Plants native to my lawn: vetch

I recently experienced one of my sporadic fits of curiosity about the various weeds wild plants that make up my lawn. I grabbed a few samples and took some pictures. I have tried to identify them. I will post some of the pictures along with what I know about them.

Common Vetch

I'll start with a little success story. I finally identified this fern-like plant. It looks similar to chamberbitter, but chamberbitter grows individual seeds hanging from the central shoot (on a fern it is called a rachis). This is vetch. I'm guessing it is common vetch because I don't expect anything more exotic in my yard.

Near the top of the picture you can see the seed pod. If it looks like a pea pod, that is because vetches, genus Vicia, are legumes. On the right is a rather sad example of the purple flower that caps off this little plant.

Edible? Not for me. Ruminants can eat vetch but people should not. Some varieties are toxic when consumed in large amounts.

Paper Pots

I employed a little child labor to help with paper pots. It was mostly an experiment and it went really well. Drop dead simple, too. We just rolled newspaper strips around a can and folded in the ends. We made six pots. We planted seeds from a grocery store apple. Long odds that they'll sprout or grow or ever fruit, but the kids wanted to try apples. Why not.

I also added more chicken wire to the leaf pile so it can reach a height of about six feet. It probably has about 200 cubic feet of leaves with capacity for that much more again. I'm piling up leaf bags at the open end so they can keep the volume contained and I can add from them as the pile settles. Turning it might be a hassle but I plan to leave it for a few years before I start mining it. It will be leaf mold, not finished compost. It should be a suitable fall dressing on fallow soil or mulch for winter crops.

The best part--I didn't rake any of these leaves. I stole them all from curbside.

Heirloom tomatoes

Planting has begun. I have a few overwintered tomato and pepper plants in the west bed. Today the girls and I went to Goodwood for the heirloom tomato sale. We got a Concord (little yellow fruit) and a Green Zebra (exactly what you would imagine) and a Hank (pert little red guys). I told the girls to leave the little label sticks in the tiny pots, which they of course removed. So we won't know which is what until they fruit.

The nursery is mostly full of hot peppers of different varieties and sprouting seeds that I mostly remembered to label. It should be worth photographing in a few weeks.

On the craft front, I researched making newspaper pots, which is quick and easy and lets you make lots of pots (which I am running out of) for no cost that you can stick right in the ground (just like a peat pot). So that reduces the shock to the roots of removing the plant from a pot. It should also be a fun activity for the kiddos.

In the world of soil improvement, I've shifted most of the kitchen scraps into the worm composter. To make up for it, I've started randomly pulling weeds and shoving them into the Earth Machine. Today I grabbed a bushel of galium aparine, also known as Sticky Willy because it is covered with velcro-like hooks. It's fun stuff for a weed and it has medicinal value, too.



Also, I have kicked big leaf pile into gear. Last week I pulled the idle chicken wire from the strawberries where it failed to serve its intended purpose. I used it to start a leaf pile in a scraggly, dark corner of the yard. Today, I borrowed a truck and swiped a few dozen bags of leaves from curbside to fill it up. Dump, water, repeat. Now I've got another roll of chicken wire to make the pile taller. Pictures when phase II is complete.

More little critters

This guy whizzed past me and I tracked him down. He's a beautiful, horny scarab with a brilliant copper carapace. He kept his legs tucked in while I was photographing him and showing him to the kids, but as soon as I put him in the composter, he walked right in like he was home. I haven't heard from him since. I googled him, of course. Phanaeus imperator is his name and he is a professional carrion crawler.

This wolf spider was actually in the house, not the garden, although I have seen many of them in the garden and yard. He's a ferocious hunter, so I actually don't mind him and his family being in the house and growing to substantial size. Two inches long, plus a little more for the legs. It is a bit disconcerting that we always seem to meet up in the middle of the night. I groggily flick on the light or look up from my laptop and he sits in the middle of the floor, patiently waiting for me to thank him for the fact that I never have to see living palmetto bugs in the house. If my wife finds him, he ends up dead. If I find him, I throw him outside and tell him where to find the bark lice.

Tiny critters

The exciting news is that I have begun vermicomposting. I bought my worms today from Ladybird Organics through Native Nurseries. My assistants and I put together a worm bin and bedded it with damp newspaper. We fed them some strawberry tops since that was what we had in the cuttings bin. In the past all of the cuttings, refrigerator fossils and vacuum contents went into the Earth Machine. Now the food cuttings will go to the worms. In about three months I will try to harvest some worm castings.

Here is a picture of one of the little guys. They are generically called red wigglers, though not all of them are

necessarily Eisenia fetida.

The other cool tiny critters we have seen lately are the bark lice on the crepe myrtle in the back yard. I had never noticed these before and was sure they presaged doom for my aging shade tree. A quick googling revealed they are in fact beneficial and live off the fungi on the tree. So, not really beneficial for fungi. But for the tree,

they're like an egret on a rhino's back. It is tough to see these little guys in the photo. They scrabble around in a herd and if you wave your finger at them they scatter--very slowly. I wish I had a good lens for up-close photos.