The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Life and Death In The Garden of Alicia

In the late afternoon yesterday my neighbor Alicia was happily watering her deer-resistant garden. 

Unlike me, she allows deer to roam free on her property. She’s even given them names like “Rat With Hooves,” “Garden Destroyer,” and “Bambi-Pig,” 

Wait. Those are my names for deer. 

So there she was, sprinkling her lavender, happily surrounded by  her cloven-footed friends.

Cue the sounds of bucolic birdies chirping and flute music. Think “Bambi meets Godzilla.” 

According to Alicia, her deer friends suddenly scattered in a big cloud of dust. When the dust cleared, one of the largest bucks was being straddled by a mountain lion. 

The mountain lion had its jaws around the buck’s neck—and for the next eight minutes the buck fought for its life, dragging the lion around Alicia’s driveway kicking and struggling until it finally succumbed.

Abutilon with Mountain Lion and Fresh Kill. Photo by Alicia

Alicia’s first reaction was to try and save the buck by running at the lion and making loud noises. 

Wha? Alicia! 

She soon realized that with all those sharp teeth, she was outnumbered. So she turned tail (or not) and ran into her house. 

She called me while all this was going on.

I was jealous that I wasn’t watching this wildlife drama unfold live. She said it was like being in an episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

Abutilon Framing Wild Kingdom. Photo by Alicia.

From her living room window she watched as the exhausted lion stood next to the downed deer and panted for about forty minutes, catching it’s breath and preparing for dinner. 

Next, the mountain lion dragged the deer—which weighed at least as much as she did, thirty feet to the base of a small hill. Then she began to eat, stripping fur from its belly and tossing it aside.

The mountain lion ate for about 20 minutes, and then left the deer carcass at the base of the hill. 

Alicia decided to finish her watering some other day.

Broiled Bird

We had a short heat wave.

And these house finches decided to make their nest in my bird feeder under a plexiglass dome. So the mother bird was sitting on her nest, her wings spread out. 

She was literally panting. 

She looked like she was in a Lamaze class, practicing pushing out a chicken egg. Poor little thing.

I thought her and her mate were smart, building their nest in a place where the blue jays couldn’t go and it’s next to food and water.

Then I realized they had made their nest in a solar oven. Her eggs were going to be cooked. It was like one of those exotic Asian dishes, roasted bird in nest with broiled eggs. 

I couldn’t let this culinary calamity happen, so I decided to act fast. 

I waited until the mama bird flew the coop; with the stealth of Bigfoot I opened our double-hung window and pulled the feeder inside. There was a cluster of five small, light blue eggs at the bottom of the nest. 

I cleaned the plexiglass dome, wrapped a dishtowel around the top to block the sun and kept the finches from being fried.

I hung the feeder back where it had been and waited for mom to come back. 

At first she was a little suspicious of the weird shroud draped over her offspring. It took her about an hour to settle back down to the job at hand.

 

Busy Birdies

Female House Finch in Nest

My baby house finches have fledged and now the nest is empty.

I was about to take the nest out of the birdfeeder and use it as a feeder again, when another female finch flew into the feeder and did this little movement sort of like she was getting comfortable, settled into the nest—and then promptly flew away. 

Maybe it was the fact I grew up in the sixties and retain only a few precious brain cells, but my first thought was, oh how cute, a baby bird has returned back to it’s place of it birth, it’s first home. Kind of like a sappy children’s book-“Birdie’s First Bed” or “Birdie Comes Home.” 

I left the nest alone, and noticed the bird was back the next day and the same Hunky male finch with the bright red head I had grown to know over the last few weeks was at the feeder next to her. 

It was starting to look bad for my children’s book.

I soon learned that house finches have 1-3 broods a year. This will be the third brood for the busy couple. No wonder House Finches are one of the most common birds in the North America with populations somewhere around 1 billion birdies. 

They are highly social and do well with human encroachment, nesting in a wide variety of areas and items. I use plant saucers and bird feeders to attract house finches to my yard. 

Well, it was kind of an accident but that’s what they seem to like so I just go with it. 

Females are attracted to males with the reddest head, and the truly interesting thing about this is birds can’t make the bright red or yellow colors directly. They get the intense colors from pigment in their food, the more pigment the redder the male. I guess the chicks love the redheads because they know where the yummy food is. 

House finches are vegetarians. They eat mostly seeds and feed their young an exclusively vegetarian diet. This is somewhat rare in the bird world. 

It doesn’t seem that rare to me, but I’m not an ornithologist, I’m just a chick with a bird feeder.

Columbine (Aquilegia) Photos of My Garden

It’s columbine season in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and my girlfriend asked my how I get my columbine to grow so well.

Well, here’s my secret: I have no idea.

I didn’t plant them. They might have shown up in another plant’s pot or on the wind. Normally I would blame my friends the birds, but Columbine seeds are highly poisonous—their roots as well. 

I wont go so far as to say that they’re invasive, because I love them so much. My dirt just happens to be Nirvana for the beautiful aquilegia.

 

The Latin word “aquila” means eagle, and they have this name because the shape of the flower is supposed to look like an eagle’s claw.

 

I don’t just have one variety, but several. They just keep popping up year after year. I never know what kind or what color will show up next.

Columbine are perennials but they die back after they bloom.

They propagate by seed. When they go to seed, I collect them and broadcast them in other parts of my garden

 

Columbine prefer some altitude. I’m at about 700ft. They thrive here, however there are some varieties that thrive at 10,000 ft. I get altitude sickness at 10,000 ft. so I don’t really care.

  They are woodland plants, and they grow wild in woodland and mountainous areas. It is best to plant them in dappled shade or partial sun. Try to choose a spot that is sunny in the morning and lightly shaded in the afternoon, perhaps near trees. They don’t do well in the hot afternoon sun.

 
You can plant your columbine in average soil and it is so hardy that there is no need to mulch or protect it during winter.

To Chicken or Not to Chicken

Chicken or Eggs?

That is the question isn’t it?

I call it the great chicken debate. In a world where fresh homegrown organic chicken eggs are going for between $6 and $7 a carton, it’s hard to not think about raising your own chickens.

How hard could it be?

Fresh organic eggs taste way better than typical grocery store-bought eggs. Unlike regular white store-bought eggs their yolks are huge and bright yellow. The eggshells themselves come in a variety of colors—like the chickens themselves. They look like Easter eggs straight from the hens.

It would be great to have chickens running around the yard. They eat just about anything, which means that they will eat your kitchen scraps. They will even eat your neighbor’s scraps. They will also eat snails and slugs out of your garden.


Chickens are cheap to buy. You can drop a buck or two or three and get some cute little, even exotic chicks down at the local hardware store and they’re even sexed for you.

You can make an inexpensive pen for them and they live outside.

The downside: An egg laying chicken doesn’t lay very much in the colder winter months. An egg laying chicken is in it’s prime during the warm summer months, and lays about one egg every other day. In our family we go through about a dozen eggs every two days, more if I’m in a baking mood. In order to keep our family in eggs we would need approximately two-dozen chickens.

But chickens can’t exist on kitchen scraps alone, so you would need to buy chicken feed. You’d need to buy a chicken feeder, and a warming light. You might have to raise the chicks in your house until they’re old enough to stay warm outside or until the weather changes.

You might even have to watch TV with them.

Ode To Wellie-Part Three (Free Wellie)

One of the last photos of Wellie. Jacqueline took it while Wellie stuffed a piece of kibble in her shoe

Jacqueline took a walk, as she does every day with her dog and her daughter. As she passed the barn, she noticed a woman standing next to the main barn gate. Jacqueline had never seen this particular woman before so she changed direction and approached her.

The woman, whose back was to Jacqueline, turned around. When she turned, Jacqueline saw that Wellie was perched on the woman’s index finger.

The woman said, “Look at this bird. It landed on my finger. I can’t believe it.” Jacqueline burst her Dr. Doolittle bubble and told the woman that the bird’s name was Wellie and briefly explained why she was so tame. Jacqueline then continued on her walk.

All the time Jacqueline was on her walk, this strange woman was in the back of her mind. Who was she? She seemed a little off. She said she had birds. She said she had a budgie and a cockatiel and she said she wished she had a bird like Wellie.

Jacqueline wondered if she had made it clear that Wellie was hand-raised by her and that Wellie belonged in the neighborhood. But this woman seemed smitten with Wellie. She wouldn’t take Wellie, would she? She understood that Wellie was happy and free and should never live in a cage—didn’t she?

Jacqueline, feeling a bit panicky about her bird’s safety, walked swiftly back toward the barn.

The woman was gone and Wellie still flew like a happy lunatic dive bombing, shrieking and squawking. Jacqueline could breathe again. She had no idea that this was her last day with her beloved Wellie.

Wellie slept outside but came inside every morning for breakfast. The next morning Jacqueline opened up her kitchen door and there was no sign of Wellie anywhere. I was reading her blog that day and she had written a piece called “Worry.” I saw the title and decided not to read it. I had a feeling what it might be about and I didn’t want to know.

The same day Wellie went missing, the strange woman showed up again and inquired about her. Jacqueline told her that she hadn’t seen Wellie. Jacqueline talked with the woman, who had some silly excuse for being in the neighborhood, an excuse that made no sense. Again Jacqueline felt a weird vibe from the stranger. She thought it eerie that the woman showed up the very same day that Wellie went missing.

So as she searched for Wellie, she also did some sleuthing about the weird woman.

Jacqueline walked over to the sculptor’s studio down the drive, and learned that the woman had shown up unannounced at the studio the day before. She knew no one and gave the sculptor and his assistants a creepy feeling.

This gave Jacqueline a stomachache.

She called me later and told me the story. “Do you think she took Wellie?” I said. “I don’t know, it just seems strange that she showed up the day that Wellie disappeared.”

“I think so too.”

Ode to Wellie (Part Two)

The days that followed the unfortunate hearing-aid incident (as it became known at the barn) were filled with ladders and ropes and tree climbing and metal detectors and hours and hours of walking around the area between the barn and walnut tree staring at the ground.

Photo by Jacqueline
I learned a lot in those few days, like, metal detectors usually detect lots of useless metal garbage.

I also learned that there are many places in a walnut tree for a bird to hide a hearing aid, and that oak leaves look just like flesh-colored hearing aids.

During the many hours Jacqueline and her family climbed trees, searched trees, shook trees, walked carefully round and round and round in circles staring at oak leaves and listened to the incessant beeping and buzzing of the metal detector.

Photo by Jacqueline
Wellie sat on their shoulders or climbed on their backs or sat in the next branch squawking loudly as if to say, “You guys are wasting your time. You’ll never find that hearing aid.”

As is turns out, Wellie was right. The hearing aid never turned up.

Wellie seemed to get sassier by the day.

I would take my dogs for walks past the barn and before she would hop on my shoulder and say hello, she would wait for me and dive past my head screeching her scrub jay cry as she flew past. She would also dive bomb the dogs and the cats and anything else that moved or breathed.

I started to warn people in the neighborhood about Wellie, especially people who were afraid of birds. The last thing I wanted was to have some unsuspecting human to take a swipe at Wellie out of shock or surprise.

I never realized that fear of birds was so common. It turns out I have three girlfriends with ornithophobia. The day after I told Jodi about Wellie, she called me and said that a scrub jay was sitting on her hot tub cover pestering her three little girls for food. She lived 1/8 of a mile from Jacqueline’s house.

Jacqueline and her family were gone for the day and Wellie must have been looking for them.

Or maybe she was just looking for a handout.

Photo by Jacqueline
I knew it had to be Wellie, and I knew that my friend was probably freaking out having the bird hovering over her and her daughters, so I walked over. She lives right around the corner.

My sons and I went over to Jodi’s house and there sat Wellie screaming, “Feed me. Feed me!” at her three young daughters. My son and I lured her back to our house.

I kept Wellie at our house as long as I could, and then off she went to find her human family.

After Wellie’s big adventure up to my part of the neighborhood, Jacqueline sent out an email warning the other unsuspecting souls who lived near this cheeky little bird.

Jacqueline started to receive calls as soon as the email went out from people sharing their “Wellie experiences.”

It seemed that Wellie had no fear of humans at all.

Wellie was giving our neighborhood sculptor, whose studio is located three doors away from Jacqueline’s house, regular visits. She would buzz around the sculptor and his assistants while they were welding and while engaged in other similarly dangerous activities.

Wellie would regularly fly into the some of the nearby neighbor’s houses and steal small trinkets.

Who knew that a little 3 oz. bird could wreak so much havoc on a whole neighborhood.

No one really seemed to mind. She could be so clever and fun and impudent and saucy and full of life.

But what made her so enjoyable would eventually be her downfall.

Do I speak Parseltongue?

Last May, a rattlesnake bit me.



Today I picked up my first snake since then.
 
I stepped from the side door of my garage (into the part of my garden I call the plant hospital—a place where dead and dying plants go to rest—my plant hospice, if you will).

My husband was standing outside the door; lips parted to ask me a question, instead something caught his eye. He looked down on the ground near my foot and he said “A snake.”

I am very proud of myself for not jumping like a cat and hanging by my fingernails from the gutter of the garage. Instead, I looked down at the small serpent, noticing that the coloring was oh so similar to a rattlesnake.

Keeping my frayed wits about me I looked a little further and noticed the head was not in the shape of a triangle.

“It’s a baby gopher snake.”

My husband let out the breath he was holding, while he conjured up the image of my giant blue leg and the rest of my body hooked up to the tubes and wires of the ICU.

Much to my own surprise, I reached down and picked up the little snake. And the little gopher snake let me pick him up.

Most gophersnakes, when they are frightened, will inflate their bodies, hiss loudly and shake their tails back and forth to imitate a rattlesnake. This little snake was very relaxed and docile. I held onto it for a few minutes, giving it a tour of my yard.

I brought it into my house.

Ode to Wellie, Part One.

Last 4th of July a friend of mine left my very fun, very crazy party and went home to feed her cats.

When she arrived home with her two kids and husband, she found that her cats had decided to make their own dinner, they had a small fuzzy baby scrub jay cornered in the window well.

The two sibling felines were just tucking their napkins into their laps when Jacqueline came to the little jay’s rescue.

Jacqueline has had much experience with taking in wild animals and domesticated animals and rescue animals and animals that lie somewhere in between. I could make a list of all the animals that have graced Jacqueline and her family’s doorway but that’s another story: that is Jacqueline’s story.

This is Welllie’s story.

photo by Jacqueline of Our Road Side Attraction
Wellie gets a lecture from Gerald after "the incident"

Wellie is short for Wellington; a name Jacqueline gave the little scrub jay in honor of the place in which she was rescued.

Jacqueline took the frightened little bird and tucked her away for the night in a flowerpot lined with a soft cloth inside a cage.

The next day Jacqueline hung up this little birdie hammock lined with alpaca wool in Wellie’s cage. It was reminiscent of her nest and she loved to lounge in it.

A couple days after my party coma had worn off, when my head stopped throbbing and my vision cleared, I came down to see Wellie, so cute and loud.

The first thing Jacqueline’s daughter showed me was how tame Wellie was—already. The bird had spent 95% of her short life with birds and here she was in the home of humans already perching on our fingers and yelling madly in our faces to feed her.

And so I fed her. I picked up a lump of gushy bird gruel and shoved it down her frantic birdie gullet and she noisily, happily gulped it down. I repeated this again and again until I thought she would pop.

How fun and rewarding it was to feed her. Something about the fact that she was wild made it that much more amusing.

Wellie first dined on chicken started crumble soaked in water and soon graduated onto everything. Some of her favorite meals included yogurt, fruit, pasta, toast and jam. Really for Wellie, it was all about the jam.

In Wellie’s eyes, toast was just a vehicle for the jam.

Her other favorite food turned out to be dog kibble, which she would routinely steal from Jacqueline’s boxer, Sadie.

One Way To Kill The Evil Tomato Russet Mites

The path to Markene's veggie garden.
I love making up my own home remedies. It makes me feel smart, even if they don’t work. There is just something seemingly scientific about pouring one liquid into a bottle and then pouring another on top and mixing it with something else, oooh it’s so, so, Frankenstein-y.

Well, my friend Markene commented on my last post that she had a home remedy for the dreaded Tomato Russet Mites.

She told me that her solution is actually a squash bug treatment and that she usually uses it to treat her squash plants. In my post, I neglected to add that the Tomato Russet Mites have devastated my squash plants as well.

I only have two squashes in my entire garden—and their days are probably numbered.
 
This is Markene’s recipe for squash and tomato mite death:
 
She says to soak garlic in mineral oil overnight, then add Seventh Generation laundry soap, and water. She sprays early morning or late afternoon, to avoid angering the bees.

She mixes up a new batch and douses the squash blossoms and tomato leaves a couple of times each week.

When the garlic solution clogs up her drugstore spray-bottle nozzle, she removes the sprayer nozzle and pours the garlic/mineral oil/soap and water mixture directly on leaves and buds that look salvageable.

She continually prunes away any dead, brown leaves and buds. Not wanting to breed new generations of evil bugs she disposes of infested foliage into the garbage, not the compost pile or yard waste bin.

If the plant is entirely brown, she removes the whole thing, including any brown leaves it may have dropped, so it doesn't infect neighboring plants.

Markene's fabulous veggie garden.
It’s a lot of work. But anything to kill the evil, dreaded Tomato Russet Mites.