The Snows of April

It is easy to be disappointed. Expectations are high. Training, preparedness, and experience is limited. As we shift from winter to virus, we work to overcome the virus of the mind; its total takeover of attentiveness to other elements of life.

What I can say about a global pandemic will take hardly a paragraph. We've fictionalized it again and again in movies and television. We practiced it via fantasy football-like parlor talk. We relearned its lessons in books and documentary. We eyeballed it from afar again and again. Still, people have died and will continue to lose life. Institutions will fail. We've maintained catharsis, not internalized preparedness.

I am not an optimist; not a ray of sunshine, but there is life beyond the virus. It is not the end of the world. For those of us lucky enough to escape the most extreme complications of infection, we must carry on those things that are worth carrying forward. We must internalize the opportunity we now have to connect with what we value.

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After hacking our three year old pepper plant back to its thick, woody stem, it remained aphid-free for the month of March. With little to no leaves on all the peppers in the house, the aphids moved on to less desirable Lamiaceae -the basil and salvia.

When they can be found, emerging lady beetles are transferred to the aphid-covered plants. Water is sprinkled on the leaves for them to drink. At most I've had three lady beetles -all eventually feed on the aphids. After a couple of days eating, some have mated, but have yet to see any of their aphid-hungry young. 

A curious event takes place on any infected plant that has maintained a lady beetle or two. The aphids scatter to the pot rim, and walk its circle, endlessly.

 

Despite the aphids, the freeze from being stuck out the window at 10°, the hard hack back to the woody stem, the pepper's hormones kicked in to regrow a healthy crown of new leaves. If occasional lady beetles emerge, are found and resettled, these pepper plants may just succeed on their path to another summer outdoors. 

Ten Percent Rule*

No matter how much insecticidal soap I sprayed, the aphids came back stronger than ever. Finally, so frustrated, I stuck the head of our giant three year old jalapeno out the window, shaking the plant vigorously to dislodge the aphids and shed the leaves on which they congregated. Although only outside for a minute, it was about 10° F, and not thirty minutes later, the remaining leaves had turned black -like frost-damaged basil. I was ready to toss the whole deal, but I hesitated. The following day, I pushed the head of the pepper out the window yet again and pruned the branches hard -all the way to the woody, tan stems.

This sweet pepper had been pruned hard in December, yet the aphids continue to show up. You can see their shed skins and the stunted condition of its remaining leaves.

About a week ago, the jalapeno's woody stems sprouted vigorously. I had hoped it would do so slowly -those new leaves such easy sucking and still three months before any pepper can be reliably placed outside.

This week, leaves twice as big but still tender, the aphids have returned. I put my ugly, fat thumb in the picture to show how tiny the aphids are. I rely on my camera and macro lens to spot new aphids since my eyes can no longer focus so closely.

Closeup of the three aphids.

It has been warmer than average recently. Although we are far from a Minnesota spring, which typically arrives in May, the warmth brings out a few Asian lady beetles that worked their way into the walls last October. Attracted to the light, they usually make their way to windows, and die. Outside, they wouldn't make it at all, given that nights drop to the single digits at times.

Aware that predation is the best way to control aphids outdoors and in greenhouses, I haven't been willing to release ladybugs in the house. So when the warmth brought this one to a window near the peppers, I coaxed it onto my hand and then the sweet pepper. The lady beetle is a reluctant helper, it seems to only want to hide, but the following day I didn't observe any aphids and the lady beetle was still on the pepper, alive.


*The 10% Rule is an ecosystem function where energy passed on from one trophic level (position of an organism in the food chain) to the next, only ten percent of the energy is available to the consumer. An example: the pepper plant passes on only ten percent of the energy to the aphid and the aphid only ten percent to the lady beetle who consumes it. To receive the full energy consumed by the aphid, the lady beetle needs to eat a lot of aphids -something for which gardeners should be thankful.

Ideal Cosmos

At my latitude, nine rotations in mid December exclude daylight for fifteen hours and fourteen minutes. This slow motion reversal at the planetary elliptical vertex is experienced as stasis. Nine days of nearly equal day light. Then, day by day, our planet rushes toward another season at 67,000 miles per hour, delivers us a minute, then two, and finally three minutes additional daylight per rotation. This is time, flying.

That it is completely dark at seven thirty five in the morning, nearly 26,000 minutes after that reversal, is still surprising. The moon, approaching its 297° northwest by west horizon, nearly full, cast its reflected light through our window, waking me as would the morning sun, set to meet the horizon only fourteen minutes later.

The rising sun's countenance a dim facade.

Winter, with it's frozen palette,

 pushes me to reconsider a lifelong disinterest in Florida.

 All places can challenge our preconceptions.

Although Florida's humanity has created endless reaches of entertainment and consumerism, gated communities and social poverties, it is a place of subtle beauty, and warm, ever so warm. I've still not grown accustomed to winter travel, its luxury and privilege. Yet, it does aid the spirit and what does one have if one is low in spirit?

I've become taken with this greenhouse situated within Florida's Mead Botanical Garden. It's not my first greenhouse, and won't be my last.

At home we invite the aura of a Floridian winter when we bring outdoor plants indoors to overwinter.  With them we bring various creatures, including this year's populations of aphids and fungus gnats.

In this choice we face the decision, should we be so thoughtful, of life or death for these insects. The suffering of plants, should they experience suffering at all, is weighted against the immediate squish or the slow, sudsy demise of soft-bodied beings. We recoil at the sticky residue and skins shed onto the windowsill, but not the lack of empathy for life. Expanded, these thoughts engage all the world, all the choices within our power to make.

Despite myself, I still moved to extinguish the aphids, to eliminate the gnats. A garden is celebrated, but a gardener kills. We do not move against the gardener, decry their deeds and demote their effort -apart from the more fashionable descriminations. We do not yet belong to an ideal cosmos, of which only mathematics and our imaginations approach.

Momento Vivere

Forty five days beyond the solstice in this coldest of states...

 ...buds form on plants dug up this past October.

The sun's elevation is high enough to energize plants placed below the sills of windows; the salvias and pelargoniums, the capsicum and rosmarinus.

In the long winter everyone has their coping strategy, but a good dose of sunlit snow, long blue shadows, and eager plants are a reminder at five degrees below zero.

 Pelargonium, otherwise known as geranium, will go into its third outdoor season, late this May.

Three weeks back, this pepper plant was profuse with blooms. Now it is, as far as overwintering peppers that were dug from the garden can be, profuse with fruit.

 The petals stick to the fruit without wind to shake or rain to wash them toward the ground.

Last year, this jalapeno, a thick and woody stemmed specimen twice ripped from its raised bed, produced winter flowers but no February fruit. It is now getting ready to produce flowers again. Time will tell if it is as up to the task as its cousin across the room. Two summers running, this pepper has produced a fine crop of jalapenos.

A long raceme of indigo blue flowers emerge from near-black calyxes seen in the second image above.

Salvia elegans, or pineapple sage, pushed into perenniality in my New York City garden, is now pushed into houseplant duty every October. We usually get a week or so of blooms in the garden beds before a freeze forces it into a pot, then into the greenhouse, then into the studio, and finally resting in the sunny south window, where it blooms in February, once again.

House Peppers

I may have learned something about fruit production, quite unexpectedly. When bringing in yard plants for the winter, I give them a good cut back. On this particular pepper plant, clipping resulted in five flowers per node, only 90 days after digging from the garden. I'm now wondering whether we have the growing season to clip back a mature pepper plant, in the garden, to produce a bumper crop of peppers.

Pepper plants are self-pollinating, requiring the services of wind or insects to shake the pollen free. Among the plants behind the southern-facing window we have a forced air duct, providing a regular soft, if drying, breeze. There are also some fungus gnats, and whatever else came in with the plants, to mess around with any flowers. At the moment there are small peppers where some of these flowers had bloomed. Whether or not they are small and or misshapen will determine how well they have been pollinated.

I kept our grown potatoes in the basement, near the sump pump pit. I thought the higher humidity would be good for them compared to the 20% humidity provided by our forced air heat system. What came of it was a short storage life, given the basement's near constant 65℉ and growing potatoes.

A Peculiar Petunia

A blooming petunia sits on the chest of overwintering. Rosemary, lantana, prickly pear, agave, lavender are companions, all known for their ease of transition from garden to window, and back. The petunia, however, has had a more interesting life, a touch of mystery and adventure, and an uneasy, surprising transition.

I've been busy spinning plates. Photographs, details on the studio shop, painting the attic post bat remediation, many websites. Tomorrow I am off to southern New Mexico to work on some art, see some old friends, make some connections up in Santa Fe, and eat at two or three favorite local establishments. Upon my return, finish the attic, make sample work for my business (three bridges and two planters), begin the gardening season, pour two concrete pads, seed the plethora of native seeds I have stratifying in the fridge, move on to buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica chopping in lieu of garlic mustard removal. It's been so mild this year that I cannot walk the woods to remove garlic mustard without seriously compressing the wet soil. And despite last year's two dozen fifty-gallon bags and countless rotting piles of pulled garlic mustard, there appears to be more growing this year than last. Maybe this spring I can post about last year's experience.

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Adaptation

The Wekiva (Weh-kee-vah or wah) Spring Run flows onto the Wekiva River which descends from the Florida central highlands into the middle sub-basin of Florida's longest river -the St. Johns. To the canoe or kayak paddler the riverside can appear strange with its palms, bromeliads, and trees bearded by epiphytic Spanish Moss as much as boats captained by duck dynasty types.

Among these, however, are familiar plants and animals of the north -water birds, trees and forbs like red maple Acer rubrum, pickerelweed Pontederia cordata, heron, egret, and white ibis (above).

The red maple, its trunk visible on the far left of this photo, is likely one of the most adaptable tree species in North American native silviculture. I am familiar with it from road travel throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic where it can often be seen in lakeside swamps turning red before autumn gains a foothold. Cultivated forms are also common to streets and yards. Although I have not seen it among our wetland edges or woodland swamps, it certainly grows here and farther north in Minnesota. It is both water tolerant and drought tolerant, shade tolerant and sun tolerant and quite obviously, heat and cold tolerant. A red maple grown in the south may not do well in the north as well as the reverse, but the tree exhibits great genetic variability and adaptability.

Given that our once vernal swamp has become, for the last three years at least, a year-round swamp due to frequent heavy rainfall events, geomorphic characteristics and a rising water table, nearly all of the vegetation has died. The last of the very large trees, namely green ash Fraxinus pennsylvanica and basswood Tilia americana, that tolerate a few months of standing water every year, have finally succumbed to three years of permanent inundation.

The adaptability of a tree like red maple struck me as a good fit for such a situation -able to tolerate the standing water or, should things change, do fine in simply wet soil or even withstand a drought. Research shows that the native tree has increased its population since the time Europeans arrived to the continent, and in some cases may be viewed as an opportunistic, invasive species. This is something I will need to weigh against the other invasive, exotic species that have taken advantage of the sunlight provided by the sudden death of the slough's canopy.

A struggle I've had over the last two years since I have moved to our place in the Minnesota woods is how to preserve and restore the woodlands and wetlands around us. It is disheartening to see government maps describe parts of our woods and wetlands as of "moderate" quality or "altered non-native plant community: no native species present" which are both misleading descriptors. However, after two years' time I believe I understand the extent to which this place has been altered by human interaction and all the species that have followed it.

In acceptance of these changes, why not be proactive? Why not plant species that can take advantage of the new conditions? Why not plant pickerelweed and red maple in the flooded slew even if they are not currently growing on site? The wish to return such a drastically altered site to a pre-human condition is not only foolish, but nearly impossible. What I am likely to consider, now, is gardening the woods and swamp with native plants, without the restrictive edicts of restoration.

Lizard's tail Saururus cernuus was identified on one Florida boardwalk trail. Is it beyond its cold tolerance in our slough? We are likely on the edge of its range, but I'm game for a try.

Any time spent in Florida with plants leads you to think about "houseplants," those typically subtropical and tropical plants we attempt to grow indoors. Seemannia sylvatica, above, may be hard to find locally, but it promises to be a great winter friend in a west facing window.

In a surprise turn, our limited collection of easy care houseplants has increased dramatically despite the winter's desiccating indoor humidity level. Beyond the easy pothos, sprengeri fern, and oxalis we are now overwintering a substantially larger rosemary shrub (2nd year), lavender, two opuntia spp (2nd year), two agave spp (2nd year), a rather large pineapple sage Salvia elegans (which blooms so late here that this may be only way to get it to flower before frost), dusty miller Senecio cineraria (last year it overwintered outside), and the odd petunia.

Now, for the peculiar case of the petunia. At some time, maybe it was August, I noticed a petunia flower underneath our terribly diseased tomato plants (a terrible year for them). We had no petunias at the house this year or last and certainly had none in the vegetable garden. I gave a pass to the notion that it self-seeded from petunias that may have been located in the long window box along the garage in years before our arrival. After all, I find tomato plants sprouting all over the gardens despite occasional -15 or -20 F nights over winter. After a few weeks I decided to dig it up and move it to a more visible location in the raised herb bed, near the parsley, where it continued to flower until the first frost sometime in November. There it lay for another couple of weeks, its pink blooms preserved by the cold. When the first deep freeze was about to set upon us we cut back the herbs for use in the kitchen but left some of the parsley under cover to keep fresh for another few days. On that last day of natural viability, when all over-wintering plants were required to come in, I realized that the petunia was still green, pliable, quite alive. I dug it up, potted it, and it is now doing well on our window sill with a mass of new leaves.