Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
What to plant? We have a sizeable bed of soil and want to get a crop in before the season slips by. But what should I plant in our sidewalk veggie bed? I don’t usually get too involved with shoulds in my garden but there are some mindsets that are starting to rule me. Native [...]
Come on, Blue Elderberry, you can do it! Grow, grow, grow. Don’t stop now – you’re on your way. Keep growing and send out roots. Send out more leaf to soak in the sun to make yourself strong. Grow so fast that you leave the snails and slugs behind. Stand firm and dig in your [...]
As spring finally unfolds here in Western Massachusetts, the final featured woodpecker of my ‘A Bestiary’ has just returned to Flower Hill Farm from his southeastern United States winter range. Northern Flickers Colaptes auratus, can be surprising and sometimes ruffle feathers of their fellow birds by not acting as a normal woodpecker should. I often see [...]
Ahhh, spring is on its way. My bones are starting to thaw. Longer days beckon me to spend time in the garden. And, being the good gardener that I am, I have an award-winning list of tasks that I ought to be getting to. Self-imposed oughts, of course. And I stress “self-imposed” because I bet [...]
With much of the Southwestern US, including the valley where I live, in drought–a historic, multi-year, drought showing no signs of breaking–I’ve been thinking about lawns. Americans are in love with our turf grass monocultures, so much so that we cultivate an estimated 46 million acres of lawn around our homes, schools, and parks–an area [...]
Love in the Garden Happy Valentines Day to you, my gardening and lover of Wildlife friend. May your heart overspill with joy and touch others today and beyond. Love is the answer; gardening sometimes gets us there. Today’s post first mentions a Cupid visit in the garden, then focuses on what I am currently loving [...]
The second member of the Picidae family featured in ‘A Bestiary’ is the showy and industrious Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Sphyrapicus varius. These brightly patterned woodpeckers are frequent visitors to the gardens here at Flower Hill Farm and are somewhat steward-like to a few of our apples, crabapples and hawthorns. The trees the sapsuckers adopt might be considered [...]
You can’t have a native garden without native plants! If you crave a native or mostly native landscape to better support the butterflies and the birds and to be a better steward of your land, you will need a good source of locally grown natives. To illustrate the importance of provenance, take the red maple [...]
The avian slice of ‘A Bestiary’ continues with the Picidae family of woodpeckers . . . and where else to begin but with the most striking and strident of these birds . . . North America’s own . . . Pileated Woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus. Walking about in the gardens and fields one early spring morning, [...]
“How can I attract wildlife to my yard?” asked an attendee after one of my recent talks. My answer: “Cultivate untidyness.” Untidiness does not mean littering your yard with old tires or trash, or letting invasive weeds take over; it means letting at least some of it remain natural– “messy” to some eyes. The compunction [...]
