Can You Dig It?

Not everyone gets excited about a pile of organic matter, but I do.  Let me explain by first telling you I am a lazy composter.  I don’t turn or aerate my pile, I simply dump more garden waste on top.  A well-tended compost pile will produce results in just a couple of months, but by my method of benign neglect, plant matter takes its own sweet time to decompose.  Each spring, the pile will have last fall’s debris sitting on top, still intact, but I dig in from the sides to uncover the dark, crumbly “black gold” hiding below.  Recently, I got curious as to how much finished compost was still hiding under the top veneer of detritus, so I decided to remove anything that still looked like a stem or leaf and reveal what remained.  What I found was a mountain of glorious stuff.  At almost three feet high and fifteen feet long, I discovered the mother lode of well-aged compost, just waiting to be used.  Like almost anything else homemade or homegrown, backyard compost is better than money can buy.  In economic terms, I was suddenly the Michael Bloomberg of the flower-growing set.

Not all gardeners have joined the church of the compost pile, but those who have believe in it with some fervor.  While I banish pet waste, meat scraps, or diseased plants from my pile, I do add eggshells and vegetable scraps from the kitchen.  My town doesn’t offer curbside pick-up of leaves (we don’t have curbs), but even if it did, my leaves would still stay home in my compost pile, or get chopped up for leaf mulch.  Composting on-site reduces the amount of fossil fuel it takes to haul raw organic wastes away and then haul finished bags of compost home to the garden.  It saves money and eliminates plastic packaging, too.  But the righteous feeling you get making your own compost pile pales in comparison to the compost itself.  I know what’s in my compost and what’s not.  There is no pesticide residue or heavy metals.  There is no plastic trash, or other junk either, unless that pair of secateurs I lost three years ago turns up.  There are also no invasive jumping worms, a rising concern not only locally but nationwide.  Using your own compost is a lot like knowing where your food comes from.  It feels nice.

I’m going to spread my compost wealth around the garden in a few different ways.  Primarily, I’m adding a few inches across my raised beds to benefit next year’s dahlias and vegetables.  I won’t use it to start seeds (since I can’t be entirely sure it is pathogen-free), but I will mix it with pine or hardwood bark to make a potting mix for older plants.  If I get ambitious next spring, I’d like to renovate a perennial border, and after the old plants come out, compost will go in.  Money doesn’t grow on trees, but free-for-the-making compost encourages the trees to grow better.

A Sage On Osage

“I gave up trying to find the answer to this one and was hoping you could pass it along to one of your crack specialists.”

So started an email with photo received this chilly November.  It is just such tantalizing inquiries which make me appreciate my job.

“If you can’t ID it, I’m gonna call it a maggot ball.  It has a fragrance to it.  It’s about the size of a softball.  Do you think it would spice up the stuffing on Thanksgiving?”

Luckily, I had grown up around maggot balls in rural New Jersey, but we called them monkey oranges.  The yellow-green fruits fell out of scrubby, thorn-laden trees in old hedgerows and along roads.  To my young mind, their most amazing attribute was the texture of their skins, which mimics most alarmingly the surface of a human brain.  This youthful exposure to the trees allowed my own grey cells to easily provide some answers.

Botanical thinkers know this plant as Osage orange, or Maclura pomifera.  Planted nationwide as living fences before the invention of barbed wire, this species is native to the Red River valley in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas.   In that locale, they commonly grow under a bevy of odd names, including hedgeapples, horse apples, or hedge balls.  Since there are separate male and female trees, only the females will develop the balls.  I’ll leave the rest to your fertile imagination.

The fruits of Osage orange look as unappetizing as they are inedible.  The pulp is white, tough and stringy.  The seeds, the most digestible part of the entire mass, are covered with slimy goop.  Cattle sometimes die when they swallow Osage oranges after too little mastication effort.  So why would a tree go to such great lengths to produce such an unappealing fruit?  Perhaps they were designed to attract some now extinct critter that roamed the Oklahoma plains eons ago.  As for the stuffing, stick to bread crumbs.

Monkey oranges make up for their culinary shortfalls in other ways.  New Jersey legend holds that a green fruit in your underwear drawer (or even elsewhere in the house) can repel cockroaches, while in the Midwest Osage oranges were said to retard the advance of crickets, spiders and other pests.  Today, some find these to be valid claims, while others cry pure bunk.  Turning to research for an answer, Iowa State University uncovered yet another odd fact:  chemical compounds in the fruit did indeed thwart German cockroaches, but entire fruits did not.  Would a rotting fruit in your drawers work better?  It’s yet another sticky question for science.

Even more astonishing are the properties of Osage wood.  One of the most naturally rot-resistant types of lumber available, it is superior for fence posts.  Burning it releases more BTUs than almost any other wood.  Students of archery prefer it for bows.  And it has been used to make fine guitars, harps, mandolins and writing pens.

Maggot balls?  Bosch!  We should be proud to call Osage orange a native American.

Bloom Where You Are Planted

I’m not sure that Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, has won the designation “Coolest Small Town In America,” but it ranks high in my opinion.  A thriving downtown, beautiful location amongst rolling hills and public artworks make it a pleasant place to be.  But what puts it over the top is The Bridge of Flowers, a horticultural showstopper that draws thousands of visitors annually from around the world.

Back in 1908, building a bridge across the Deerfield River to carry railway freight and passengers, as well as a water line, seemed like a good idea.  The nearby Iron Bridge, constructed in 1890, wasn’t up to the job (yet, somewhat ironically, it is still in use for motor vehicle traffic today).  In a fit of optimism, The Shelburne Falls and Colrain Street Railway paid $20,000 to have a new bridge constructed.  They built well:  the sturdy structure was formed of concrete and featured five arches.  Soon, the Railway was transporting everything from mill products and farm produce to U.S. mail, and carrying 200,000 passengers each year.  But those heydays were short-lived.  As cars and trucks became more numerous, the fortunes of the Railway declined, and it ceased operations in 1927.  With the trolleys gone, the bridge could have been destroyed, but the necessary water line made that impractical, and it was a costly proposition, anyway.  What could be done with a bridge with diminished purpose?     

It might have been a stroke of genius, or perhaps Yankee ingenuity, but the bridge didn’t sit derelict for long.  While doing household chores, local resident Antoinette Burnham suddenly struck upon the idea of turning the bridge into a garden.  Aided by her husband Walter and a growing cadre of supporters, a fundraising concert was held and funds gathered.  Soil was ordered and the first plantings installed in 1929.  Eventually, the Bridge of Flowers Committee, under the aegis of The Shelburne Falls Women’s Club, germinated to further organize the efforts.  Today, two part-time paid gardeners, assisted by many volunteers, keep the bridge looking beautiful from April to October.  The initial budget of $1,000 has also grown, thanks to memorial gifts, bequests and donations given in secure boxes located at either end of the structure.  And when significant deterioration threatened the structure by the 1970’s, the good folks involved rallied once more, raising thousands to reconstruct and repair so both bridge and garden would survive.

While planting in two narrow beds on a bridge dozens of feet above the water might seem daunting, it turns out to be a pretty good place to grow.  The soil depth varies from 2 ½ to 9 feet, allowing trees to be planted in the deeper areas.  When I visited in August, dahlias in a broad array of colors were featured, supported by daylilies, phlox, crocosmia, hibiscus and coneflowers.  Annuals such as sunflowers and bachelors buttons shared space with woody viburnums, hydrangeas, redbuds and even a hemlock.  All were kept in tip-top form with nary a weed in site.  Happy 90^th Birthday, Bridge of Flowers!