The glory of fall days spent with children

I think one of the chief reasons God gives us children is to remind us how much beauty and wonder he's given us that we've come to take for granted.

Today, I asked the girls if they wanted to come outside with me to do some work in the yard. Now normally, there's no interest and I end up doing whatever I came out to do fairly quickly, and a few things besides, or if there is interest, it peters out in a little more than ten minutes, and I end up pushing Rachel on the swing. It wasn't like that today.

Today, the girls took to raking leaves off the patio with a vengeance. I helped a little, by moving patio furniture out of the way, lifting fallen chrysenthemums and showing them how to rake, but they both engaged themselves quite busily in the task. And then, once the leaves were off the patio, Evangeline decided we should make a pile and jump into it.

The past three or four years, I haven't really bothered raking leaves. I've been content to let them fall and then to run them over with the lawnmower, creating leaf fragments too fine to blow into the neighbor's yard, and small enough that they quickly decompose and disappear into the yard, if not during the fall than certainly in the early spring. It's basic human laziness masquerading as environmental sensibility.

I raked leaves with a vengeance, creating a big pile that the girls could jump into, and then raked it up again so that they could jump in some more. And jump in they did, again and again, and again. They would stand at the far side of the yard, and then when I gave the signal, they would burst into full speed and ran toward the pile, shouting "Banzai!" at the moment of decision, and then laughing with childhood's full innocence.

After they tired of running across the yard, we made a separate pile at the foot of the slide, and they took turns riding down and splasing into a sea of fallen leaves, sending foam of red and gold flying when they landed. And what that grew old thirty minutes later, they began a new game that involved burying one another (and me) in the autumn.

In 35 years, I have never enjoyed raking leaves before. Today, I would have raked not just my leaves, but my neighbors' as well for these girls.

clover

The best way I understand to eliminate clover is through an early-spring application of corn gluten. A natural and biodegradable byproduct of corn processing, corn gluten acts as a new-growth inhibitor that stops seeds from germinating. Over a period of about a month, it biodegrades into nitrates that will fertilize your lawn. It has absolutely no deleterious effects on the lawn, the worms or the other beneficials that live in the lawn, nor upon plants with established root systems. You apply it in early spring, when your first flowers start to bloom, about six weeks before last frost.

Six weeks after you apply the corn gluten, overseed your lawn. The new grass plants will gobble up the space left by the weeds and will make it difficult for new weeds to get established later in the year. In the space of a few growing seasons, the yard should be virtually completely free of not only clover but other weeds as well.

I'm generally content to let my clover be since it aids the biodiversity of the lawn and adds nitrates to the soil.

because you asked

I'm curious, Dave, what do you do about weeds in your garden? I haven't been going organic like you, partially since I'm not growing much of anything that I'm going to eat, so I got a bottle of weed killer and sprayed it rather heavily over a corner of my lawn that was grown over with clover and dandelion. It had pretty much zero effect.

We've got a bumper crop of dandelions ourselves. The only way to remove a dandelion is to pull out its entire taproot. If you just break off the top of the plant, it'll grow back.

There's a couple ways you can get of them with varying degrees of ease:

1) Pile on the mulch. The dandelions will grow through, but because the mulch is loose, they won't have a very good grip and will come out more easily when you pull them. If you don't want to pile mulch on, try compost.
2) Mix equal parts vinegar with water and pour the mixture on the offending spot. This kills weeds and other plants since the vinegar burns the plant from the inside. I've never used it because I'm not sure how the vinegar would affect other plants and grubs, though I'm sure it's a lot less nasty for the environment than conventional herbicides and lawn chemicals.
3) If you have a particular part of the lawn in mind, dig it up or rototill it. The rototiller especially will destroy any plant in its path, clearing the way for you to plant whatever you want.
4) Enjoy them. Personally, I love dandelions. They look nice, their seeds are fun to blow when they go all white and puffy, and if you collect their leaves early enough, they make a nice addition to your salad. (Let 'em go too long and they get very bitter.)

If you want to prevent dandelions, it's too late at this point, but next spring when your crocuses -- or the crocuses of somebody else who lives relatively close, at least in the same county -- start to bloom, hie unto your local Agway store or the equivelant and buy yourself some corn gluten.

Corn gluten is a byproduct of corn processing. It has no effect on established root systems like your grass, but when you spread it on your lawn, it acts to inhibit new seeds from germinating. Put that on your lawn at the start of the spring, and it will greatly reduce not only your dandelions but your crabgrass as well. Best of all, it biodegrades into nitrogen and fertilizes your grass as well.

Corn gluten is effective at inhibiting seed germination for up to six weeks, although you can transplant established annuals and other plants in the treated soil at any time. (You also can walk on it and let your children play on it, which you can't do with herbicides.) After the six weeks pass, overseed your yard with new grass seeds, and in the course of a couple years, your yard is going to be pretty much weed free.

When I pull a dandelion or other weed out of my garden or flower beds, I toss it into the middle of my compost pile. The heat kills the seeds, and the whole mass decomposes and becomes a part of my garden the next season.

trees folo

Alas, my good fortune was not to last. The apple seedling has died, and the willow never rooted properly after all either.

The walnut tree actually isn't a walnut tree either. I'm not sure what kind of tree it is, actually, but the walnut seedling I did have was dug up and turned under when I planted a bunch of wildflowers in a heavily shaded raised bed in my back yard.

less grass

After doing some reading on the subject, I've decided to take action to phase out our grass from parts of our yard over the next year or two. I've been composting like crazy to improve some of the worst parts of the yard, where I'll be sowing seeds for wildflowers that require only one to three hours of sunlight.

I'll be planting a few auxiliary vegetable gardens since the main one is too small to grow all the vegetables I would like to, adding another flower bed or two, planting an apple tree, and continuing to spread some moss around in other areas where the grass doesn't grow.

My wife doesn't especially care for grass lawns, but I guess that's understandable, since she grew up in Tucson, Ariz. I don't mind them, if they look nice. Our lawn looks nothing even close to "nice." Our soil would be described more accurately as "dirt." It's low in nutrients, and packed hard as a rock. What grass we do have generally is choked with weeds, and the lawn is mottled with bare patches where nothing grows because of a combination of the poor soil quality and the heavy shade we get from our neighbors' tall trees.

The end result, I hope, will be a yard of breathtaking beauty that attracts various bees and beneficial insects, hummingbirds and other birds, a few bats for insect control, and generally improves the quality of the little piece of God's creation I've been given responsibility for.

Ahab had his whale -- I have a hedge

When I was a child, TV commercials came with advisories like, "Professional test pilot. Do not attempt at home with Radio Flyer."

I always found these warnings useful, and many times I know I was dissuaded from attempting to fly in my little red wagon, eating fire, or jumping the Grand Canyon in a specially modified motorcycle because of these warnings.

Now that I'm older, I wish certain pastimes came with similar advisories. Who wouldn't benefit from caveats like, "Mr. McCandless is a professional landscaper -- do not attempt this by yourself."

I know I would benefit.

I say this because my struggle with the Ugliest Hedge in the World has extended into its fourth month. More than six feet tall when I moved in, the hedge now looms even larger in my mind.

By day, it dances tantalizingly before me, as ugly as the girl who put paste in my hair in kindergarten. By night, it robs me of my sleep and fills my dreams with horrible visions until at last I awake, screaming, "The clippers! Get me the clippers!"

For the first time since I read "Moby Dick" in sixth grade, I understand Captain Ahab. I, too, have a white whale to chase.

I hate the hedge. I want it gone. I'd chase it round the maelstrom and through Perdition's flame just to get rid of it. If it could walk, that is.

I'm not sure why I hate hedges so much, but I've always considered them to be among the ugliest plants known to the front yards of mankind. If I had my choice of having a hedge, the living disembodied head of Richard Nixon or a queen-size mattress in my front yard, I would pick the mattress every time.

As it happens, I do have the mattress, but Natasha and I keep that on the side of the house, completely out of sight. We briefly considered getting Nixon's head, but we decided that after "Futurama," that just wasn't original enough.

I'm stuck with the hedge, but I want to be rid of it.

Burning it out would do the trick, and could even reinvigorate the yard, just as the 1987 fires out West took Yellowstone National Park to previously unknown heights of glory. The problem is those fires first had to burn a third of the park to a crisp. I'm not yet ready to risk losing the house.

Because the hedge has grown up along the edge of my property, I feel compelled to chat with my neighbor and sound him out before I avenge myself upon this monstrosity.

I've dropped by time and again, but my neighbor is never around. I finally decided the hedge has to go anyway. Last week I took my hedge clippers outside and, as a blue corona of energy illuminated them, not unlike St. Elmo's Fire as it lit Ahab’s harpoon, I swore I would bring the hedge down or die trying.

Last month, I had trimmed off everything the hedge had grown during the summer, and a little bit more. This week, I cut off an entire foot.

That's my strategy. The hedge will grow new leaves to replace the canopy it just lost, and eventually, it will look fine, only shorter than it used to be, and then it will be time to strike again. Right now it looks shorter than it used to be and -- hard as this is to believe -- uglier. All the cut and leafless branches stick out on top.

I figure if I can maintain a subtle pace, my neighbor eventually will look over at my house, think to himself, "Didn't there used to be a hedge over there?" and, unable to remember a clear delineation between hedge and no hedge, will simply scratch his head in confusion and go back inside.

It may sound implausible, but it's worked for a number of my friends with their hairlines, particularly the aforementioned Mr. McCandless.

My struggle this past week was arduous. Previous trimmings have left the hedge armed with pointy sticks to poke me with, and its branches in many places are too thick to trim effortlessly and too dense to trim quickly. By the time I finished, I had spent more than two hours on the job.

"No, you can't get away," I gasped as I tried to cut one particularly troublesome stalk at the base. My breath was coming in rasps, and the trimmers grappled ineffectively with the thick stem. I had to add my left hand to my right to find the strength to squeeze the trimmers through the wood.

"From hell's heart, I stab at thee." The blade cut into the thick branch. "For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee." With one last squeeze, the blades cut the hedge trunk right through.
I watched in great delight as the harpoon sank into the flesh of my personal white whale and left a rather satisfying scar. With a crash, it fell.

Unlike the good captain, I've survived my ordeal. Moby Dick dragged Ahab to his death. All I have is a few dozen scratches on my arm and a sore hand. I'm a winner.

Of course, there are still about five feet of hedge left to go.