Pollution in China

Not a heartwarming read. Photos of pollution in China.

Birds of Prey Show in Wrentham

The falconry demo that was cancelled due to rain is back on for this weekend! Wildlife expert and rehabilitator Marla Isaac will be showing a number of live raptors such as hawks, vultures, and owls.

The event takes place Sunday, Oct. 25 at 2 PM at the Picnic Pavillion at the Wrentham Developmental Center's softball fields.

Gabe's Garden on Ecosystem Gardening

Woot! Gabe's Garden has been featured at conservationgardening.com.

October Review

I'm going to pretend for a moment that the snow and killing frost have not yet turned our tender plants into mush. This is what the garden looked like at the beginning of October.


Flowers!


Nasturtiums, rosemary, lavender, creeping thyme. . . I'm looking forward to having more native plants in here. Only the violets are native.


I think this is Monarda citriodora, lemon horsemint.


Gabe wanted to play in the scummy birdbath, so I had to move it elsewhere. I stuck some leftover plants where it used to be. And a dinosaur.



When I found out the cable company had to lay new lines through our yard, I ripped out the native plants that I thought were in their way, moving them to other locations. They didn't dig up my bed after all. It's a mess, thanks to me.


This is a Western native called pussytoes that I grew from seed which I started indoors two years ago. The Latin name is Atennaria parvifolia. It thrives in the hot, dry conditions of my front yard. This patch slept beneath a pile of leaves last winter, and came creeping out in the Spring with oversized, gluttonous leaves.


Here between rocks, it grew much smaller leaves. The wet June caused it to get some sort of mealy buggy ick on the leaves (as did the pussytoes up at Garden in the Woods), but some proper sun straightened it out. I love this plant!



The raspberry and strawberry bed.


Chris' beautiful garden.

What What?

What what what?


Again? It already snowed once this October.



This was the earliest nor'easter I've ever seen. A few degrees colder and this snow would have been up to our knees.

Aggressive Natives in Gabe's Garden

The violets planted between the rocks grew like gangbusters this year. They did so well, that even though they were a regular salad-bar for the bunnies, they grew back, and grew back again, and grew back again. This is exactly the aggressive native plant I needed to withstand animals and toddlers.

Have I mentioned that violets are edible? I haven't tasted them yet, but violet salad may be on the menu next year.


That, underneath the blueberry and grass, is common cinquefoil. I couldn't have asked for a better ground cover. It grew from a couple of small sprigs to this in just one season. Perhaps I should fear for the safety of my yard, but what's the worst it could do? It hugs the ground, so it isn't going to deprive anything of light. I don't care if it gets in our weedy mess of a lawn. The worst thing that it does is send runners onto the play-area mulch, just like its cousin the strawberry.

The roots are very long, so I may hate it if I ever want to eradicate it entirely, but that's true of many plants.

Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary

Words aren't needed sometimes.










Highbrush blueberry:


I don't know what this is:


Solomon's plume:


This is the same unidentified fern that grows in my yard:


My partners in crime.