Here are my favorite “Whereas” statements in the new, bipartisan Resolution that just days ago declared April to be “National Native Plant Month:”
Continue reading “a National Native Plant Month!”a National Native Plant Month!
Category: Urban nature
Instant Butterfly Garden (from scraps)
Easiest butterfly garden ever: let celery butts and carrot butts sprout, then stick ’em in soil.
Maybe I mean “easiest butterfly factory” ever, because these butts won’t just feed butterflies, they’ll make butterflies.
All summer, Black Swallowtail butterfly moms will find the leaves and lay eggs, and then you’ll have more Black Swallowtails.
And if you put your butts where you can see them every day, you can watch the whole butterfly lifecycle from the comfort of a lawn chair.
If you have not yet watched a butterfly lay an egg,
or a caterpillar hatch,
or a caterpillar molt,
or a caterpillar become a chrysalis,
or a chrysalis become a butterfly,
this scrap garden is your chance to increase your chances.
You MUST SEE THESE THINGS.
If you have a kid or a parent or a friend or soulmate or neighbor, then THEY MUST SEE THESE THINGS, TOO.
Continue reading “Instant Butterfly Garden (from scraps)”Free the Tree (a mini Weed Wrangle®)
“Smothered and Covered” works great for hashbrowns at Waffle House, but not for trees in your yard.
When invasive vines smother and cover trunks and branches, the tree—eventually—is toast.
Look around. It’s winter. Are shade trees casting shade from twigs that should be bare?
Are elms and hackberries magically green from soil to sky?
Robins for Thanksgiving
The Robin ‘Hood show is starting. Nashville ‘hoods keep robins all year, but we get an influx of winter robins, too, and right now all the robins are appearing in a hackberry near you.
November is the month I love hackberries all the more.
And, it’s the month hackberry haters hate them all the more.
The same reason explains both: ROBINS.
The Sidewalk Nature pic below is another Robin “hood:” the hood of a car. Surely the driver must was from out of town, because locals know better than to park under a hackberry full of robins.
Continue reading “Robins for Thanksgiving”When Plants Cry
Here’s another Wonderful Thing.
First, I’ll show you, then I’ll tell you.
But what you see here is NOT rain,
is NOT dew.
Look:
Choices
Look, a mosquito!
Should I:
1) Spray my entire property with synthetic pyrethroids that “target” mosquitoes and are “safe,” but which actually kill bees, butterflies, and all invertebrates, and can “persist in the environment” for months?
Or
Continue reading “Choices”Birding by Star Trek
Even just the endpapers are helpful in Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America. But this is the first time these endpapers don’t end a mystery. There’s this mystery bird, see, who I DON’T see, and who I barely hear: high, fast, faraway.
Continue reading “Birding by Star Trek”Second week of October
A Signs of the Season roundup for the second week of October:
Bumblebees go to sleep early now, and our Canada goldenrod is hung with dark, little blobs well before Civil Twilight.
Each blob is a bee or fly.
Few things are cuter than an upside-down bumblebee falling asleep.
Tree Soap
Our Sugar Maple is blowing bubbles in the rain.
Not to fret: It’s fine, it’s just one of Nature’s Soaps.
After a long dry spell, rain is washing accumulated salts and acids down rough bark—mixing, agitating as it goes—and crude soap is drooling to the ground.
Like shampoo at your feet as you wash your hair in the shower.
“TREE SOAP” is the kind of news I love to share.
Michael was busy when I ran into the kitchen, so I shared to the back of his head, “Our tree is making SOAP!” and then apologized for the distraction.
Continue reading “Tree Soap”Buckeye lashes
Let me explain.
When I posted a photo of buckeye capsules at Music Row, I mentioned that they would dry and split, and that the outer hull would look like a buck’s upper and lower eyelid. The seed inside would be the eye: the Buck-Eye.
Nancy, who has known me since 6th grade, wrote, “I want to see the eyelids when they open!”
Sidewalk Nature 