Many people spending time outdoors do not appreciate wasps, but gardeners ought to know better—wasps eat more than 200 kinds of harmful insects.
If you don't wave things in front of them, they will very likely leave you alone. Besides, people owe wasps a debt of gratitude: They are the inspiration for perhaps the most momentous invention in all human history.
About 2,000 years ago, a Chinese scientist, Cai Lun, was studying wasps. Cai became interested in how wasps made nests out of wood pulp and used weird thin stuff to make the walls of their larvae's cells. He duplicated the process and invented—paper!
*********
In this heavy rain we've been having in Chicago, watch out for your houseplants outdoors. My jade plant's pot doesn't drain well and the poor critter nearly drowned!
*********
The new shade over my pond meant my floating water hyacinths weren't blooming so I took one, put it in an outdoor vase ( no drainage ), put that in the sun and it's been blooming ever since. ( Flowers look like blue orchids. )
**********
You know perhaps that bees, our crops' top pollinators, have been having problems with pesticides, diseases and such. We should respect them more. In the Middle Ages, when an apiary's owner died, a formal delegation processed to the hive to inform the bees of their owner's passing.
**********
In Mexico City, the pillars holding up the expressways in the city are being planted with hanging gardens. The plants, which are already beautiful, also help cut auto air pollution at the source.
***********
Here's your recipe for this month: Soba salad.
Ingredients: Pack of dried soba noodles ( buckwheat, I believe ), tbsp of sesame oil, tsp of rice vinegar, tbsp soy sauce, juice of one lime, one inch piece of fresh ginger ( grated ), eight scallions sliced, four tomatoes chopped, 4 tbsps fresh coriander, salt and pepper.
Instructions: Cook noodles, drain. Mix with liquid ingredients together and chill. When cold, add rest of ingredients.
**********
I'm gathering seeds from my jungle garden for my hobby of guerrilla gardening: pholx, morning glories, jewelweed, pokeweed, milkweed, Virginia creeper ivy. The glories and the ivy on my top deck are cooperating since I don't have to stretch to pick them. Remember if you do this—no seeds even in your hateful neighbor's formally planted yard, but railroad verges, ugly chain link fences, scrubland alleys, blank brick walls are all okay.
**********
I have a new tenant who wants to garden. I had to inform him that gardening for food in my garden, in the ground, is a no-no. Thirty years ago, when I moved in, I learned the previous owners had been a lesbian-feminist commune who had farmed the yard. They had taken advantage of a city offer to give free truckloads of sludge—the leftover composted residue of city sewage ( odorless, by the way ) for private gardens. The commune got seven dump-truck loads. Three years later came an admission from the city: "Ooops! We made a mistake! The sludge is full of heavy metals—cadmium, lead and mercury!" My yard is poisoned forever! Okay for flowers, not so good for veggies. Edible plants have to go in pots.
*********
I've hit bonus with the Alcea family: these 4 flower cousins are all blooming or starting to bloom in my yard: hollyhocks, rose-of-Sharon, rose mallows and tropical hibiscus.
*******
Check out a fun ( smallish ) book—Fifty Plants That Changed the Course of History, by Bill Laws. Full of tidbits I didn't know: just exactly how and why sugar is bad for you; soy beans can't take frost; and wassailing in England was a fertility rite involving apple trees!
