things, weeds included.

I have been doing something I learned from crafts class in school, long ago. I take a section of the newspaper, already soaked in rain, and tear a hole in the crease.

This gives me a circular area to fit around the tiny plant, a bib to let in water easily and yet smother the rambunctious weeds surrounding it.

The weeds think I am lazy and do not want to bend over and pull them out. That may be  true, but I also consider fresh, green, vibrant weeds to be future compost. The newspaper bib puts weeds in the dark and unleashes the forces of Creation on them. They wilt in the dark and fungi,bacteria, and earthworms turn them into the best soil amendment around.

Once the three bibs were installed and a few damp newspapers added for stray weeds, I opened a bag of shredded cyprus mulch on them and spread that around.

The next step is important. Although rain was hours away, I gently poured stored rainwater all over the mulch around each plant, using more rainwater to settle the soil around the fragile roots.

A wet plant in dry mulch is going to have the water wicked away by the dry wood, and that is wicked for the plant. But once soaked, the mulch will hold water for the newborn plant.

Gardening gurus will say wood throttles the nitrogen, so only use old, composted, wood. Wood will absorb nitrogen while rotting, but it will also give it up slowly later, a better bargain than the fear-mongers imagine. Pouring rainwater on the mulch provides an extra measure of nitrogen. When the roots become established they will insist on nitrogen from the fungi which are hungry for carbon.

The fungi are only too happy to absorb creatures rich in nitrogen.

At the center of any viable soil food web are plants. Plants control the food web for their own benefit, an amazing fact that is too little understood and surely not appreciated by gardeners who are constantly interfering with Nature’s system [Creation]. Studies indicate that individual plants can control the numbers and the different kinds of fungi and bacteria attracted to the rhizosphere by the exudates they produce...  

Soil bacteria and fungi are like small bags of fertilizer, retaining in their bodies nitrogen and other nutrients they gain from root exudates and other organic matter (such as those sloughed-off root-tip cells). Carrying on the analogy, soil protozoa and nematodes act as “fertilizer spreaders” by releasing the nutrients locked up in the bacteria and fungi “fertilizer bags.” The nematodes and protozoa in the soil come along and eat the bacteria and fungi in the rhizosphere. They digest what they need to survive and excrete excess carbon and other nutrients as waste. Left to their own devices, then, plants produce exudates that attract fungi and bacteria (and, ultimately, nematodes and protozoa); their survival depends on the interplay between these microbes. It is a completely natural system, the very same one that has fueled plants since they evolved [GJ - sic]. Soil life provides the nutrients needed for plant life, and plants initiate and fuel the cycle by producing exudates.

Lewis, Wayne;  Lowenfels, Jeff;  (2010-09-10). Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 199-206). Timber Press. Kindle Edition. 

Roses More Glorious
This morning I went out to do my paper route, putting the newspaper on the front porch of the Gardeners. I also placed a surprise near each Queen Elizabeth rose, one plaque for Bethany Joan Marie, and another for Erin Joy.

The KnockOut Roses are begging for cutting and pruning. The roses finish fast and start to fade, and they are not "self-pruning." Today the neighborhood mothers will each get a vase of roses - magenta, pink, white, and whatever the hybrid teas offer.

The result will be a new blooming, especially with so much rain and so many earthworms under the mulch.

Butterfly - by Norma Boeckler,
our artist who loves gardening, butterflies, and birds.