The Garden in August

I've now officially become one of those gardeners who has specific dates for routine seasonal activities.

I realized last night that when the tree frogs begin to chirp at night—an event that usually begins around the first of August—is the time when instinct tells me to spread the previous year's compost over the flower beds.

August is a very dry, hot time in the upper midwest, and mulching the beds with compost now will help keep the soil cool and moist into the autumn. The plant material added to the compost heaps last fall have now broken down fully, and emptying the heaps now also creates space for the shredded leaves and other plant materials that will become available as I begin to take care of fall cleanup beginning in a few weeks.

In addition to the compost itself, I'll also start adding the grass clippings to the garden, over the layer compost. Up to now, those grass clippings have gone into the compost bins themselves. Some gardeners believe that raw grass clippings are a problem if they are used to mulch beds directly before they have been allowed to break down, but I've never found this to be a problem, largely because I d0 feed the gardens anyway, and the breakdown of green grass clippings never causes the nitrogen deficiency that is sometimes bemoaned. As the grass clippings turn to the color of straw, the visual effect is pleasing, as well, looking like a lighter shade of shredded bark.

If you mulch with grass clippings, though, you should do so only if you are not treating the lawn with herbicides. Adding chemical-laden grass clippings to flower beds may have bad effects on your flowers.

I"m not one of those gardeners who insists that all plants must be surrounded by clean, pristine soil. In the routine, day to day acts of deadheading old flowers and removing stalks, I snip up these bits and spread them over the garden as I go, so that the beds themselves do their own composting all summer long. Small twigs picked up from the lawn also get broken up and spread between the plants, so my gardens tend to resemble a forest floor in many ways. This isn't at all evident from a distance, though, so my gardens look quite manicured from a casual distance.

Next spring, the gardens will have quite a bit of organic debris that has wintered over the top of the soil, and rather than raking all this off, as some compulsive gardeners do, I will simply dig this material into the soil before planting time. The overall benefit of this approach is that it reduces the amount of fertilizing you need to do, as well as keeping the soil friable and easy to work with.

Creatures Know

I've always quietly believed that our identities aren't at all fixed in time and space, but that who we are this moment is entirely different than who we are the next.

Animals seem to know this quite clearly, as they treat me much differently when I'm in the role of gardener. It's not always fondness I'm feeling from animals, but I do know that I'm a different being altogether when I'm gardening.

It's as though gardeners are somehow kindred spirits to creatures in the garden. Normally, animals sense the innate animosity of the human species to their kind, and react defensively, or with fear, toward us. Gardeners, though, get treated differently. For example, I've never, ever been stung by a wasp or bee when puttering around the garden, even though that's normally where I come across stinging insects. Put me in a car, though, at a picnic, and I'm just as likely to get stung as the next fellow.

Squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, birds of all types might be startled and flee from me if I come upon them on my walk to the bus stop in the morning, but when I'm tending the garden, it is largely as though I'm invisible. I've had squirrels run over my feet on the way to the birdbath to drink. Chipmunks have run up my legs to sit on the end table next to the armchair on my patio when I'm sitting there quietly reading. Voles come up from the ground to look at me. Birds actually flock to me when I'm watering the garden, as they know the moisture will raise worms and other invertebrates out of the soil for them to eat. One robin, when it spots me, will come and scold me severely until I spray the water for her.

Rabbits have no fear of gardeners. Though we hate them passionately for the mayhem they inflict on the lilies, they know full well that no gardener is capable of violence against them. Once, a mother raccoon came down out of the ash tree in the yard with her baby gripped in her mouth, paused in front of me to allow me to compliment her family, then scurried back up the tree to the hollow spot where she nested.

Alas, though, the mosquitos haven't yet learned that I am their friend.

An Illusion of Perfection

To casual passersby, my front lawn is an admirable feature.It has the apparent uniformity of a green felt surface on a billiards table. Some of the neighbors who know me well admire it because they know it is achieved largely without the benefit of chemicals or fertilizers. I never fertilize it, and only the dreaded crabgrass ever gets a treated with spot spray of a selective herbicide. Never, ever, does the entire lawn get broadcast with a layer of any chemical. The fact that it is so green and smooth puzzles the folks who can't acheive anything like it, no matter how much modern chemistry they bring to bear.

My secret is quite simply this. The lawn is horribly imperfect, by design. As any avid amateur landscaper knows, a lawn isn't a uniform culture, but is a hodgepodge of many different types of grasses, and also includes a fair percentage of non-grass species. Over the years, I've become quite familiar with my lawn. At various places, certain types of grass come to the forefront. In a spot in front, a large expanse of fine fescues prosper---my very favorite grass, fine to the touch and easy on the eyes. In other areas, hardy bluegrasses are dominant. In some areas of my back yard, very short bent-grasses dominate. While bentgrasses are very good on golf course greens, they aren't quite so fine for lawns, as they are rather hard to care for in the heat of summer. These small isolated colonies of single species are the exception rather than the rule, and they are in fact susceptible to tragedy.

Most places, though, you will see that the lawn is a mixture of things--bent grasses and blue grasses and fescues. And it isn't all desired grasses, by any means. Much of my seemingly perfect lawn is horribly imperfect. Small spots of wild violet can be seen many places, as well as creeping charley here and there. There are a few plantains scattered about, the occasional dandelion, some oxalis, a bit of chickweed. Overall, though, the effect of all this imperfection is a pretty perfect looking lawn. When weeds sometimes get dominant, I extract a few by hand, with a hand operated core plugger that both removes the weed and root, and also takes a core plug out of the ground which helps with aeration. I never, ever strive for a perfect lawn, though.

The lawn looks great exactly because it is diverse and imperfect. Years ago, I once tried to acheive one of those perfect golf course lawns, and I found that the effort to create singularity and uniformity was disastrous. I reseeded a large section with one very expensive grass seed, which failed miserably. Such attempts are also disastrous in the garden, as any gardner quickly learns that the healthiest garden is not one free of all pests and diseases, but one in which many, many different pests exist in small numbers that keep things in balance. Try to keep black spot fungus off roses entirely, and you open the door to devastation from aphids, for example.

In the backyard near the raspberry patch, there is now a patch of lawn where the fescue is dominating. It's very pretty for the moment, but I won't be at all displeased if a bit of creeping charley or a few violets join the party.

Similarly, time has taught me that my inner landscape is a happier and healthier place when a few weeds are accepted as part of the plan. A bit of sadnes occasionally, a sprout of temper once in a while, an occasional outbreak of pride---nothing to worry about really. Perfection, I think, isn't the goal at all, but the enemy of peace.