Yankee Volunteerism

Americans pride themselves on their ingenuity, their work ethic and their tendency to step up when something needs doing. Or at least, that's what I've heard. I think that same attitude is reflected in the very land on which we live.

When our chicken population was suddenly reduced from seventeen birds to six, we moved the survivors into the smaller yard. Three and a half months later, vines from the rest of our property, seeds from scratch the chickens didn't eat and other various weeds have taken hold in the old chicken yard. It's remarkable to me - the place was a veritable moonscape while there were chickens on it, and now it's...well it's not exactly a lush and verdant meadowland, but it could hold its own against any vacant lot.



The place where volunteers really flock, though, is at the compost bin. Up on our deck we're growing tomatoes, rhubarb, strawberries, mint, oregano, lemons and a few flowers (fuschia, alstromeria and another I've forgotten). The tomatoes are doing okay, healthy big plants with a few blossoms. The strawberries are throwing out berries as well as they can.

Down by the compost bin, though,we have plants whose plant-to-blossom ratio is much more impressive.



Here we've got tomatoes and some kind of squash. Both have tons of blossoms, and they're never watered. These plants on the ground have either been pollenated by bees or by ants - we've got plenty of both here. I think that if any fruit does form, it's likely to be given up to the chickens. I'm sure they're the ones who planted it there in the first place so it's only fair that they should enjoy the reward. We'll eat the more conventionally grown fruit from up on the deck.



It does seem unfair that this volunteer tomato plant seems to be flourishing in a way that the ones up top aren't. I'd ask the chickens for their gardening secrets, but they're pretty tight-lipped about things like that.

A Sense of Perspective

I was looking off the back porch on Friday and saw this:


What does it look like to you? To you, it might look like some bushes, but to me it looks like blackberry jam. Or, if I tilt my head slightly and squint, pie.

I'm sure you've heard about the honey bee die-off, and what you can't see in this picture are hundreds of bees swarming all over the blackberry blossoms doing their busy bee thing.

The hive is in a giant tree on the border of our property and our neighbor's, above a bunch of California buckeye trees, which, if you click the link, you'll find are poisonous to bees. When we first moved here, we would constantly find stoned bees lolling around the driveway doing little bee somersaults. Then, at the beginning of this summer, the driveway was inexplicably littered with tiny corpses. We looked up where the hive was an saw nothing, so you can imagine my relief to see zillions of them in the blackberry bushes.

You can see the blossoms a little better here:



The structure is the one the Pirate had built to make the blackberries a little more accessible. I personally am not entirely convinced it'll work, but like the rest of our lives, it's a work in progress. It'll be another couple of months before the berries are ready to pick. The Pirate has also made a blackberry picker - a can with a V-shaped notch cut into it and fastened onto the end of a long stick. We'll use that to grab as many of the little treasures as possible.

I love the blackberry bushes because they bring out an entirely different set of birds than the ones that live with us year-round. It's not unusual to look out the kitchen window and see some kind of bug catcher swooping and diving about the creek eating four times its body weight in bugs. It must be nice to be able to feed oneself by merely doing the human equivalent of walking very fast with one's mouth open. But come fruit season, the fruit eaters come to call. Our blackberry bushes, being on the downslope from the chicken coop (and therefore from the most amazingly rich fertilizer in the world) and on the bank of a creek is prolific - there's more than enough for both us and the birds and a few that nobody ever gets around to. I love that feeling of plenty, of overabundance that leads to the kind of generosity that comes from recognizing that it's just not productive to be greedy. I'll have what I need, you'll have what you need and if anyone else comes along, there'll still be enough.

If only the rest of the world worked that way.