IT’S ALL HAPPENING IN MY GARDEN

My garden is starting to look like a September garden.

Many of the marigolds have started going to seed.  I’ve started collecting the seed.  I’ll likely get enough to fill a bucket.

Did you know you’re not supposed to plant small marigold plants (several inches high with small crimson and orangey-yellow flowers) in the same yard with large marigold plants (much taller with large lemon-yellow flowers).  You’ll get a hybrid that is a large woody plant with small crimson and orangey-yellow flowers.  Well, I did that.  I didn’t suspect anything would happen.  Now I have almost none of the regular large marigold plants left.  What I have are maybe fifty or a hundred of the hybrids, some of which are very tall.  Mostly more than knee high.  A few chest high!!!  The tallest are growing where I have compost.  The hybrids tend to be very bushy in shape.

I do think that the hybrid is an improvement over either of its predecessors.  There are far more flowers per plant.  And while I guess I prefer lemon-yellow, I don’t really care which.  After years of planting this hybrid I guess I have a plant that is very well adapted to the hard clay in my yard (heh, heh).

Let me add here that I have the marigolds planted partway along two sides of the house so you don’t start visualizing whole fields of them.

I’m glad things turned out the way they did.  I guess the moral of the story is this – things could turn out better than you could ever imagine.

Or not?  Well, here I am disturbing the balance of nature big time in my garden.  The tall hybrids are ideal habitat for praying mantises who like:  (1) to be a few feet up off the ground, and (2) to be able to snap at any flying insects coming to the flowers.  Which means that my lovely garden is not so butterfly-friendly. 

I’ve been conserving mantis egg cases when I find them.  Of course they are beneficial insects, keeping the garden free of pests.  But I think that this year I will be moving all the egg cases out of the marigold area into some other area of the yard that has no flowers blooming later in the season when the mantises are big enough to prey on the butterflies.

Whether that will work or not I don’t know.  Mantises can fly.  For sure many will still find their way to the marigolds.  Which is good because I need a few?  But not too many.

I wish the praying mantises could kill the Japanese beetles which are voracious pests.  I found out why they can’t.  I watched a standoff between a Japanese beetle and a praying mantis many weeks ago.  The mantis moved very, very slowly in the direction of the beetle that just sat facing the mantis.  This inching forward took perhaps a minute or two.  Time stood still.  Then faster than the eye can see, the mantis struck.  Thud!  Then – nothing.  The beetle’s hard shell was impenetrable?  The mantis wandered off.  The beetle, realizing the coast was clear, stretched out its many legs (that had been curled under it for protection?), and started to wander off, too.  Interesting that the beetle could sense the mantis, curl up, and protect itself.  Interesting that the beetle could not defend itself against me.

I should add that the hybrid marigold is fairly resistant to the Japanese beetles, unlike its large marigold predecessor which would get demolished.  The beetles like to sit on top of the hybrids, but don’t seem to damage them.  And when they’re all congregated like that, makes it easy to spot ’em.

I’ve been trying to change the balance of nature by weeding out the trumpet vine (with small trumpet-shaped vermillion flowers) that grows everywhere and makes a tangled mess.  But this year I planted morning glories, and somehow ended up with more trumpet vine in that area than morning glories.  I think because the leaves are so similar, I left the trumpet vine thinking it was morning glory. 

But that turned out alright anyway.  The hummingbird likes the trumpet vine flowers – a lot.  I can look out my window over that bit of garden.  Once in a while the hummingbird will come zooming in, then dart at the flowers for nectar.  One time I was watching, I saw it perch a couple of times on plants to rest – I never saw that before.  (The hummingbird does not perch while feeding.)  I wondered if the hummingbird knew pure happiness, perched there in quiet sunshine surrounded by flowers.  What is even better is to be out in the garden and have a hummingbird come by close enough so I can hear its wings humming.

I very much like to see the goldfinch perched on the tall coneflowers, busily pecking out the seeds.  The goldfinch is not really gold, but lemon-yellow with black trim.  That’s the male.  The female has a greenish cast to her back and so is closer to gold.  I had almost weeded the coneflower thinking it was a weed.  Well, it is a weed but I’d intentionally put the coneflower seed there, seed I’d gathered from my drain field meadow.  Just didn’t recognize it at first.  That turned out well.

When I saw my second katydid (strange insect that looks like a leaf), I wondered at the marvelous balance of nature that allows the katydid chorus to play in the evenings.  The katydids are mostly unseen up in the trees, playing their tune.  It is such a soothing cadence.  And they do it without any help from me.

-2008-

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