continuous niches

the strawberries are edging closer to dormancy in the community garden and with lows in the 30s forecast for nine of the next ten days next weekend seems like an auspicious time to mulch the berries and the garlic...so we will be procuring straw...landscaping staples and the row cover fabric are in hand so it shouldn't be too much of a job to breakdown the critter net ( some serious thought has to go into how to protect the fruit in a more accessible manner next season...there has been justifiable criticism...we know...we weeded the bed ) and layer some straw on the plants...look for a how-we-did-it blog on that...the winter wheat is robust...and speaking of robust there are some mid-autumn blooms erupting out there just behind the sign...there are more ecological niches than we probably think ( and if the mood for the day were a grumpier one there might be a rant here about how monoculture destroys them wholesale...but it isn't that gloomy here so let's just settle for saying they do and look to work with perennials instead )and the garden is a microcosm of them...there's a zen precept that maintains if you understand a frog fully you have understood everything that illuminates the role a microcosm can play in understanding a wider truth...this garden can fill the same role if we look closely enough...one lesson here is that true nature doesn't waste anything...time or space.