Saturday, August 13, 2016

Mother Nature, that old so and so...

Bonsai may be an old, even ancient pursuit, but somehow it finds ways to be  a new and different experience every growing season.
I’ve dealt with the same pests that every plant grower has wrestled with. Aphids seemed to be the the big problem, every year  the little suckers fins the soft new growth of the quinces, cotoneasters and crabapples and can make a mess if they are not dealt with swiftly and severely. Scale shows up once in a while as well.
Thirty years in bonsai, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Japanese beetle on any of my trees. But they are making up for it this summer with a real effort. There was a grape arbor behind my parent’s house, and every summer it would be covered with Japanese beetle. It got to a sort of sport, in the cruel innocence way of kids, to ‘flick’ the bugs of the leaves one by one,  appoint for each bug, double score for beetles that wee mating, and an extra special recognition for those with strong enough fingers to flick the pets hard enough to disable.   I find myself doing the same sort of damage control on my bonsai now. It’s an irony that I’ll make an effort not to step on bees or will shoo a spider out of the house rather than squash it, but I feel no sorrow at the satisfying snap of a crushed Japanese beetle.

Sometimes the ingenuity of a pest can be the fascinating thing about dealing with them.  Every gardener has had to deal with rabbits, and if you’re serious about raising  lettuce or spinach you’ve probably got a fenced area to do the  growing. I put in a double row of bush beans this year, and expected my only trouble would be from slugs. Once the beans had put out one set of true leaves, I thought all danger from slugs was past. Imagine my surprise and anger when I came out to the backyard to find two rows of beans stems-no leaves! The rabbits had added another green to their menu, and kept coming back for it.  As the bean plants tried to keep growing, the rabbits made return visits to clip of the next flush of fully formed leaves. The beans pooped out after three ties, and the rabbits moved on to other items in the back yard. One of the common names of Dwarf Jade is Elephant Bush, since they are relished  by these animals in their South African native range.

Well, its not just large herbivores that appreciate this plant, but smaller ones too. I was giving a few of my dwarf jades a trim and decided to take of a rather thick well formed branch. Every bonsai  grower knows what that means-a ready to go new tree!  Dwarf jade set from cuttings with no real effort, so I put the trimmed piece in the dirt under my potting bench intending to deal with  getting into a container once Id finished other projects.  Two days later ( this is not a real problem, I have had dwarf jade cuttings sit on a bench several weeks and root well when potted-some advocate for this method of starting cuttings to avoid rotting in damp medium) when I came to deal with the cutting in question, I was shocked to find it was missing every single leaf!  Some hungry little bunny took the time and courtesy to nip off each and every succulent green leaf leaving all the stems intact.
If you, like me always thought of rabbits eating grass and an occasional carrot. It can be surprising how wide ranging their diet can be-and what heights and lengths they will go to get it.  There is a row of cork barked elms of some sort that line a long stretch of road in a residential development not far from me. They set seeds in the fall, and it’s easy to go gather a handful or two in early spring, after Mother Nature has stratified them for me.  I had a growing flat full of these  seedlings going well, with maybe 3 or 4 true leaves and put them out on the front porch to get some air and sun. That porch is a concrete rectangle with  two sides facing the house, the other two surrounded by flower beds. Its two steps up from the ground to the porch top, and the trees were at the end of the rectangle opposite the steps.


One morning I come out to check the little elms, and found that every single one had been mowed down to about ½ inch above the soil level. Some how that rabbit knew they were there, and then either climbed the steps and crossed the porch  to get to them, or leapt up almost three feet , if it decided to skip the stairs.  With all the lovely green chemically enhanced grass that my neighbors make sure is available, why would the varmint take such effort to chew on some sticks?

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