Friday Favorite: Botanical Gardens in Winter
Yesterday, Mr Chiots and I headed down to Boothbay for an errand. Since we were in the area, we decided to stop at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. I really enjoy visiting botanical gardens during the winter, it’s the perfect time to notice the structure of the gardens and the plants. You notice interesting things you might not see at other times when you’re distracted by flowers and other things.
I was particularly interested in seeing the witch hazels. I’m planning on adding them to the gardens for color at this time of year and I was looking for varieties that would suite my climate. Luckily, they had a nice selection. Back in Ohio, we had native wild witch hazel that bloomed in November, they were pretty and understated, nothing compared to these showy beauties. ‘Arnold Promise’ looks almost like a forsythia, only it blooms much earlier.
There’s something so wonderful about a plant that produces blooms like this in a season like this. When everything around is dull, muddy and gray, the bright pop of yellow is eye catching to say the least. This is ‘Aurora’ with hazel, it’s quite lovely don’t you think?
‘Limelight’ witch hazel has smaller, less showy flowers and had a slight greenish tint. The green was immediately noticeable with the other with hazels blooming in the area. You might not notice this if it was the only one in your garden.
‘Bernstein’ witch hazel was especially lovely, I think it was more wonderful than all the others. The blossoms were large and lovely, though there weren’t too many.
I’ll definitely be adding a few of these to my garden this year, now I just have to decide where to put them.
Do ever visit botanical gardens in the off season?
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Just Visiting
Last Saturday, I found a Flat Stanley in my mailbox. It was sent to me by a friend’s young daughter. Her class is doing a project where they each send out a Flat Stanley to see where he will end up between now and May 15th.
Since I was the person they knew who lived the farthest away, he came to my mailbox first. The class requested that Stanley send postcards from the places he visits with details of his journey. I decided he could write a blog post here today for his postcard. Here’s what Stanley has to say about his visit.
The first morning of my arrival in Maine, I was warmed by a large mug of coffee. You might think this was a bad thing, but it wasn’t. There was actually about a foot of snow on the ground outside and it was very cold. The coffee was a nice warm blanket and it prepared for what I would do the rest of the day.
After morning coffee, we headed out to feed the chickens and gather eggs. There were 13 chickens in all, 2 big roosters and 11 hens. We gathered 9 eggs that morning for breakfast.
Then we went to check on the ducks, they were happily splashing in puddles in the driveway. Even though it very cold outside, some of them were swimming in their little pool. No wonder down blankets are supposed to be so warm!
We came back inside from checking on the animals and water the seedlings. There were onions, celery, herbs, and all sort of other little plants underneath grow lights inside. They will be planted outside when the snow melts and the weather warms. There were hundreds of seedlings, the garden will be bursting with vegetables this summer!
After a hearty breakfast of those eggs we gathered from the chickens, we were back outside to cut firewood for next winter. The rest of the day was spent cutting, splitting and stacking firewood. Boy was I tired after that. It’s certainly true what they say, you warm yourself twice!
I also made a trip to the coast to see the big boats and the lobsters, but it was raining and I was afraid I’d disintegrate, so I stayed in the car.
Then I was folded up into an envelope and mailed off somewhere else. Where will I go? Who knows, but I certainly can’t wait to get back to Peri in Kentucky so I can tell her all about my trip!
If you could fold yourself up into an envelop, where would you mail yourself?
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Quote of the Day: Josh Kilmer-Purcell
I’d been selfish. I hadn’t yet realized that the true goal of organic farming wasn’t harvesting crops in spite of bugs, pests and predators. It was about harvesting crops alongside of them. It was about planting more than the amount we need. And it was about making sure there was enough extra to go around for everything that made it’s home on the farm. For every sparrow I’d killed in the netting on my cherry tree, there would be millions of fewer seeds spread over the fields from their droppings and millions of uneaten bugs, which would in turn attack our vegetable garden. We’d be paying for our unblemished cherries in some way or another for the rest of the season. Sure, we hadn’t sprayed chemicals all over the cherries. But we’d been just as deadly.
Josh Kilmer-Purcell (The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers)
When I read this book, this quote really resonated with me because of my stance on dealing with insects in the garden. You can read more about my methods and ideals for “pest” control in the post titled: Empty Shelves. I’d like to encourage you this gardening season to be proactive rather reactive when it comes to controlling pests.
Put up a bird feeder, add a garden pond or small water feature, plant lots of plants that attract pollinators, add a few extra plants to share with nature. Realize that every action you take in the garden will have far reaching consequences, generally the opposite of what you were hoping for.
Birds will be one of your greatest allies in the garden, anything you can do to attract and keep them will be of great benefit to your garden. Hummingbirds eat thousands of mosquitos, chickens eat loads of insects as do ducks. If you can have chickens and ducks, consider adding them. If not, put up a birdfeeder and a birdbath, plant things for our feathered friends and watch in amazement at how important of a garden partner they can be. I wrote and entire series on attracting birds to the garden for the Your Day Blog: For Our Feathered Friends.
In what ways do you think you are proactive instead of reactive when it comes to garden pests/problems?
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The Chicken and the Egg
In Colombia, having chickens on your small farm is vital and the eggs they give aren’t the main reason for having them. They are kept for pest control, particularly because they eat brown recluse spiders and scorpions.
For a while, there were no chickens at the camp, then they started having trouble with spiders and scorpions. A flock of traditional jungle type birds were brought in and the scorpions and spiders were history.
These aren’t your typical laying hens that we are used to here in the states. The chickens roost in the trees, no cozy coop to keep them safe. There are a few branches propped up into the crooks of the pomarosa trees to aid them in getting up there. They do a great job staying away from predators since they’re not penned in. In fact, there was someone that tried to keep some chickens contained in a coop and run at the camp and they were quickly eaten by ocelots that snuck in out of the jungle.
My dad has one larger chicken that was a gift from one of his workers. She’s a big girl, much larger than the smaller jungle type chickens, more of the type we’re used to seeing here. It’s funny, because everyone that visits has their eye on her for the soup pot.
One day while we were there, she decided to use the wheelbarrow as a nesting box and left us a big beautiful blue egg. We found another one later in the week.
A few days before we arrived at the camp, one of the smaller chickens showed up with 5 chicks. She was down to three after only a day or two. It looks pretty promising for these three, since they continued to show up every afternoon that week. No doubt they will have the skills to survive.
It was fascinating to watch these chickens, they retain their wild instincts and they’re completely different than the ones pecking around my garden. I suppose these traits aren’t desirable for large scale agriculture, but they certainly would be in the small garden setting. This spring I’m hoping to find some chickens that are a little more like these, I’ve found a guy locally that breeds them. You’ll hear all about them, I’m hoping it won’t be long.
Would you be willing to keep chickens with more of their natural instincts and get fewer eggs if you had chickens?
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Welcome Home
Last week, we arrived home at around 8 pm on Saturday night. We had grand plans of taking Sunday off to relax and rest up from our 3 week long trip. Nature had other plans for us.
We woke up Sunday to a blanket of snow. It continued snowing throughout the day. Mr Chiots used that new tractor to move the remaining snow from the blizzard that we missed while we were in Colombia. The snow was heavy and piled rather high, we are thankful that we had the tractor or we wouldn’t have been able to get into our garage for quite a while. The driveway was also plowed twice, I did a ride along in the big red plow truck to take a few photos.
I really should take advantage of all this snow to get out and get my Christmas card picture for this coming Christmas. I’d really like to feature this truck with big old fashioned Christmas lights. It sure would be nice to get that out of the way.
So much for a day of rest. We didn’t really mind, we love snow and we enjoy hard work. Since we did so much physical labor on Sunday, however we didn’t feel well-rested on Monday morning. We’ll just have to be mindful to take a few evenings off during the week.
Does nature every thwart your plans of rest and relaxation?
