A noun. A verb. A blog.
I keep telling my friend D that she can give these to me We’ve had a word or two or even three to say about squirrels on this blog. Yet, for a gardener who wages a constant (non-violent) war on squirrels, I must confess to having a perverse squirrelophilia. For example, I always claim the […]
A screw-up with iPhoto deleted my 2013 “Scott Shot” of urban bee guru Scott MacIvor, so I’ll have to make do with 2012. With some regret, last month I waved bye-bye to my last urban wild bee nesting box – or, the last in the three-year study by ecologist and PhD candidate Scott MacIvor. Read […]
This hoverfly might be narcissus bulb fly. Boo hoo. It sure looked like some kind of red-headed bee to me when I found it sitting on a Pelargonium leaf in my west-facing window. Out came a drinking glass and piece of card to capture it while I researched: What the heck is it? Then I […]
The delightfully named “dog vomit fungus”, aka dog vomit slime mold (Fuligo septica) Talk about going from the sublime to the real-ick-ulous on the Toronto Gardens blog! Look what bloomed – overnight – on my worm condo. When I say “overnight,” I mean that the slimy yellow barflike substance frothed up over the lid and […]
Helen Chicken says: Pssst! Wanna support a movie (and a movement)? If you wanted to keep chickens in the city of Toronto, you’d be walking on eggshells (can’t help myself, sorry). It’s illegal. Jan Keck is trying to change that – by making us laugh. The documentary film maker and his Red Gecko Productions hopes […]
A pre-dawn hummer goes for the nectar at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Long, thoughtful posts, full of depth and perspective, aren’t always possible at the best of times. They’re even harder when you’re trying to post every day for thirty days as a sort of shadow NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month – a poor […]
Clavate tortoise beetle on a chewed potato leaf. Note that teddybear shape on its back. Noticing some pellet holes in my potato leaves, I wondered if we’d been hit by flea beetles. Then I saw what looked like a small fleck of bird droppings on the leaf. When flicked, it moved. That’s when I first […]
Get those squishing fingers on. The lily leaf beetles are back, and they’re noshing on your Asiatic and Oriental lilies. In fact, they’re making like the two-backed beast, or beetle, to create the next generations of bright red eating machines. Until they earn their red beetle wings, these will be squishy brown blobs of beetle […]
Study nesting box for wild solitary bees Something special arrived in our back yard on Earth Day 2011: a nesting box for wild cavity-nesting solitary bees such as mason (Osmia) and leaf-cutter bees (Megachile). It’s one of 220 scattered in private and public spaces, including green roofs, around the city, as part of a […]
During a post-vacation check-up of my heat-challenged, newly planted Japanese maple this morning I spied this pixel-patterned egg mass. Aha! I exclaimed, summoning my vast store of entomological knowledge, Those are definitely the eggs of some kind of insect. No, I’m not an entomologist. But I can be a fairly good detective when it comes […]
Nip your lily leaf beetle problem in the bud, or in the egg, by squishing this pest’s red, shiny ova before they hatch. Here’s what they look like… laid in a line, on the underside of lily leaves. Oriental and Asiatic lilies are particularly yummy to the lily leaf beetle, and the three successive generations […]
I have birds on the brain. That can happen when you read a lot of garden blogs. Inevitably, the topic of backyard chickens crops (corny anatomy pun: sorry!) up. Originally, I was going to use this photo in a post about our dad, bless his cool buckled shoes. (This week would have been his 83th […]