Bursting all over the place

Some of the perennials are waking up and a few flowers are blooming. Garden season has begun again. I spent some time pulling grass from around the flowers today, in the cold. The temperature here did not venture far above 40F today, and snow was falling this morning when we left for church.

Try as I might, I have not been able to remove the violets from my plantings. I admit, I have not tried very hard.












Wild blue lupines are more fickle than I had thought. I planted many, from plugs, in fall 2006. Few survived the winter, and fewer still are sprouting now. However, I have seen lupines thirve through drought, fire, and being nibbled by deer. One thing it appears that they cannot abide is loamy, rich soil. They are only persisting in a sandy barren corner of the yard that barely supported grass when we bought the place.













This native relative of the yucca wins the contest for best name: rattlesnake master. I adopted this fellow at a native plant swap in Kalamazoo last year.


















Lest you think we grow only pretty flowers, here is my May/June salad. I bought several packets of different greens in fall 2006 for $0.10 each. I did not get around to planting them in 2007, and so I dumped them all this year.










This is the parent to a plant that I am propogating from seed, I like to so much. Almost all the hawkweeds in Michigan are invasive exotics, a major weed of lawns and a minor (usually minor) weed of natural areas. However, there is one native: hairy hawkweed. The flowers are nondescript and yellow, but the foliage is a basal rosette of very fuzzy leaves.









Here you can get a little perspective on the small size of these young shoots. The small plants are one of our native Silphiums: cup plant. The taller plant is a daffodil that has not yet bloomed. In a few weeks, the cup-plant will tower over the daffodil, and by August the cup-plant will tower over me.















And lastly, I have a picture of another non-native, and one of my wife's favorite flowers: bleeding heart. (The flower of liberals?) And in the background you can see something else in the yard.

Signs of Spring

Finally.

Signs of spring.

While walking through a remnant prairie is Branch County on Tuesday I was buffeted by cold winds and pelted with sleet. But the sound in a nearby wetland was unmistakable. Frogs. Amidst the western chorus frogs, Pseudacris triseriata, which sound like many fingers run along many combs, I heard my namesake - the spring peeper, Pseudacris crucifer (or "Pcrucifer" for short).

The second sign of spring came yesterday, Thursday, in the cackle and roar of a grass fire. This particular fire was set by me and several of my colleagues to stimulate native grasses that had been planted and to set back the non-native grasses and weeds.

In the garden the tulips and daffodils are up but not blooming. We have a few crocuses in bloom, but fewer than last year. They do not seem to find our garden amenable to naturalizing.

One new sign this spring: a "For Sale" sign in the front yard. Now all we need is a spring buyer.

Goats and Permaculture

I suppose I really should split those two topics into two blog posts, especially given the reputation that goats have for eating all things garden related, but both are on mind, and so here they are today, on my blog.

First the goats. Why goats? Well, it starts with turkeys. Turkeys?! Stay with me here. For Christmas I purchased for my wife a book that I wanted to read, I mean, that I thought she would like to read. (OK, like you've never done that.) The book was (still is) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, who is one of my favorite living nonfiction writers. And this book was about a couple passions of mine: gardening, eating local, and heirloom varieties. I had always thought of heirloom varieties as plants, but Barbara and her family raised rare "heirloom" turkeys. Kathy and I (she really did like the book) discussed heirloom plants, and the topic ranged over to "if we had some land." If we did not live in the city, what livestock could we keep. Not cows (too big). Not pigs (too smelly). Maybe chickens (still smelly). Turkeys could be cool, when the kiddos can defend themselves. And then Kathy mentioned goats. Goats? Don't goats have horns and are mean? (OK, I admit it, my sum total knowledge of goats was from petting zoos and Saturday morning cartoons.) No, Kathy said, we could do dwarf goats and milk them, and make our own cheese. I decided to look them up on the internet and immediately came across a site with pictures of baby dwarf goats, and I was hooked. Since then I have bought two books, including The Year of the Goat, 40,000 miles and the quest for the perfect cheese by Margaret Hathaway, and our house will be going up for sale next week so we can buy a goat farm, I mean, shorten my commute and grow more vegetables - and goats.

Permaculture is a new word I only recently learned. My friend Eric, from Madison, WI, mentioned it off-hand the other day. He mentioned it in one of those ways like, "Can you believe so-n-so did not even know what permaculture is." Ha ha we both laughed. So I got some books from the library. Apparently it is a system of using ecological principles in designing gardens that combine flowers, native plants, and vegetables all in the same garden. Very good. Sounds like a good idea. But as I read on in Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway, I got increasingly annoyed. Toby seemed to have serious issues with the movement to plant large areas of lawn to native plants for wildlife. His critiques were many, but what annoyed me is that here we have two uber-progressive gardeners, one with native plants and vegetables, and one with only native plants, and the veggie guy just rips into the native plant guy. I mean, come on. Most Americans are still buying chemical fertilizer to make their lawn grass monoculture a more unnatural shade of green. We are allies, not enemies.

Maybe I am a little sensitive on the point since progressives in general seem determined to demonize those who are not pure feminist or pure civil rights. We should be celebrating the fact that half of the country can't decide between a black man and white woman. Similarly, we should celebrate native plants and sustainable vegetalbe gardening wherever they are found.

Budburst a Blast

For a year or two now I have thought that someone should put together a website where people all over the country could record when certain plants start blooming. The website could then map all these records, and we could watch the wave of blooms move north. The information could help scientists document the effects of climate change on different plants in different places.

Now someone has done it! Check out Project Budburst - which starts accepting records on February 15 - not that I expect anything in my garden tro start blooming until April...

Help me get the word out. The more folks add their bloom times to the maps, the better we can watch the wave of blooms move north. I plan to include my kids; and there are resources for teachers to use the project in their classes.

Yard Redemption - Hope

Can a yard, a city lot in small town America no less, be redeemed? Is it right to speak of saving, delivering, restoring land? I'd like to continue to explore those questions.

We cannot turn back the clock. What has been lost, at a landscape scale, can only be restored at a landscape scale. But what about the scale of a yard?

Inch for inch, a native wildflower garden can contain greater plant diversity than most intact prairies and savannas. My yard, for instance, has 80 different native plants on less than 500 square feet. Animal and fungal diversity are probably lower than an intact savanna, but are still far higher than my neighbors' deserts of mowed grass.

I suppose "success" depends on comparison. A restored yard does not reach the same ecological value as a native savanna, but is far superior to the typical American yard.

But is it "redemption?" I suppose that depends on what we mean by "redemption" and whether that applies to land or only people?

Yard Redemption - Maybe Not

Can a yard, a city lot in small town America no less, be redeemed? Is it right to speak of saving, delivering, restoring land? I'd like to continue to explore those questions.

Something special has been lost. That much is clear from the accounts of early Euro-American settlers of Michigan in the previous two posts. The landscape today is picturesque, pastoral. But it is tamed, simplified, and less varied.

Restoration efforts on public and private land are making strides to preserve remaining pieces of savanna on the scale of tens or even hundreds of acres. But the miles of unbroken functioning ecological communities have been altered; there is no turning back the clock, at least not by human hands. And in that sense what has been lost is truly lost. When we preserve a remaining bit of savanna, we preserve not just many dozens of kinds of grasses and wildflowers, insects, birds, and other critters. We likely are preserving hundreds, thousands, millions of fungi and bacteria that make up that system. Planting a few plants back into a yard will not bring back all the insects, bacteria, and fungi that interacted to make the savanna truly healthy.

Restoration always takes second fiddle to preservation.

Does this mean that a yard cannot be redeemed? No. The damage cannot be fully undone - but it can be healed, taken a significant way toward being undone.

In my next post: why I am hopeful.

Yard Redemption - Oak Savanna Lost

Can a yard, a city lot in small town America no less, be redeemed? Is it right to speak of saving, delivering, restoring land? I'd like to continue to explore those questions.

This account of Hubbard is by no means unique, although it is perhaps the most elegant. My out-of-state readers probably envision rusting and shuttered factories as the current landscape of Michigan. There are shuttered factories (and working factories), but the landscape, especially the 90% of the landscape that is rural, is nice. Corn and soybean fields are intermixed with hay, pastures, and woodlots. Compared to Iowa or Illinois, field sizes are smaller more often bordered by wooded hedgerows. Residences are more frequent, and basic landscaping is common. Fewer wetlands have been drained in Michigan compared to other states. Michigan has both an East Coast and a West Coast and has more shoreline than any other state in the lower 48. More coastline than California. More coastline than Florida. Michigan is an undiscovered secret.

But it is not an "orchard" of majestic oaks scattered with small prairies and "gemmed" with wildflowers.

I want to continue to stress what has been lost, and continue with pioneer accounts from Kim Chapman's thesis.

"The annual fires burnt up the underwood, decayed trees, vegetation, and debris, in the oak openings, leaving them clear of obstructions. You could see through the trees in any direction, save where the irregularity of the surface intervened, for miles around you, and you could walk, ride on horse-back, or drive in a wagon wherever you pleased in these woods, as freely as you could in a neat and beautiful park." [Van Buren 1884, describing the oak openings settlers saw passing through the southern tiers of counties into Calhoun County]"

To-day for the first time, I saw the meadows on fire. They are of vast extent, running far into the woods like the firths of a lake; and as the wild grass, which they supply in the greatest profusion, furnished the new settler with all the hay he uses for his stock, they are burnt over thus annually to make it tender. These fires, traveling far over the country, seize upon the largest prairies, and consuming every tree in the woods, except the hardiest, cause the often-mentioned oak openings, so characteristic of Michigan scenery. [Hoffman 1835, recounting his impression of a December fire]"

Today we would call the oak openings, "oak savanna." Only 0.02% of the original oak savanna remains today. In other words, for every 4 square miles of savanna, an area the size of my yard (1/2 acres) remains. Enough has been lost to say that the landscape of savanna is lost. Enough remains that we can study it, replicate it, restore it and redeem our land, even our yard.

Yard Redemption - What was Lost

Can a yard, a city lot in small town America no less, be redeemed? Is it right to speak of saving, delivering, restoring land? I'd like to explore those questions over the next few posts.

We could start with the sorry state of the modern American lawn, and my lawn in particular. This is perhaps as much a shortcoming of religion and lawn care. Instead, let's begin with what was lost. What was this land before it was commodified, parceled, monetized, plowed, graded, and covered with lawn grass?

Kim Alan Chapman quotes many early accounts of the prairies and savannas of southern Michigan in his Masters Thesis entitled "An Ecological Investigation of Native Grassland in Southern Lower Michigan" from Western Michigan University, 1984.

"The ordinary character of the "openings" is that of a majestic orchard of stately oaks, which is frequently varied by small prairies, grassy lawns, and clear lakes. These magnificent groves were, until within a few years, kept free from underbrush by the passage through them of annual fires, allowing successive growths of herbage to spring up luxuriantly, covering the surface with a profusion of wildflowers and verdure...

The variety so essential in a landscape, of woodland, glade and sheets of water, are here combined in a manner which seems the result of art, but which is not less truly inimitable. It is difficult to resist the impression that we are surveying an old abode of civilization and of tasteful husbandry. It resembles those exquisite pictures of park scenery, where the vision roams at will among the clumps of lofty oaks, and over glades, gemmed with flowers..." from Hubbard 1840.

Can a yard be redeemed?