Vaughn: Problems with wet soil and cowbirds
Great heavens it has rained a bunch this past month. I can’t remember having this many deluges in such a short period of time.
In the spirit of research, I looked it up. Our area had close to 8 inches of rain in January. To put that into perspective, that is almost double the rainfall we average in January.
On an annual basis, our area averages about 48 inches of precipitation a year, so we are well on the way to our yearly totals and we only just celebrated Groundhog Day.
Soils are saturated and I am still seeing people running their sprinklers, which I don’t get. There has been a steady stream of water running down the street in front of my house for two weeks. The water is coming off the banks of the neighbor’s and my own front yards like you were squeezing a sponge.
A couple of things I can mention with this much soil saturation is avoid having something heavy like a car, trailer or ATV tire ride on your lawn. It can leave a major rut and ruts don’t just buff out. Fixing ruts in your lawn takes work and lots of top dressing to get them back to normal.
The good news about the rain is that the cooler soil temperatures aren’t conducive to root rot issues, so the wet feet of plants should be fine for a while. But when we do warm up and the rains are still coming, it is going to be a mess. Our phones will be ringing off the hook the coming spring to assess the damage from “Artic Christmas” as well as slow death plant drownings.
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We did have a small reprieve from the rain this week and we are finally seeing some signs of life in this normally drab time of year. Flowering apricots (Prunus mume) are showing out with their pink blooms. The early flowering varieties of Saucer magnolias (Magnolia x soulangeana) are popping up around town. This deciduous magnolia can really produce some beautiful color this time of year, but always gets me a little nervous.
If we happen to get a decent freeze, it will turn what is an amazing display into a big mess of brown dead blooms in one cold evening. Let’s hope for the best.
I have also seen some forsythia and winter jasmine putting out some yellow flowers which is always a good sign that there is a possible end to another challenging winter.
The last topic of the week is the attack of the brown-headed cowbirds. These birds are native, but I consider them jerks. Let me explain. If you like to keep food in your bird feeders like I do, you probably noticed that birdseed ain’t cheap. Like eggs, gas and toilet paper, the price to supplement my neighborhood flying friend’s diet cost about as much as it does to feed my 14-year-old son.
I built a bunch of feeders to scatter around the yard and they hold about as much birdseed as a B29 holds fuel. Recently I bought 40 pounds of birdseed that I had to take a second mortgage to afford. I filled all of the feeders with about 90% of that bag and then came the cowbirds. Hundreds of them. Like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, within five days there wasn’t a seed to be found anywhere. It was like an avian version of locust.
I am still debating what I am going to do about refilling the feeders. Maybe I will give it a week to see if they will finally move on to some other sucker’s house that enjoys being attacked by swarms of black birds.
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Campbell Vaughn warns of wet soil causing problems in the spring
