teachers from on high: my bird essay in ‘parade’

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.

Poppies are easy to grow, sometimes too easy  because they self sow all over my garden and despite the delicate petals I thought of them as weeds. So much so that I forgot to photograph any earlier this year but now have captured some pictures of perfectly purple poppies.

Blueberries are one of the easiest fruits to grow in the backyard garden. Provided the proper soil conditions and care, a blueberry planting can be very productive and long-lived. One of the biggest challenges for backyard berry growers is protecting the fruit from marauding birds.

EVER HEARD the expression “birding by ear”? Despite my years-old collection of CDs (and even older tapes!), I have never gotten good at telling who’s who, sight unseen, perhaps knowing merely 15 of the 60ish avian voices who visit each year. A new online resource called All About Bird Song from Cornell Lab of Ornithology aims to improve our ability to retain the vocalizations by visualizing them—and also reveals what song is all about: its purpose, its mechanics, and just how amazing a feat it actually is.  

(first published in 1989; proof positive how long I have been at this garden writing thing, friends)LIKE A GRADUATING SENIOR in that pointless last week of school, I have lost all ability to concentrate. I hadn’t been sure, until I sat down to write this, exactly what was on my mind, but it is full, so very annoyingly full that I awaken every morning when it is still dark to the tape playing in my head. It is a droning, relentless list, with lots of static punctuating entry after entry of musts, to-do’s, and did-I-remember-to’s.Probably it is partly the disease of gardening that does this to a person come June. At this time of year i

I came upon Kollibri (below, curing tobacco leaves), and his farming partner, Nikki, thanks to their listing in the online collective called Local Harvest [dot] org. Why, I wondered, was my endless Nicotiana search, already many pages deep into Google results, taking me there?I knew Local Harvest as a great place to find a nearby CSA farm to buy a share of, or to order farm-made cheeses or meats or even wildcrafted salves and soaps and such—but Nicotiana? Turns out that Kollibri and Nikki are former CSA farmers from the Portland, Oregon, area, and so the connection. And I couldn’t resist their online claim, under their internet store called Daggawalla Seeds and Herbs, founded in 2012 [UPDATE: Daggawalla is h

THAT OLD, DISCARDED ELECTRIC FAN that isn’t strong enough for the hot summers of global warming…hey, bring it on. It’s perfect for accomplishing one of the tricks to growing better tomato seedlings, which is (after all) the only thing you probably really care about on the run-up to another spring. To hell with winter.

THERE ARE OTHER people who can show you step-by-step how they start tomatoes from seed, but I have two little secrets: 1, APS System, and 2, control yourself. The former is a self-watering system of styrofoam cells that will last forever and I think of as an essential garden tool.

I was fighting the cues: wanting to get on with cutting miles of clean edges between turf and beds despite sodden soil (answer: don’t!) or rake some grassy areas that are still plastered with leafy, twiggy winter detritus but likewise still soft. Again: no can do, without pulling up the lawn.As much as I want to make it all “just so” in time for Open Day next weekend—maybe I can’t.The orientalis hybrid hellebores (Helleborus x orientalis) know about

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:

CRAZY, BUT TRUE: I ALWAYS THOUGHT the quirky “voice” of the Fedco Seeds catalog, named C.R. Lawn—get it? Lawn?—was a fictitious character, the made-up but pervasive green spirit of the longtime seed cooperative’s brand. But he’s not make-believe. He’s the Maine-based Fedco’s founder, and an organic gardener, market grower and seedsman with more than 30 years’ experience, and he took the time to answer some of my questions on what to grow and how to grow it better. The result is a vegetable-gardening Q&A (from peas to potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, mineral dusts and more), with the very real C.R. Lawn—and the chance to win three $20 Fedco gift certificates I bought to share with you, and say thanks to him. Let’s jump right in:

I first heard about “Bird Songs Bible: The Complete, Illustrated Reference for North American Birds,” edited by Les Beletsky, featuring sound from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and published by Chronicle Books, in this NPR segment last month. One caveat: The book-cum-boombox (birdbox?) ain’t cheap (cheep?) at $125.‘Millions Against Monsanto’ CampaignIWON’T ELABORATE OR START SHOUTING, but rather leave it at this: One of the things that scares me most is GMO crops, whether in the field or in our food. The Organic Consumers Union offers education, and also an advocacy program (aimed squarely at Monsanto, of course, whom they label “the biotech bully”) to make it easy for us all to add our names to the fight.