September 08, 2019
I'm learning to garden with abandon and reverence. That sounds contradictory but is not. Gardening with abandon has you trying new things and experimenting with different techniques regardless of your knowledge of the suspected outcome."Let's see what will happen" is a bit of a childish approach to gardening, but a method of keeping gardening fresh, and creating the potential for the joy of discovery..
It's frivolousness is counterbalanced by a profound reverence for the processes you are tinkering with. The complex processes of life are indeed awe inspiring, and if you are not on your knees, figuratively, for the vast beauty of nature's gifts, and the overwhelming amount of information we are unaware of, you have simply failed to connect the dots..
September 09, 2019
I have two Brussels sprout plants, in the same row, 18" apart, that are three feet tall. One has its stalk covered in perfect one inch, tightly formed sprouts, and the other has all half inch ones. Crazy huh? Same soil, light, water, wind, humidity, temperature and fertilizer, but different results. Speculation on how this could occur begins with soil microbia and genetic traits of the seed. Pathogens in the ground are neutralized by the plants ability to ward off attack. Apparently some plants are better at it than others. The mysteries of gardening far outweigh the knowledge..
It's like when you look at the woods. You see the front of every tree and bush, but the back, and everything behind them is unavailable to your sight. You see less than half of what's there. What you don't see is bigger than what you do see. Just like gardening..
September 10, 2019
I found about eight cabbage moth caterpillars on the cauliflower in the greenhouse, and none on the ones outside. Then I realized the outside ones are covered with bird netting. Duh. I also found out that cabbage moths are gray and brown, and stay still on the ground all day. They fly around at night, eating your plants and laying eggs on them..
The white, large winged garden visitors that I've always called cabbage moths, are actually butterflies. They visit flowers during the day extracting nectar with their proboscis, and lay eggs on your cole crops that turn into the caterpillars that eat them. This is another example of being told something one time, and believing it for a lifetime, even though it's wrong. Someone called the large mosquito like insects that get trapped in your house "mosquito eaters" and for the longest time I thought they actually ate mosquitoes..
