Matt’s Adventures in Northwest Gardening

Well, it was sorta provoked.

Jen bought a Venus Fly Trap - which you can see here at her LiveJournal. If you look at the picture, you can see the outline of an unfortunate victim inside the plan. Did it end up there naturally? Well, it was alive and it was inside the plant. How they came together in such a way, I will leave that story up to Jen.

So, here is a bit of info about Dionaea muscipula - which we call commonly the Venus Fly Trap. They are found in nature in the steamy swamps of North and South Carolina. They are commonly sold at grocery stores, where I too acquired one as a kid. Unfortunately, they are very fickle plants, and, being from humid and warm areas naturally, they are not suited for regular home growth. Instead of buying a plant terrarium, Jen is going to use a nice cheese plate and cover to recreate that sweltering magic land.

VFTs lure flies through the release of a scent like a normal flower. After a fly lands inside the head brushing against the tiny little hairs inside the plant’s head, the VFT snaps - slowly - closed, and traps the fly between its little plant teeth, finally sealing the poor fellow up. The head of the plant hermetically seals, and the plant then proceeds to digest its prey in about 10 days.

They are able to be grown without eating flies and other insects - but what fun is that?

What happens when you feed it a small piece of cooked Chicken? Yup, it turns black and dies. It is like the old saying, give a venus fly trap a fish and it’ll eat for a day; Teach a venus fly trap how to fish and it’ll eat for a lifetime.

Here is a neat bit of American history most of us didn’t learn in 10th grade US History.

Back in the mid 19th Century, Europeans began to get all excited over what was literally Bat Sh*t. Apparently, they realized how potent this substance was for fertilizing crops. Immediately, the Big Players of the time went in search the valuable and rich deposits of this guano and attempted to acquire as many little islands full of this stuff as they could find. In strictly strategic terms, it would not be prudent to yield this resource (not to mention the land being acquired) to other nations of the world, when the USA itself could play in that same game!

So, in response to this came the Guano Island Act of 1856. The first bit of it says:

Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.

In the end, we got something close to 100 islands all over the world, many of which we still claim today. It began, in reality, as the United States’ first dramatic motions toward non-continental American expansionism.

This is still an active law on the books, U.S. Code, Title 48, Chapter 8, Sections 1411–1419. So, If you were just moseying along in a boat somewhere in international free waters, and notice the there is a preponderance of bats, and a cave for them to poop in, do your civic duty and claim that sucker for Uncle Sam. K? Cool.

This site has a pretty decent run down on the basic history of this act and how it came about. I also posted here about Guano and its high nitrogen as a fertilizer. The only other thing I remember about Bat Guano was Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Yep, high comedy that goes for the bat-toilet-humor crowd.

For Valentine’s Day, I decided not to buy Jen a dozen roses, ’cause, well, I just don’t do that kind of thing; if I did, she’d probably assume I did something wrong and was trying to make up for it. Also, there were reports that the flowers grown and sent on Valentines day were actually bad for the environment, and I am not about to have that on my conscience.

Knowing that I had to come up with something, I did some almost-serious thinking; I decided that in keeping with the theme of my blog here, I would buy her a new little planter pot and some seeds. So I bought her a nice little blue terra cotta pot as well as some very good smelling sweet peas. I had hoped that she could plant them and then take the whole thing to work to watch grow all year. When I got home, I looked at the back of the packet, and it said “grows 6 feet”- oops. Maybe she can erect some sort of cubicle sized trellis.

So, I went ahead an purchased a new digital camera. I won’t tell you its brand, as I am still in the process of boycotting that companies terrible warranty policies. Lets just say that it seems like a nice camera, and I hope it lasts more than 14 months.

The bright side is that I can now start to upload pictures on this site. w00t!

So, Canon, even though they said that my repair was covered under Warranty, has turned around and said that it would cost me over $100 to fix my new old camera. In the same email, they also stated that if I wanted to forgo getting it repaired, I can go ahead and just pay the $99 for a refurbished one.

I called them and explained how the website had told me it was still covered by warranty even though it was 14 months pas the purchase date. They told me that they can only lower the repair cost by 20%, which is still 80$ - more than I was intending to spend on a camera that is on eBay going for 65$. 

Ugh.

This has really put me in a bad mood. Now I have to decide whether I want to have them fix it, or use that $100 toward a new camera from a different company.

At 5:45pm tonight when I was leaving work, the Sun had just set over the Olympics in an incredible orange and blue affair. Off in the distance to the East I could make out Mount Rainier and see the dark outlines of the Cascades against the just-past-dusk evening sky. I think this is the first time I have been able to see that much light at that time for months.

It is a wonderful sign, thinking that Spring is just around the corner. The Hyacinths are breaking through the bark dust in the back and there is new growth on the rose bushes. The ancient Rhododendrons out front are all sporting their spring buds ready to blow up their colorful blooms. Even our little Bonsai tree is trying to remember how to be alive.

A friend of mine in living in New York, a Western Washington native, quickly reminded me that it won’t last, and that it will rain again pretty soon. And I know that this is true. It is natural, however, for us Moss Backs to wear shorts and a hooded sweatshirt at the same time with no sense of irony.

But, that being said, I must say it still makes me happy to think that pretty soon, I will be both waking up and going to bed with the sun. Even though that means I will have to start mowing the damn lawn. I spose it is a fair trade.

So this is the first post of hopefully a full year of posts. My mission for this site is to chronicle the adventures and hazards I encounter while attempting to grow a successful garden in the

Pacific Northwest.Today, for example, I planted some 2 year old seeds into an old wooden apple crate, lined with some felt and filled with new and clean potting soil. It is the end of January - the ground was frozen this AM. I am going to attempt to grow some mesclun lettuce while the ground is not yet thawed. I would normally plan to include pictures - but my camera is D.E.D., so I am shipping it off to the Canon digital camera elves tomorrow to get fixed.

So Onward! To the next seed, to the next sprout, to the next soil test and to, hopefully, the next post.

-M