Neighborhood birds bring me closer to nature

Western tanager, one of my new sightings this year
(Photo credit: fotolia, julielubick)

I have always loved birds, but I would not have considered myself a birder until recently. Now, birds are one of my strongest links to the natural world.

As a kid, I had parakeets (Pepper, Penny and Powder – my young writer self loved alliteration), and I enjoyed watching the sparrows who would nest in the trees outside my bedroom window. I tried to lasso starlings with my jump rope, and I built birds' nests out of grass clippings, hoping a bird would take up residence in them.

Despite my young fascination with feathered creatures, I really didn't start paying attention to the sheer diversity of bird species until my husband and I moved to our current neighborhood four years ago. We live in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, that is nestled between the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and the plains. Our neighborhood also happens to be along a migration path for several species, so we are lucky enough to see some birds that others in our area don't often see. 

You might be surprised to learn that the suburbs are often home to the widest variety of bird species, as documented last year in this NPR story, which attributes that phenomenon to attractive backyard habitats and food sources for birds.

Western kingbird
(Photo credit: fotolia, spatesphoto)

So, when I made the decision to start paying attention to the birds more closely, I started to notice birds beyond the ever-present sparrows and robins. On my daily walks with my dog, which cover 2-4 miles depending on the route, I began to look for new birds. The more I looked, the more I found.

I also started to notice patterns, and now I anticipate the arrival each spring of a large migrating flock of robins (50+ in this group), as well as the bullock's orioles and western kingbirds who always seem to arrive last in the spring.

Most importantly for me, this practice helped me slow down, listen and be aware of my surroundings. It is a quiet sort of meditation for me to walk in the fresh air and sunshine – and it helps me feel more human.

You don't have to go to the country or the wilderness to experience nature (although, of course, I love a good hike in the mountains). In my suburban area, from neighbors' backyard landscapes to the grasses and shrubs of the parks and open space, nature is present and it thrives. Urban dwellers can also tap into the natural world by making use of city parks and trails.

Great blue heron (Photo credit:
fotolia, donyanedomam)

Year-to-date, I have counted 42 different bird species in my neighborhood alone. Some of the more exciting sightings for me have been an adolescent bald eagle circling high above our park, a great blue heron flying past our area (we don't have water in our neighborhood, so it wouldn't roost here) and a new-to-me sighting of a western tanager, but I love and appreciate each an every bird I see.


To learn more about identifying birds in your area, one excellent resource is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. You can use its tools to ID birds, or you can be a virtual birder as you watch owls, osprey, hawks and more on the Cornell bird cams. 

Children's Book Review: How Groundhog's Garden Grew

My daughter, the wanna be farmer, is also very into...everything. She wants to know how the world works. To that end, she has eleventybillion books. I thought it would be fun to go through a few to give you our green thumbs up or down on a few kids' books.

Today's will be How Groundhog's Garden Grew, by Lynne Cherry.

This is a delightful book about a little groundhog that gets caught eating everybody else's hard work. Squirrel tells him to stop stealing food from others and instead of just chastising him, sets about teaching Little Groundhog how to create and tend his own garden. Squirrel teaches Little Groundhog how to select seeds, how to cut sprouting potatoes, and even what to do when the bounty is too much for Squirrel and Little Groundhog to eat themselves.

I liked this book in part because it's a delightful little story for children (and wonderfully illustrated) but everything in it is real guidance. You and your child could follow Squirrel's advice for a real garden of your own. The book even talks about things like thinning seedlings and beneficial bugs. Little Groundhog's delight in new vegetables might encourage your "little groundhog" to try a few new veggies him/herself.

We give this a green thumb's up.

Flushable in Name Only

I'm sure many parents are like us. When your child finally gets to the age where they can use a toilet by themselves, you do your own kind of Potty Dance. Unfortunately it takes a while for true self-sufficiency. When "flushable wipes" came along, we bought them. We bought a lot of them. They seemed to be the answer between wads of toilet paper and a stinky 3 yr old. They were even easier for our child, and wonderful for camping. Big name toilet paper companies even started making some aimed at adults, and there were similar products in the feminine hygiene aisle. Wipes for everyone!

Unfortunately, the marketing was a bit misleading. They have become the bane of water treatment plants. They'll flush and not back up your pipes, but that's the end of the truth in advertising. The issue starts when they leave your house. When I realized they were such a problem, we stopped flushing them and then stopped using them altogether. The companies that make the wipes blame the consumers, saying that people are flushing regular baby wipes and not just the wipes that are intended to be flushed. While I don't doubt intelligence is a bell curve, I find it hard to believe that it's all baby wipes.

I ran across this video that illustrates the enormity of the problem. This is just one treatment plant in New York City. It's disgusting. It also makes me think what other products are causing problems I don't see because I'm blessed to live where my trash gets picked up in blue trucks and I never see it again. In this case, good old toilet paper is the way to go (no puns intended) because it breaks up and it's biodegradable. It's a natural product, unlike the plastics used in wipes. It doesn't end up in huge bins, being trucked to landfills.

Moms and dads - I hear you. Those wipes are calling your name. Just don't flush them. Or, consider a moist paper towel if your kid needs a little help. Think of the poor guy in the Bronx whose job is to use a rake to get them out of the treatment plant. Ew....

Dear Garden, I'm sorry. Love, Bitsy

I’m going to be completely honest and admit that I’ve let my  vegetable garden go to hell.  I’ve spent the majority of the past three years pregnant or dealing with a newborn and neglected it horribly.  This year I am determined to reclaim it and give it the love and attention it desperately needs.  Where I live I get six months of winter and two months of the other seasons if I’m lucky. The year I tried to establish my raised beds we had a long spring with two weeks of summer and an early fall. Everything rotted where it grew because it never got hot and dried out. Thankfully this year seems to be following the usual pattern. I was able to start my bed prep in April like I prefer.  I did most of it in a single afternoon with help from my husband and a good friend.  

The first thing was to rake out all the dead and pull anything left to winter over.  I had left all my roots in to winter over and thought I would find quite a few things nicely preserved under the freshly thawed surface.  I found six partially eaten carrots.  Unbeknownst to me a rabbit had gotten inside the fence and made herself quite a nest between two of my raised beds.  She lived high on the hog all winter off my veggies protected from predators by my fence.  The hole she was using to get in and out has since been mended.  

Raking the debris was fairly straight forward.  Since I neglected my beds I had disease issues last year so instead of composting the leaves and dead plants like I would normally recommend doing my husband and I burned them on our dirty burn pile.  Then I had him and one of our friends use a weed torch and burn off the surface of all the beds to kill any remaining disease causing microbes and germs before they were turned into the soil to wreck havoc with this year’s crop.  My husband loves any excuse to get the weed torch out so it was not hard to get him to help at all.  

Turning beds is very hard for me.  Last year my husband bought me a two handled broad fork to use.  He had seen one when we went to the Mother Earth News Fair in PA the fall before and felt it would be big help.  He was right, the broad fork allows me to use my body weight to turn the ground as opposed to relying on strength and stamina both of which I struggle with.  With a broad fork I just have to step up on to it and rock back, the tool does the rest of the work.  It did not take the 3 of us long to get the six big raised beds and four small ones turned like this.   

After the beds were turned I had the guys burn the beds again.  This time they were going after old root material and the worst thing that has resulted from my neglect, an infestation of  Japanese Beetle grubs.  I hate Japanese Beetles.  As grubs they destroy the roots of plants and any root vegetables.  Once they become adults they feed on the leaves and fruit of the plants and can kill full grown hardwood trees if there are enough of them.  They are also highly annoying buzzing around crashing into everything including windows, the dog, cars and people.  They seem especially adept at locating and bouncing off my glasses and falling in my drink. Only mine, never my husbands or one of the kids.  It has to be personal. They are huge pests and a big problem.  Burning the larvae and eggs in the soil is a big step towards reducing their numbers this year.  I have other organic pest control methods I’m going to implement as the season progresses but this was attack one in my war against them.  

Here is another confession:  I haven’t amended my raised beds in years.  I knew that I would have  to do that this spring and shopped around for organic solutions. I found a four part system from Arbico organics that I decided to try out.  It’s called Bob and John’s soil prep kit.  It promises not to burn any existing plants and is all natural.  I bought the small kit because I don’t have a great deal of soil to cover.  I found it very easy to use and I am optimistic about the results.  The first three parts were easy enough to broadcast by hand and the last just required a hose sprayer.  No complicated mixing and measuring just toss it, spray it, and water it in.  The forecast is  calling for three days of rain which should help the amendments work their way in nicely before I put any seeds or plants in.  

That is how I spent my Sunday.  Hopefully It was a big step towards reclaiming my vegetable patch and undoing the damage caused by neglect.  Maybe my poor garden will even forgive me and I’ll get a decent crop this year. 

Suburban Gardening, Metro DC style

A few weeks back, we got a freak snowstorm here, and now it is bright and sunny and about 47F, which to my husband means t-shirt weather. Welcome to springtime in DC.

We are suburban gardeners. (I use the royal We here, as it is mostly him.) Several years ago, he and a friend built a raised garden bed in the low point of the backyard, where it was spongy anyway, and he covered it with chicken wire above and below to keep out the deer and rabbits. That is where we contain most of our gardening. Leaving it open would just be a deer snack bar. The garden in back in mostly squash, tomatoes of all kinds, beans, lettuce and basil.

Last year, Husband dumped some of our compost into the front yard, in a sunny spot between the azaleas, where I hadn’t managed to keep a flower garden growing. Our 6 yr old is the co-gardener and on this day, she is supervising the building of  new beds in the front yard. Part of the prep has been to take old wood from a previous project, and make about a 5ft by 2ft box and a smaller 3ft x 16 in box for the plants. The boxes were filled with compost from our backyard tumbler and old leaves. He ran drip lines from the rain barrels. The rest will have to wait for a trip to a nursery for seeds, unless we get more volunteer plants. One of the benefits of composting is that you sometimes get more of what you already eat when seeds survive in the compost. We would love to have the room to do what Sara does but that will take more land and probably fewer deer.

Kiddo wants to be a farmer. She's gardened with her dad since she could toddle up to the side of the garden bed and eat the basil straight off the plant. I enjoy watching them do "their thing". It brings back memories of my own childhood when my mother had a garden behind our garage. I also think it is good for kids to see food, to watch it grow from seeds or sprouts, and care about the soil. My role is pretty much to eat All The Things. Tomato sandwiches, anyone? Hopefully in a few weeks I can update with how our garden grows.

Corralling my Compostables

(Or more honestly, ‘Tidying that Garden $h!t Up’)

In between random downpours and snow flurries, and when the temperature gets up above 5C, I have been engaging in ‘productive procrastination’ in the garden.  Weeding – yup, love that one. Cutting odd stuff with secateurs – yup, love that one too. Rounding up all the branches, sticks and twigs that were either lopped last October and have been hidden under snow for 6 months, or have dropped off my trees due to weight of said snow – yeah, not so much. But with the weather limiting my options for more exciting things like pouring the concrete foundations of my new tool-shed, or ripping the roof off an old outbuilding, tidying that $h!t up is about as good as it has got recently.

Wood, wood & more wood

With a hungry wood burning stove that powers my homes’ central heating, you’d think I’d be revelling in so much free fuel, right? Well the OCD freak in me has of course devised a system for dealing with all this – as thick as a finger gets stripped, cut and bagged for kindling (8 sacks and counting), 1-2 inches thick gets stood up to dry (if it’s straight it’ll become tomato canes, otherwise it’s bigger kindling), and fat branches or trunks get stacked for burning. But the whole twiggy mess of a snail trail this has been leaving behind, Hmmm. Compost heap?

As you can see, my main heap didn’t fair too well over winter (build new heap already added to ‘must do’ list) and with my gut instinct telling me that adding a pile of twigs twice its size probably wouldn’t help it along, I researched alternative uses for my twigs (oh yes, that’s another top productive procrastination tool for indoor days when I should really be cleaning or building my kitchen). And then I found the mother of all valid excuses to dump that wood in a single place and call it meaningful – Hugelkultur.

Literally meaning ‘hill culture’, Hugelkultur is basically creating mounded raised gardening beds starting with a base of decomposing wood. YAY! As I am already growing in raised beds using the ‘lasagne’ method of building my soil, Hugelkultur seems not that much of a stretch. To boot, I also happened to have the perfect spot for my new bed - a long south facing trench behind my big barn that wasn’t doing much other than getting waterlogged every time it rained. Talk about serendipity!

I’m currently about half way through clearing the myriad piles of wood in the garden but so far my new Hugelkultur bed is looking pretty good …OK, maybe not good but it looks intentional at least. Once I’m done with the woody layer, I’m supposed to cover it with layers of composty stuff but as the contents of my existing compost heaps are bound for my current raised beds, I’m thinking it might have to be some concoction of cardboard, ground cover moss, chicken coop cleanings out, and grass clippings (the latter two begged from a friend in the village). Er – sounds just like a new compost heap to me. Oh well, if it gives me some place new to compost while I empty and rebuild my other heap, that’s great.

**There is a science to Hugelkultur BTW. If you want to know more, Permaculture magazine has a great intro HERE

Our First Sugaring Season

Late winter is maple sugaring time. In the woods all over Vermont, blue plastic tubing zigzags through the trees, directing gallons of sweet, clear sap from taps to collection tanks. At twilight, steam rolls out the tops of sugar houses where the wood-fired evaporators are boiling down the day’s run into sweet, dark syrup. It’s our first winter here on our new property, an 1836 farmhouse with almost 3.5 acres. Starting a maple sugaring operation was one of our major goals for this year and since J grew up sugaring with his family, he was eager to jump into the process.

As the season winds down, we’ve collected around 500 gallons of sap from fifty maple trees on our property. Preparation started in the Fall, marking the largest maples with bright tape so we could easily identify them during winter when they are without leaves. After Christmas, we purchased and prepared the equipment-- taps, tubing, connectors, and collection tanks--and began setting up the lines. People who sugar as a business increasingly use vacuum pumps to extract the sap and propel it efficiently toward the collection sites, and then reverse osmosis to remove the water from the sap and speed up boiling time. But this is a small scale family hobby for us so we are keeping it old-school and inexpensive. We even used metal buckets on a few trees where tubing didn’t make sense. Buckets are more labor intensive but they certainly have a nostalgic charm to people who grew up around maple sugaring. 

It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup and the success of any year’s crop is highly dependent upon weather conditions. Warm days and cool nights are the best combination and typically the sap does not begin running until late February or early March. An exceptionally cold winter this year delayed the season a couple of weeks. It’s the second week of April and we have been collecting thirty to sixty gallons of sap a day. J’s brother boils it down nightly in his sugar house and has made 28 gallons of syrup from sap collected on three different properties. As daytime temperatures begin to reach the 50s, the season is winding down. Eventually the sap turns yellowish and less sweet, a sign that the tree is turning its energy into new leaves and sugaring is over for another year.