Nasturtium Seedling

A newly planted nasturtium seedings is poking out of its pot. Its six-odd sister seeds are still sleeping below the surface. I’ll transplant some out when they are big enough, but will leave about three plants in the pot, which I will put on the sill of the little window between the main courtyard and the herb courtyard. I have this image of them tumbling, a profusion of green leaves and bright orange and red blooms, out the pot and down the wall, in a gorgeous flowery froth.

Nasturtiums are really marvellous plants. Gardeners like to grow them in vegetable gardens as a decoy for bugs, which are seem to prefer hitting the nasturtiums rather than most veggies. Although I get just as indignant when bugs chow my nasturtiums!

But their suitability as a sacrificial plant aside, these guys are hardy and very, very quick growing. They even trump one-month-wonder radishes! Their flowers and their leaves are edible, and make a peppery addition to any salad. And their green seedpods make a nice substitute for capers, if stored in a jarful of vinegar for a while. Here’s a picture of some seedpods brining in salt water, before immersion in vinegar:

Nasturtium Pods in a Glass of Water

But most of all, nasturtiums are beautiful. And plants just don’t get any prettier or more useful than this.

Cherry Rose Nasturtium

Anyway, I had these cute little guys to distract me:

So I wasn’t prepared for the worst, when Big Spoon called to me from the herb garden this afternoon. In his hand lay Maurice.

It was clear he had been dead for some time. His vibrant, fresh green complexion was olivey yellow, and he looked like a crumpled leaf. There was something so sad and pathetic about his pose, with his arms thrown up as though to protect himself.

Given Maurice’s predilections for living dangerously, Big Spoon thought that he probably got stung by a bee. I wasn’t convinced that a bee could puncture Maurice’s carapace, which resembles green overlapping armour. I’d always thought his biggest threat would be a hungry bird, but of course a hungry bird wouldn’t leave the body behind.

I went online, and discovered two more likely possibilities: slugs, which produce an enzyme that is toxic for praying mantises, and old age. Most praying mantises live only for one year in the wild, and die after mating (the males!) or laying eggs (the females). So maybe Maurice got slugged, or maybe he just got old.

We buried him next to the raspberries, not far from the borage plant he called home. We felt quite subdued by his death, although it’s just business as usual for nature. When I next looked, his home wasn’t even empty any more; a tiny interloper had already taken over Maurice’s turf.

I will miss him on my daily inspection round the garden.

Maurice, Guardian of the Herb Garden

Hug Me!

This little guy is a Contender green bean, and is a precocious ten days old.

Big Spoon called me into the garden to see Maurice’s catch, which he was chowing down on with obvious enjoyment. While the poor bee was still alive, and wriggling up a storm. Ouch. Maurice started at the head and worked his way down. He was finding my frenzied photography distracting, so I left him for a while to enjoy his treat in private. Half an hour later, when I checked back with him, there was no evidence left, aside from two bee back legs and a pair of wings. Maurice was enjoying a leisurely post-prandial foreleg lick, so replete that he even gave me a wave.

And even though I’d brought him here to eat the bad pests, not useful ones like honeybees, I didn’t begrudge him his meal. It’s hard to begrudge such a magnificent creature, especially one who perpetually looks like he’s grinning.

Mushrooms, by Sylvia Plath
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

Mulching means putting a layer of material on top of the soil, to help it retain moisture and heat, and prevent weeds from popping up. You can mulch with artificial materials like black plastic, but organic mulches break down over time and add nutrients to the soil. Therefore… good gardeners mulch.

Now, I don’t really consider myself a good gardener. More likely a forgetful and absent-minded to the occasional point of neglect gardener. Just ask the lavender bush I bought two months ago and still have yet to plant. But hey, I aspire to greatness. And there are many less pleasant tasks than taking handfuls of dried rooibos stok tea and sprinkling them over the soil.

Carrots cuddling under a rooibos mulch 'duvet'

Stok tea are fine, twiggy bits of rooibos tea, a byproduct of the rooibos industry. Coarser than tea, they have that lovely, herbal smell redolent of hot cups of every South African’s favourite tea. Rooibos mulch isn’t particularly cheap (I paid R34 for my medium sized bag), but a little goes a long way in a small garden like mine, and I love, love, love its smell. And I’m pretty sure it increases the acidity of my soil (as rooibos plants grow in acidic soil, and most teas are mildly acidic), which is good news for most plants.

Cape Town has been blasted by a wintry storm all weekend. Even in a courtyard, my plants have been buffeted by gale force winds. They are not happy (in fact, a couple are having a lie-down in protest, parallel to the ground!), although a bit of rain certainly won’t hurt them. I think we’re over the worst now, despite the grey clouds hanging low over the mountain. Here’s to hoping for a sunnier end-of-week.

In a staring competition, he would certainly win.

Well, while I was checking him out in situ, I noticed lots of small, black things on the leaves and stalks of the borage plant. They were strangely shaped, round but slightly stretched, with something white sticking out of the flatter end. I didn’t want to touch them, so I brushed them into a bowl. They were hard, and striated.

What were they? Some strange egg laid by a new bug, set to hatch and eat my plant? Maybe Maurice’s poop? Maybe Maurice’s… eggs? I dashed inside and googled ‘praying mantis egg’, and proceeded to learn many interesting things about praying mantises, their eggs (charmingly called oothecas), and the strange people online who are obsessed with them. No, definitely not an egg. To my amazement, no one has yet thought to put a picture of praying mantis poop on the internet (so there are virtual leaves still left unturned!). I returned to the borage plant and Maurice to ponder further. He was upside down, and looking terribly smug, almost close to… laughing. I peered in closer (but not too close – I think he’s waiting for me to get within jumping distance) and them I noticed another black… thing, inside one of the borage flower calyx. I shook the flower. It wouldn’t come off. At which point it dawned on me that the black things come from the flowers. Otherwise known as… seeds. Duh. I simply hadn’t noticed them before because borage seeds are brown and look perfectly round until they are totally mature, when they turn dark, dark brown, and fall off – revealing a flat end with white tissue sticking out, like a razor clam from its shell (or a particularly disgusting tongue from a mouth). And since borage plants are so hairy, the seeds stick to whatever they fall on, including the leaves.

Mystery solved! Although I felt pretty let down by Maurice and the prospect of babies. Even baby praying mantises are pretty cute. It turns out that praying mantises lay big white cocoon like nests for their babies in the autumn, and they only hatch in the spring. And since Maurice has been here only a week or so, it would be super-mantis of him (or her) to already have babies running around now.

I spent a slightly subdued half-hour collecting all the seeds I could see (I’m a seed saver after all, and even if disappointing, the black alien cocoons are still seed). Maurice continued to mock my stupidity from afar, rocking from side to side with laughter. But as I moved away from the final borage plant (a very anaemic creature, potbound too long and guiltily transplanted by me to a less-than-ausicious position next to the compost bin), something moved on the top leaves. It was almost microscopic, the movemnt, and I don’t know how I saw it, but as I moved in closer I almost couldn’t believe it… not one, but two baby praying mantises!

Tiny, tiny babies, maybe 5mm long, and correspondingly fragile and skinny . Like all praying mantises, they have the personalities of particularly irritable prize fighters, weaving and ducking the often imaginary enemy. While they’re certainly not Maurice’s offspring, I am touched by their presence here. And hope they’re smart enough to steer clear of Maurice, on his neighbouring borage plant lookout tour, since praying mantises are, among their many gifts, very cheerful cannibals. In the meanwhile, I will think of names for the Terrible Twins, something which does justice to their ninja personalities.

One more fact before I leave you, gleaned from my day’s research (nothing is ever wasted): while we all know that most female praying mantises eat the heads of their mates while copulating, did you know that certain types of male praying mantises will only release their sperm sac once their head is removed?

Worth thinking about, surely.

As predicted, Big Spoon and Bro stomped all over my nicely fluffed, thankfully empty planting beds, but since I got five trellises hung on my walls out of the experience, I’m not complaining.

The problem with natural wooden trellises is that they are not totally straight. This is part of their rugged charm, but it makes it difficult to hang them. We did it by eye, i.e. without spirit levels and the like, since we will be enjoying them with our eyes in the years to come, not right angle triangles! Thankfully I found some hooks at the local Mica Hardware store which fit the wooden poles’ diameter (I bought an experimental set to try at home, before buying enough to hang all the trellises), and Big Spoon and Bro drilled holes, filled them with plastic plugs which came with the hooks, and then screwed in the hooks by hand. Big Spoon used a nifty trick to screw them in, which I had not seen before, but no doubt he learned in engineering 101: he did the initial three or four twists of the hook by hand, just until the threads engaged properly with the plastic plug. Then he put a short, sturdy stick through the hook, and twisted that, like a bar steering wheel, to screw the hook all the way into the plastic plug, which allowed him to get it in much tighter, and was much more comfortable for his hands.

I thankfully watched this from afar; there are benefits to being too short sometimes. The only trellis which gave us any trouble was the one which needed to go on a vibracrete wall in the herb garden. Vibracrete is made of concrete, with as much air removed as possible to make it denser, and aggregate (in this case, small, jagged stones) for additional strength. Ouch. Big Spoon tried drilling into the centre pole for about one minute, and after getting nowhere (well, five milimetres, precisely) hit upon another solution.

Sometimes I secretly wish I shared my life with someone who loves art house movies, can speak Italian with me, and got my witty references to Charles Dickens novels. Now is not one of those times. When it comes to finding solutions and getting things done, give me an engineer, any day. He took two heavy duty, galvanized hooks I had bought, screwed them together so they look like the letter S, and hung them over the edge of the vibracrete wall. I’m buying another set of identical hooks today, so we can have two S’s, to hang the two sides of the trellis on. Problem solved!

I thanked both men with a roast pork feast, replete with ribs, shredded pork and lots of super-healthy crackling, baked potatoes, a fennel, apple and poppyseed ‘slaw and creamed leek and spinach. I considered it a fair exchange of skills.

October already, and no seeds in the ground! I hope to remedy that tomorrow, since Kyle and his brother Wesley will be hanging my trellises on the courtyard walls this evening. I don’t want to put in delicate plants and seedlings if they’re going to be trampling the beds today. So I’ve impatiently bided my time, and designed and discarded a hundred garden plans in my head in the meantime.

But the tomato seeds I planted into seed trays have not been idle. I examine them minutely every morning, and yesterday, I was greeted by the sight of two tiny stems, emerging timidly from the soil.

The seed leaves are not even out yet, and the stems are bent under the weight of the tomato seed casings. Since the leaves are the last (and largest) thing to emerge from the seed casing, it is up to them to break out, causing the seed casing to split and fall, its task now completed, to the ground. The reason the first leaves the plant grows are long and pointed (like the blades of scissors) is to help the plant break the seed casing, which is why we call them seed leaves. Most monocot seeds (carrots, lettuce, etc) have identically shaped seed leaves, so clearly natural selection has decided that this is the most effective shape for breaking out of a seed casing. All the leaves which grow on the plant after this first set will be the plant’s normal, ‘true’ leaves.

Seeds only contain enough nutrients to fuel the growth of a taproot into the soil and the emergence of a single stem, ending in a single set of seed leaves. After this, the seedling sheds the now useless seed casing, and can manufacture its own food for growth, from water and nutrients its tiny root takes from the soil, and the sunlight’s energy its seed leaves harness. These are the key ingredients of the life-giving chemical equation we know as photosynthesis.

But back to the important stage my tomato seed/seedlings are at: shedding the seed casing. This takes immense strength from the seedling, which at this point consists of just a delicate stem, that is narrower and softer than the hard seed casing. Not all seedlings are strong enough for this vital burst of action, and will die, still wearing their hard seed casings. Since all of this drama takes place in miniature, my fat fingers cannot even help in this battle, life waged against death. Indeed, I shouldn’t want to help; a seedling which cannot get its seed leaves out by itself doesn’t have the requisite strength, either through a poor choice of environment (not enough water, the seed not deeply anchored in the soil, etc) or bad genetics (it’s just not as vital as larger, tougher seeds). It’s survival of the fittest, on this tiny, tiny scale, but I find it just as gripping as watching nature documentaries about ecosystems in the wild. And after all, it is more relevant to me, as this battle will decide whether I have tomatoes to eat three months from now!