Posts related to conservation: of biology, ethics, groups, mindsets, and movements.
Welcome to the first installment of Wild Wednesdays! This week I’ll be sharing info I’ve learned about the Northern highbush blueberry Vaccinium corymbosum. It’s the first berry plant we bought for our garden back in 2017. Continue reading “Wild Wednesdays: Northern highbush blueberry”
“A bumblebee can only fly for about 40 minutes between feeding. But we’ve lost 97% of our wildflower meadows. So please plant at least one nectar-rich flower in your garden or community this year. Your one flower could be the pit stop that saves a bee”
~ Little Green Spaces Tweet Continue reading “Save a bee–plant a bee pit stop”
One of the ideas I’ve been mulling over this winter is how to help promote the use of native plants in folks’ gardens. The hardest part of that for me is knowing more about the native plants here in Gardner, MA. That is what the hold up was when I first thought up the notion a few years ago. How could I ever find the time to research them weekly? Continue reading “Wild Wednesdays: a new series on plants native to my area”
One of the native plant organizations here in Massachusetts is Grow Native Massachusetts. I can’t remember offhand if I’ve mentioned them before or not. They offer public lectures on various topics relating to native plants and gardening. Continue reading “Online lecture: Managing an Urban Landscape for Biodiversity”
“Our children don’t inherit the land from us,
we borrow it from them.”
–Native American Proverb
It may be ingrained in folks to tidy up the garden when things start to die back in the fall, but many bits if not all of those plants are useful to a broad variety of wildlife as shelter and/or food in the colder weather to come. They may spend their winter in a curled up leaf; use browned milkweed stalks as a resting or observation perch on your lawn away from the cold snowy ground; feed from seeds of goldenrod; or many other possibles, depending on the visitors in your garden. Continue reading “Late Winter Wildlife Feeding”
Before tucking the Monarch incubator containers under a tea towel for the night so artificial light doesn’t interfere with their sense of direction, I checked them all for dryness and development. Continue reading “Firstborn of the nine”
Very foggy this morning, but that didn’t deter me from looking. I still have no idea if the Monarch butterfly I saw yesterday was male or female, but I did find eggs in the area of one of our common milkweed patches where it was flitting about.
I noticed it this afternoon outside the south kitchen windows, just before the downpour. Continue reading “First Monarch spotting this season”
