Late summer is a great time to enjoy a good book. If you’d like to have some good laughs while learning about natural gardening methods, check out Ciscoe Morris’ latest book, Oh, La La! Homegrown Stories, Helpful Tips, and Garden Wisdom.
Ciscoe is a zany local garden expert and popular TV and radio host. The book shares stories about his gardening life, along with tips on pruning, managing wildlife and insects, and growing specific plants. His tales about managing the landscape at Seattle University (where he worked for many years) and taking care of his own garden in northeast Seattle are often hilarious. He also shares a few tidbits from the international garden tours that he and his wife lead.
To give you a flavor of the book, here are a few stories.
Seattle University
When Ciscoe began managing the grounds at Seattle University, he looked for ways to take care of trees, lawns and shrubs without depending on pesticides. He and the grounds crews adopted integrated pest management strategies. Over the years they continued to look for ways to keep the landscape healthy using natural methods. SU became a national leader for its environmentally friendly approach to landscape management.
Bald-faced hornets
One of Ciscoe’s SU stories concerns bald-faced hornets. Ciscoe knew that wasps, such as yellow jackets and hornets, are actually beneficial creatures that eat all sorts of harmful insects. While their stings can be quite painful, they won’t sting people unless you get too close to the nest. He was reluctant to spray their nests unless they were in a place that posed a public safety risk.
He finally got management to agree that he could leave nests on the outskirts of campus as long as he flagged them with yellow tape so no one would run into them accidentally. But he had to spray the nests in the center of campus.
One time, he decided that rather than spray a nest of bald-faced hornets, he would go to campus in the dead of night and relocate the nest from a central building to a back area. He borrowed a bee suit that turned out to be twice his size. He also borrowed a spray mask that covered most of his face.
His plan was to insert the nest and the branch it was on into a large clear plastic bag, seal it shut and then transport it to the new location. When he got to the shrub with the nest, he gathered his courage and pulled the bag over the nest, then cut off the branch. “The bald-faced hornets came roaring out of the nest like Pickett’s Charge,” Ciscoe wrote, causing the bag to undulate so wildly, it almost knocked him over.
He lugged the bag over to the rhododendron shrub where he planned to release them. He opened the bag and, with wasps swarming around, managed to wedge the nest into the bush.
“By now the wasps were all over me. I turned to run, but I noticed that when I dropped the plastic bag, the open ends sealed together, thereby trapping hundreds of bald-faced hornets inside. I grabbed the back of the bag and took off running.
“So there I was, an alien being in a ill-fitting white suit, running across campus holding a plastic bag with hundreds of wasps streaming out of the back, when I practically ran into an inebriated man holding a bottle of fortified wine. He dropped the bottle and ran screaming and I never saw him again. To this day, I don’t know if I killed him or cured him.”
Soil and drainage
“When it comes to gardening, nothing is more important than the soil,” Ciscoe writes, “and one of the keys to knowing the quality of soil is how well it drains.”
To test drainage, Ciscoe suggests digging a one-foot-square hole one foot deep. Fill the hole with water right to the top. Then measure how much water drains in one hour. If the water level drains:
- Between one and three inches: you have well-draining soil.
- More than four inches: the soil is too sandy.
- Less than one inch: soil drainage is poor. You probably have clay or hardpan.
With the first two types of soil, tilling in compost before you plant a new bed will greatly improve soil structure and add moisture- and nutrient-holding capacity. It also introduces many beneficial microorganisms that help keep diseases in check. The proportions should be about 1/3 compost to 2/3 soil in well-draining soil and 1/2 compost to 1/2 soil in sandy soil.
With clay or hardpan, adding compost won’t solve your problem. You can choose plants that thrive in poorly drained soil (by far the cheapest method), or you can bring in topsoil to create berms or raised beds.
The drainage bet
Ciscoe tells about helping a friend to install a landscape. When he tried to till the soil to add compost, he found “the soil was so hard, it was like trying to till concrete.” He told his friend they would have to either build berms or choose different plants. His friend disagreed. He said the soil was compacted from heavy equipment, and it would drain well once it was tilled.
So they made a bet. They dug a hole, filled it with water and set a stopwatch.
When they returned an hour later, Ciscoe was surprised and chagrined to find that the water level had dropped more than four inches. His friend was strutting around like a peacock, bragging about being the soil expert. Then the woman next door who had been watching Ciscoe work all morning called out to him.
“‘Sir,” she said, ‘that water didn’t drain.’
“When I asked what she meant, she said, ‘Your dog drank that water.'”
Keeping Bambi out of the garden
Several years ago, a woman called Ciscoe’s radio show asking how to keep deer out of her garden. Ciscoe suggested a fence: either a solid fence that deer can’t see through or a fence that is at least six foot tall. Another option is deer fencing, which looks like bird netting but is thicker and stronger.
The caller didn’t like the fence idea and asked about repellents. Ciscoe replied that repellents were tough to use properly and did not have great results.
The next caller suggested using coyote pee. She said coyotes are natural enemies of deer and it really works to keep deer away. She sent a bottle to Ciscoe to try. He put out a call for a test site.
A woman named Mabel allowed Ciscoe to test the coyote pee in her garden. The repellent came with little golf tees with golf ball-size sponges glued on top. Following directions, Ciscoe dipped the sponges in the pee and then put them all around the perimeter of the property. The idea is that deer would think that coyotes were marking their territory and they would avoid the garden.
Two days later, Mabel called Ciscoe to say get out there and those coyote things out of her garden, now! He couldn’t figure out why she was so upset.
At Mabel’s house Ciscoe found about eight male dogs in Mabel’s garden. The coyote pee smelled like a coyote in heat! Ciscoe “tried to make them leave by shouting and chasing them, but they knew there was a female there and they weren’t going anywhere until they found her. Worse yet, they sang love songs all night long: ‘Eeeeyowww!'”
After about a week, Ciscoe figured Mabel would have calmed down, so he called her to find out if the coyote sticks worked. The dogs were still there and still singing. Meanwhile, deer had come right into the garden past the tees and eaten practically all of her roses and perennials in one night! Ciscoe said that couldn’t have possibly be true with all the large male dogs hanging out in the garden.
“‘Those dogs couldn’t have cared less,” Mabel said. “They were in love!'”
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