Studiology

A Guinea Summer

Not even talking about the heat, it's just a busy time of year. In the garden it's a watering, deadheading, weeding, and oh, watching butterflies. There are also the extraneous things like birthday parties, Cullowhee Native Plant Conference, and serving as a bodyguard to the guinea. In this last duty, my serious job of protection, I can share the background story. 

In late winter 2 cooper hawks built a nest in a large white pine behind the garage. A bit chatty at first, in time they became so quiet that I thought maybe they had abandoned their nest. In early summer I heard the first vocalizations of the young and could hear them flapping around as they bounced from limb to limb. In time I learned that there were 3, one much smaller than the other 2. They vocalize all day long, triangulating where each one is, it's a constant during the day. They have grown quickly in the last month and are close to the size of the parents. Since they have seen me come and go on a regular basis, they pay me little mind. It's not uncommon to find them sitting on the roof, or on the posts for the cloths line, which causes the guinea to yell in terror and me to jump up from whatever I'm doing to defend him, he is the last one. Cooper hawks are not the largest hawk, but one of the fastest and they have spent a lot of time learning to glide and then go faster. 

Yesterday was the first attempt at a real attack on the guinea, which I thwarted just in time. This is my survivor, and he has aged to a mellow sort of fellow who follows me everywhere, unless Duke the yellow lab is there, then he follows him. He stays close to the house and survived 2 owl attacks in early spring, one of which was a hit but only resulted in some lost feathers. The last hit was at 2 in the morning and he actually came into the house and let me close the door. He slept on the floor and I crawled back into bed. For any guinea owner, this is hard to believe, they regard themselves as wildly independent.

My recent concern over the hawks and my worry over the guinea's survival prompted a friend to suggest a fake owl to scare the hawks. It seems wrong, very wrong, but I can't be there every time the little raptors want to test their strength. And I will add that everyday with my last guinea has been one I'm grateful for, we have become best buddies.

Here he is drinking out my garden water bowl, which was the same watering hole for the 3 young hawks only half an hour prior.

So fake owl it is. The deluxe version, it's solar powered with a motion detector. If anything sets off the motion detector, the eyes light up and some digital owl sounds follow (hardly scary but what do I know). Now, all is quiet but the guinea hasn't seen it yet. The night is young.

Deadheading

A gardener's summer is filled with deadheading. In my case, I'm consumed by it, a daily activity, the act of keeping things tidy. As much as anyone understands deadheading, the principle is simple; to remove a finished flower or seed pod to encourage energy to flow back into the plant, hastening new growth. As simple as it sounds, it's a bit complex. Annuals and perennials are the primary subjects of deadheading, although shrubs like butterfly bush and roses are freer flowering if spent blooms are removed.

Annuals, true annuals such as sunflowers, zinnias, and marigolds may be left to seed, the latter volunteers generally inferior to the parent plant, which are the result of careful breeding. Most of the time sunflowers are grown for the birds, the seeds allowed to ripen fully with a smattering of seedlings returning; the birds never seem to consume them all. Zinnias rarely seed for me, but I am judicious at cutting them for flower arrangements, a form of deadheading and encouraging more flowers. Marigolds do respond to a regular cleaning or removal of spent flowers, it does encourage more, this the gardener learns from doing. 

Perennials often require a little homework, only because there are vastly different plants lumped together into one category. Those with umbelled flowers such as fennel or parthenium are short lived or biennial. With the aim of absolute seed removal, you've closed the door to future generations because this year's flowers may be the last the plant will produce. Other short lived perennials include columbine, linum, gaillardia, and campion, all of which require a bit of seeding to return.

Big flowering bulbs like lilies are better with deadheading, but only high on the plant, allowing foliage to cure or restore the bulb to a healthy state for next year. Daylilies are deadheaded every day and routinely cut to the ground as the show ends. Since they are not bulbs, there is no harm in the removal of foliage and it sets them up for a surge of new leaves that remain handsome into fall. 

Phlox and bee balm are not only deadheaded but also cut to the ground (6" or less). The resurgence of new growth is most welcome and richly green. Coneflower poses a bit of a conundrum, the fancy hybrids will seed and the subsequent seedlings will be inferior to the expensive plant you purchased. The majority of seedlings will grow into thigh high purple daisies, which is certainly fine, but you may have been better off just buying Echinacea purpurea, or E. laevigata and allowing them to spread at will. With the fancy ones, I do deadhead, with their expensive price tag; my aim is to keep them true. One exception is a seed strain named E. 'Cheyenne Spirit', the idea was to allow them to volunteer, which they will do in a wonderful array of colors. 

Sometimes the seeds are too pretty to remove. My first thought goes to the ornamental onions, so handsome are the seed heads that garden art has been created to imitate them. Other plants with glorious seed heads are nigella or love in a mist (annual), ornamental grasses, milkweed (my humble opinion), and most poppies. Leaving them is decision best made with some knowledge of how much and how far they will spread. Like I said, it's complex.

Case # 477

The call came from the Blue Ridge Wildlife Center that my turtle's fractured jaw had healed and he needed to go back home. Since this was  a difficult rescue and the scariest one of my life, I have spent some time plotting on how to take him home. The request for relocation is no more than a quarter mile from where they are found and headed in the direction they seemed to be traveling. I managed to scoop him up from Route 50  (April 28th) where it's 3 lanes of fast moving traffic and I was only successful because he was on his back and on the white line of 2 lanes. Figuring out where he was going was pretty simple, the land he lived on had become great big storage facilities, he was looking for an escape (or so I believe), but Chantilly would not be considered a good habitat by a long stretch. 

I settled on Cub Run Creek which appears to be surrounded by wetlands and won't be developed. It's more like a mile from his original haunt, but the kind folks at Blue Ridge pulled up a map of the area and we determined that it was the safest place. I even brought some tomato hornworms, specifically the ones that had parasitic wasp eggs on them. I figured a slow torturous death is worse than today's turtle food. 

His case was EBT 19-477, which I'm sure means Eastern Box Turtle, year 2019 and the 477th one?! 

The spot I placed him was overrun with poison ivy, so probably not visited much by humans. The creek was nearby and a plane from Dulles Airport was flying over, which most certainly would be a familiar sound to this turtle. We had a little chat about highways and he ambled on (without his snacks), I'm sure he was glad to be "in the wild" again. 

Safe travels # 477!