Plant sale? Not impressed.

The Husband and I got up this morning, ate a hurried breakfast and drove an hour and a half to go to what was promoted as a big garden sale with vendors from several garden clubs and nurseries, including some from neighboring states. I thought this would be a great sale. I was disappointed.

When we arrived (5 minutes before the sale began) there were only 5 other shoppers there. Yes, it was raining, but still! So The Husband and I grabbed a cart, looked at all the vendors' booths and bought ONE PLANT (a viburnum). Then we drove the hour and the half home.

I'm about to do one of those things I always hate when other people do - Back in North Carolina where I used to garden we had some serious plant sales. Let me describe them to you.

At North Carolina State University's Arboretum they had annual spring and fall sales that raised money for horticultural scholarships. If I arrived 5 minutes before that sale began, in the rain, I would be about person 100 in line and lots of people would have brought their own carts. They often had rare and unusual plants, including some that weren't yet commercially available. I never left without the back seat of my car stuffed full.

NCSU also had plant giveaways where members of the arboretum could get free plants that had been propagated by students learning the trade. Again there were lots of unusual plants and for this one if you weren't there on time you were out of luck. Image, if you will, over a thousand plants being given away in less than 7 minutes, civilly.

Add to that the University of Chapel Hill's Botanical Garden which also had twice yearly sales (and again, you needed to show up on time to get the best choices) and Duke University's Sarah Duke Garden's plant sale (ditto) and I had great opportunities to get plants either cheaply, or hard to find plants or even plants not available on the market. THAT's what I call plant sales.

I'm still hoping that there are sales like that up here that I just don't know about yet. If anyone knows of really good sales in New England I'd love to hear about them. I'm still dealing with transplant shock.

Live Heading

I'm sure you've heard of Dead-Heading - the process of cutting off spent blooms to increase re-blooming (or to prevent seedlings from popping up all over your garden next year) but Live -Heading might be a new term. That's because I just made it up.

My lovely Bronze Fennel is too big for the spot I placed it (I changed my garden plan, a frequent occurrence here On The Edge) so I was contemplating where to move it. I was discussing this with The Husband and mentioned that it was attracting lots of yellow jackets and that needed to be a consideration. The Husband is allergic to bee stings and we have learned to work around bees and wasps without getting stung but yellow jackets are aggressive and are one of the very few species not welcome in my garden. The Husband asked if maybe I could just take the plants out completely. I'm considering his request (I want to keep him) and in the meantime I went out after dusk and removed the active blooms. I'm calling this Live-Heading.

The yellow jacket have dispersed to I know not where (my other plants don't seem to attract them like the fennel did) and peace has been restored. Now I just need to decide what to do with the plants themselves - move and constantly live head or compost. Fortunately Bronze Fennel isn't rare or expensive so to the compost heap with these plants and maybe next year I'll find a spot The Husband never visits in the yard for this beautiful plant.

Internet Day Without Cats

Pigeon ready for his obedience training (the dogs get treats for it, why shouldn't he?)

Somebody somewhere tried to declare that for today the Internet should be cat-free. So I decided to write about why cats belong indoors and not out in your garden. I wrote these lists when I was working as a biologist in California, facts were collected from the US Department of Fish and Game, the Cat Fanciers' Association (CFA), the ASPCA and the American Bird Conservancy. For more information (including tips on how to convert your outdoor cat into an indoor cat) please see www.abcbirds.org.

Top Ten Reasons Keeping Your Cat Indoors is Good for YOUR CAT

10. Free roaming cats are sometimes picked up and sold for biomedical research or dissection laboratories.

9. Outdoor cats may get caught in traps set for feral cats or "unwanted" wildlife. These traps may only be checked weekly or sometimes even abandoned, leaving your pet to starve to death.

8. Your neighbors might not appreciate your cat using their garden or child's sandbox as its litter box and might collect your cat and take it to a distant animal shelter. Cats are often turned over with incorrect information so the owner cannot be traced. Most adult cats that enter a shelter never leave.

7. Cats may be poisoned. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally. They can catch and eat a mouse or rat that has eaten poisoned bait. They might lap up antifreeze; it has a pleasant taste to dogs and cats and results in high vet bills and sometimes fatality.

6. Cats do fall prey to other animals. Dogs, raccoons, other cats and coyotes will all fight with outdoor cats resulting in increased vet bills, permanent maiming or death.

5. Outdoor cats are exposed to many diseases carried by other cats; some of them are incurable and unpreventable. Some are transmissible to humans and can cause severe disease, miscarriage, birth defects in unborn children or even death.

4. Millions of cats are hit and killed by cars in the United States each year.

3. Free roaming cats can bring home parasites such as fleas (which can carry bubonic plague), ticks (which can carry Lyme disease), several types of worms and ear mites.

2. The life expectancy for a cat that is allowed outdoors, even part time, is 1/2 to 1/3 that of a cat kept strictly indoors.

1. For every person born in Los Angles there are 45 cats born. That is not a typo. Most of these kittens never find homes. Cats that are kept indoors have significantly fewer opportunities to add to the unwanted pet population.

Pigeon doing 'up' (he knows about half a dozen tricks)

Top Ten Reasons Keeping Your Cat Indoors is Good for WILDLIFE

10. Wildlife Rehabilitation facilities report between 25% and 50% of their intakes are cat caught animals.

9. Even with treatment only about 20% of cat caught birds survives. The remainder may die of internal injuries, hemorrhaging or bacterial infection.

8. Free roaming cats can spread diseases to wildlife. California Sea Otters have been getting the parasite Toxoplasma from cat feces being washed into the ocean. California Mountain Lions have contracted Feline Leukemia and Feline Infectious Peritonitis from domestic cats. The endangered Florida Panther and Bobcats have contracted Feline Immunodeficiency Virus from free roaming pet cats. All of these diseases are fatal.

7. Cats compete with native predators such as Great Horned Owls, Red Tailed Hawks, Bobcats, Foxes and Barn Owls for the same prey animals. Domestic cats have the unfair advantage of medical care and regular meals.

6. Free roaming cats do not distinguish between common species and endangered species. Their predation is implicated in the decline of endangered species such as the Piping Plover, the California Gnatcatcher and the California Brown Pelican (nest predation). They are implicated in the extinction of over 40 bird species in New Zealand.

5. Cats with bells DO kill birds. Birds don't associate a ringing bell with predators. Many cats learn to stalk without the bell ringing.

4. Overpopulation. There are over 40 million pet cats that are allowed outside. It is estimated that there are between 60 and 100 million stray and feral cats in the United States. These population densities are higher than normal predator densities due to supplemental feeding and medical care. In some areas cat populations are so high that breeding adult birds are unable to raise enough offspring to offset the number removed by cat predation. Biologists are calling this an unsustainable situation.

3. Most outdoor cats kill over 100 animals each year. One well-fed cat was observed to kill over 1,600 animals in an 18 month period. Just because yours doesn't bring them home doesn't mean it doesn't kill them.

2. In the United States pet cats kill billions of small mammals including chipmunks, squirrels and rabbits. In the United States pet cats kill 100s of millions of birds each year.

1. Environmentalists, bird watchers and nature lovers are just starting to recognize this problem. In some places cats found roaming outdoors are already being rounded up for the good of wildlife and sent to shelters. Most animals in shelters, especially adult cats, do not find homes.

Katydid right where she should be

Naming a Garden

Most people, OK, maybe not most... Try again. Lots of people, no? Really? OK. SOME people name their gardens. I've heard of gardens named Wit's End, Foggy Bottom, Tick Bottom, Froggy Bottom (are you detecting a theme?). My last garden was Chipmunk Hill (it was on a hill and we had two well behaved colonies of chipmunks). While I'm calling my blog Garden on the Edge I'm not sure if that should be the name of the garden itself, too.

I'm thinking the garden name should have Dragonfly in it somewhere. When I went out for a mid-day walk around the garden I counted over 25 dragonflies. I'm not sure where they all perched when there was nothing but grass and foundation plants here.


I think these are all the same species (male and female and/or juvenile) but I have noticed quite a lot of different species and sizes and colors as the summer progresses. Dragonflies are predators and while they might take some of the butterflies I'm working to attract they will also take some of the mosquitoes I'd like to avoid so they're welcome.

Here's a photo essay of some of today's mid-day Dragonflies.

Dragonfly on seed pop of Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa)




Dragonfly on cut end of Bronze Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare)

Dragonfly on seedpop of Buttefly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Dragonfly on Ninebark Coppertina (Physocarpus opulifolius)

I hate mums

It's that time of year again. The big box stores and local garden centers have filled to the brim with what is apparently the only available fall blooming plant the mum. Now you probably know that there are plenty of other fall bloomers - asters and goldenrods are two obvious examples - but are they on display in the stores? So far this year I've spotted a few annual asters but nothing else, just the monotony of mums.

Why the monotony? Fall is a fabulous time of year full of color, cool days, a great planting season in most of the country (although none of the local garden centers up here are stocked for a fall planting season, except for the mums, is it not a good time to plant up here in New England? Not enough time for the plants to establish before the harsh winter arrives? Or just a different philosophy about gardening? OK, got sidetracked there, time for a new paragraph).

I hate mums. I hate the monotony of available plants just when it's cool enough to get back out into the garden. I hate the fact that it is the first sign that winter is coming, with it's cold days of sitting indoors and dreaming of spring. I hate the fact that they signal the upcoming decline in my garden and upcoming increase in my heating fuel bill, a decline in the wearing of sandals and an increase in layers of clothing, a decline in sunlight and an increase in bad TV watching.

I enjoy fall weather. I love Halloween. I usually like Thanksgiving (I love to cook the big meal but this year I think I'm stuck with my husband's relatives who won't fit into my house so no quality kitchen time for me unless we want to eat the big meal twice). I hate Christmas (although it's a great excuse to bring a tree into the house). January, February, March all have nothing to recommend them and the sight of mums reminds me that those months are coming.

I hate mums.

Passing of a Tomato Hornworm

Yesterday I found the Tomato Hornworm (previously posted about) covered with white lumps. Being a biologist and a blogger I first grabbed my camera then hit the reference books and the Internet. The odd white lumps? Pupa of a parasitic wasp.

The Braconid Wasp group are tiny, tiny wasps that parasitize a wide range of pest insects - the Hornworm caterpillars are generally infected by species in the genus Cotesia. The very small female Cotesia wasp (we're talking 2 - 13 mm depending on the species) lays her eggs on young caterpillars. The young wasps then (and this is gross) hatch out and eat the host from the inside out. These particular wasps pupate on the outside of the dead host until they mature into adults and fly off to attack other pests.

The Cotesia wasps have symbiotic viruses that they inject into the host with the eggs. The virus is believed to be involved in suppression of the host immune system and interfering with development. Instead of the caterpillar pupating and turning into a Sphinx Moth it keeps growing past it's normal size, providing extra food (and extra time) to the young wasps.

So despite the damage to the tomato plant (and it's already bouncing back) by leaving the caterpillar I got to watch nature at work and doesn't she do some cool stuff!

Spotting a Gardener

How can you spot a Gardener when she's out in public? She's one of the women who rushes into the grocery store looking like she's already late for something. But she sticks out from that group. She's not well coiffed, not well made-up, not dressed in nice clothes or heels.

She's the one who is wearing a t-shirt with a plant or an animal or an environmental slogan on the front and a tear where she caught her garden clippers on the hem.

She's the one whose knees are green, whether she's wearing shorts or jeans, and her shoes have a tinge of green or brown and did she just leave some mulch on the floor?

The Gardener is the one with the dirt smeared on her hip in the shape of a hand print.

It matches the smear of dirt on her forehead from when she pushed the hair out of her face.

Her nails would make a manicurist shudder.

She looks longingly toward the door that leads back outside into perfect 70-something sunshine and the garden chores that still need to get done.

She only slows down when she passes the in-store florist to look at the house plants and orchids. Then she shakes her head. Winter is the season for house plants and it's late summer and there's so much to do in the garden.