Where do you keep your bird rescue board? What do you mean "I don't have a bird rescue board?" How then do you jack up your porch roof when you need to free a frantic and frightened fowl? Maybe I should back up a little bit...
The wildlife rescues just keep coming. Strange how I'm out in the garden about 5 minutes every day lately but there's time enough to find animals in distress. This rescue did not involve downspouts or disassembly or even a creature in apparent distress. In fact it was only chance that I happened upon it.
Today I start a series of posts I'm calling "tiny things", for reasons which will soon become apparent. Some weeks I wonder just what I'll post about, as interesting topics seem so hard to find. Sometimes though, topics get handed to me.
According to Blogger I made my first blog post on March 5, 2010 which means today is my three-year anniversary! Three years of daily posts? Yep. Since I think about gardening every day, why not post about it every day too? One of the main reasons for creating this blog was so I'd document everything I did in the garden, and I have to admit I've done a pretty good job of that. Did I list every detail of every task I did? No, certainly not. I missed lots of stuff, including some important details such as what exact varieties of veggies I planted, spacings, fertilization schedules, etc. but I also shared a lot of things that I would normally have just observed and enjoyed for myself, and have hopefully given some entertainment and knowledge to my readers.
Yesterday turned out to be an eventful one for me, and it all revolved around Spring and what it means for the animals around me. As well-balanced gardeners and nature lovers, we all pay attention to the new life around us: baby rabbits all over the place, nesting birds of all kinds, the calls of mating toads and frogs (if you happen to have water nearby). You can't help but notice it, as it's everywhere at this time of year.
Today's post is different because it won't contain any images. (Strike that -- it won't contain any new images. I decided that I had to have at least one, so I reused an old one.) A certain chain of events occurred this past weekend that required quick action and two free hands, neither of which are conducive to photo taking.
It seems every year we're rescuing some bird from a gutter downspout. Yesterday as I was putting dinner onto plates I heard that telltale scrabbling again, the sound of tiny claws on sheet metal.
It's been a few years coming, but I finally started the stream rebuild project a couple of weeks ago. It's been silent and dry (except for rain of course) since the winter, and I miss it!
A few years ago I started an experiment: using a bottomless nursery pot as a way to give larger plants better soil without restricting their roots. If you remember, this was specifically to house a cardoon.
If you've been reading my blog for a while, you're probably familiar with the finch nest. It's been a regular feature of my front porch for three years now, two broods a year. I posted about this the first year, then last year too, and then earlier this spring in the infamous bird rescue board post.
Yesterday's post was titled "Sharing is best", and I talked about sharing my tomato plants with some tobacco hornworm caterpillars. Today it's all about the next level: caring. Last week as I was giving everything a good watering before leaving town for a few days, I noticed that the parsley that I planted specifically for attracting swallowtail butterflies was crawling with caterpillars!
I'm going way back into the garden photo archives for today's post, which is something I don't normally do except when I want to show how things have changed in my yard, or how some plant did in previous years. Today it's all in the past though, and it's not going to be pretty. Did you read yesterday's post about the insect photos from last summer? Did you get to the photo of the ants on the big dead caterpillar? Did you find it to be creepy? If so, was it the ants that bothered you, or the death aspect? Or maybe the giant caterpillar? If it was the caterpillar that you didn't like, then you're really not going to enjoy today's post.
Although I'm a big fan of insects in my garden, eager to find interesting or "new" bugs whenever I can, I'm not always fond of what they can do to plants.
I've decided what to do with the new coneflowers I bought the other day: they're going in my coneflower bed. (That certainly took a lot of careful planning and consideration, didn't it?)
Things have been busy lately, so not only have I had very little time out in the garden (hence nothing much to write about), there's no time to write.
For my second bamboo-related project of the weekend, I'm going to transplant a "groundcover" bamboo and transform a terrible-looking part of my garden. This is the bamboo that I'll be digging:
Remember how the stream rebuild unexpectedly turned into a tadpole rescue? Well, it's time for an update on these metamorphosing amphibians.
Although it's been ten months since the polar vortex reminded us cold-climate gardeners that we shouldn't get too comfortable with mild winters and caused quite a bit of bamboo damage in my garden, I still have reminders of it: the dead bamboo culms that I left on three or four of my plantings.
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