Moultrie

The mail arrived. Significant decisions to be made.

Will it be Crunchy or Munchy carrots?

Before spring, seed and plant catalogs arrive. What seeds and plants can I purchase locally, from catalogs, and online?

Once, dozens of catalogs stuffed our mailbox. These days, a modest offering. I take into account shipping costs, a smaller garden and successes (and failures) from past gardens.

Tenacity

We’ve planted gardens throughout the West. We’ve had birds, pigs, neighborhood herbicide spray, and a herd of dairy cows take out fruit trees and vegetable gardens. We persist.

Hollyhocks are new on this year’s list. Mom recounted how she and her sister “made flower dolls with hollyhock petals for skirts.” Older farm homes around Grant County seemed inviting with clumps of hollyhocks through flowerbeds.

While on a VLB (very low budget) travel plan to Denmark, I came upon a row of fishermen’s cottages painted blue as a spring sky. For accent, pink hollyhocks lined walkways and filled flowerbeds — the tableau like a still life from the 1800s.

In a Danish village, a hollyhock clump survived where it inched up from a crack in the road concrete.

In Morocco, I spotted a hollyhock bush growing on a rock-littered slope next to a gravel road. One word for hollyhocks — hardy.

I ordered two packets of hollyhock seeds.

We met a gardener who grew a lovely yard with expensive-looking shrubs.

“The garden plants I got free,” said the gardener. “I took cuttings from plants gardeners shared with me.”

War against weeds

Studying the spiral-bound handbook titled “Noxious Weeds of Grant County” (Oregon) can leave a gardener a nervous insomniac.

Field bindweed, genus Convolvulus, flourishes in my garden. The “troublesome pest” has an impressive resume — taproots up to 10 feet long with seeds viable up to 50 years!

Another unwanted guest in gardens and roadsides resides in the genus Tribulus, known as puncture vine or goathead. The handbook lists sandbur as another name but the two do not resemble each other. Puncture vine grows low with sprawling stems and lives up to its reputation with the needle-sharp burrs. I’ve had numerous punctured bicycle tires from these.

Even with the many thistles and other noxious weeds, I nominate sandbur, genus Cenchrus, as one of the most noxious. Grass-like and hard to spot when it first germinates, it develops sharp spires that are painful and hard to see. Insidious. Makes barefoot games on the lawn and working around the flower and vegetable beds a painful process.

Different botanical groups have names such as a covey of quail, herd of elk, a murder of crows. My current garden I’d label as an embarrassment of weeds.

Mystery

Who was eating the blueberries and raspberries I grew for grandchildren, and hauled off just-purchased herb plants?

Eyewitness accounts — not birds, squirrels, porch thieves.

The guilty party spotted slurping off raspberries and blueberries from bushes and hauling herb plants to his bone collection, the gourmet thief — the family dog.

Treasures discovered

Amazing quantities of produce can come from a single seed. One notable seed — a pumpkin seed yielded a pumpkin last fall that weighed a whopping 2,749 pounds!

Reportedly, one seed in this class of pumpkins sold for $850, and the pumpkin can use over 1,000 pounds of chicken manure. Not sure how the neighbors dealt with that.

Other treasures and resources: OSU horticultural staff, Corvallis, and Master Gardener volunteers.