Herbs versus the animal kingdom

Salvia officinalis 'Tricolor'. Deer-resistant.

One garden that I maintain stands out above all others as the most challenging in the animal control department. My client feeds the deer in her backyard. I should say, my client feeds an entire Noah's ark of animals in her backyard. Rolling the wheelbarrow around the corner and down the path causes the rushing, clattering, crashing sound of mass departure.

Let me paint you a picture. Occasionally, I must defer to the skunk: if he is coming up the path, I do not continue down it. Sometimes, there are fawns asleep in the compost heap. And... I once witnessed a pair of juvenile woodchucks tearing through the yard. The second little fatty was in hot pursuit of the first, who had a treasure clutched in his jaws: one of those red rubber Kong dog toys, I am quite sure. Pure mayhem.

If it weren't for the fact that my client's dedicated husband always has his finger on the trigger of the deer repellent squirt bottle, there would be no garden at all.

The heaviest pressure is on a pair of small flower beds outside client's husband's office. Either he doesn't spray this area, or the stone-wall-resident woodchuck has grown to appreciate a meal spritzed with that nasty putrescent-egg-solids potion. Either way, these beds have been steadily grazed to the ground. Each year I replace the disappeared plants with something I think will be more critter resistant, and this season, I actually gained some ground.

They do not like herbs! While my old standbys for deer-resistant plants - beebalm, yarrow, and ornamental salvia - have all been sampled, enjoyed, and subsequently cropped, the lavender and culinary sage appear to still - in autumn! - be in possession of all of their parts.

Lavandula angustifolia (English lavendar),
resistant to dog-toy-toting woodchucks.

Just before frost, there was flame

A Candle: California poppy bud

A Campfire: Calendulas

A little blue

This time of year catches me unawares when it comes back around, as if my heartbreak isn't predictable. It's not just the deeply cloudy skies, or the way the hours of daylight quickly diminish like sand in an hourglass, or that for a whole summer I spent each day - from coffee to cocktail - in someone's garden.

I watched my three friends - two black swallowtail caterpillars and a banded orbweaver spider - feed until well past the frost date. Wiser and wilder than I, they packed it in safely before our first real hard freeze. I checked on them obsessively until each disappeared, hoping I'd find the place where one would build a chrysalis or egg case. I cried when I lost track of them. I have always cried at goodbyes, and somehow, at this time of year, I feel closer to the others who live in my garden than just about anyone else.

I look for ways to feel like I still have a purpose. Tactics that work are physical - lots of yoga classes and hikes. I try to - and do - feel grateful that I have a job that allows me so much time off. I appreciate that I am in tune with the seasons, and that it's okay to feel sad about death.

And I remind myself that what I'm witnessing isn't only death, but also dormancy. I read once that a chipmunk stores far more seeds in his hollow than he should ever need, and then hibernates atop a great mound of them, which I imagine are so deep and so old that they perhaps ferment like compost and give off a little heat. This cheers me immensely.

Cotton

The only way I can describe cotton flowers is: Tattooed. The petals are a freckled complexion, and the husk they emerge from is an ink-speckled scroll.

Matt brought two seedlings home from a friend at the farmers market in the spring. We are well north of the cotton belt, but of course growing zones and geography do not stop the inquiring mind.

The seedlings waited in static perfection under the grow lights, forever. We planted them, and they went out of sight, out of mind, dwarfed by peppers and eggplants. Then one day a flower peaked out, and we were entranced. I did not get any pictures of the pink ones, probably because I was chasing the woodchuck with a pitchfork. Oh well.

I would have loved to see the pods split and the cotton poof out, but our season is apparently too short, even when it's long. So oh well, again.

Weeks after peppers reached their knee-high potential and eggplants slumped under weighty fruit production, the cotton stood up tall, with straight strong stems. It was purple and cream and green, and sort of built like a praying mantis, with slim angles and soldered joints.

Happy Halloween

This is me, dressed up as a polyphemus larva!

Just kidding. Yesterday, Matt found this caterpillar on our hike. It is Antheraea polyphemus (I had some ID help from a professional). If it hurries up and pupates for the long winter, it will turn into a beautiful, brown giant silk moth in the spring.

Long, tall, and purple: Three fabulous flowers

Ageratum, probably self-seeded from 'Dondo Blue'.
Grows to about 24" high.

I pretty much threw a temper tantrum this year when my tall cutting ageratum seedlings all got damping off and croaked. I maintained my funk for two months, and then all of a sudden, little baby ageratums starting sprouting in the garden! One, two, ten, two hundred! The freakin' things were everywhere, having (apparently) seeded themselves quite successfully the year before. They waited to germinate until July, and I feared they wouldn't mature before frost. But they took off gangbusters and made a pillowy blue-and-purple late summer display.

Ageratum, probably seeded from 'Red Sea'

This honeybee passed away on a blue powderpuff, in the night.

During my extended conniption over not having tall ageratum, I searched at local nurseries. This caused much cussing and stomping of feet. Five inches may be a fashionable height for spike heels, but it is an abominably dumpy height for ageratum, if you ask me.

Instead of ageratum, I found something I'd never grown: Lavandula multifida. It's the lavender that smells like a skunk! Who wouldn't want one? It has soft, ferny, blue green foliage, and rather unobtrusive flowers that go on blooming forever. I really like it.

Lavandula multifida

Also during my ageratum anxiety period, I dug up little Verbena bonariensis volunteers with their clods of soil and poked them in the garden hither and thither, like a mad squirrel-woman caching her snacks. I am at a point in my life when I have to have tall, skinny purple flowers everywhere. Or else my garden is all for naught.

Verbena bonariensis blooms, bobbing high above
a patch of purple sage and dark purple nicotiana.

I heart garlic

I planted garlic this week - 15 different kinds, about 120 cloves altogether. Not nearly as many as in years past, but this year space is limited. All of the garlic is our own seed, except for the purple Italian, a gift from a friend.

To read about how I plant garlic, see Garlic Harvest 2010.

Above, Laika lords over the strawbale. I mulch garlic beds with six inches of straw for a few reasons... First, without mulch, it is very convenient for a squirrel to yank out a garlic clove and pop in a peanut (and a squirrel can do that approximately 120 times in half as many seconds). Mulch also keeps cloves from heaving out of the freezing and thawing ground over winter. And mulch will keep weeds down next summer. Here are all the kinds we keep.

Whistlestop

Brown tempest

California

Carpathian

Chinese red and white

Colorado black

Continental

German red

German white

German extra hardy

Legacy

Music

German porcelain

Purple Italian

Romanian red

Garlic makes the heart grow fonder.

(For further good instructions on planting garlic, see Curbstone Valley Farm's Planting Garlic post.)