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.”
Courtesy Notice: This is another of my long rambling posts.
The short answer: handy reference because my memory isn’t perfect.
The long one with history and how I arrived at my present record keeping status:
As I’ve mentioned before, last year was our first year here at Beebe, and I knew things would be a bit nuts. (Beebe is what we call our house–it’s a beekeeper surname reference since we like bees even though we don’t have the name in our ancestry that we know of, and don’t actively keep them other than try to provide plenty of food to encourage them to be here.) Continue reading “Why I like keeping garden records”
Things were swimming along, and then a bunch of stuff fell in my lap. Well, some I carted on a garden wagon uphill with one soft tire, but that’s a story I hope to tell soon. *chuckles*
We’re due rain for later in the day tomorrow, so maybe I’ll finally wrap up some “drafts” that have been sitting to share what’s been happening here of late.
Time will tell.
Last year, as I was timidly letting my backyard go wild, I started spotting something that looked like it would be flowers and not a tall grass or weeds, but hadn’t the faintest idea what they might be. Continue reading “Devil’s Paintbrush”
