Because It’s Not Easy

Puddock Hill Journal 59: Confessions of an imperfect backyard steward.

First of all, welcome to the many new folks who subscribed over the winter. I usually post on Fridays, but not always, and not every week, so please don’t be disappointed if you don’t hear from me in a given week. (Or, more to the point, be disappointed, but understand!)

I had hoped to post last Friday from Pennsylvania, but the transition from our desert garden to Puddock Hill threw me for a loop. (See below.)

Anyway, I hope you find insights into your own stewardship journey as we go along. Thank you for whatever you do to contribute to a healthier ecology in your area—and thanks for subscribing!

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We arrived home to a forest of weeds. Weeds in the flower beds. Weeds in the raised beds. Weeds in the gravel paths. Weeds weeds weeds!

While spending the better part of two days bent over prying one weed after another from the ground, one has much time to contemplate life. Songs float in and out. To-do lists. Plot points for stories. Investing ideas. Random bits of philosophy. Memories of people now gone…

And in between them all returns the refrain, Why am I doing this? Wouldn’t it be better just to SPRAY?

Moments after the first time that thought crossed my mind—or was it the fiftieth?—I remembered a brief conversation I had with my daughter when she was miserable at boarding school years ago. Her misery only lasted a couple months freshman year, but that’s an eternity to a teenager. (She would soon come out of it and thrive.) I was constantly reaching for new things to say, new ways to encourage her to stick it out. And one day she said simply, “It’s too hard.” To which I responded, “We don’t do these things because they’re easy. We do them because they’re hard.”

This was at best a white lie. Of course we don’t do things only because they’re hard. Much more accurately, we do things worth doing in spite of the fact they’re hard. Things like backyard stewardship.

The first test of my will as a backyard steward always comes in early spring when the fresh wash of green and a few pretty flowers cannot adequately mask the mess left over from last winter. One part of this mess is the brown stubble and stalks of transitioning plants. Back to that in a moment. The other part is the inevitable weeds, which have either been revealed by winter’s die back or have out-sprinted the plants we’re encouraging.

It makes me anxious and my wife even more so. I’m catching up on emails and she’s out there on her hands and knees, shaming me into action. (This is one of the reasons I failed to achieve my Friday publication schedule last week.) So, having been properly chastised, I join her, bent over, testing my creaky lower back, and thinking…

WOULDN’T IT BE EASIER JUST TO SPRAY?!

The simple answer to this question is, of course, yes. It would be even easier to mow and easier still to manage a plot of land covered in tar. But what would that accomplish for nature? Nothing. Still, backyard stewardship is undoubtedly the more difficult path, especially when one has sworn off chemicals.

Most of our weeding activity targeted planting beds and paths rife with invasive or nuisance plants such as chickweed (Stellaria media), Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense), dandelions (Taraxacum spp.) and clover (Trifolium repens and Trifolium pratense). But there were also innumerable specimens of daisy fleabane (Erigeron annuus), an herbaceous native annual or biennial plant that performs well at Puddock Hill, and that I believe will have an exceptional year, based upon the numbers I’m already seeing everywhere. Here’s one poor plant soul before getting yanked:

And here’s what it looks like in early bloom, left to its own devices in the patio garden:

When it occurs in the garden beds, we mostly leave daisy fleabane—and in wilder areas we let it go crazy—but we do pull it from paths and raised beds, where one expects a greater degree of neatness.

Neatness, however, is a subjective value, and here is where the arguing and compromises begin. As regular readers of this newsletter may recall, we mulch in fall with unchopped leaves and we endeavor to leave dead stalks standing into spring.

These actions have explanations. In the case of the leaves, in addition to doing the normal mulch jobs of moisture retention and weed suppression, leaves feed the soil and provide places for small critters to hide. They also harbor the eggs of arthropods—which is why I oppose chopping the leaves as some gardening blogs recommend.

In the case of the stalks, their seed heads feed birds through winter. Later, they can serve as repositories for the eggs of native solitary bees, which are increasingly endangered. The Xerces Society suggests pruning dead stalks “in early spring, at a variety of heights between 8 to 24 inches” and leaving them, explaining, “As you prune, you are creating new nesting sites for bees.”

But my wife, Pam, becomes spring feverish and insists on cutting the stalks to the ground as soon as we return home, giving me great anxiety over the missed opportunity. We also argue over how many leaves we’ll allow to remain in the beds. My position: more is better. Hers: very few. The winner of these arguments is always the first person to take up clippers and rake. Guess who.

So this is where we test our principles. And, not coincidentally, early spring presents the first moments when principles yield to practicalities.

One might plausibly argue that our cultivated garden is small compared to the rest of the property, where we limit mowing, maintain healthy ponds, and undertake rewilding efforts. Yes, I’d rather we left the stalks and leaves longer in the garden beds, but in reality I don’t even know how much that would accomplish for wildlife. I do know that compromising to satisfy my wife’s aesthetic sensibilities makes for a happier marriage!

On the subject of chemicals, I try to hold the line, but later this year I may try mixing a natural solution to fight weeds in the gravel paths. Much more torturously, I walked around with an arborist this week and identified certain mature trees that simply must be protected from invasive pests, even in some cases deploying dreaded neonicotinoids.

The genie of ecosystem disruption is out of the bottle, after all, which makes it nigh impossible to be a purist.

In point of fact, while down on my hands and knees in the gravel paths I noticed that the plastic liner laid down just two years ago has begun to disintegrate. As one who opposes putting plastics in the environment, I had asked the patio garden designer to explore natural alternatives, but he couldn’t find any he thought would hold up. Alas, I now regret deploying the plastic.

In the nature, we rarely see the results of our actions overnight, so we often don’t know the impacts our compromises have until it’s too late. Yet, if we can’t move forward without compromising, we will accomplish nothing.

Like I said, backyard stewardship is hard. But even with compromises, it pays.

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Native Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) naturalize in the woods off the barn path:

Nearby, for the first time ever, I also spotted native maiden blue eyed Mary (Collinsia parviflora):

Despite falling down a few years ago, our oldest eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis), a native favorite, continues to put on a show:

Native witch-alder (Fothergilla) thrives in one of the newer lawn beds: