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Resolutions for 2017 – Habitat for Birds
One of my favorite winter pastimes is backyard bird watching. We typically keep a steady supply of seed in the feeders, and occasionally put out a block of suet. Last week my youngest son and I made a fresh batch of peanut butter pine cone feeders, which the chickadees especially love. While I love putting out food for the birds, it doesn’t make me as giddy as seeing a bird land in a newly planted tree for the first time. I know it’s a little silly because birds will basically land on anything (and poop on anything). I also know that these same birds I’m attracting in the winter will…
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Single Serve Garden
As a harvest of beans has been steadily coming in for several weeks now and the heirloom tomatoes are starting to blush, I’ve been thinking on the idea of a single serve garden. Some days we haul in a grocery bag of beans, squash and cucumbers, and other days it’s just a handful here, and a sprig of something there. Several weekends ago I wanted to saute squash for guests and didn’t have enough for everyone, so I threw in some beans, cabbage, garlic and onions. We got to sample the garden fare, and the combination of textures and colors was much more exciting than if I’d only used squash.…
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The importance of interplanting and biodiversity in the vegetable garden
Companion planting, or interplanting is the practice of growing crops together so that one or both may be benefited by the presence of the other or planting crops together that at the very least won’t commit unspeakable crimes on each other. Conventional home garden methods are to plant crops in orderly blocks or rows, which makes navigation and harvesting much simpler. Here’s the problem, when you don’t interplant, your rows are essentially a buffet for whatever pest or disease takes a liking to that specific crop. When we planted a garden at a nearby school using conventional methods, squash bugs absolutely ravaged the patch of squash and zucchini. When I…
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Taking care of the bumbles
I’ve always been skittish around flying insects with stingers. I blame my parents who potty trained me in the buff on the side porch, during which I was stung on the bumkin by a bee. When approached by a yellow jacket, I will actually take off in flight until I lose him. However, in the garden, there is one stinger I’ve found peace with – bumble bees! Mind you, the carpenter bees are still evil assassins that chase me for no reason, but the bumble bees are my friends After reading that bumble bees are essential for pollinating many of my garden vegetables, such as the tomato which they pollinate…
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Creating a Lizard Habitat
We have managed to attracted a diversity of birds and pollinators to our garden, but I’ve only seen one or two lizards in the past year. There are several benefits to having lizards in your home garden. Lizards prey on insects and rodents They help propagate native plants by aiding in pollination and spreading seeds They typically don’t feed on the vegetation but on the pests that may be eating your vegetation They are one more critter for kids to learn about! To create a lizard habitat, I first selected an area of the garden where there wasn’t a lot of foot traffic and there was plenty of vegetative cover.…
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Growing Habitat
The first time I saw a male cardinal perched in the peach tree I had planted in the back yard, I couldn’t help feeling a little light-hearted. I was actually so excited that for a moment I contemplated interrupting Joe at work to tell him there was a bird in my tree. What made me most excited was seeing that this tree, which I had planted to commemorate a baby lost to miscarriage, was no longer my tree. It had been adopted as part of the growing habitat in our back yard. Everything we do to the land on which we live shapes, alters and transforms habitats. When we took…
