Dirt By Amy Stewart

GardenRant is too awesome for words

We got picked up on BoingBoing, y'all.  It's been a busy week over at GardenRant World Headquarters.

GardenRant in USA Weekend

Read all about it here.

My Overcrowded Garden

Something has changed about my garden this year. It’s reached a kind of critical mass, finally. It’s matured. Most of the perennials have been in the ground long enough to reach their full size, and some, like the two dozen lavender I planted when I moved in, are now old and woody and ready to be pulled out.

I stood in the garden this afternoon, thinking over the fates of those lavender plants, and I suddenly realized that in a few more months, this will officially be the garden I’ve had longer than any other. How did that happen? I still think of this as being my new garden, the one I filled with plants from my old garden. But it’s not so new anymore. It’s full grown—and it’s also full.

Gardens have a way of marking the passage of time in sudden, surprising ways (how did that tree we planted get to be taller than the house?) and mine is no exception. A sturdy, yellow-flowered phlomis I planted a few years ago has sprawled entirely out of bounds, burying a couple of interesting and unusual salvia in the process. The salvia in turn have buried some Oriental poppies. The Oriental poppies have squashed a—well, you get the idea. I’m out of room, but I can’t stand to throw anything away, and I can’t stop buying more plants. Last time I reached this point in a garden, I moved. But I’m not moving this time, so what do I do?

Miami's stalled construction boom

From hotel window, Miami

See You in Miami?

I'm on my way to the Miami Book Fair.  My event is Sunday at 11; come say hello if you're there.

And in the "this has nothing to do with gardening" section:

While I'm gone, please head over to NPR's website and hear Peter Sagal's brilliant commentary on the insanity of the American dream.  I could kiss him on his little head.  Go, Peter Sagal. (He's got a new book out called The Book of Vice--check that out, too.)

Meet the Haggards

  Pete Haggard didn’t take a vacation for ten years. Why? There was no one to watch the bugs.

    Haggard, a Humboldt County agricultural inspector, began photographing and cataloging northern California insects over a decade ago. The result is a new book from Timber Press, Insects of the Pacific Northwest, which he co-authored with his wife Judy, a wildlife biologist. Often, the only way to get the pictures he wanted was to raise them himself.    

“For about ten years,” he said, “I’d go out on Saturday mornings and take pictures of the insects I found. But it’s hard to find them in their immature stages, so I’d look for the host plants and gather eggs, then bring them back and raise them in the house in five-gallon buckets.”    

Maintaining an insect nursery is a complicated endeavor. “It’s not like a dog or a cat,” he said. “You can’t leave a hundred different insects with somebody and go away. They’re like babies; they have to be cleaned every day, they need fresh foliage, and you have to check them twice a day to see if they’ve hatched.” Moths and butterflies in particular are tricky; if they emerge, they need to be released or they will beat themselves against the glass. “You can’t get a good picture after even a day or two,” Pete said, “because they start losing scales that quickly.”