Spooky Stuff in the Garden

Anytime you engage Nature, you’re confronted not only with Life but also with Death. The Cycle of Life includes birth, growth, death, decomposition and rebirth from the enriched matter. Decaying mulch, worms, discarded plant parts — all contribute to a rich compost that builds the soil and strengthens the ecosystem.

But sometimes ya just gotta laugh! I don’t know if I’m having extra, over-the-top spooky stuff this week because some faeries are having a giggle fest, or if it’s all part of the Goshen gardening package. Some of this stuff is so odd and macabre that I just had to share.

Death Card from the highly recommended Robin Wood Tarot: http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Books/BookPages/RWTDeck.html

As regular blog readers know, I’ve been wood mulching the heck out of our yard. Inspired by the film “Back to Eden,” as well as other farms that experience incredibly rich soil and eventually no need to water, I looked at our 10% grass, 90% weeds and tree stumps yard and thought, “Build up!” I made arrangements with a local arborist to have truckloads of wood mulch dumped into our yard and driveway (for free), and I’ve been mulching pretty much since Easter. We also had David’s parents save five huge garbage bags of leaves for us last Fall in anticipation of this year’s garden.

We’ve had good success with leaf mulch in the past, and I’ve recently learned even more about the benefits of mulching. Not only does the mulch save on watering efforts and costs, but it also enhances the mycelium in the soil. Mycelium is the branching, threadlike, vegetative part of fungus, and it has all sorts of amazing properties. Some researchers even claim that mycelium can save the world.

Well, let me tell you, mold and fungus can also creep you out! Off and on for the past couple weeks, we’ve had this funky looking foamy stuff that’s rock hard show up in little spots around the yard, usually around stray wood mulch. The other day, I saw a sadly dead nasturtium that I’d been meaning to pull out surrounded by what looked like sprayed on foam. It was pink and white with flecks of red. It hadn’t killed the nasturtium sprout. That would be the leaf hoppers, but despite its fluffy appearance, this foamy substance was just as hard as the stuff on the wood mulch. Later in the week, I noticed some of it on top of the pile of pine needles awaiting compost and blueberry bushes. I watched through the window as it shifted from white to pink to bright yellow. Then, this morning, I found the same foamy strangler around my very happy chives. What the?!

I should have taken a photo before I broke the strangling foam up with a stick, but I wanted to poke it to see whether it felt the same as the earlier stuff. Yep, except this was kind of sticky, gooey, like caulk before it dries. It concentrated itself at the base of the chives, which actually appear to be growing even better than before. The photo shows a little dish of slug beer, as well as leaves of the very happy watercress making its way around the bed.

I came inside and begged David to come out to the garden to look at this alarming stuff. He did but didn’t have any words of wisdom other than his usual “the internet is a powerful tool.” I came inside and searched “slime fungus strangling plants in the garden.” Well, it turns out we have “Dog Vomit Fungus.”

Dog Vomit Fungus

I kid you not, there are threads and threads of people completely freaked out by this apparently harmless mold. Someone claims it is one of the oldest life forms on our planet — the first mold to move towards decaying matter. It usually occurs near mulch or on lawns after saturating rains — both of which we’ve had.

The thing is, this Dog Vomit Fungus makes me giggle (now that I know what it is), especially after I had just decided to let a devoured zinnia put forth a flower anyway. I call it “Skeletor Zinnia,” and god/dess bless the little one, it’s got almost no leaves but seems to be bursting a bud:

Skeletor Zinnia

And then, there’s the highly informative, but certainly odd phone conversation I had with the friendly neighborhood Lowe’s Garden Center guy yesterday afternoon. I was calling for Bonnie (non-GMO) chard and kale starts, since my sprouts appear to be irresistible to something. They appear and disappear within hours of each other. He didn’t have anymore starts for me, but he shared some helpful garden pest tips.

I asked about rabbits (ours are ginormous, possibly hares!) and he said that if I didn’t want to fence in the garden, I could “collect the urine of a wild fox and circle that around the perimeter.” Ummmm, yeah. While I’m conjuring a wild fox to pee in a jar for me, should I add eye of newt and toe of frog? I asked if we could just use human pee, but he said “only urine from a natural predator will work.” I told him I thought fencing the garden would be easier than catching a wild fox and forcing it to pee at my discretion. He seemed surprised but eventually said that I was “probably right.”

He then informed me that I could also spread human hair around my plants. “If those rabbits get a whiff of human hair, they’ll run away from your plants.” “So, I can either catch a wild fox and make him pee on demand, or I can just trim my hair and put the ends out there?” “Yep. That’ll work just fine.”

For years I have cut my own hair with pinking sheers, because my hair grows as fast as our dandelions. I’ve been using the pinking sheers, but also intensely looking for some layering scissors I’d misplaced last December. (Like, looking for them several times per week, because I have a lot of hair that gets heavy at the ends.) No matter where I looked, those scissors would never turn up. Last night, I decided to test Mr. Lowe’s Garden Guy’s theory, so I went into the bathroom, mindlessly picked up a bag I’ve looked in several times before, and “lo” and behold: the missing scissors, and only the missing scissors.

I thinned out my hair and then sprinkled the layering leftovers around my lower level plants last night, thinking about voodoo and wondering if the bunnies would run in terror or if they’d gather my hair, cast a spell and ban me from my own garden.

Mr. Lowe’s Garden Guy also advised me not to let David mow down any of our clover, but there’s nothing particularly spooky about that. Clover offers more nutrition than most garden plants, so the rabbits will eat that instead. Nonetheless, in addition to a growing clover patch, we’ve now got witchy red hair thinnings, decaying leaves, rotting wood, Dog Vomit Fungus and Skeletor Zinnia, all in fairly close proximity.

If only it was Halloween, I could probably charge admission. 😉