There may be a six-foot-tall skeleton on your neighbor’s lawn and a zombie in the yard across the street, but the real horror is often lying in an unmarked grave in the very person you suspect the most, perhaps your own yard.
I’ll be the first to admit that there have been some scares in my garden over the years. english ivy And that ends with the pea gravel mulch I inherited when I moved into this house, and the mint I foolishly planted directly into the ground years ago, not knowing then that it would still haunt me now.
Did you say “it ends”? Who are you kidding? I still cause all kinds of mayhem in bed and on the border. Recently I had to hire a landscaper to remove a creeping Liriope that I mistaken for the clumping type. The poor man worked with a pickaxe for over three hours. I’m glad he didn’t come after me with it.
In the process, we lost many of the mature perennials and bulbous plants next to the weedy groundcovers. It takes many years for new plantings to mature and for the border to return to its former lush glory.
plenty of blame
Bagworm cocoons hanging from conifer branches in Kentucky. Bagworms are destructive pests on coniferous trees that can be mistaken for pine cones. (William Fountain/University of Kentucky/Bugwood.org via AP)
Some horrific garden scenarios, like my mint accident, are clearly our own fault, but the blame can fall directly on outsiders, like nurseries that mislabel plants or squirrels who “plant” invasive species among our natives.
Either way, it is our responsibility to clean up after ourselves. No one knows this better than John and Mary Richardson of Port Jefferson Station, New York. He once wrote to me and said he was advised to sprinkle cayenne pepper around his vegetables to repel the critters that were wreaking havoc on his crops.
“We generously sprayed every bed in the garden,” they told me, adding that they were careful to repeat the application after each rain to ensure “continued protection.”
Eventually, the couple said, pepper plants began taking over all the vegetable beds and flower beds. “We had no idea of using ground cayenne pepper instead of seed pepper flakes,” they admitted.
When I think of seeds, I think of a story a few years ago told by a reader who was perplexed by the weekly loss of tomatoes from his vines. After checking out a particularly voluptuous heirloom to appreciate its beauty, he decided to postpone the harvest for another day, having planned to enjoy a lunch of tomato sandwiches. But when the salivating sower went out to pick tomatoes, they were nowhere to be found either. It was lawn mowing day, but it didn’t take him long to realize that “the landscaper had put tomato seeds in his teeth,” he said.
I once heard of a desperate reader who was struggling with a dripping bamboo plant planted by his neighbor. A virulent intruder, a plant with iron roots, was growing under the fence dividing the property and protruding from the pool liner. Did he have to move?
“The ultimate rookie mistake”
Weeds sprouted in a rock garden in Granbury, Texas, after a bird dropped seeds from an overhead feeder. (Alyssa Shirek, via AP)
Next up is Alyssa Shirek of Granbury, Texas. “As someone with many years of gardening experience, I made the ultimate rookie mistake,” she admitted. “I placed the bird feeder directly on the newly landscaped rock, but forgot that the bird seeds were actually seeds.
“Between birds dropping confetti-like seeds and several severe Texas storms, our pretty rock landscape has turned into a haphazard mess,” she said. Strictly avoiding pesticides, Mr. Shirek spent hours “picking out surprising sprouts by hand, collecting ant bites, knee scrapes, and bruised self-esteem along the way.”
Months later, she said stray seedlings still pop up every once in a while, especially after a storm.
“Alie Q Mac” from Middle Island, New York, shared her unfortunate misadventure story with me via Facebook. She wanted to do a fun project with her kids, so she ordered some ladybug larvae by mail. “I released them on my zucchini plants and later found out they were actually beetles,” she said. “They killed all my plants.”
And sometimes that comes with the job. Alice Raimondo, who works as a horticulture lab coordinator at the Cornell Cooperative Extension Diagnostic Clinic in Riverhead, New York, says she sees a lot of strange phenomena as homeowners bring in diseased plants and creepy insects for identification.
Raimondo remembers that once, a woman brought in a wreath she had made from the corn she had collected. “She liked the look of the cones, but after working with a few cones, she realized they were undulating,” she said. “As it turns out, they were bagworms: harmful pests that enclose themselves in ‘bags’ made from leaves and other plant parts. The woman “was feeling pretty sick,” Raimondo said.
As these brave gardeners can attest, one simple mistake can turn into a terrible lesson. But I think the real lesson here is that despite our best intentions, nature can sometimes surprise us with tricks rather than rewards.
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Jessica Damiano writes a weekly gardening column for The Associated Press and publishes the award-winning Weekly Dirt Newsletter. You can sign up here Get weekly gardening tips and advice.
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