Crazy Little Birds

We seem to have a few new male hummingbirds around chasing all the young ones away from our feeders. I think they may be ones that are migrating through, since they just appeared today. There are 2 of them as far as I can tell. One sits on top of the feed in the back and chasing away any other birds that come and the other one sits in the maple tree on the side of the house and chases away any birds that try to go to the side feeder. They’re so crazy!


They will probably be leaving soon, the males usually migrate mid-august and the females follow in a couple weeks. The young may stick around through October.

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Up on the Soap Box

I’m a big advocate for organic gardening, not using chemicals & pesticides at all. I wish more people were of that thought since streams in residential areas are more polluted than ones in agricultural areas. While reading I came across this quote and thought I would share.

After years of gardening – and as I grew older and a little wiser – I began to really listen to the message of the environmentalists. The razing of woodlots and the loss of farmland for factories and monster housing developments in my growing city helped me understand how cavalierly we were treating our world, and how endangered the species in it were becoming. It seemed strange to send money to preserve the disappearing rain wildlife in the rain forests of the Amazon, or to sign petitions to save our own declining prairies, when we weren’t considering the importance of nature in our own back (and front) yards.

-Liz Primeau, (Front Yard Gardens: Growing more than Grass)

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Great Gardening Books: Creative Vegetable Gardening

Creative Vegetable Gardeningis a useful book if you are interested in growing vegetables in non-traditional way. There are no squares of tilled earth lined with rows of veggies in this book. The garden photos and plans are creative and beautiful, often including a mix of perennials, bushes and edible plants all in the same garden. These gardens have structure in the winter and beauty in the summer. There were tons a great photos in this book and many different garden plans that could be implemented in many differently sized & shaped gardens. Joy includes a lot details in this book. It explains in depth how to make your own espalier fence or fruit tree, how to lay a garden path, and how to build small garden structures out of natural material. There is also a section in the back devoted to all kinds of garden plants and their specific growing conditions & needs. This book would be a great reference book for anyone interested in growing a beautiful edible garden.

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Growing Edibles

“For us, there is a deep, elemental pleasure in growing at least some of our own food.” Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd (North Hill Garden).

Check out the photos of their gardens on their website or read one of their books. My favorite is “Living Seasonally.” You can’t go wrong with any of them!

Here’s an article about them in the NYTimes.

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Bunches of Beets

I harvested my beets this past week and I started some seeds for my fall harvest.

So what did I do with these beautiful beets? They were pickled. MMMMM, I love pickled beets.

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