Garden Weeds Spreading Underground

Most yards have some spot where you'll look down and see something like this. English ivy and Japanese honeysuckle spread above ground. But also in this photo, poking its head through the prostrate vines, is Canada thistle, an exotic weed that spreads underground, gradually becoming a many-headed, prickly monster.

Mugwort is another example of this, though it was featured in an edible plants walk I went on recently. Picking its tips for mugwort soup in the spring may slow it down a bit, but probably not enough to make a difference.

Most of my backyard garden work in the spring consists of pulling out plants that spread underground via rhizomes. Some, like various species of perennial sunflower, put on enough of a show in late summer that I get lazy and charitable, and leave a few in, then feel regret the next spring when hundreds of new plants rise from last year's adventurous roots. Several native floodplain species of goldenrod can seed in and also prove to be very aggressive spreaders underground, as is the so-called obedient plant.

How much easier gardening would be if one could resist the temptation of spreaders and strictly limit the species to those content to form a clump and go no further. In a raingarden, many plants fit this description, like bonesets, cutleaf coneflower, Lobelias, soft rush and most sedges, Culver's Root, Indian grass, blue-eyed grass, Joe-Pye-Weed, Helenium, wild senna, and many others.

Night Crawling for Night Crawlers

A few days ago, having delayed a dog walk until night-time, I came around a corner to find two men with flashlights scrutinizing the pavement in front of a house. They were looking for a couple screws that had somehow gotten dropped next to the curb. The screws were black, the flashlights were dim; they'd have to wait for daylight to find them.

That was about as much life on a suburban street as I had seen in a long time, and was of no account other than it reminded me of how, as a kid looking for fish bait, I would take a flashlight out at night and crawl across our lawn, hunting for night crawlers. Catching big fish in the nearby lake, largely imagined but occasionally real, meant first catching big worms that would venture partway out of their holes at night. It worked best to point the flashlight down and angled towards me, then focus on the leading edge of the circle of light it cast upon the ground. 

The worms, thick, long and sure to lure a big fish if only I could catch them, were lightning quick and easily spooked by vibration, light or movement. Most of the time, they would slip instantly back down their holes before I could grab them. But if everything went right, if I was stealthy and soft in my approach, sharp enough to see their shapes in the dim leading edge of light, and quick and accurate as my hand shot forward, I could grab the end of the worm and pull the rest of it out of its hole. 

In retrospect, it's the closest I'll ever get to thinking and acting like a cat, and often proved as memorable as the subsequent fishing expedition.

Then Came the Duck Eggs

More eggs began showing up in the nest lately, signalling that the ducks had "come on line" after six months in our backyard. Before, with just two Araucana chickens laying, it was easy to tell which eggs were whose. Now, with about four eggs of subtly different shapes and colors showing up every day, it's a bit of a guessing game.

Chances are, these three eggs correspond to the three types of ducks in this photo, with the outsized egg being the work of the big white Pekin, the more numerous mid-sized eggs being the Runner Duck's, and the miniature variety being an early effort by the mate of the male mallard in the photo.

The two eggs on the right in this photo have no shells, but instead are more like water balloons that slowly deflate as they dry out. Sometimes, the presence of these shell-less eggs means the birds aren't getting enough calcium, but they're getting the standard feed for egg-layers, plus whatever they forage for in the garden. More likely, it's taking each bird a few egg-laying tries before they get it right.

Here, the deflating of a shell-less egg is more obvious. A similar process of drying out occurs within a normal egg, though much more slowly because the eggshell has an outer coating, or "bloom", that keeps the egg inside fresh. It's recommended to delay washing of a homegrown egg until just prior to using, so that the coating can help protect it during storage. In fact, refrigeration is not necessary for unwashed eggs if they'll be used within a week, or so I've heard and read. Store-bought eggs tend to have been washed.

Related to this, you may have noticed that some hard-boiled eggs are easier to peel than others. As an uncooked egg sits around, the membranes between shell and eggwhite loosen. Using older eggs for hard-boiling will increase the chance of the shell easily coming loose from the eggwhite during peeling.

This "deflation" of the egg inside the shell also makes it possible to tell whether an egg is fresh or older. As my neighbor Pat pointed out, a fresh egg lays flat at the bottom of a bowl of water, while an older egg will tilt upward at one end because air has gotten trapped inside where the egg has slightly deflated.

Dandelion Free, or Pesticide Full?

A lawn free of dandelions is restful to look at, but implies a use of broadleaf herbicides, which pollute the restfulness and maybe the local waterways as well. Always expressive, a dandelion reacts to herbicide as if in paroxysms--a frozen dance of death.

There are less toxic approaches for anyone with time and patience--a weeding knife, shown in a post from last year called "The Dandelion's Roar", or this curious implement called a "Weed Hound", demonstrated by a neighbor on Valley Road. It has a lever at the top and a cluster of squidlike metal spikes at the bottom that close around the dandelion's crown and pull it out, taproot and all.

The implement's length allows the gardener to adopt a relatively civilized upright stance while waging combat, rather than sacrifice knees and dignity by getting down and duking it out at ground level with a weeding knife. One could even pretend to be leaning on a racket, awaiting one's turn in a match of croquet while actually skewering a hapless weed. The neighbor allowed me to give it a try. The dandelion was unmoved by my efforts. Clearly, civilized weeding takes practice.

Backyard Habitat Recipe

For a thriving backyard, first add rainwater. It can be from the roof, the driveway, or runoff entering from the neighbor's. Play with its descent, as a mountain does with water cascading down its sides. Steer it away from the house and into swales and depressions,

where it can slow down and collect into miniponds. Rocks can be a nice addition, if you can figure out how to get them there, and some sort of sculpture adds a sense of place.

Add native plants that love being in or near water, like this royal fern just unfolding, and the fringed sedges in the background, and then let the rains come.

Add hens, who will love your yard even more than you do, turn dandelion seeds, ticks and worms into delicious eggs, and provide companionship as you pull a weed or two or three from the soft earth.

And finally, or at least finally thus far, add ducks, who will love your ponds even more than you do. Some will ask, as I did, "Why a duck?" But the next generation, which will inherit this world of habitats large and small, may counter bravely, and with the internet research to back it up, "Why not a duck?" The answer to that, if there is one, has yet to be found.

Fothergilla gardenii

The Princeton Shopping Center isn't as colorful as it was during a gardener's long tenure, when love, experience and work ethic dependably combined for a glorious show of annuals and perennials year after year. The re-landscaping features low-maintenance masses of mostly native shrubs.

Here's one that's attractive and easy to grow, but rare in the wild. Dwarf witch-alder (Fothergilla gardenii)--now in bloom at such places as the Princeton Shopping Center, in Marquand Park along Lovers' Lane, on the Princeton University campus, and my front yard--is native to the southeastern U.S., where it is said to grow on high ground in swampy areas of the coastal plain.

A taller version, the Mountain Witch-Alder (Fothergilla major), grows in mountain ravines and along streambanks in the southeastern U.S.

The green on the right, contrasting with the Fothergilla blooms, is inkberry (Ilex glabra), a native evergreen holly that, like the Fothergillas, I've never seen growing in the wild.

Walking Through Mountain Lakes Preserve in Late April

As part of a course on utilizing water in the landscape that I taught this spring at the Princeton Adult School, I led several field trips to show off Princeton's more dramatic examples of manipulating the flow of water across the land. The dams at Mountain Lakes Preserve are a prime example.

The recent restoration of the 1900 era dams has been winning awards, the latest detailed at PlanetPrinceton.com.

The signs, recently reinstalled, tell the story of how the dams were built in order to provide a safe source of ice for Princeton's ice boxes for the first few decades of the 20th Century. In the background, you can see the web of rope that does a good job of keeping geese off the grass.

At Mountain Lakes House, the Friends of Princeton Open Space are growing native wildflowers to restore habitat in the preserve, where much of the native herbaceous flora was erased by plowing long ago.

The swale designed to channel runoff away from the house and into a raingarden looks to be working well. If one's trying to manipulate where runoff goes, a swale is cheaper and more dependable than any buried pipe.

Across the lake, one of the fallen trees along the trail looks to have been modified to serve as a gravestone for an ancestor.

Rose Rosette Disease is having its way with the invasive multi-flora roses that have long dominated the lowlands. Though the disease is unfortunately impacting some planted roses in people's gardens, in the wild it is heartening to watch particular specimens of multi-flora rose slowly succumb to the disease, their thorny frames serving as deer-proof nurseries for native spicebush and silky dogwood. Not all multi-flora appear to be affected, but hopefully the disease's presence will help natives make a comeback in the shrub layer of the woods.

Heading back towards the Community Park North parking lot through a grove of black walnuts, you can see how the non-native shrubs (mostly honeysuckle) have leafed out much earlier than the native walnuts, which are very conservative about committing their foliage in the spring.

American basswoods (Tilia americana), are related to the lindens found along Linden Lane and in front of town hall. We encountered one of the few specimens of native basswood in the park, its fresh new leaves glowing in the spring light.

Miniponds as Mosquito Traps

If you happen to have a small pond in your yard, without any fish to gobble up the mosquito larvae, it's time to do some low-calorie dunking of donuts. The active ingredient in these "mosquito dunks" is BTI, short for Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, a natural bacteria that kills mosquito larvae that ingest it. You break off a chunk of the donut, according to the size of the pond, and the donut slowly releases the biological control into the standing water. They are available at local hardware stores, and are best applied to water before the mosquitoes show up, so the active ingredient has time to disperse into the water.

Though people tend to think any standing water breeds mosquitoes, a backyard minipond with this BTI applied essentially becomes a mosquito "trap", sabotaging the breeding efforts of whatever female mosquitoes visit the pond to lay eggs. This occurred to me about fifteen years ago, and I heard a similar contention expressed when I happened upon the radio program "You Bet Your Garden" a few weeks back.

There are other natural predators of mosquito larvae, such as predatory dragonfly larvae, water striders, and a couple types of soil fungi. These various controls may or may not be present, making for a lot of variation in which ponds will breed mosquitos.

The package gives the green light for putting these in animal watering troughs, which I'm taking to mean they're okay for our ducks' habitat. Dunking is recommended once every month or so during the growing season.

Lonely Chicken in Kingston

My younger daughter and I went to visit a lonely chicken in Kingston. Where once there had been six, a combination of coyotes, raccoons and a hawk had reduced their numbers to one--a Barred Rock named Queenie that finds solace in the company of humans, the neighbor's goats,

and an old horse whose messy eating habits leave lots of grain for the chicken to pick up afterwards.

According to the caretakers, the chicken produces 2 eggs a day, which sounds extraordinarily high. Our Aracanas each take three days to lay that number. I'm reminded of how stress in plants can trigger a surge in seed production, as if the plant is in a hurry to produce progeny in anticipation of its demise. Perhaps the combination of good care in a dangerous environment has stirred this Barred Rock to great feats.

The caretakers also said that before the attrition, the chickens would shift in pecking order, with rank often depending on which chicken was laying the most eggs. During molting, a chicken would lay fewer eggs and drop in the pecking order accordingly. I had thought that the pecking order was worked out quickly, after which chickens would live in peace.

The subject of pecking order came up because we were considering adopting the chicken, and were concerned that it would disrupt the harmonious chemistry of our current miniature flock of two. I'm told that the best way to add a new adult to a chicken coop is to wait until the resident chickens are roosting in the evening, and then add the newcomer. In the morning, the chickens will wake up the best of chums. We'll see if we get a chance to test this.

Soaking up the farm ambiance on the outskirts of Kingston, I heard tell of another wild visitor. The caretakers had seen wild pigs come out of the forest one day. Whether they were truly wild or simply escapees from a nearby farm is open to speculation. Wild pigs (not native) have been in the national news lately, for the ecological havoc they wreak, and also in the context of edible invasives, as in this "Malicious but Delicious" piece by NY Times columnist Frank Bruni, who was part of a food panel at the university recently.

Of course, it would have been nice to get a photo of the chicken itself, for this post, but the goats will have to do.

Blooming Barberry Bush Bops Bees

It's bee-bopping time, as barberry bushes present their trigger-happy stamens to the insect world. Find something narrow, like a blade of grass, and tickle the base of the stamen to see how the flower delivers a dollop of pollen with a tiny wallop to any visiting pollinator.

Past posts can be found here and here.

Lesser Celandine On the March

I thought my photo here of Lesser Celandine at Pettoranello Gardens demonstrated the plant's capacity to completely "pave" lowland areas.

But Pat Palmer sent me some even more demonstrative photos, taken April 16, showing its rapid spread through the lower portion of Institute Woods close to Rogers Refuge.

If one's looking for good news, one could point to the multi-stemmed shrubs, which are likely spicebush that have grown back since deer culling has reduced browsing pressure. Birders link increased nesting activity in Rogers Refuge in recent years to the resurgence of spicebush.

The Ants in the Pantry Come Back

Springtime, and life returns to the kitchen counter in the form of those tiny ants discussed at length in a post last year. Not content with stray crumbs and traces of spilled honey, they wander far and wide with impunity, across furniture, my computer screen or my glasses, as if aware I had long since given up trying to blot them out.

Fortunately, the endearingly named Source Kill Max poison that seems to work did not get lost over the winter, but came quickly to hand during what had been expected to be a long search. It comes in the form of a jell. Fipronil is the active ingredient, which according to Wikipedia disrupts chemical pathways in the insect's nervous system that don't exist in mammals. Though I saw only an ant or two visit the tiny dabs placed on bits of waxed paper in a couple out of the way spots on the counter, the ants have diminished in number. It also can be bought in trap form.

2016 update: Consult the package, but we've found it to be more effective to apply the gel directly on their pathway, as out of the way as possible, rather than on waxpaper. They eat it all up, so there's no residual.

Counting the Years on Pine and Spruce

A neighbor's white pine tree, likely killed by the delayed effects of a scorching drought a couple years ago, shows clearly the whorls of branches that mark each year's growth. Count the whorls to determine the tree's age.

The remains of this spruce tree, traumatized by Hurricane Sandy, show a similar but less distinct whorling of branches. Many people refer to spruce trees as "pines", but it's easy to tell them apart. A spruce has much shorter needles, and the white pine's needles come in groups of five (the same number as letters in the word "white").

A Walk Through Herrontown Woods and the Princeton Ridge

By chance, my daughter and I both had the same idea at the same time--take a walk through Herrontown Woods. Must have been the call of a spring day that finally reached us late in the afternoon, deep in our suburban exile.

Sightings of a pileated woodpecker and a wild turkey awaited us as we headed down Snowden Lane, traffic squeezing by us as we negotiated the sections that still don't have a bike trail (a bit of a hint there to the Ministry of Bike Trail Construction).

A short hike up from the preserve's parking lot are the Veblen cottage and, through an opening in the fence, the Veblen House, where remnants of Elizabeth Veblen's many daffodils and a lone Kerria still bloom. The Veblens--Oswald being the famous visionary mathematician--donated the farmstead and Herrontown Woods to the county back in 1958. In retrospect, it appears to have been Princeton's first nature preserve, the seed from which the now preserved corridor of the Princeton Ridge grew.

A patch of mock orange blooms (update: I've since learned that this is actually an invasive shrub called jetbead!) not far from the Veblen farmstead. Wood anemones and Christmas ferns grow in profusion along the paths in some areas, testimony to the capacity of these rock-strewn slopes to keep the plow from erasing the land's memory. (2021 update: What looked like mock orange proved to be jetbead, a nonnative that has been showing up in various preserves around town.)

A little ways west of the farmstead, my daughter told me to stop and listen to the echo. Our shouts reverberated among the boulders to the count of four. In addition to having saved a rich flora, the boulders enrich the acoustics as well.

Trails have gotten more zig-zaggy since Hurricane Sandy. Reaching this blockade, we saw a young man approaching from the other side. With the creation of a Friends of Herrontown Woods in the back of my mind, I said hello, thinking a conversation might lead to recruiting him to help clear trails. Turned out he was training after a long week at the office for a Ninja Warrior contest, and was using the Herrontown Woods obstacle course to hone his reflexes. For him, the more challenging the trails, the better.

He made quick passage through this muddy stretch, making the long leap from stone to stone.

We chose a drier trail that led up to Princeton Community Village, across Bunn Drive from Hilltop Park. Bisecting this affordable housing is a section of the Transco Pipeline, whose proposed expansion has been causing some controversy. The pipeline carries natural gas, and an expanded pipeline would help whisk the nation's shale gas out of the ground and onto ships for export, which seems to undermine the notion of energy independence in the longterm.

Across Bunn Drive, behind the soccer field at Hilltop Park, Bob Hillier's Copperwood development is due to be completed later this fall, according to their sign.

It's a good example of clustering that allowed preservation of 17 wooded acres of this Princeton Ridge parcel. It's also a good example of how community activism, through a group called Save Princeton Ridge, can bring about a more environmentally sensitive development than had originally been planned.

As part of the agreement to build the development, this massive stormwater retention basin at the base of the hill, built originally for runoff from the Village, is being repaired.

Nature, too, had been at work building its own retention ponds, with some better at holding water than others. Though it's sad to see so many trees blown down by storms in recent years, these pools can be seen as one of the tree's parting gifts, providing a nursery for tadpoles in the spring, and a place where the wild turkey we heard, and then saw, might take a sip as it walks in its gallinaceous manner through the woods. A lumpier land more closely approximates what existed in America before the forests were cleared and the land plowed. Here's a link to other posts about adapting this sort of minipond concept to backyards.

In the recently preserved Ricciardi tract, across Bunn Drive from the new development, a pileated woodpecker swooped by me just twenty feet away. It landed on a nearby tree, pausing between short head-bobbing hops up and down the trunk to scrutinize the bark for signs of insects. Finding nothing, the bird then flew to another tree, where it repeated its survey routine before flying to another, and another. It's reassuring, somehow, to see that this Princeton Ridge forest's inventory of trees are being so thoroughly inspected, and by such a beautiful bird.

This monster white oak, with its characteristic blotchy bark, has sprawling limbs that suggest it dates back to an earlier, less forested era in Princeton, when trees were more solitary and could spread out.

High bush blueberries are scattered through the understory in the 35 acre All Saints Tract. Here, too, you can see how one of the many tributaries of Harry's Brook begins to form out of pools and rivulets, fed by seepage from the hill.

Not sure what's going on here. Affordable housing for the birds? There was no evidence of past use, and it looks like it would get hot in the summer if the sun reached it. The stringiness of the bark of the tree it's attached to says "Eastern red cedar"--more evidence of a less forested past.

Lush growth of skunk cabbage forms a green ribbon leading back into Herrontown Woods.

This is how twin white oaks fall--laying down an angle in a mathematician's forest. Just needs a couple more walls and a roof to make a cozy habitation, though there might be the problem of a wet basement.

Back at the parking lot, the kiosk erected some years back by the county gives no indication of the pleasures of Herrontown Woods. Something about human nature makes it easier to build kiosks and those wooden boxes for brochures, than to keep them filled.

Heading back on Snowden Lane towards home, a silverbell (Halesia sp.) was blooming, with a snowbell (Styrax sp.) across the street. Both are in the Storax family, and neither have I seen growing anywhere else in Princeton.
(Note, 4.28: Of course, as soon as I say such a thing, I notice a Halesia in full bloom on South Harrison Street, on the left before reaching Route 1. Hard to glance sideways while navigating a narrow 2-lane road.)

As the day's light waned on Franklin Ave., far from the rocks and echoes and wildflowers of Herrontown Woods, my vote for "Princeton's most graceful Forsythia" grows.