Gardening Within Mendocino

My wife and I are planning a move to a less remote area. Our realtor friend was here yesterday to discuss whether the house could be sold. There are a lot of issues with selling a remote rural home. The particular issue I'll discuss here is my peculiar landscaping and gardening style. It might not be attractive to potential buyers.

We came to the coastal area of southern Mendocino County, California in the early 1990s. At the time I had been active with Earth First! for about 5 years. The earth was already dying then, and it is dying faster now, and so when we bought a small piece of land (with the help of a mortgage company), I wanted to treat it in a manner consistent with my views. Which is not consistent with how most people, around here or anywhere, treat their land.

But let's go back even further, to a time when there were a lot less people (by about 50%) living on this earth, the 1960s. After 6 years of growing up on or near various Marine Corps bases, I was moved to suburban Florida. The lawns were mowed green grass. At my family's first home there were a few shrubs and 2 palmettos on either side of the driveway, but no trees. The second home had some nice trees: a hickory, an oak, a pine and a holly. But my mother was determined to grow some sort of grass species that did not like it there. Another, coarser grass wanted to grow, plus the usual weeds. For ten years at intervals I worked on the lawn project, pulling out undesirable grasses and weeds and raking up leaves (my older brother got the mowing job).

I cast a dim eye upon the entire Florida lawn project, and not just because of the mosquitoes, horseflies, deer flies and biting gnats. I cast a dim eye on a lot of stuff. Not as dim as my mother's famously dim eye, which was very conventional in its tastes and hatreds. But pretty dim. Why was the world watering and fertilizing grass, then cutting it, raking the cuttings up, and sending them away in the trash? Hadn't anybody read a biology book? Didn't they know that in nature you don't need bags of fertilizer to keep grass growing? But my mother's lawn was a precious symbol of middle-class respectability (she had grown up on a tenant farm). We had a grass lawn, but it was not to be played on. It was for looking at. And for weeding.

Nature has its cycles, its wheels within wheels. The land I now "own" is on the first ridge above the ocean. Almost certainly it was overgrown with redwoods and other large trees until the first logging took place sometime in the 1800s. Because it was a ridge, the soil was not thick, and the trees were not as big as the ones on the slopes below. But they were easy to cart to mills and then to San Francisco, and so they were cut. Then heavy rains eroded the soil. When the trees grew big enough, decades later, they were cut again. By then the soil would not sustain a redwood, so other species came to dominate: manzanita and madrone, bishop pine and rhododendra. Brush, not forest. Apparently there was a big fire in the 1950s, which was followed by more erosion.

So there I am, in 1995, with a parcel of land dominated by dying bishop pines (an at-risk species local to the area), covered with brush, and with only a couple of inches of mostly sandy soil in most places. Sucking up water from the septic lines there were some pretty big sequoia (the kind found around Yosemite) planted by the prior owners and there were a couple of coast redwoods, the bigger ones being less than a foot in diameter, and the smaller ones, also planted by the prior owners, stunted for lack of soil and water to mostly under two feet high.

People kindly made suggestions. The most common one was to buy a truckload or four of "good" soil and dump it on the land. Brilliant. Buy soil, which means ripping it up from somewhere and burning a bunch of petrol to place it somewhere else. That'll put a stop to global warming.

Instead, I started caring for the land, and under my care it has begun to heal. When a tree or shrub dies, which happens a lot since they grew up too close together and it usually does not rain between May and October, one of two things happens. It gets cut up for firewood, so that we don't have to burn propane of use electricity (much) for heat in winter. Or it gets left (perhaps after some chopping) to turn itself into mulch, which eventually turns into a tiny bit of soil. The mulch helps hold moisture in the soil. It furnishes nutrients. It is just what happens in a natural forest. If a dead tree is left standing, it attracts insects and then woodpeckers.

With regard to land care three kinds of people irritate me. I don't criticize them, but if they ask me why I don't do as they do, I explain my alternative practice. They rarely ask.

Burn Pile People. For some reason people in the country, including most people who move in from the suburbs or cities, love burn piles. They have the same appeal as fireworks. When a tree dies or just does something irritating like blocking the sun or an ocean view, it gets thrown in a burn pile. Sometimes people bulldoze brush (also known as rare California native plants) and small trees from a good sized area into a burn pile. Then they set it on fire. Construction scraps and garbage may to in to. Creating air that is as bad as you might find in Beijing or Mexico city. It gets the dead wood out of sight, but then they don't have mulch, so their soil gets thinner, with less organic matter. Burn pile people expect to dump bags of fertilizer on their land or haul in soil to get anything to grow. When those external inputs are turned into plant material, eventually they chop it down and burn it. It is a way of rural life.

English Garden People. I use English Garden in a general sense for a garden that is extremely orderly. I do find such gardens to be pretty: they are eye candy. But natural they are not. It does not matter to me if an English Garden is organic or heavy with pesticide: what you won't see is a decaying log or tree stump. I like decaying logs. I like lines that are not straight. I like wildflowers coming up in odd places. However, when I walk in an English Garden I just say "Those are pretty roses. What variety are they?" and the like. The better English Garden people don't say, if they see my garden, "why don't you move that decaying log?" They say "that pear tree seems to be doing really well!" I wish they would ask about the decaying logs, because I long to tell them how decaying logs are mini-ecosystems that support large numbers of species and, eventually, become the complex soil that makes my pears so wonderful.

Fire Hazard Paranoids. These are often also burn pile people. They are afraid their house will burn down if they leave a tree or shrub within a hundred yards of it. They look at my land and they say "But the fire hazard!" Now, as in most paranoia, it is true there is such a thing as fire, and there are forest fires (and brush fires), and occasionally a house burns down as a result. But of all the houses that have burnt down around here since I've been in the neighborhood, exactly zero have burned down because they caught fire from an external forest fire.

Your house is the fire hazard! There are three major sources of fire in a typical country home. There is the electrical system, the usual culprit. There is the gas (natural or propane). There is the woodstove or fireplace. I know of homes that have been destroyed by each of these. Another source of fire is vehicles: if you car or pickup or tractor catches on fire, there is a good chance your garage or barn is going to light up and take your house with it.

I'm not saying I pile up dry wood against my house. My house already consists of dry wood! I keep the area immediately around my house clear of dead brush, and I water the trees that shade my house, if necessary, to keep them green. Green trees can burn, but not easily.

So I have my ways. I don't use a chain saw, a lawn mower, or a weed whacker. I use my hands, my back, some simple tools, a wheelbarrow, and mulch. You might say that while I don't mind a good apple or pear or plum or snow pea, what I have spent nearly 20 years doing is growing mulch. It isn't for everyone.

And in another 25 years, this land will look great. Except I am likely selling it, and it will be up to the next person to decide how to treat it.

River of Smoke by Anitav Ghosh, book review

title: River of Smoke
author: Amitav Ghosh
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York
year of publication: 2011
reviewed March 14, 2012
hardcover (also available as paperback & e-book)


Complex and beautiful, River of Smoke takes the reader back to a time when the tiny, greedy, uber-violent nation of Britain ruled much of the world and still had difficulty distinguishing between trading and piracy. Building slowly from a side show in Mauritius, its central plot follows the fortunes of an Indian merchant, Bahram, who has decided to risk his family's fortunes on a vast cargo of opium for the Chinese market.

Bahram's story line alone would have sufficed for a major novel, but it is just one of many wisps in the complicated plot. Smoke is worth breathing for its rich vocabulary, a melange of words from an array of linguistic groups. The names of characters reflect this, as do the names of the foods they enjoy. Savoring new words, readers can get an introduction to pidgin, the common language of Asia ports.

For florists, gardeners, and art lovers, too, there is a subplot: the search for a rare Chinese flowering plant rumored to convey longevity. This involves botanical illustrations, gardeners, more than one painter, and some love affairs.

Bahram has done well as an opium trader. He knows that technically he is a smuggler, that taking opium to China is illegal, but in the past the corruption of Canton officials has made the practice easy and yet still highly profitable. Now a new Emperor, for the benefit of his people, is determined to stop the opium trade, which is destroying the culture and economy of China. Bahram's shipment, which was to finally win him great wealth and respect in his home community, is first decimated by a storm in transit. Then it sits in the waters near what will become Hong Kong, unable to be sold.

In the end Bahram prefers the pipe dreams induced by opium to his shattered dreams in life itself.

I wonder how much most Americans know of the aftermath of the events that take place in Smoke. The first of the Opium Wars followed, in which the British attacked China and secured a treaty allowing them to trade freely in Chinese ports, and continue to sell opium is vast quantities. China, the richest nation in the world in 1700, was a hallowed-out shell by the time the British (and Americans, and Dutch, French, Germans, Russians and even Japanese) had worked their "free market" magic. Many American fortunes were made in the opium trade, notably those of the Forbes family and the Delanos (later of Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

In the jungles, the oceans, and in human culture too, new life cannot come into existence until something old dies, making some room, providing fertilizer by its decay. Today the opium (now heroine) trade runs the other way, hallowing out not so much nations as susceptible segments of a global society, supplemented by a vast array of newer drugs, diversions, and human luxuries. The Chinese people are, for now, back on top, hopefully wiser for the experience of having spent over a century down-and-out, trying to work their way back to prosperity and to understand how they could have allowed a small group of English (and Scottish) gangsters to cause so much misery and death.

River of Smoke is a sequel to Sea of Poppies, which is set in India, and which I have not yet read. I did read and review The Calcutta Chromosome. Amitav Ghosh now has 9 published novels.

Of Aphids, Ants, and Apples

Most of the entries in this blog will be about politics, economics, history, and philosophy. But I have many interests, including gardening. Today I set up a gardening main page at my WilliamPMeyers.org site, but the only link so far is to this essay:

Aphids are a perennial problem in the garden. I want to add a new twist to dealing with them when they are a problem on fruit trees, in my case apple trees.

I am trying to garden organically. I am not hard-core about it, I just don't want to poison the food I eat or my property (or my well). I planted three apple trees when I first cleared my garden area back in the autumn of 1998: a Fuji, a Braeburn, and a Kidd's Orange-Red, all on the same semi-dwarf rootstock. Here's an entry from my garden journal I started in 1999: "At first they did well, but they were attacked by aphids. I decided to let nature take care of them, which eventually happened, but it stunted the growth of two of them."

Aphids will attract aphid eaters, but often not fast enough to allow the plants they victimize to grow at a healthy rate. Among the aphid eaters are wasps (both predatory and parasitic), lady bugs, and lacewings. It is possible to buy lacewings and ladybugs to release, but there are two problems I have found with this approach. One is that once aphid populations drop, so do the populations of predators, which means it is possible to have another aphid growth spurt that harms your plants.

The other problem is ants. Certain kinds of ants will protect aphids from predators; I have such ants in my garden. I don't consider seeking out and destroying the ant colonies as a good option. Ants have a generally beneficial role in the garden. And they just come back unless you keep your garden permanently poisoned; the only thing that deters ants, ultimately, is other ants.
So you can crush the aphids by hand, if you are not squeamish. That worked pretty well when I just had 3 small apple trees, but now I have much more to attend to, and other problems besides aphids.

You can hose the aphids off, but this is of limited effect, they come back quickly, and the spray can spread fungal diseases.

A cheap and effective method is spraying with soapy water. This kills the aphids and even the ants, but not all of them and the ants will quickly move back in. If this method is used it must be used once per week.

The next step upward is spraying with an oil. You can by commercial oil sprays, but I make my own from soapy water and canola oil. The soap disperses the oil. This is very effective. It kills the ants and aphids. But it leaves a messy-looking tree and kills aphid predators too.
So this year I tried something new. Two new things. I released lacewing eggs and larvae I bought from Gardens Alive (there are many other suppliers). That did not do the trick because of the ants.

Instead of spraying oil on all the parts of the trees, or even on the places most infected with aphids (usually the tip-growth areas), I took a paintbrush and coated about a foot of the lower trunk of each tree with canola oil. It took only a tiny amount of oil.

Sure enough, the ants did not like it. To us the oil is a thin film, but ant-scale it is a marsh of a substance that causes them to suffocate. The trail of ants up and down the trees came to a halt. This did leave some live ants stranded in the trees. Eventually they mired themselves in oil and died, or they jumped off. Four days later no ants.

Now the predators are going wild. They will fatten on aphids and reproduce. The aphid and predator populations will fluctuate on the typical carnivore/herbivore fashion.

The and farmers have been eliminated. They upset the ecology. My apple trees look like they set a bumper crop this year. Not to disparage the Braeburns or Kidd's Orange-Red, but my Fuji's are famous for their size, beauty, and flavor.

Unfortunately, out in the greater world we humans are now sucking the planet dry. We farm ourselves and have no predators. Unless we learn to limit our numbers, sooner or later those numbers will crash from disease, starvation, or war. To see more of my writing on the population issue, follow this population link.