Mysterious Maypop

(My Forest Garden)

This is my forest garden (aka food forest) and this photograph inspired me to say something about this garden. This is one of my first gardens and it’s the one closest to my house.  Early this spring a lot of mustard greens came up and quickly bolted into the flower stage.  I planted a soil mychrorizza seeds mix cover crop there last fall to help amend the poor soil in this area.  I was happy when these mustard flowers showed up -- they added a bust of color to the garden and attracted bees and butterflies. 

This garden has a peach tree that blossoms (even though is doesn’t produce fruit), a variety of figs called prolific (It is truly a prolific producer of fruit), a host of blueberry plants, a pomegranate tree, hostas, canna lilies, roses, strawberry plants, gogi berries which produce berries that taste pretty awful (the birds seem to go for them), forsythias, beautiful euryonous plants that showed up on their own, and a sacred bamboo plant that migrated from my next door neighbor’s yard.  I even had a passion flower fruit plant that show up. The flower was beautiful and the fruit was inviting, but  I didn’t think about eating those fruits.  The flower only lasted for a short period of time.   I recognized the plant but I had not planted any and was very surprized to see it in my garden.  I trust my powers of observation, but not enough to eat a foreign plant.  My neighbor’s cherry tomato plants often show up in my garden.  I don’t even want to eat them.  Who knows, maybe that neighbor is out to get me (smile).

The fig tree is on the right. The mural in the center is something I painted on my tool shed. I had fun building that shed because it taught me some important carpentry skills that I made use of as I built other structures in my garden. The red “unfinished” structure between the mural and the garden was intended to become a honey house for processing honey.  I painted it because carpenter bumble bees treated the unpainted wood as their new home and started burrowing symmetrical circular holes in the wood (have you noticed that when insects construct anything, it comes out looking perfect). The bees stopped completely when I painted the wood. The high cost of building material slowed down the construction of a honey house; besides, I haven’t been getting enough honey to be concerned about a facility in which to process such a rich glorious substance.