Rewilding

 I love gardening. I wanted to talk about rewilding, which is a pretty good description of how I have been managing my 4 acres plus marsh and stream frontage.

I work with what I have, what does well; I usually let volunteers go. I have had different things come on a bit too much; one year I had tons of Queen Anne's lace-I simply snipped the flowerheads as they matured and then threw them along the road frontage. 

The road frontage gets periodically razed and ditched by the town, and sprayed and whacked by CMP, and then brush hogged by the town. In order to maintain some sort of vegetated buffer between the dirt road and stream, if I have extra seed heads I toss them down there. This year I actually planted a bunch of fern in the ditch, because I had to rip it out of one of the gardens and hate to kill plants that are doing well.

Then I let the lambsquarters go. This one is easy to weed out as seedlings, and can be eaten fresh or sauteed, but I never seem to get around to eating it. I still have a couple plants here and there this year, because I do like to have it but not SO much of it.

One year I had plantain take over the lawn. This was bad because it is slow to grow in the spring and the Firebird had the lawn a mudfield with his soccer ball. The geese took care of it in the lawn, that and one or two summers pulling the seed stalks. Ditto with heal all.Today I saw some of the blue flowers mixed in with the now in bloom white clover-a must in an "intergrated" wild lawn, but not the WHOLE lawn in the case of heal all.

I do have some flowers and vegetables out there. Tomoatoes, Italian pole beans, Nasturium, sunflowers, bee balm, yarrow, daisys, iris, tulips, on and on..

But it takes a lot of hand weeding, learning what you really won't tolerate (weedy amaranth was a nightmare once it got ahead of me, and I rip every one I see now.)

I lost the battle with the jewel weed, the entire far side of the drive is jewelweed, and also down over the bank. I was actually thinking of buying a weed whacker to knock it back this summer. I am loathe to do it, because it offers excellent cover for the small songbirds, and the bumblebees like it when it is in bloom.

But luckily for me, the deer, who has discovered my garden of delights is no longer scented with dog, likes jewelweed. Sadly, it also LOVES hosta, and they look like bare celery stalks at the moment. It denuded the raspberries and blackberries, comes back every few days and razes the red potatoes(!) loves jeruselum artichoke, and tall phlox. And evening primrose, which  was going to be the strong volunteer in the garden this year, but the deer really like it. They actually just basically top what they eat-except for the big blue hosta, where they took every leaf. The first time through it left ONE leaf-it made sure to get it a couple nights later.

I hung a stinky t-shirt on a stick by the poles beans this afternoon hoping to deter it. But since it was weaving through the clotheslines out back this winter, I don't think much is going to stop it. I need to find a motion activated dog barking device. 

I can't really be mad at the deer. I mean such variety!  Like a kid in a free candy shop.