Mysteries in my garden, part 2
And where are all the animals?
I finally saw a hummingbird. At my salvia. I was hidden in some bushes when I saw her.
I have a little chair back there under where the tall grasses hang over and form a bower of sorts. I can sit here an hour or so after the sun is up and watch the activity. I see birds flitting about, the small brown birds, as I call them: the sparrows, the finches. A titmouse is often heard, or a wren, but they seem to keep out of sight.
Early morning just after the sun is up is the best time to hear them all — despite the traffic and other noises. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays are the worst, as the “landscape crews” are out in force with their roarings. I put “landscape crew” in quotes to signal that I consider them not to be doing anything real for the landscape; in fact, continuing to make it sterile… but I digress.
There are studies — you can look them up; reports in places like Nature and PNAS — which describe the effects of machine noise in the environment; how it has caused less breeding, fewer animals — a bird’s mating calls cannot be heard by potential mates — lots of research. But knowing that these harms exist changes nothing: the noise continues, louder, it seems, every year.
The crows usually convene about this time, too, and have their meetings; I can hear them over across the road on the high utility poles where they seem to like to meet.
I just happened to look to the East, and there she was, going from flower to flower as is the humminbird’s habit. This was the big salvia (cultivar: “black and blue” Salvia guaranitica) that has grown so lush this summer, but with very few blooms. Stalks of buds, but only few blooms. The hummingbird had only several fonts from which to sup at this plant.
What is going on? I continue to ask around; gardener friends are noncommital. They haven’t noticed, they say. And when I visit their gardens it does, indeed, seem that their flowering plants look, well, normal. Mine don’t. Lots and lots of greenery; few buds.
I do need to add that this seems to be species dependent: The coneflowers are if anything over-blooming; huge numbers. And that’s good; they’re a big “pollinator plant”; they feed lots of critters, and not just bees. The goldfinches get on them too and extract the seed. And it seems — I hope I don’t jinx this by writing it down — it seems that nothing affects the weedy rudbeckia that self seed every fall and become even more prolific.
But the butterfly bush is huge and has the same problem as the salvia. The monarda never did bloom — or hasn’t yet, and it reliably blooms in May or June. Not this year. The baptisia had very few blooms.
This is a kind of follow-up on my report last time on the monster plants in my garden. I forgot to mention the biggest monster of them all: my giant pokeweed.
Self-sewn, growing in front of my bedroom window in a little sunny alcove, this year it has far surpassed last year’s gargantuan heights, and is easily 8 feet tall, with leaves as big as palm fronds. And the even better news: it is full of blossoms, most of which now have turned into pendulous racemes of berries, still small and green. But they’ll be dark and red and juicy in just a few weeks, I think. And if this year is like last year, I’ll have my own nature show as cardinals — mostly cardinals — wander among the branches, turning this way and that, hanging sideways, upside down, stretching, reaching to pluck the berries off.
I finally got my soil tests back. They were uninspiring. The nutrients the tests measure — soil pH, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, zinc — were all in the acceptable ranges. But turns out they don’t measure nitrogen! Who knew? I called the extension agent about this, and she explained why, but I wasn’t much clearer on the reason than before we talked. Nonetheless, I got a prescription: 3.2 to 4.8 oz N/100 sq ft.
This being an agricultural service (“extension” means extension of the university’s agricultural college), they assumed people getting soil testing were farmers with fields of commercial crops, and that the fertilizer we would use would be commercial artificial granular fertilizers with names like “14–14–14”.
But I don’t use these kinds of fertilizers.
More puzzling, more research. Turns out I needed to start applying my old go-to staple, fish emulsion. The amount prescribed on the bottle was the right amount. I was to do it every 3 weeks.
I could do that!
I still do not understand why plants with the “correct” amounts of nutrients — even high in phosporous — are not blooming more vigorously. And, as usual, I haven’t been able to find out.
I began this essay talking about the aninals, though, so to end I will go back to that. There are fewer this year in my garden: I’m sure of that. Not a single rabbit. (You’re lucky! I can hear you saying.) But I don’t feel lucky. I had a solitary rabbit for a few years; I assumed he was the same rabbit, but I guess a hawk got him. He really didn’t eat all that much. My veggies are in a raised bed, where he couldn’t get at them, and this year my clover patch, being a green plant, has expanded and is thick; and it does have blooms. But no rabbits to eat them.
Also, no skinks. I used to reliably see the skinks — mostly the blue-tailed youngsters —racing in and out of my raised bed, skittering along my windowsills in the sun. I haven’t seen a skink yet this year.
Even the robust chipmunk population seems to have decreased.
I know it’s not that the animals have less food to eat in my garden. I know that. Could it be a hawk? Or two? Or…
It’s a mystery.
