Simplify your garden: Go wild!

Before we downsized and sold our suburban home, we kept formal gardens and they were wonderful.  But the care of our gardens took hours and days and weeks of work to keep them organized and flourishing.  The result was marvelous. But the time involved was not. At our new location, our little cottage, we are now experimenting with smaller, more informal gardens that largely depend upon native plants for their blooms and color.

Formal Garden

In our more informal setting, we let the native plants and flowers mingle with the grasses and plants that just pop up and join in for the fun, with the exception of invasives and poison ivy, which we remove by digging up  We added a few colorful flowers and bushes, mostly native to our North East area, that mingle next to the wilder plants.  We tell our plants in our garden to have fun, make room for everybody, move over, if necessary We wish them luck and tell them we hope that it rains so that they get some water. Surprise us, we say, with your arrangements. The end result is very joyful.

We mow a small amount of our yard to make the wild and wooly chaos of our plants look organized.  On one side of our yard, the middle is wilded and on the other side of the yard, the edges are wilded.  A stone path runs through the middle.

Informal Garden

Keeping large parts of the yard wilded is making a buffer, slowing down the flow of rainwater into the lake, thus reducing erosion.  The end result of simplifying our yard is that we only need to mow small portions of the lawn once a month, just to keep walking paths around the garden.  Birds and butterflies enjoy their newly found meadows.

The time we spent before pulling weeds is now spent swimming, kayaking, talking walks, researching and writing.

Wilded with flowers

Naturalized yard

When it comes to gardens, I say go wild.

Is the World Over Populated? Or Who Ate my Toast?

A friend just asked me whether I thought that the world was really overpopulated.

"Overpopulated for what?"  I asked.

He replied, "Oh, you know what I mean.  Our whole life we were debating whether the world had too many people, whether we were going to run out of food."

"That's true," I said, "but have you noticed that the longer that we debate this, the bigger our population gets and the more food we have to eat?   What's the problem?"

"But," he protested, "Don't you remember the warnings of  Rachel Carson when she wrote Silent Spring? She tried to show us that there are repercussions to all those pesticides we were using to finesse our food supplies.  What about the arguments of Robert Malthus about overpopulation?"

"Oh yeah, I get what you mean, now" I said.  "You're talking about those hysterics who told us we had too many people on earth.  Way back when the US was a quarter of its current population size, people argued that we should reduce our population growth to zero, work toward a stable population.  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we quadrupled our population, increased our GDP,  our food production went through the ceiling and we added a minimum of 20 to 30 extra pounds just around our waists, without even estimating what we added to our legs and our behinds.  Is that what you are talking about?"

"Yeah, something like that".

"Well, I never believed in overpopulation." I said, "Not even for a minute.  We are not overpopulated. 'The more, the merrier', that's my motto  More people means more growth.  That is what keeps our economy chugging. "  

"But what about all these people I keep running into, right when I don't need them" he protested. "I get stuck in traffic every single day, at least twice.  Once on my way to work, and once on the way back.  Isn't that overpopulation?  Wouldn't it be easier if there were fewer people to contend with on the highways?"

"Heck, no" I replied. "That's because we don't have a mass transit system!  What are we doing all riding around in cars?  What happened to bikes, to walking, to public transit?"

"So, you don't think its as simple as slowing down on population growth?  Listen", he said. "When I was born in 1940's, the United States had 130 million people. In 2046 , when I am 100 years old, we will have around 400 million.  I'm just guessing, of course, that I will make it to the ripe old age of 100, now that we have these newly improved life expectancies.  Don't you think that all these people will negatively affect our public spaces, our national parks, our school systems and waiting times in doctor's offices?  How many people does it take before we are overcrowded?"  

"Try to be alone!" he added, woefully. "Just try to find a place outdoors where you can sit there for an hour and not see anybody.  Just try it.  See what happens.  It is clear to me that we have taken over all the habitats on earth,  plants and animals, ours and theirs.  There is no place left to hide!" he exclaimed.

"Sounds pretty boring to me."  I replied.  "Why would we want to be that isolated from people?  I love people."

"Well, you might feel differently if you were a bird or other animal," he said..  "How often can an animal  find a spot where they can sit down in a quiet place and munch peacefully on a carcass or take a drink from a stream without running into one of us?  They must have permanent indigestion from all our commotion."

I replied to him, "That's not because of overpopulation.  We don't have to spread out like that.  We could cluster our living arrangements more densely, like bees or ants, and take less land from other animals, give them more space.  Blame that experience on our spreading suburbs.  That's not overpopulation."

"Okay, then, help me out here." he said. "If every time I bring up an example of overpopulation, you make it sound like the problem is something else.  Is there, then, no such thing as overpopulation?  Shouldn't we slow down population growth?"

"Nope," I said. "We could keep growing forever. Relax! Let things happen naturally.  It doesn't have to be orchestrated.  There's no need to overreact. Nature knows how to take care of things, just you wait and see.  One untreatable infectious disease brings down our population size a whole lot faster than any slow, complicated policy change.  All it takes is a couple of unexpected food and energy shortages to do the trick without any need for intelligent action on our part.  And I haven't even brought up the important impact of the inevitable war yet."  

And with that, I walked away, fully confident of my position in this argument.

Addendum:

The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See  was produced several years ago by Greg Craven.  I find his video very compelling and pertinent to this discussion. 

When a blog languishes

What an irritating thing to do.  Just stop blogging?  Why?

Suppose there are friends out there wondering what happened.
For example, is she still alive?

Did she commit a serious crime?
If so, when will she be getting out of prison?

Has she lost her voice?
That shouldn't stop anybody from typing.

Did a bear eat her after mistaking her for a bird feeder?
How is the bear feeling?

It may be simpler to get back to blogging
than it is to come up witha litany of flimsy excuses.