On mowing the lawn

(I doubt these guys are saving any gas.)

I've been mowing lawns since I was about 7 years old.  We would never let our young kids use dangerous power equipment like that today, but that was a different time.  The yard had to be mowed, my father worked long hours away from home, and my mother was busy with two younger siblings.  I've mowed lawns of houses in which I have lived in Ohio, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Oklahoma, and New York, so I have given the activity a great deal of thought.  In fact, thinking is mostly what one does while mowing the lawn.

I mow about a half acre here in Ithaca.  Until 5 years ago, I used a walk-behind mower and it took 3-3 1/2 hours to complete the job; after I got a riding mower, the job was reduced to a third the time, so it gave me less time to think than doing it the old way.  Now I feel rushed.  I have to cover a lot of mental ground in only an hour or so.  I used to have time to outline my classroom lectures in my head while on the mower.  Now, I can barely enumerate the names of my kids and grandkids before I am finished.  When we rented a farm in Monteverde, Costa Rica years ago, the peon who worked the place mowed our lawn by hand, with a machete.  Wow!  He must have gotten a lot of thinking done.  He always seemed like he had life pretty well figured out, and the abundant time he had cutting grass probably contributed to that.  We modern North Americans can cut the grass lickety-split with our fancy machines, and we are clueless about almost everything.  See the correlation?

One of the first issues in mowing is exactly how you are going to do the cutting.  What pattern will you adopt?  Most of us mowers probably go around in a square, shooting the cut grass to the outside of the mowed area.  That means you are going counter-clockwise, because the outlet on the mower is on the right side.  I have seen some mowers simply go back and forth, first shooting the grass to the outside, and then shooting it to the inside of the mowed area.  That seems bipolar to me.  Some of the vegetation gets cut once, some gets cut twice.  Some aficionados have recommended that I mow my lawn using swaths that are diagonal within the yard, rather than horizontal or vertical.  Pretty fancy, so it would look good from a Google Earth photo.  But I stick with the counter-clockwise square, so I can easily determine that the geometric shape remaining to cut is diminishing in size as I go.  I need that positive reinforcement.

I have learned a great deal of ecology while mowing lawns for five decades in half a dozen states.  I apply no chemical spray to my lawn, so it is a bit rough with all sorts of herbaceous biodiversity that tell me something about what is under my feet.  One learns where the wet areas and the dry areas in the yard are located.  This often comes in handy later if you want to plant flowers or trees in the yard.  I learn where the yellow jackets have their hole in the ground, after they find me first.  I know where the pickerel frogs, which like wet meadows, live in my yard.  I enjoy the beautiful orange hawkweed blooms, just before I whack their little heads off, and I have followed the health of the same patch of buttercups for years.  I am aware of when crickets hatch in August, and I then anticipate the female turkeys that bring their brood through the yard to feed on the abundant insects.  I see deer droppings, and dog poop, and the occasional raccoon pile.  I know where moles like to dig their tunnels, and I know where they never dare to try.  And I see the non-sentient seedlings of white ash trees that are forever trying to find a home in a yard that is cut to the ground repeatedly.

So I think and I examine and I reduce the height of the vegetation. I accomplish mental work, I learn some ecology, and I make the yard look better simultaneously.  It's multi-tasking, the manly way.  When the mower is put away in October for the winter, I feel like I have closed up my mobile office or my lab for the season, and I truly look forward to all the mental stimulation that next May will bring.  Next time you have this chore to do, focus on nature's classroom that is all around you, and try to enjoy the relative solitude the job provides.  And remember, don't drink and drive, or try to send text messages as you negotiate that counter-clockwise square.

I hate irises

(Just look at this cheap, gaudy flower.  Disgusting.)

I am an avid gardener.  The action of putting a seed in the ground and watching what it becomes is truly amazing, and you don't have to pay for college when it grows up.  In fact, if it is a vegetable, you rip it out of the soil when it matures and you eat it.  Pretty cool.  If it is a non-edible flowering plant, you watch it grow until the day it begins to flower, and you admire it, or smell it, or brag about it.  But there are some flowering plants that are common in human gardens that I don't like at all.  I hate irises, for example, and peonies and gladiolas.

I have long known which flowering plants were on my hate-list; this list is many years old.  But what the heck is this aversion to certain plant varieties or species all about?  After all, I find all living organisms truly interesting and biologically beautiful, including the tick that causes Lyme disease and the mosquito that carries malaria.  So what is it about an iris that would prevent me from ever planting one on my property or buying them in a flower arrangement?

I think these plant dislikes must be an aversion based on childhood experiences or associations with these plants.  My mother had irises in her garden around the edge of our yard as a kid.  I always remember them not doing all that well.  They were often buried in weeds, falling over, and they just looked cheap to me--like inexpensive costume jewelry.  I think I hate glads because they remind me of irises.  And peonies, let me count the ways.  I grew up near Van Wert, Ohio, which at one time was known as The Peony Capital of the World, because of all the commercial peony farms in the area.  They used to have an annual Peony Festival with a huge parade; when I was in high school, the marching band that I was in used to march in this thing every year.  I remember it being hot and humid and exhausting on that day--all in the name of peonies.  My mother also had this plant in our yard and all I ever remember about this plant is the sticky flower buds and all the ants climbing up and down the stems all day.  Heat, humidity, ants, stickiness, and an uncomfortable marching band uniform.  I guess that would do it.

But the flower I choose not to grow or even consider growing is the rose, and this one is complicated.  During the last 20 years of his life, my grandfather became a rose grower par excellence; he had been an auto mechanic all his adult life.  He had a rose garden with over 300 varieties in it, all neatly arranged in raised beds, all labeled with their proper name on a tag that stuck in the soil in front of each plant, and complete with a large water fountain in the middle of the garden.  It was absolutely beautiful, and the Gavin Rose Garden was locally famous.  He gave talks at the local rose society, was written up in the local newspaper nearly every year, tested new varieties of roses sent to him by the big rose companies, and supposedly had a new rose variety named after him (although I have never been able to confirm this).  To this day, my two younger brothers, who are also avid horticulturalists, will not grow roses and have no desire to do so whatsoever, even though we have great memories of playing in that garden as young boys and admiring it as we got older.  (Actually, my youngest brother just told me that he has gotten into growing heritage rose varieties.  Traitor!)

I am interested enough in this question about plant aversions that I wonder if others have experienced the same.  Let me know.  Will an unpleasant interaction with some plant as a child cause you to dislike that plant for the rest of your life?  Do you outgrow such a thing?  Is an interaction even necessary to dislike the species? 

You know, one approach in gardening is to create thematic gardens: a herb garden, a garden containing only blue-flowering plants, a rock garden, etc.  Maybe I should have a garden that contains only plants I hate--call it the God-awful Garden.  I would plant irises, gladiolas, peonies, and a few rose bushes together in one bed and then I would treat it as badly as I could.  I would never weed it, or water it, or fertilize it.  I would walk on it regularly, let the dog urinate on it, and encourage deer to browse there.  Maybe, if the poor plants survived all of that, my aversion would change to admiration, and I would want to grow these varieties all over the property.  Ummmmmmm....nah!

Compost: The Holy Grail

(I wish my compost pile smoked like this.)

My wife and I always have a large vegetable garden. It has never produced all that well. My wife blames me; I blame the soil. Our soil here in southern Tompkins County is clayish and is always in need of more organic matter. It tends to be soggy in early summer and then bone dry in late summer. It is obvious that one answer would be to add that rich, black, loamy material that one can produce by composting. Ahhh, compost--farmers' gold, Jayhawks' jewels, pioneers' platinum, homesteaders' heaven, cornhuskers' crack. Well, you get the idea--it is rich stuff.

To produce compost you simply mix together "green" material with "brown" material. Green material is fresh plant stuffs like grass clippings or kitchen waste, and the greens are your source of nitrogen. Brown material is dried plant stuffs, like old leaves or straw, and this is your source of carbon (=sugars). The nitrogen to carbon ratio in the compost pile is critical to get the pile to do what a proper compost pile is supposed to do--cook. If mixed properly with sufficient moisture, microorganisms multiply in the pile, and their biological activity raises the internal temperature of the pile to about 170 degrees F. The high heat, naturally produced, decomposes the plant material, kills insects, pathogens, and weed seeds, and results in a beautiful mound of black, loamy compost that can be used to amend your lousy soil. I have this vision of looking at my compost pile from afar one cool morning and seeing steam slowly rising from a smoldering heap.

Has never happened. I have built compost piles for about 20 years, and I can never get the temperature of the damn thing warmer than the gravel in my driveway. On the other hand, my younger brother Bill, who lives in Corvallis, Oregon, loves to call me and describe the trash cans full of fantastic compost that he has produced. He produces so much compost that his entire backyard of perennial flower and vegetable gardens is grown in compost only. He doesn't even use the Willamette Valley soil that God put behind his house some time ago. He uses only compost, HIS compost, HIS BEAUTIFUL compost, HIS BEAUTIFUL COPIOUS amounts of compost. I now use my caller ID not to answer the phone when I see that Oregon area code, because I can not stand to hear about HIS compost victory one more time.

And then yesterday morning, it happened. I dutifully checked my pile like I always do and, what the heck, there was heat. Not scorching heat, but an unmistakable increase in temperature that I could feel with my hand. I had to tell Robin right away. I ran to the house screaming "We have heat!", stubbed my large toe on the top rung of the garage stairs as I skipped up the steps, fell into the laundry room just inside the house, and banged my head on the washing machine. I was excited, happy, angry, in pain, and out of breath, all at the same time. I was like a carbon:nitrogen ratio that had gotten all out of kilter. I described to my wife that we had heat in the compost pile but, I must say, she was not nearly as impressed as I had hoped. But, never mind, I had a prideful lilt in my step all day, aside from a small limp.

But by evening, it was gone. What the hell? No heat at all. What kind of a cruel joke is this? Had I imagined the whole thing? Had I incurred that lump on my head for nothing? What will Robin think now? What happens when my brother calls? Within an hour, I had calmed myself into my usual passive state about how life is not fair and don't expect it to be. If my soil sucks and I can't grow beautiful veggies, so be it. Farmers in Iowa might have great soil, but they don't have the Finger Lakes. My brother might have great compost, but he has larger slugs. New York pioneers might have been able to live off the land here, but they didn't have a Toro rototiller. So I'm doing ok. And after all, we can buy tomatoes Saturday at the local Farmers Market.