Garden Birds - November 2020. During this "lockdown and go nowhere" year Bird Protection Quebec have replaced their weekly guided birding field trips with a series of interesting virtual alternatives. Basically, they have been saying, here’s a challenge, go and do it and then tell us all about what you found. For the [...]
We are now a couple of months into our learning experience with high density successive vegetable growing. Quite a success so far and perhaps this is a good time to publish an update for those who have been asking questions. In May we started with the installation of three raised vegetable beds [...]
Following a long and very heavy spell of high heat days with health warnings to stay indoors etc there was rain today and afterwards this wonderful moth was working the flowers on the milkweed plants. About the size of a thumb and an absolute gem of an insect - we have seen [...]
Mid-summer Progress Report We are now in our second full year of letting what was once a scrappy lawn have the freedom to just grow while we wait to see what's there and what has arrived. Mid June is a good half-way stage in the process of creating a "mead" and to pause [...]
There is a famous phrase from a chidrens’ poem written in the 1760s by Isaac Watts that asks: “How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour?” ... and the answer in our case is by industrious labouring in our Socially Distant Garden. What, you will be wondering, loyal reader, has [...]
After over a week of unseasonably cold northerly winds that held spring bird migration back things changed overnight and we are in a south-westerly air flow that's a bit warmer. Quite a change and we have spent half the day glued to the windows watching the garden, especially the waterfall, as bird [...]
May-Day turned out to be a very birdy day in the (locked-down) garden starting with ten or a dozen White-throated Sparrows who stuck around all day and were busy singing to the accompaniment of more of their kind in gardens up and down the road. You can never have too many Sparrows. [...]
Mourning Cloak butterfly, appeared in the garden last week after overwintering in a sheltering crack somewhere We spend a lot of our lives doing gardening things and watching the wildlife regardless of whether the virus and the government allow us to wander further afield. Despite that, however, there is a [...]
Solitude with a Spade - A New Garden Journal Gardening is balm for the soul Coronavirus is here and until there is a treatment or a vaccine, at least a year away, it is sensible to be realistic and accept that social distancing at least is going to be with us for [...]
Messy Eater Blood on the Snow We’ve noted before that the berries on the native Viburnum triloba are eaten in the fall while those on the similar European species (Guelder rose) are left until well into the New Year. Obviously those of the native species are more palatable while the [...]