birding by ear, with nathan pieplow: how to listen to what birds say

David Tsay

Birds make a great addition to your garden, they’re great to look at and they’re useful as well. For instance, they will eat slugs, snails, aphids, insects and other well-known troublemakers.

A happy and pleasant surprise has just arrived through the post at home.

Like all of Ken’s 18 books (!!!), “Making More Plants: The Science, Art and Joy of Propagation” is rich in instruction, but also visually arresting, since he’s an award-winning photographer, too.  It covers the botany of propagation—the why’s behind how you can make more plants of a particular species sexually or asexually or both—because as Ken says:“It is not essential to learn about botany to garden well; it’s inevitable.”Then in words and intimate pictures he covers virtually every tactic for doing so, from seed-sowing to leaf and root cuttings, to layering, grafting, division and more.  The photos are so beautiful, and Ken’s obvious enthusiasm so evident on every page, that I want to try everything. (Just what I nee

Tom Stearns is founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds in Vermont, with more than 20 years specializing in breeding, selecting and marketing of organic varieties. From microgreens indoors to baby-leaf to mini-heads and up to full-sized heads in the garden, we talked about timing, spacing and making lettuce happy—even which types hold up best in the heat (and ways to help all lettuce do better when summer arrives).Read along as you listen to the Jan. 14, 2019 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).success with lettuce, with tom stearnsQ. Over the years on the show you and I have talked about tomato h

IWROTE A PIECE FOR TODAY’S ‘PARADE’ MAGAZINE about birds, and how many things these avian messengers have taught–and continue to teach–me. It’s a theme in my new memoir “And I Shall Have Some Peace There.” The birds that visit me are among the book’s leading characters, in fact.

IT’S NO NEWS TO YOU THAT I’M A BIRD PERSON (and often described as “birdlike”); to me birds and gardening are inseparable notions. As close as I feel to my feathered companions, I can’t say I’ve ever been as intimate as zoologist Mark Carwardine in the video above. Unbelievable. More bits about birds from my recent travels around the digital realm:

http://vimeo.com/13985863 SOME OF YOU MAY KNOW Shauna James Ahern, the Gluten-Free Girl, who has participated in many Summer Fest and Fall Fest events here with me the last couple of years. Her extremely popular blog is for people who love food—and great writing.Don’t let the “gluten-free” part of Shauna and her chef husband Danny’s website or their new cookbook scare you off, if wheat and other glutens aren’t something you worry about eating because you don’t have the kind of sensitivity that prompted Shauna to go gluten-free in 2005. This is just plain delicious food, made from fresh ingredients—and (surprise! rapture!) there is plenty of baking in the mix, including carrot-ginger cake and focaccia–and a pear tart, made with Asian pears and a sorghum, potato and sweet-rice flour crust. There is even hom

Research from the nearby Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, reveals how acorns initiate a complex series of ecological chain reactions. And not just the obvious ways, like feeding turkeys or chipmunks or deer, but in influencing Gypsy moth outbreaks and tick-borne disease risk, and even the reproductive success of ground-nesting songbirds.Dr. Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist from Cary Institute, helped me understand what–both seen and unseen–is going on with those tiny acorns and their mighty, wide-ranging influences. Read along as you listen to the Oct. 19, 2015 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).my q&a on acorns’

Whether you get technical or go generic with your terminology, it’s time to tuck tubers and corms and tuberous roots and rhizomes and yes, even some true bulbs into the soil for years of enjoyment. But which ones, and how?With help from horticulturist Jonathan Wright of Chanticleer Garden, who joined me on my public radio show and podcast, we’ll learn some less-than-expected uses of bulbs, like massed in lawns [photo below, at Chanticleer], and layered in containers. Plus: tips such as which bulbs are more animal-proof tha

First, some background: Great Lakes Worm Watch is a citizen-science outreach organization, working to map the state of the earthworms—and the habitats they’re living in.“We want to know where earthworms are across the landscape,” says Ryan—and that means even beyond the Great Lakes area, where the project began.  (There is a Canada Worm Watch, too, for those across the border; researchers at the University of Vermont, at the Cary Institute in Millbrook, New York, and elsewhere are likewise studying earthworm invasion.)Individuals, schools or garden groups can sign on help collect data on what worms are fou

The latest longing for a way to store my garden produce properly overtook me last week, when I was looking for images of roots (as in those ant-farm-like diagrams of a cross-section beneath the soil surface of the prairie).  One of the “autofill” suggestions that appeared when I started typing r-o-o-t into a Library of Congress photo-archive search was the phrase “root cellar,” and I could not resist.Suddenly, down the rabbit hole into underground repositories of yesteryear I went, touring historic root cellars around the United States that had been surveyed as part of a Histori