The vine that has been flourishing in my front flowerbed is blooming. It is skunkvine, also called stinkvine. The flowers are pretty and trumpet shaped, but I can't find any evidence that the hummingbirds like it. It is food for hummingbird moth caterpillars, somewhere, maybe Singapore. I don't see anything eating it in my garden. I am pulling it off the plants and pulling up the roots wherever I can find them. It will take months, but if I keep a steady pace of working once a week through the winter I think I can ultimately get ahead of it.
I'm afraid the street view of our yard, as realtors call it, is not inspiring. But come up the driveway and the prospect changes.
The years when I couldn't get around to the whole garden are really showing. Wild grape vine, smilax, Virginia creeper, trumpet vine, Carolina jessamine, and now skunkvine are rampant in the front beds. What little time I have had for landscaping and garden maintenance has been selfishly spent on the areas around the house-- the garden rooms I see when I look out the windows, or walk out the front door, especially the newest bed (about three years old) at the side where I grow vegetables and flowers. From the back porch, I see the second newest bed, the paisley bed, named because it is shaped like the Iranian/Indian/Pakistani mango design that was adopted and renamed by Scots.
The paisley bed gets almost as much attention as the new vegetable bed. As a result, the earthworms are plentiful there and the ground is easy to work. Nighttime raids by the animals that like worms and grubs are a constant problem. I suspect the possum, because I have seen him, and he's ugly, and this is ugly behavior; it could just as easily be the armadillo. In the spring there was a little troup of armadillo babies accompanying their mother to the rotting stump near the front door every night. We surprised each other in the driveway several times.
The creature moves around and I move around trying to foil it. The eggplants were a favorite for a few nights. This past week, I have been focusing defensive actions on the two new passionflower vines I planted in the vegetable bed. One passionflower was rooted around by the creature so vigorously that its main root was destroyed and it withered and died. I replaced it a week ago and so far its organic and physical barrier has held the creature off. It went after the other passionflower root, but that one was tougher and withstood several assaults. It is now covered with fritillary caterpillars.
Thwarted in the vegetable bed, the creature moved on to the paisley bed. I replanted a bay tree this morning that I had planted a week ago. It was completely uprooted last night. I added more mulch and an organic barrier instead of a physical barrier, which actually presented no barrier at all as it turned out. And so it goes, making the rounds every night looking for worms and grubs in the parts of the garden with the softest soil, with me trying to anticipate what attracts and discourages it.
Maybe I should dig a hole, fill it with fertilizer and compost, cover it with mulch, and plant nothing. A hole just for the creature. I'm going to go do that right now and I know just where to put it. There's a big blank spot in the paisley bed next to a clay dish I fill with water for the birds. Will it keep the creature out of my plantings? Even one less hole a night will be a welcome respite.
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