The $64 Tomato

by William Alexander

  I settled on an absolutely foolproof strategic approach. First I found where I thought they were getting in and out: a small gap in a valley on the roof. I brought in plaster and chicken wire but did not seal the hole up yet. I wanted to catch and remove the squirrels and then quickly seal up the opening. I bought my first Havahart trap (the “squirrel model”), baited it with peanuts, and waited. And waited. A week later, we were still waking to the sound of highway and squirrels.

  And then, one Saturday morning, we awoke to a new sound: the rattle of a cage. Victory! This was the first creature I had ever trapped, and I hadn’t yet learned to drive it two counties away, so I took it to a small park a few blocks away and released it. Back at the house, I inspected the attic. Empty. This is what I had hoped for and expected, for we rarely heard the squirrels during the middle of the day, when I presume they were out gathering nuts or stealing apples. I worked the chicken wire into the gap, slathered the whole thing in plaster, and opened a beer. Well, that wasn’t so bad.

  Sunday morning, we woke to the sounds of eighteen-wheeler transmissions … and pitter-patter above our heads. We still had a squirrel in the attic. I’ll venture a guess and say it was Dale. Why? Because I heard another sound: the sound of a squirrel scratching on glass. I went outside and looked up. Chip, the gallant fellow, had found his way back from the park (probably before I had) and was desperately trying to rescue Dale. Now, it’s quite possible I have this backward, but because I was raised on notions of classical chivalry, I’m going to stick to the assumption that the female was stuck inside, and the male was trying to claw his way back in. And he didn’t work on the glass for long. He soon moved to the window frame itself and started to eat his way through it. Now, this was truly alarming. We had owned this house less than two weeks, and a lovesick squirrel was eating it up. It was interesting that he had chosen the frame to break through,not some other weak point in the roof (and I’m sure there were plenty). Did he choose the window because he could see his beloved on the other side as he gnawed? Years later it seems quite touching, actually, and I wish I could have reunited them, but at the time it was nothing short of terrifying. We were afraid to open the front door, for fear he would shoot through and make for the attic. It was like living Hitchcock’s The Birds, only with squirrels.

  I set up the trap in the attic again, now in a race against time. Dale, however, was lying low. Each day, meanwhile, Chip got a little farther into the frame as I watched helplessly. So this is home ownership, I thought ruefully. I wanted to call the landlord, to yell at the super. But they were both me.

  Eventually, after a few tense days, Dale got hungry enough to overcome her reservations and ventured into the trap. I released her far, far away, and the instant she was removed, Chip stopped gnawing. I examined the frame. He was only another day from breaking through, and I faced a considerable repair job. Amazing.

  The most valuable lesson I learned from this experience came not from the squirrels but from a work colleague, a thoughtful Irishman with wire-rimmed glasses and a snow-white mane and beard. Jim is only a hundred pounds removed from being Santa Claus. My co-workers during this period were receiving daily updates on Squirrel Wars, much to their delight. Most of them considered it all a real hoot, some demonstrating their sympathy and wit by whistling the Rocky and Bullwinkle theme each time I passed them in the hall. On the day that Chip was within a half inch of reaching Dale, I sat in Jim’s office, despondent, looking for an answer. Jim listened to me for a while, stroking his beard thoughtfully and staring at the ceiling.

  “The problem is,” he finally said, pushing his glasses up on his nose, “you may be smarter, but he’s got more time.”

  Truer words were never spoken.

  AFTER WATCHING MY CURRENT peppery-appleloving squirrel make a couple of more raids on my apples, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I settled on a compromise solution: netting two of the trees and preemptively picking all the apples off the others. We made several apple pies with the tiny, tart apples. Then, predictably, the squirrel got hung up in the netting. I was able to untangle him without harm to either man or beast, and I guess he learned his lesson, because on his next trip back he chose to go for the apples in—believe it or not—the Havahart. I took him far, far away, but I know he—or his kin—will be back.

  Nature Abhors a Meadow (But Loves a Good Fire)

  We did it with a plan that seemed valid and workable. Things happened that we couldn’t or didn’t anticipate.

  —Roy Weaver, Bandelier National

  Monument superintendent

  With the kitchen garden established, I decided—in an act of horticultural hubris perhaps not seen since, well, since Yahweh designed the Garden of Eden—to Build a Meadow. This ambition was fed by my sixth viewing of The Sound of Music, with its breathtaking opening scene of Julie Andrews twirling around in the Alpine field of grasses and wildflowers (including, of course, edelweiss), followed by a trip of ours to a remote section of Prince Edward Island. Our rental cottage was perched on a seaside bluff next to a lighthouse in the most marvelous meadow I have ever seen. The relentless ocean wind kept the grasses short and thin, and the field was speckled with wildflowers of a half-dozen varieties, with nary a weed in sight. One of my prized possessions to this day is a photograph of Katie walking through this seaside meadow, the flowers up to her knees, the lighthouse shining proud in the background.

  As it so happened, our property had a large area that had been cleared of brush as part of the installation of a swimming pool. I decided it would make an ideal meadow. So with Julie singing and dancing in my head, and egged on (almost criminally) by glossy wildflower-seed catalogs, I set out to Build a Meadow.

  Getting wildflowers to grow in a bare patch of earth is easy. After all, that’s why they’re called wild flowers. The trick to maintaining a meadow is to keep the even wilder flowers—that is, weeds—from moving in and taking over. But how to do this in a large meadow? If I relied on the stirrup hoe, I’d end up making Millet’s Man with a Hoe look like Man on Vacation by comparison. Mulching wouldn’t do, either, as it would suppress the spread of the very plants I was trying to grow. In a meadow, one ends up in a delicate balancing act: the field needs to be wild, but not too wild. When it comes to gardens (if not life), absolutes are easy; balances are tricky. It’s not so hard to maintain a weed-free monolithic lawn of Kentucky blue-grass, with its underground runners and thick carpet of growth. Environmentally unsound, no doubt, as this usually involves the application of tons of chemicals and water, but when it comes down to it, relatively straightforward. But to turn that lawn into a diverse ecological environment requires more skill and effort.

  So how does one create a meadow? Well, if you take a cue from nature and travel to the western prairies or an Alpine (or Prince Edward Island) meadow, you’ll find that a meadow is actually made up mostly not of flowers, but of grasses—wild, native grasses. In North America, these might be big or little bluestem, switchgrass, or Indian grass, to name the more common types. One characteristic these native grasses share is that they are “bunch” grasses that do not spread by underground runners. Rather, they grow in clumps, allowing the wildflowers to come in between them and take up the bare spots before weeds can get established. Grasses such as Kentucky bluegrass or (in the South) Bermuda grass, which spread via underground runners, would eventually choke out the wildflowers, and in a few years you’d be left with just another lawn to mow and fertilize and water.

  A couple of seasons earlier, I had tried to grow some native big and little bluestem grasses in another part of the yard, with no success whatsoever. In fact, my pound of bluestem seeds, for which I paid some hugely exorbitant price, yielded exactly one plant. That is a ratio of failure to success of something like ten thousand to one, a ratio even I couldn’t tolerate, so when I designed the meadow, I ditched the idea of using a true native grass and instead selected perennial rye. It may not be traditional, but it seemed as though it would accomplish the same goal as
any of the true prairie grasses. The weeds wouldn’t know the difference.

  The wildflower-seed catalog I was consulting (note to self: use catalogs for buying, not as sources of information) advertised a number of “clay buster” wildflowers—that is, flowers that will not only tolerate clay soil but send out deep roots that loosen and break up the clay. This was of particular interest to me because my meadow site was nearly solid clay. In fact it had a foot-deep topdressing of the brick-quality clay that had formerly resided in what was now the bottom of our pool. This material (I won’t dignify it by calling it soil), which came from eight feet under, should never have seen the light of day, but there it was, spread out on top of my Hudson Valley topsoil—dull gray brown, nonporous, and, depending on the weather, either baked and hard as rock, or wet and slimy enough for the weekly mud-wrestling match at Fantasies.

  My catalog promised to turn this barren landscape into a joyous meadow (Julie not included, although there were plenty of photographs of little children prancing about). I eagerly ordered not envelopes but pounds of flower seeds—echinacea, daisies, and black-eyed Susans—and on a late-September morning, I mixed them all together in a bucket with some ryegrass and raked and sowed and raked some more, then went up to the house and waited, like an expectant father, for spring.

  In March the winter snows melted, and I held my breath through several April storms that I feared would wash the seed down the slope, but by summer it became apparent, somewhat to my surprise, that I had indeed built a meadow. Now, I do have to qualify the word meadow. What I had at that point was a lot of small, stubby plants that had germinated from seed, but not, that first summer, a lot of flowers. That was to be expected. Perennial wildflowers spend their first year sending roots down and getting established; then they start growing upward and worry about reproducing. (If you failed high school biology, this is where the flower comes in.) But I was certainly on the right track, and here and there a precocious flower even bloomed.

  The following summer, it actually looked like the meadow of my dreams. By June the field was sparkling with hundreds of white daisies, and by July the black-eyed Susans showed up, although the echinacea (purple coneflowers) never busted through the clay, except for a stray here and there. One other little glitch became apparent that summer. I thought the daisies I had selected would bloom through the summer, like black-eyed Susans and coneflowers, but I had chosen the wrong variety. These daisies vanished around the Fourth of July—just about the time we start using the adjacent pool, which overlooks the meadow. Oh, well. I still had the black-eyed Susans through the summer, and the important thing was, I had Built a Meadow! I felt a little like God, Zeus, and Martha Stewart all rolled into one.

  I was a little surprised by how high the ryegrass grew. I was hoping it would top out at about two feet, more or less the same height as the flowers, but it kept zooming up and by July was hiding many of the flowers below it. The grass had to be cut. But how? Certainly not, at three feet tall, with a mower. I had always been fascinated with scything, and I like anything that doesn’t require an engine, so, still caught up in my Sound of Music fantasy, I ordered a Swiss scythe by mail. I figured a few swings with that baby a couple of times a year would keep rye down and Susan up while providing me with some exercise. It even looked as though it would be a fairly enjoyable activity, swinging this glimmering steel blade to and fro while walking through my meadow, singing, The hills are alive…

  I used it once. Half an hour later, back aching, with a lot of dented ryegrass, I stowed it back in the basement, where it still hangs, waiting for a more skilled (or patient) operator.

  In addition to being tall, the ryegrass also seemed to be spreading. As in, invasively. Maybe it wasn’t spreading by underground rhizomes, but it was nevertheless spreading. It was slowly starting to take over the lower meadow, squeezing out the flowers.

  Meanwhile, the upper, wetter part of the meadow had already lost a battle to quackgrass, that tall, wide-bladed grass that loves wet soil. Because of the new clay “topsoil” that had been spread throughout, the drainage patterns of my yard had been changed dramatically, with a wet, marshy area forming in the margin between end of lawn and beginning of meadow. The quackgrass and the rye were battling for turf, with the shrinking “meadow” caught in the middle. In the midst of it all, bull thistle, a nightmarish tall weed with spiked leaves so sharp they will penetrate cowhide gloves, was moving in. It was time for action.

  It is not unusual for man-made meadows to require maintenance. Just as man-made beaches need constant infusions of new sand, if you are going to try to imitate nature, you can’t just do it once and forget about it. You have to keep at it. This is the lesson the U.S. Forest Service is (slowly) learning in managing our vast forests and trying to prevent them from becoming tinderboxes. And the formula for maintaining meadows and “domesticated” forests is remarkably similar: managed fires.

  In the case of the meadow, the current thinking is that one should set the field ablaze every spring or so. The fire, naturally, doesn’t discriminate and burns everything to the ground, killing the annual weeds and any weed seeds in the vicinity. The wildflowers and natives grasses are burned to the ground as well, but the deep roots of the grasses and wildflowers survive the burning and, now with plenty of light and air, send up new growth and prosper. This annual burning is meant to mimic the action of natural, fire-starting lightning storms in the great prairies (which we generally don’t get in my backyard in the Hudson Valley), in the same way that managed forest fires are meant to reverse the consequences of years of aggressive firefighting of naturally started blazes in our national forests.

  The day Building Controlled Fires arrived in the mail, Anne looked a little worried.

  “What’s this for, dear?” she asked, her voice slightly higher pitched than normal.

  I gave my best James Stewart impression. “Time to burn the prairie, darlin’.”

  “You’re joking, right?” she said.

  Uh, actually, no. Fire was a bit of a sore spot between us because I had nearly set the house ablaze the previous January. On a frigid winter night with the temperature dropping below zero and the north winds pouring through every crack in our stone foundation—and there are plenty—the water pipes supplying the kitchen had frozen solid. I spent the next morning in the basement with a hair dryer crammed up between the stone foundation and the kitchen floor, trying to thaw out the pipes, but cold air was coming in as fast as I could warm it, and I was getting impatient.

  “This is a toy. Time to get a real tool,” I said to myself as I headed down to the shop to retrieve my electric paint stripper. “Now we’re cookin’,” I muttered as I placed the nozzle up against the pipe. Anything hot enough to melt away six layers of paint and make floor tiles peel up in agony ought to be able to melt a little ice in a copper pipe.

  Holding the paint gun soon got tiresome, however, so I locked the trigger in place, propped the gun in the crevice with a brick, and sat down in a lawn chair to leaf through some garden catalogs. Sometime later, I heard yells from the kitchen above.

  “There’s smoke pouring out of the dishwasher!” Anne cried.

  I jumped out of the chair. Oh, my God, the floor joist was on fire! This timber had had ninety years to dry out, and it was burning like fatwood. There was no water faucet in the basement. “Send Zach down with a pot of water!” I yelled up through the floor. The next few minutes remain a bit of a haze for me, but with water and rags I managed to extinguish the fire—but not the memory of my recklessness.

  Patience in thawing out pipes is a good thing. (I must try to remember that.)

  So Anne was understandably not enthusiastic about the prospect of using fire as a gardening tool. “I don’t want to know any more,” she wisely concluded, and left me with my book.

  I have to confess, I was also a little squeamish about setting my yard on fire, but I had been building bonfires (outdoors) for a couple of years by then, and that experience, along with th
e genetic memories passed from my caveman ancestors, had left me somewhat confident in my ability to control fire. I had been building bonfires because, when our septic field had finally been completed, I had asked the backhoe driver to rip out some tangly brush before he left. (I had to get something out of storing that damn backhoe in my yard for six months.) By the time he was done, he had accumulated quite a sizable pile of grape and other miscellaneous shrubs and vines. Could he cart it away? I asked.

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “Dumping fees are ridiculous.”

  I looked dolefully at the huge mound of brush. “What am I going to do with it?” It was too tangly and voluminous for the chipper.

  He looked at the two acres of woods behind him. “Want me to haul it back there?”

  I really didn’t. Two acres may seem like a lot of space, but if you start dumping yard debris out there, it fills up quickly. We didn’t want our woods to look like a dump. I shook my head.

  “Why don’t you just burn it?” he suggested. “Burn it?” Having grown up in a suburban town where the fire department would come calling if your barbecue was too smoky, this seemed unthinkable to me. “How?” I asked stupidly.

  He patiently explained the process to me. I simply had to get a permit from the town clerk, call the fire and police dispatcher when I was ready to start (so they would know to ignore all the 911 calls they were sure to get), then start a small fire with kerosene—not gasoline—and small branches. Once it caught, drag the big stuff onto the pile, and open a beer.

  I thought it sounded dangerous.

  “Nah,” the excavator assured me. “It’s easy. Just keep a hose nearby, and don’t leave it unattended. You have good water pressure?”

  I nodded.

  “And the fire department is only a half mile away if you get into trouble.”