Garden Rant

Wildlife Habitat Communities are great for wildlife and people, too.

Now this may surprise long-time readers, if they  remember my taking the National Wildlife Federation to task for its anti-gardening rhetoric.  And then there was the time I posted about the NWF focus-grouping the notion of partnering with Scotts Miracle-Gro.  

But today I'm cheerleading for their Wildlife Habitat Community program, and cheering especially for my town of Takoma Park, the first wildlife-habitat-certified community in all of Maryland (okay, it's a small state, but still).  We join just 52 other towns in the U.S. who've achieved this certification (happily, before two other Maryland towns that were competing with us to be the first). Here's a list of the certified communities in the U.S., plus another 42 that are registered, meaning they're working on it. 

So what does it mean and what does it take to get certified? Towns need a certain number of wildlife-certified backyards, public spaces and schools, depending on population, plus a public education campaign of some kind.  With our population of 17,000+, my town needed 100 homes, 4 common areas and 3 schools.  Here's how you earn points toward registration, then certification.  For example, points are awarded for creating a website to tell the community about the campaign, and we tweaked that by having a blog instead.  The blog and the campaign were called Wild, Wild Takoma - thus the inscription on the cake.

The NWF's community campaign goes a long way toward not just creating pockets of habitat in our overdeveloped world, but educating homeowners about wildlife-friendly ways to treat their property.  It's well designed and run, with great help given to each community - like detailed, step by step organizing help.

Our effort began in 2005, led by Bruce Sidwell (in floral shirt) on behalf of the terrific environmental group Friends of Sligo Creek, and I was part of the little committee of conspirators, contributing articles about the campaign in the local paper and serving as the official blogger. 

In this photo the team has just received books from a reprepresentative of the NWF (Roxanne Paul in brown shirt), at our very fun little celebration, which also included saxophone music, a reading by the city’s poet laureate, the symbolic planting of three Viburnum nudums, presentation of an award to the mayor, and a choral rendition of “O, Takoma” to the tune of “Oklahoma!” Some select lyrics include:

O, Takoma, home of hippies aging gracefully,
And of trees preserved, energy conserved,
And a true quest for equality.

Yep, that sounds like the place!

Refreshments included the lovely cake in the top photo and a surprisingly delicious mustard garlic spread – like pesto but zestier, and a great use of one of the worst invasive plants in our area.  Ingenious!

Lower photo by Julie Wyatt for the Takoma Voice.

Walden Pond in Winter

 
Speaking of independent garden centers, blogger Layanee DeMerchant visited Walden Pond just so she could show it to readers of the Mahoney's Garden Center blog. And why not Rant-readers, too?  Here's "Visiting Walden Pond in Winter."

Ed Begley on Losing the Lawn, telling Half the Story

I don't blame Begley for this omission - he had to make a compelling case in 200 words or so.  So his contribution to Twelve Things the World Should Toss Out in the Washington Post is to boast about having ripped out his lawn and replaced it with California natives.  But some of the space went to a veg garden, and some of it, as we posted here, went to synthetic turf. 

Begley's never hidden the facts and he sounds really normal and human when this whole, more complex picture is given - the wife wanted some grass and there in SoCal, synthetic may be a more responsible choice than the real stuff.  I bet that story is more helpful and motivating to readers than the black-and-white conversion presented in the Post, though I'm happy he was able to at least raise the issue.

Here's the full list - and it's a good one.  They're calling for other ideas and I may have to suggest something else we might toss out - the notion that we can afford to finance putting ourselves on other planets.  At least until we've funded health care and transitioned off fossil fuels.

Suzy Bales, Organic Gardening's Best Spokesperson?

Now that I've gotten the attention of the fans of Mike McGrath, Paul James and a bunch of other evangelists for organic gardening, let me explain. Seeing her wow Maryland's Hardy Garden Club, a lovely group of women I'll simply describe as not the granola crowd, convinced me that when it's presented by someone they identify with and like, there's no group who can resist the appeal of eco-friendly gardening.  Okay, except for the chemical companies, but we won't hold our collective breath for that bunch. 

Here's how she does it.  Of course the talk and the scrumptuous photos were about nontraditional flower arrangements, but she casually let it slip that "Floral flowers are dipped in poisons."  Unlike flowers from her own garden, where she uses no chemicals or fertilizers at all.  Just compost, and her own shredded leaves.

Also, don't tell the AARS but she said the All-American Rose designation "means nothing".  She said the winners have to survive all over the U.S. and many do just well enough.  So wait a few years to buy a winner because if it's still on the market it probably really IS a winner. 

Then I was pretty shocked to hear Suzy say doesn't cut her roses back.  Heresy alert!  This I have to see - which I'm happy to report will actually happen when I visit her Long Island garden in early June.

Lower photo by Suzy.

Sustainable and Urban Gardening News January 2010

GardenRant edition.  The whole newsletter is here.

Urban Gardening on the Web

• Chicago's Mayor Daley pushes green roofs, as reported on The Growing Edge.
  
  
• Does this count as urban gardening?  It's  How to Love thy Neighbor, Post-Blizzard. 

• Top Sustainable Food Stories of 2009 include the White House Kitchen Garden, and lots about urban farming.  Food stories are increasingly food-growing stories.

Sustainable Gardening on the Web

• Does Lawn Have to be Green All Winter? is my reaction to a painted lawn in California. The California lawn activist just wants "Peace on Turf".

• Are Natives the Answer? asks Garden Prof Bert Cregg.  His own answer is: "Not necessarily." Provocative stuff!
  
  

• Are your spring bulbs coming up already?  Not to worry, says gardening educator Gene Sumi.

 

Garden Travels for Garden Bloggers

I'm pretty excited about the garden-related trips I'll be taking this year, first to Long Island to visit Suzy Bales with a day trip to the NY Botanic Garden in the spring.  I'm also determined to see Colston Burrell's garden sometime this spring - almost whether he invites me or not.

Of course I wouldn't miss the super-fun Blogger Meet-up in Buffalo, cleverly called Buffa10. I mean good Lord, have you seen the website that Jim and Elizabeth put together or received their e-newsletters?  This event will be truly awesome, and I'm lobbying for some dancing this year! 

Then the GardenRanters are talking to garden centers at their shinding in Chicago.  I'm also pondering a trip to the Boston area, and still undecided on going to Dallas for the Garden Writers conference.

So garden writers online or off, what 2010 travel plans are getting you through the winter?

The Garden in Winter Book Giveaway

Guest Post by Suzy Bales

UPDATE FROM SUZY: We have a winner! There were lots of wonderful ideas which made it hard for me to pick a winner. A big thank-you to everyone who shared there ideas. I chose Terri Whitelaw because of her combination of humor and practical advise. A sense of humor is just as important as a good spade in gardening.
______________________________

Ironically, winter is when we need color most, yet it’s the season least planned and planted for color. That’s why I wrote The Garden in Winter. Instead of putting gardens to bed, gardeners should wake them up! To further my cause, I’ll send an autographed copy of my book to the commenter with the most original idea for waking up a winter garden. All ideas, even outrageous ones are welcome!

Until a decade ago, a garden in winter never crossed my mind. Now, I plant so I can enjoy winter performers out every window. The sight of a few brave shrubs blossoming under a desolate sky warms the soul better than the coziest muffler. Although sensible shrubs wait until spring to bud, winter bloomers gamble setting buds in the fall, clasping them tightly through winter blizzards, then opening them for us to admire.

Sunflowers stand guard over Suzy's vegetable garden

The earliest blooming bulbs also taunt Old Man Winter with their lively appearance, as if to say, “You can’t keep us down!” They are also great multipliers, so why don’t we see lawns of snowdrops, crocus, Siberian squill and glory-of-the-snow?

Color in any form—structures, conifers, bark, berries, and foliage—brighten up a drab day. But only gold foliage warms up the garden. It lets the sunshine in. Think gold conifers, and golden berries.

Conifers, in all shapes, sizes, colors and personalities, dress up a garden. Some are show-offs, overdressed and snobbish like the oriental spruce ‘Skylands’. Some are short and squat. Hinoki cypress ‘Nana Gracilis’ waddles in the wind like a toddler in a snowsuit. And we mustn’t forget the eccentrics. A Chamaecyparis nootkatensis waves its arms and wears a witch’s hat while C. ‘Pendula’, a weeper, could be mistaken for the Cookie Monster. Squint at conifers on a foggy winter day and the figures dance.

An empty urn left in the garden screams, “a death in the family.” Poke in an assortment of conifers,  broadleaf evergreens, rose hips, or berries and the arrangement stays fresh to embellish the garden for months in the cold air. 

Forget cutting down gardens in the fall. Leave sculptural seed heads to be capped by snow and ice. Even giant sunflower heads on 6-foot stalks take the winter in their stride. They simply bend a little closer to the earth and are a beautiful sight to see.

Winter is the most fascinating season, a time to closely watch changes in plants. It's when I've seen miracles and been confounded by mysteries. Every plant has secrets to reveal. Have you noticed that the first glimpse you have of a peony sprout is red, while a Virginia bluebell’s is black and most bulbs are yellow? If not, you had better enter the contest for a chance to win a copy of my book. Otherwise, you’ll simply have to buy it.

Enter with your comments, and the deadline is tomorrow at 9 p.m. Eastern.  And to add my 2 cents, it's a beautiful book.

Support Urban Gardening - Hang out with Celebrities!

Hey, gang!  I just got word of this Exciting Opportunity - for fantasizing about a different, much wealthier and frankly hotter version of the life I actually lead.  But hey, fantasy is fun so I'm bidding on:

Well, it's a tie so it looks like I'll be placing two (presumably huge) bids.  First for the walk-on in a movie with Steve Carrell and Paul Rudd.  And Lord knows I'd pay good fantasy money to hang out with Richard Branson on his island.  Sigh.

But who would YOU bid on?  Do tell.

Make your bids right here.  In the real world, presumably.

True Confession: I gave up on worm composting

To recap the history here, I researched worm bins, saw a vermicomposting demo, and was psyched!  So I bought a compost bin and some worms from The Worm Girl and was on my way.  Or so I thought.

First, the big bin took up a lot of space and the spot I gave it was (apparently) too cold for these fussy critters over the winter.  Moving the bin into my living room worked, but Lord, who wants a worm bin in their living room?  And worse, when it came to harvesting the castings I had to manually separate the worms from the decaying food from the worm poop - not my idea of a fun time.

So I switched to a small multi-layer homemade bin and tucked it under my kitchen sink.  Surely the worms, food and poop would sort themselves out without my micro-managing the process, I thought, but that didn't pan out.  And the bin was either too wet or too dry, had not enough food or too much, and I worried about failing at my worm-keeping duties.  After all, these red wigglers are out of their element here and would freeze to death next winter if I just released them to my back yard.  So honestly, I felt burdened by their care, inadequate to the job, and frankly, turned off by the whole operation.  (Hmm, is there a pattern here?  In my defense, I manage to keep three cats alive and happy.)

Lucky for me and the worms, my friend PamJ loves worms, and even has a blog - My Lovely Worms - devoted to their worship care.  Aspiring worm composters find her and she mentors them to worm-composting bliss (one assumes).  She agreed to take my worms and do something with them -  I don't really care but I'm sure she'll fuss over them, truly appreciate their special qualities, and eventually find them a good home.  A far better home than my own.

In this video you see Pam examining and assessing my worms and their bin, then the contents of her own worm bin - with cat.

Making the case for wildlife in the garden, kinda

In this article, garden writer/garden designer Joel Lerner does a great job of encouraging us to plant a variety of wildlife-feeding plants, provide water, and building materials, and even reduce the size of our lawns.  He covers birds, bees, toads, frogs, and the mosquito-eating capacity of bats.  And sure, chipmunks can be pests but they're so cute.  Even snakes Lerner assures us aren't poisonous in this part of the world.

But here's how the article ends.

Rabbits and chipmunks also can dig up the garden. Raccoons can be destructive. Foxes are beautiful, as long as they don't have rabies. If these animals are approaching you, especially in daytime, acting aggressive or strangely, call animal control in your local jurisdiction.

Is it just me or is that a total buzz kill?

Photo credit.

Worm composting in New York City: "It's disgusting and you're absolutely crazy"

In today's New York Times you'll find the most unlikely of articles - about worm composting right there in the Big Apple - and that quote refers to the practice of keeping a vermicomposting bin under one's bed.  Which I can kind of relate to - the disgusting part, that is.

Here's what was news to me:

Food accounts for about 13 percent of the nation’s trash — it is the third largest component after paper and yard trimmings — and about 16 percent of New York’s.

And this:

But keeping food discards out of landfills does more than twice the good of keeping mixed paper out, E.P.A. officials said, because decomposing food that is buried and cut off from air releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, at higher rates than paper. (The ventilation in composting prevents methane creation.)

Photo: Proud worm composter at the Studio School in Washington, D.C.

World Famous Lawn Rangers in Inaugural Spotlight

In case you missed this important inauguration-related story, chosen from among the thousands of groups applying for the privilege to march in the parade that day were the self-styled World Famous Lawn Rangers of Amazing Arcola, Illinois.  Motto: "You're only young once but you can always be immature." 

And what are they famous FOR?  Dave Barry, a veteran member of the group himself, describes their schtick as performing "highly sophisticated, semi-synchronized maneuvers with lawnmowers, brooms and toilet plungers."  This post about them on the Inauguration Blog proudly counts them among the "incredible talents" chosen to perform. 

Finally, this newspaper article fills in the back story - about their having entertained people across the Midwest for some 28 years and, for Chicago's 2003 St. Patrick's Day Parade, having been joined by this toilet-plunger-wielding state senator.

Green Gardener Guides Go to...

When Joe Lamp'l told us why he wrote his Green Gardener's Guide and offered a freebie to someone who needs it, you all nominated yourselves or your clueless neighbors, and I randomly chose JEN from that bunch.  We hope she'll read it and then carry the message by sticking it in a neighbor's mailbox.

But you guys  had some things to say about whether the average homeowner could ever be reached with this message and if so, how.  So a book also goes to GINNY STIBOLT, because she offered to take it on the road with her when she tours to promote Sustainable Gardening for Florida.  And another copy goes to FOY somewhere in rural Panama, who'll donate it to the Peace Corps library there.  (We have Foy's address, so just need for Ginny and Jen to send their mailing addresses to SusanATSustainable-GardeningDOTcom.)

But how CAN the message get through to nongardening homeowners?  Besides putting Joe himself on the road to talk to every civic group in the world, that is.

Seen from the garden - winter cyclists

By Guest Essayist Ed Cullen, from the collection "Letter in a Woodpile."  Here's the link to Ed's very own (very Southern) reading of the piece on All Things Considered.

Girls on new bicycles approach in late afternoon winter light. The riders are oblivious to the pale wash of blue sky, cool air and patches of still-green grass. The girls are fixed on the gear shifters inside the handlebar grips on their Christmas bikes.

"I'm in gears 3 and 7," a rider says.

"Try 1 and 4," says the girl on her wingtip. "That's where I am."

The bicyclists glide by as I turn compost and dirt into beds for romaine lettuce, arugula and mustard greens. I pause to listen to the cockpit chatter.

The girls cruise in squadrons of three or four. Children on the verge of young womanhood, they are beyond the pull of parental gravity when they ride bicycles. They have graduated from piloting machines with foot brakes and one gear to mountain bikes with cantilevered brakes controlled by hand and 21 speeds.

That's 20 more speeds than bicycle riders in Baton Rouge need.

There are no hills in Baton Rouge, only small rises from land to higher land. At 30 feet above sea level, increased pedal pressure conquers most elevations. The riders passing my front yard garden are feminine Chuck Yeagers, girls drawling that test pilot talk. Try 2 and 4."

"Four's too easy. Go to 6."

The girls move by, their wrists sending messages to derailleurs, chains slackening to tighten again in new configurations. My shovel's blade exposes white grubs to the buttery sun as I follow the girls' progress down our dead-end street.

A few minutes later, back they come. The girls are riding faster now. They've found just the right gears. Up the street they go, leaning into the wind, hair flying, ears tuned to a private frequency.

They are free – until suppertime.

Birdcam!

Oh, I once scoffed at the notion of a birdcam - until I followed the link to a new commenter and found this photo.  And cam-owners John and Liza in New Hampshire say it's easy to set up, even if the temp hovers around zero (I say easy for them).  Here's the link.

Wishing I could take Dr. T's classes

I want to go back to college.  But this time not to some liberal arts enclave in the Midwest but to Texas Tech University's honors program of interdisciplinary studies in the natural world - so I can to take classes from Dr. T, known to Rant readers as Susan Tomlinson.  

ABOUT LANDSCAPE
First I want to take her class on landscapes, "which can include anything from a truck stop to a cemetery to mountain wilderness.  They do a lot of drawing," she writes.  Her guest post about loving an ugly landscape gave us a hint of what's going on here - it's not about waterfalls and sunsets.

READING NATURE
Then there's Dr. T's class teaching students to read nature like a text. These kids also do a lot of drawing - of flora and fauna - and learn basic surveying skills.  From "Pentimento":  "The students work at learning about wildflowers and jackrabbit signs and other secrets of the prairie.  I know from experience that many of them are also learning to love this place."

One class outing was to the Prairie Chicken Festival to watch lesser prairie chickens.

The LPC is an uncommon, indigenous bird, seldom seen even by long-term human residents of this region. None of the students had ever seen one, and this was an optional trip in the middle of a busy semester. Even so, over half the class made the weekend trip, rose well before sunrise, and froze for two hours in an unheated van, just to watch the craziness of bird hormones at work.

The students volunteered to mark barbed wire fences so the birds wouldn't get caught in them, and Dr. T wrote that "I was proud of my students that day."

I happened to hear on "60 Minutes" this week that Texas Tech, with its 28,000 students, is craaaazy for football.  Nice to see it's also a place for kids who are crazy for nature.

Photo:  student Matt McEwen protecting lesser prairie chickens from barbed wire.

Where do you keep your gardening gloves?

Fun winter project for gardeners?  Collect all the gardening gloves you can find and survey the sorry scene they create.  Here you see:

• Stiff leather things I'll never use again
• Versatile work gloves, though all too large
• Waterproof gloves, regular length and extra length - useful for hundreds of jobs
• Shown in the photo below, the workhorses of my gardening life - covered in mud, riddled with fingertip holes, and stretched beyond fitting.  To be trashed.
• A very promising pair of West Country recycled ones - in purple - that I'm eager to try and review.
• Some pink Atlas gloves at $7/pair, yet to be tested.
• And not in the photo (coz they were in my office - go figure!) some Womenwork stretch gloves, all high-tech with "micro suede", Velcro, you name it.

Reviews of all of them are coming soon but first - where to hang 'em?  Anybody got the perfect way to store your gloves - so they''ll dry out, and you can see what you've got?  Because the "system" of stack of gloves in various places, indoors and out, is simply not working for me. 

To love an ugly landscape

By Guest Ranter Susan Leigh Tomlinson.  In this excerpt from "Pentimento", published in the literary journal Isotope, Susan describes her complicated relationship with the land around Lubbock, Texas, known locally as the Llano.

Normally this is the place where I would have an epiphany of sorts and come to realize that the beauty is indeed there, but hidden. But if you'll permit me, I'm going to swing a little wide of the standard paean to the comeliness of nature. Because except for the brief moments I see this pentimento and I can convince myself that this landscape is visually pleasing, the rest of the time I have to own up to the bald-faced truth: The place I call home is, by most standards, butt-ugly. That fact simply will not go away, no matter how hard I try to stuff it in a Sunday suit and take it to the dance.

And it is beauty that we value, not the lack of it. I'm no different from anyone else in this. It takes grit to love an ugly landscape. Some days I feel I have it, and some days I don't. But what is love anyway but a relationship that has its ups and downs? What is it but commitment? Real love, in a sense, transcends the simple emotions that are the result of aesthetic appeal. It has to, or the first time a spouse or child was less than beautiful or likeable (and it's going to happen) we'd walk away.

Maybe it is more accurate to say that I don't always find the Llano especially attractive, but I have decided to love it. And god help me, a place this ugly needs someone to love it.  And that's the other side of the story, isn't it? Suppose I did live in a place that was easy to love? It might even have that mountain range, or seascape, or burbling brook. I could look out my window every morning, sip my tea, and say, "My, isn't nature a pip?" And that would be a very nice life. I will not lie to you, if someone offered me the opportunity this very minute, I'd be hard pressed to turn my back on it.

It is easy—natural, even—to desire that which is beautiful. Beauty takes hardly any grit a'tall. But the unlovely place is like the odd girl in the schoolyard, with the bad haircut and the wrong clothes, to whom nobody ever talks. Perhaps it is a measure of character to choose to overlook these shortcomings. Perhaps we would be surprised at what we find beneath the surface. Perhaps I am sympathetic to the unlovely landscape because I was that girl in the schoolyard. I know what it feels like to be overlooked. I know what a mistake it is.

Some people should stick to plastic plants

by Guest Blogger Wendy Tweten, who's shown herself to be a garden writer willing to jump in her car in search of just one more gorgeous Portland garden - during which adventure I learned there's an inner ranter behind her friendly face. Garden coach Sue Goetz was riding shotgun that afternoon. Susan

The time has come for me to put down the trowel, emerge from my herbaceous border, and throw down the gauntlet. Once again I’ve been listening to my favorite radio gardening shows, and once again I’m amazed at the spray-first-ask-questions-later mentality of so many of the callers. But what has finally set me to ranting and waving the secateurs are the namby-pamby replies of the experts on the other end of the line.

Pruned your cherry tree down to nubbins? That’s okay. Sprayed your fruit trees with Orthene when the bees were out? Don’t fret. Whether on radio, TV, or in the newspaper, the typical gardening guru responds to all questions – no matter how inane – with an understanding smile and a pat on the head. Enough, I say. What some people need is more of a swift pat on the fanny.

Consider the woman who said she’d recently noticed a strange, scaly growth on her azaleas. Without hesitation – and without bothering to do anything as boring as read a pesticide label – she grabbed the first chemical that came to hand and sprayed her entire garden with Malathion.

Now let’s break this down. First of all, the strange, scaly growth was no doubt lichen, nature’s benign and interesting little tree decoration. Lichen is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and (usually) algae. It exists to photosynthesize, not to kill the shrubbery. In any case, the lichen didn’t deserve to die, so it’s fortunate Malathion doesn’t kill it. This insecticide is, however, great at snuffing out honeybees. I live in hope the Malathion will cause the lichen to mutate into a big, fanged freak of nature that feeds upon homeowners who don’t read pesticide labels. Feed me, Seymour, indeed.

Think people: if the baby develops a rash, we don’t rush to the cleaning cupboard to douse him in Lysol (at least I hope not). Here’s the drill: 1) find out what you’re dealing with, 2) find out if it’s hurting anything, 3) if forced to take action, choose the least toxic control, and 4) follow label directions.

Anyway, we haven’t yet finished with “Miss Malathion.” When the lichen survived the toxic assault, she snapped on her gloves and proceeded to peel it from the branches (I suspect it also bothers her that her garden is full of dirt). “There,” she’ll say when her beloved azaleas – now devoid of lichen – go to that great compost heap in the sky. “I told you that scaly stuff would kill my plants.” Of course, the poor plants will have died from having their bark skinned away with the tightly adhering lichen.

Perhaps it’s time for all serious and sustainable gardeners to trade the hori hori knife for a cutlass in the teeth. The moral is this: when dealing with certain people, as with certain plants, we must apply a bit of acid if we are ever to help them go green. Also, some people should stick to plastic plants.

Hummingbird feeders? I can't handle the commitment

I've been reading up on hummingbird feeders and have learned that there's a RIGHT way to use them:

• Mix one part sugar with 4 parts water, boil to dissolve.  Or use baker's sugar, which dissolves in cold water.  (Is that the same as confectioner's?)
• Or you can buy "instant nectar," which comes in flavors.  (But why?)
• Clean really well, before using, with Qtip and vinegar-water.
• Replace and clean every 2-3 days or more, depending on how hot it is.
• To remove black mold spots, advice ranges from special cleaning concoctions to doing something with sand that made no sense to me.
• Use an ant guard AND a bee guard to keep them from - I don't know, but I'm sure it's bad.
• Hang them in partial shade so the nectar doesn't ooze out, which attracts ants, which we've established is bad.
• Not much action?  Add a red ribbon to feeder, though some people say any color will do.

Here's what NOT to do:

• Do NOT use food coloring or honey - bad for the  birds
• Do NOT use honey - it ferments, and that's bad for the birds.
• Do NOT use artificial sweetener - it has no nutritional value.

Replace and clean as often as every other day?  Only for my cats would I go to that much trouble.

OR how about just growing a few colorful plants and maybe adding some water?  I'm lusting for some bloomers to climb up the pillars of my front porch - crossvine and American honeysuckle, and maybe the tropical annual tacoma I'm hearing good things about. 

Reading up, I've seen a few plants I already grow recommended as attractants, but I've never seen hummers feeding from them - petunia, columbine, azaleas, butterfly bush, and weigela.  Y'all have any luck with them?  What plants work for you?

I love this video, though I can't help worrying that the little guy might be slurping up red food coloring, which we know by now is a no-no.  But guess what - he's not drinking this stuff by sucking.  I found out that hummers are actually LICKING.  Really, really fast. 

 

These folks seem to know how to do it - with a red pipe-cleaner wrapped around a solution-filled tube.

Once I started watching, I couldn't stop.  This next one shows one feeding its babies.

Photo credit: University of Alberta.

Is this how the Left sees gardeners?

I stumbled upon a leftie website called Irregular Times, which has a section on "Gardening from the Underground," titled Irregular Growth. I suppose that's a good thing, but read the introduction: 

Gardening - when one hears the word one thinks of old people: retired couples with nothing to do, aged devotees of Martha Stewart, or rich, matriarchal wives jealously guarding access to their garden and gossip clubs. Like so many other traditional domestic activities, gardening often feels like a relic, a holdover from a past of little relevance to the electronic, simulated, placeless world of today.

The gardens that we see on television and read about in newspapers and magazines reflect the ludicrous mismatch between the literal earthiness of gardening and the desires for perfection that have emerged as a part of our virtual culture. These gardens might as well be experienced on a computer monitor. They are completely managed, with no surprises. They are without depth, texture, and odor, separated from the environment around them. They are to nature what the Epcot Center is to culture.

Irregular Growth rejects the idea of gardens as museums. In a world in which consumerism is equated with virtue, gardening has the potential to become a subversive art. These pages are centered around the effort to realize that potential, reacquainting people with their humanity through a symbolic immersion in the natural world.

Come grow with us.

Where to start!  Maybe with the description of gardeners, with "old", "retired, "aged" and "gossip" all in the same sentence.  And is YOUR garden ludicrous, perfect, completely managed, with no surprises,  without depth, texture and odor, an Epcot Center Museum?

And turning to the articles themselves, it's a weird little collection that I read so you don't have to.  Just one quote, though, on weeds:

Weeds help a garden seem integrated into the landscape that surrounds it. Weeds remind a garden viewer that a flower bed is located in a particular place with a natural community of plants. Unlike the artificially perfect curves of the trendy mulched flower beds, the curves created by weeds make sense within a landscape. Weeds follow the terrain, living in great sweeps with borders defined by the rise and fall of the land and the natural distribution of nutrients and soil texture. Weeds always make sense where they grow. Their appearance is never contrived.

Yeah, down with trendy mulched flower beds!

The obvious question is who ARE these people, so I wrote to ask- there being no About page - and was told that "Some of the people who post to our site don't want to have their political writings interfere with their day jobs (which unfortunately can happen)."

Wow, if people are being fired for their positions on flower beds, we want to know!  We're bloggers, after all, risking our livelihoods every day to take positions on these defining issues.

Photo by Michael Krinkle via iStock, where it's filed with the tag "active senior".