Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time or resources to do what you want. Life happens and postpones things. You just can’t make up your mind. Mistakes can be made even by experienced gardeners that cause setbacks as well.
Most of what we have done last year and so far this year hasn’t felt like enough even though I’d be a dunce not to acknowledge what has changed and acknowledge we really couldn’t do much more with the time and resources we had to spare. Continue reading “Let your garden grow”
Time is again flying by, so here’s a few things going on to let you know I’m still busy in the garden: Continue reading “Few bits about what’s been up since July 7th”
I heard back from a local monarch expert I’ve been corresponding with, and she concurred that what I found is more likely to be milkweed tussock larvae. Continue reading “Update on things that go from wormy to fluttery”
Despite knowing that Gardner has many wetlands, ponds and waterways, because we don’t really see any of it from even the upper story of our home, you wouldn’t consider our home sited terribly near any of them. Yet if you look at one map that shows various water features, there’s quite a bit in our portion of the Greater Gardner Area, especially wetlands to the south and west.
I am an idiot. Of all the things to forget about with gardening, I forgot about sparrows and dust baths (aka sand baths).
If you don’t know about this habit, the crazy almost rolling popping they do in such cases is them trying to fluff their feathers out to get the dust as near to their skin as possible. The dust on their skin helps act as a deterrent to pests that would live there and annoy and possibly sicken the birds.
So if you see something like that, the bird hasn’t gone mad. A cluster of them fluffing and flinging doesn’t mean they are a performance group. It’s just self care. Continue reading “We need a dust bath decoy”
I updated the 2018 Plantings page.
We’ve had another casualty, but some success as well (one noted by image yesterday). We also ate our first blueberries and raspberries of the season (red and black). It was still a bit soon for the blueberries we taste tested. The strawberries keep getting raided by the critters before we get a chance. To be fair, we have a lot more raspberry canes than we do fruiting strawberry plants so far.
As I noted before, I did finally attend a local Conservation Commission meeting, and in doing so found myself volunteering to help share some plants with a homeowner that inadvertently removed plants he didn’t know he shouldn’t because part of his land was in a protected flood zone. Not a “you’ll flood every year” sort of flood zone, but what’s known here as a Q3 “100 year flood” zone. You’d think there’d be some law stating sellers of homes should make sure buyers know about that sort of thing…I guess it’s more expected that folks will inform themselves about such. I remember after I heard about one legendary Gardner flood, and soon found myself well acquainted with the OLIVER map which helped us strike a few homes off our house search possibles. Continue reading “Follow up of attending my first Conservation Commission meeting.”
