Gardening by Mistake

The robins are back! I saw my first one several days ago and since then they’ve started showing up everywhere. I now have hope that spring will finally arrive.

Interestingly (to me, at least), I’ve got two male robins hanging around my bird feeding station. My presence does not seem to bother them at all. One of them has discovered he can get to the suet if he sits on top of the suet holder and leans forward. The other chases that robin off, but hasn’t eaten any suet. Both robins have been chowing down on the seed I have out there. I have some seed out in a tray feeder and that’s the seed they are visiting. I’m curious about how long the seed will remain appealing to them. I’m guessing once insect life gets back into full gear they’ll quit coming for the seed. In the summer, I always have robins with me in the garden. My garden is rich with worms, and the robins follow along behind me as I weed.

A male grackle has shown up, too. He’s dropped by a couple times over the winter, but never stayed. Now he is. I’d be willing to bet he’s the same bird that kept trying to chase me from my garden last summer. At the time I thought it was a crow, but I know now that it was a grackle. From what I’ve read, they aren’t territorial like that, but this guy sure was. The nest was way up high in a tree at the edge of my garden and that was just too close for that guy’s liking.  I imagine he’ll be using that nest again this year. Oh goodie. And even once the nest was empty, that grackle family clucked at and chided me all summer long. They would sit on the telephone wires over the end of the garden and tell me at length of their displeasure at my presence.

I haven’t given up on growing some native grasses from seed. I just potted up another batch today. Even if they all make it, I’m still not going to have what I’ll need, but I’ll be a lot farther along. At this point, ironically, I don’t have a place to plant them.  I’d set up a lasagna bed for the pocket prairie area, and it’s not composted yet. It seems too deep to just plant the small, slow-growing grasses in it. Those grasses will get out-competed and covered up by invasive, quick-growing grasses, I’m sure. So, it looks like I’ll have all of this spring and summer to grow my grasses in pots with the expectation that I’ll be able to plant them, finally, in the prairie, in the fall. I also have the forbs that I intend to plant in the prairie area. I guess I’ll go ahead and plant those whenever they seem big enough. They can have a season to get established before they have to start competing with the roots of the grasses, which I read will be quite impressive some day.

Thanks to my gardening friend in Minnesota, I have both Big and Little Bluestem grasses. They are quite different. I find it interesting that the Big Bluestem seems much more vigorous. I’ve got quite a few of those– when I originally didn’t plan on having any due to their size! They grow much faster than the Little Bluestem and I have no idea why. They seem hardier, too.  The Little Bluestem are more appropriate for my small prairie area, so I do hope I have success with the batch I potted up today.

The dogs were excited today and I thought it was the neighbor’s annoying dog who gets out of their yard and spends the days running around and barking at the dogs in yards. I was surprised when I looked out the window and saw this walking across our yard. (Our front yard, thankfully. Thor hasn’t added this to his list—yet.)

Oppossum

I have to say, he’s  rather unattractive. And quite large.

I’m hoping he stays away from the backyard. If he doesn’t, there’s a good chance he’ll end up on Thor’s list.

The log suet feeder has turned out to be quite popular. Or, at least, the suet mix I’ve put in it has. The downy woodpeckers seem to appreciate the natural style of feeder as well as the suet mix.  Yesterday, four starlings were trying to land on it at once. The starlings really like my homemade suet. It must be great stuff because there’s a male cardinal doing everything he can to eat it.  He has to work hard at it. Even though the cardinals are able to hold on to the wire peanut feeder, they aren’t able to cling to the log feeder. So one determined male cardinal eyes the log, looking for a good chunk of the suet mix, and then he launches into the air and tries to hover long enough to grab a beakful. He has to be fast because cardinals just are not made for hovering. It seems to be working for him although he’s fast to take advantage of any suet which drops to the ground.  The suet mixture, by the way, was simply bacon grease mixed into peanut butter and then into this was mixed chopped peanuts and a seed mix that has millet and shelled sunflower seeds. I found out accidentally that my dogs and the pesky squirrels also think that suet mixture is good stuff.

Back in early January I posted about the mistake I made with one of my worm bins when I put an entire, huge pumpkin in the bin. (The pumpkin was so large, I had to have DH bash it into pieces that would fit. That should have clued me in, but I blithely continued in my plan). The results were predictable: goopy, wet, gunk in the worm bin instead of nice vermicompost. Sewage smell instead of that lovely fresh dirt smell. I really screwed up on that one. I suppose everyone has to prove it to themselves once. I’d never done something like this to a bin before.

At any rate, in January I decided that there was no way I was going to be able to add enough dry materials (bedding and food like dried horse manure) to soak up the liquid there. I drained as much liquid as I could and then I started the process of drying the bin out by airing it. Once the surface of the bin was relatively dry, I turned it over and exposed some of the still sodden vermicompost. I’d quickly slam the bin lid back on, though, because the sewage smell was awful. (The first time it was so bad I ended up opening windows in the house while there was snow on the ground!)

I only turned it over a few times a couple days apart before leaving it to sit. I was absolutely astonished last night when I opened the bin and saw the entire surface of it covered in fluffy castings and almost all of the bedding gone! Wow! I’m going to have to finally feed that bin. When I dug down I could still find a nasty section, but only a small one and that is now airing. In just 24 hours, I expect that smell has already disappeared as the aerobic bacteria regain control. The main thing I need to do now is just continue to let the castings in the bin dry out. I’ll do that by leaving the lid off for the foreseeable future. I have to say that I have seen a lot of healthy looking worms in that bin. It’s not the recommended method for vermicomposting, but it doesn’t seemed to have hurt the herd any.

Overnight and this morning we got a layer of ice and during the day that was topped off with some snow. The weather this winter has been unbelievable.  The gray dreariness of the day has gotten to me. I almost laughed a while ago when I checked on my rudbeckias to see if they were finally blooming. They are… but they are Charlie Brown blooms. Kind of pitiful, really, and pretty fitting for the day overall.

I’ve got a new worry: my City of York climbing rose. It has “climbed” enough that it covers about 60% of my arbor. It covers more every year. At least until now. I’m not worried about the rose dying but I am worried about it dying back to the ground, or even part way. If it does that, my arbor will be uncovered and, worst of all, my traffic-stopping display of roses in May, like this one, will not happen:

That rose has always laughed at winter before now, but this winter has been a whole different beast and, frankly, I’ll be surprised if City of York doesn’t die back severely. I’ll be worrying about this until the roses leaf out. Judging by our weather so far, that’s going to be late this year, so I’ll remain in suspense longer.

The woodpeckers don’t seem impressed but the starlings love it. Darn it.

Update:

Not long after I posted this a female downy woodpecker stopped at that feeder and helped herself to the suet mix from multiple spots on the feeder. She, at least, seemed to like it. I probably just need to give the others more time. Interestingly, once she left, a chickadee who’d been watching her went over and investigated for himself.

I added a new bird feeder to my feeding station. That’s #9. I’ve been wanting to add it for a couple months. It’s a piece of tree branch from a pruning job on one of our trees.  DH carved out nice quarter-sized areas around the branch and added a hook for me. I filled the holes with a peanut butter/suet mix/bird seed mix.

This is my first attempt with making any kind of recipe for bird food. We had some bacon last night and that’s waht started the whole thing. I didn’t want to just toss out the bacon fat, so I decided I’d mix up a batch of the suet/peanut butter stuff to make a log or cake out of.  While I did that, though, I was thinking about how I’d like to put some in the log. DH had the misfortune of walking by at that moment and voila! I now have my log feeder. I also have a ton of the peanut butter mix left over, so I’ll also be making a cake out of it by adding more seed and corn meal until it’s thick enough to be shaped. My plan then is to put it into my other currently empty suet cage.

Now I have to wait for one of my woodpeckers or flickers to discover it, I guess. The starlings get aggressive around the suet, but I think they’ll be out of luck with this feeder.

Last summer I ordered some Africans (Eudrilus eugeniae) because I was curious about how they’d compare to the 3 kinds of worms I already had. One thing that was clear from the beginning was that these weren’t your “red wigglers” (eisenia fetida). These suckers were huge —about 3 times as long as an EF—and they did NOT take kindly to being bothered. Their reputation for stampeding is well deserved. I found some that traveled the entire length of my house—on carpet! I have no idea how they made it that far before drying out and turning to crispies. They are an impressive worm.

I did my usual when I got my worms: divided them into 2 bins. That’s my insurance in case of catastrophic loss of a bin, although I’d never had that problem before. That way I still have some worms left with which to build a new herd. For a variety of reasons, I ended up with two decimated herds after a couple months. I combined the two into one bin and left them alone. This time I fed them, but I tried to disturb them as little as possible; I didn’t want to cause what was left of my herd to stampede. So, for a couple months now they’ve been left alone except for food.

Today when I fed them I decided to see how they were doing. They are, in fact, GONE!  Oh, there are worms in there, probably the worms I’d caught glimpses of when adding food. But they aren’t EEs. They are EFs. There’s nothing wrong with EFs, but I did want to have the EEs, too. The EEs can produce vermicompost like mad. I just can’t figure out how the darn EFs got into that bin to begin with!  Like orphan socks in the laundry, I doubt I’ll ever know what happened.

I’ve heard the occasional titmouse sing here and there over the course of winter, which has been lovely. Last week I heard a black-capped Chickadee.  And this morning things seem to be picking up. I was greeted before it was completely light yet by cheerful Cardinal song and later this morning by some other bird. I couldn’t identify it because it was sitting in a tree in the direction of the sun, unfortunately.

I haven’t yet seen any robins, but I have to think that the increasing rates of singing and the fact that “my” goldfinches are beginning to show patches of sunny yellow are indications that, yes, spring is going to come. Someday, anyway. It’s 16 degrees here at the moment and our temperature forecast for the coming week are nowhere approaching our normal highs. But spring is coming! Now if the snow would go away, that would be easier to believe!