There’s nothing delightful about carrot roots that have bolted. Yet, I’m here to sing their praises. Carrots are biennials, and are supposed to wait until year two to produce flowers. When they bolt in year one, instead of sending their energy into root production, that energy gets moved into reproduction, aka flowering, leaving the root…
Category: Wildlife
How I Remove Wasps from Our Farm Home
On our farmstead we have a pro-wildlife stance, and that includes smaller types of wildlife too. We don’t kill bugs outdoors without good reason, and we have the same philosophy for bugs that end up inside our home. If we find a bug in the wrong place (according to us), we try to investigate to…
Showy Milkweed – Weed or Wildflower?
When it comes to differentiating between a weed and a wildflower, the answer lies in one’s perspective. Many farmers find that milkweed gets in the way. I wouldn’t exactly say that my husband and I qualify as farmers. Though we do live on a small farm and keep farm animals, we earn our living from…
Watching Our Pollinator Neighbors
Once the days are warm and the flowers in bloom, one of my greatest and most simple pleasures is watching insects – and our garden affords many opportunities to do just that. Actually, harvesting food from our garden makes me quite happy, but honestly, not as happy as watching these little “neighbors” of ours buzzing…
We Grew It from Seed – Lauren’s Grape Poppy
I’m not sure why, exactly, but I decided to grow several different types of poppies from seed this year. Lauren’s Grape poppy was one of my favorite varieties. With deep purple flowers, this poppy variety was pleasing to the eye – but also to our local pollinators, affording me many pleasurable moments snapping up photos…
A Natural Way to Remove Skunk Smell from Dogs – Apple Cider Vinegar
Living in a rural area means we have lots of wildlife visitors. Loads of friendly pollinators visit our garden, deer come to browse at the apples that fall from our apple trees, and skunks make themselves at home here too. For the most part the skunks tend to stay out of our fenced in back…
Wildlife: Painted Lady Butterflies
Last summer we had some borage come up as volunteers in our garden. Did I say “some”? I meant thousands of plants. We didn’t have borage plants, we had borage patches. This was our first year with a borage explosion, so we thought we’d let some of it live, not realizing just how hardy it…
Native Plants: Milkweed
Milkweed is one of the loved, cherished weeds we have growing on our property. The plant is very important for monarch butterflies and may be edible (this subject gives rise to much debate!). And they are beautiful! We were wondering, though, if this was the RIGHT milkweed for monarchs in our area of the country. So I…
Wildlife: How to Attract Birds to Your Backyard
Last weekend I took a class on birds. It was a great crash course in ornithology and I was delighted to learn all sorts of interesting things about our feathery friends. The main purpose of the class though was to learn how to attract birds to our backyards with native plants. Because I love to share, here…
Hearthwilde 