Bird Feeding Tips: Beyond what most folks tell you

I like to feed wild birds. It's like having a giant aquarium, with aerial battles and better sound effects than an aquarium pump and bubbler. I haven't fed wild birds in a long time. Setting up my feeders reminded me of a bunch of stuff:

When you start out, don't expect a lot of birds, even if you see them all over the place. They not only need to find the feeder, but learn to trust it. If you think about it, a bird feeder is a very weird, unnatural thing. Give them time to figure it out and learn that it's not evil or some sort of bizarre trap.

When you first put out the bird feeder, don't fill it all the way, and prepare yourself for the possibility that the seed may go bad before enough birds come in to finish it. Always clean out the feeder if seeds have gotten moldy inside, and dry it out with a hairdryer before putting in more seed, or the mold will just come back and spoil seed that might have lasted much longer if you'd cleaned out the feeder well in the first place. Not only will birds avoid spoiled seed, but if they're desperate enough to eat it, they can get sick, possibly die, and it can cause problems that prevent them from raising chicks, or kill chicks that they're trying to keep fed. Anyway, unless you have someone else close by who is also feeding birds, the local birds may visit it only sporadically while they figure out if this is going to be okay and safe. Braver, bully birds may be your main customers early on. Plan for that, and increase the amounts you place in the feeder only when there are enough birds to finish it before it goes bad.

About millet: Although a lot of birds love millet, a ton of it ends up on the ground, which gives it a bad reputation among bird lovers. If you watch the birds feeding, you'll find there's usually a good explanation. In my experience the main reason millet ends up all over the ground is because they're part of a mix and jays are sweeping through the tray with their beaks to get to the sunflower seeds. Juncos and other birds that like feeding from the ground can do an all right job of picking up these sweepings off the ground, but the jays can be so messy that they simply can't keep up. My solution? I rarely buy mixed seed. In my experience, if you feed mixed seed then the birds will always keep dumping stuff to get to the stuff they see just out of reach through the feeding port. My chickens are the same way. I feed them a uniform layer pellet in their feeder, and mixed seed (the scratch) is distributed only on clean ground or in small enough amounts in a heavy pan that it'll be all gone in a few minutes. To attract different birds, I put thistle in one feeder, sunflower in another, and peanuts in the shell in a feeder that's a bit tough to get them out of to keep my jays busy and entertained. Seed is relatively cheap, but why waste money by feeding stuff that mostly ends up on the ground?

Speaking of stuff on the ground: it will happen. There are parts of the seed, usually hulls but also bits of seed that escape the birds when they sit and crack them before swallowing, that will end up all over under the feeder. Birds also poop while they eat. Even the mixes that have been shelled will not have pristine ground underneath. If you're fastidious, you don't want a deck feeder, nor do you want a feeder stuck to a window with a suction cup with your favorite lawn chair sitting underneath. I recommend siting your feeder in a sweet spot where you can both see the feeder, but where the debris will serve a valuable service: namely, fertilizer and mulch. I have feeders on and among a grove of deciduous trees beside my house. The trees were struggling along until we came along and pruned off dead and crossing branches, and set up a feeding area under them. To us, those small birds don't seem to produce significant amounts of fertilizer, but that little bit made a huge difference to our trees. The hulls and broken bits of seed provide valuable mulch, contain organics that help loosen and condition soil, and the whole mix of debris attracts earthworms and other organisms that enrich the soil. Alas, it's not worth it to plant pretty flowers around the base of a feeder unless it's a big enough one that they're somewhat protected from all the falling stuff. But, if you have a moveable feeder, you might consider changing the placement by a few feet each year and plant annuals where the feeder was before. Turn what a lot of people consider a disadvantage into an advantage!

A special note about hummingbirds: sugar water can spoil rapidly in warm weather, which will harm the little jeweled jerks. My answer is to feed in fall and spring, when flowers are scarce, and wean them off when the garden begins to flourish through the summer. I have a lot of plants that are great for keeping our hummingbirds well-supplied with nectar, and natural nectar is better for them anyway. Yes, it's nice to have them humming around your window where you can enjoy them, but you can also plant something like a honeysuckle, train it over an arch set over a bench, and voila! Perfect place to read in summer. Not as convenient, yes, but these days we need all the excuses we can get to go outside.

Another note about hummingbirds: they are fast but unfortunately cats can catch hummingbirds. When planting for hummingbirds or when feeding them, consider height. You can't control all the predation that goes on. Cats will get the adorable little hummingbirds and it's sad, but not technically your fault. To keep yourself as guilt-free as possible, place hummingbird feeders very high and prune up plants that produce attractive flowers, or put plants meant for hummingbirds in hanging baskets or in tall containers. The death zone for hummers can be quite high for a skilled cat that has decided that hummingbirds are favorite prey, but it seems to me the worst area for them is at ground level up to about three feet. At that height range even a cat that's not that into birds may be tempted to give it a go. To be safe, try to get feeders and plants up above five feet whenever possible. Lastly, although male hummingbirds will sometimes make attractive nests quite high up, often the females, after choosing that male to be their beloved, will nest much lower and that's where they'll raise their chicks. In fact, many birds nest much lower than you'd expect. So be careful when you're gardening!

There are lots and lots of reasons why you want to do your main pruning, plant moving, etc. in late winter or mid-to-late fall, but one of them is that you may inadvertently destroy a nest full of chicks, or expose them to the weather and predators. Also, beware of disposing of debris piles that have sat around a long time. A random summer day may not be the best time to light that baby up. Quite a few birds like nesting in what they see as a nice, undisturbed debris pile where large predators will have a hard time finding them, if they even bother to look in such a place. The birds don't know it's slated for burning at your next convenience. Thank you for checking or simply waiting until after the nesting season before you dispose of that loose pile of branches from the wind storm a while back. Conversely, if you want to create an odd but often attractive nesting site for birds that like to nest close to ground level, you can build a debris pile for them, and make it quite attractive with complementary plantings and found art. They may or may not use it, and eventually decay will make it flat, but a debris pile can be attractive for quite some time and if you do get some nesting birds there, it's super fun to watch them dash back and forth while they're raising their babies.

Thank you for reading!

Spring bliss

Why I love spring in the Pac NW:

Storms, especially lightning storms.  They're rare here and seldom have ground strikes, so I consider them lovely rather than something that's terribly hazardous like they might be in other parts of the world.  

Those sudden, blustery winds and downpours followed by sun and rainbows.  If they're fast and hard enough, sometimes I can smell the ocean in the westerlies.

The contrast of dark-bellied clouds and bright blue sky.

Glorious heat to bask in one day, sweet coolness the next.

Flowers everywhere!

The first flights of bees at my tiny heather blossoms and pussywillow blooms.

Daylight stretching and opening up so fast it seems unreal.  We'll be gaining over an hour of daylight in a single month.

New leaves.  Bright greens, yellows, pinks, reds, purples, sometimes draped like lace, sometimes sharp and clean, always beautiful.

And I love spring fever.  Even the goats kick up their heels and dance in the field.

I love spring.

Springtime Pics

The garden, she is blooming! We won't be in full awesome mode until summer, but in the meantime, I'm enjoying some much-needed color outside my window.

Red currant (with my house in the background.)

I love my daffodils. I have a couple hundred of various colors.

#escapefail

(BTW she got out of there fine on her own--she went in head first and turned around into this position before leaving.)

Early daze of spring

It's spring in the Pac NW, which means it's going to rain until June.  No exaggeration there.  The weather folks said we'd have a sun break on Sunday, but it was a no show.  That's going to be typical for the next long stretch.  Chances of a little sun for a few hours, but no assurances that they'll actually occur.  

Now, I don't mind the rain, really.  It makes me sleepy, but that's about it.  It's pretty, and it makes the air smell nice, and I don't have to worry about watering my garden.  But.  I really want to garden.  I made a lot of progress in February and early March, and I got addicted to spending that time outside getting ahead of schedule.  I sweat, I breathe more deeply, I connect with the earth, I enjoy the birds and insects and get an occasional tiny jet of adrenaline when I freak out over spiders, and I can immerse myself in the beauty inherent in fellow living things.  I especially like plants having sex, aka, blooming.  I love that.  Pregnant plants are awesome too.  I eat their babies.  Mwa ha ha!

But I can't do all that.  I'm either stuck inside home, stuck inside a business elsewhere, or stuck in heavy clothes in the rain.  There are alternatives, but the ones I can think of are expensive (travel) or not enjoyable (dancing naked in the rain is, as far as I'm concerned, a sport for warm summer rain, not freezing cold March rain.  It was 35 degrees F yesterday.  Distinctly *not* Kami dancing naked in the rain weather.)

On the plus side, I have fewer distractions from writing.  The writing seems to be coming along nicely.  Now, if I can only get through my reading list!

Black Angus in the Dark Woods

I was picking through the remnants of devoured (the bulbs, by voles) tulips, making them into a nice bouquet, when The Sea of Unconditional Love alerted me to ... are those Newfoundland dogs?  No?  Black ponies?  (No no no I mean the animal kind of black ponies!)  No?  

Aha!  Black Angus.  

And here I thought I'd have a quiet evening sipping Navan and writing.

I'd tried to get goat feed earlier but the feed store was closed by the time I got there, a fact that's particularly annoying because I had nothing, no alfalfa, no grain, nothing that would appeal ... well, now that I think about it, I do have peanut butter and also rabbit feed.  D'oh!  But I didn't think of that.  I went out to try to herd the cows toward our neighbors' place.  Whether or not they belong to the neighbors is moot.  They needed to be contained so the rightful owners could eventually locate them.  Right?  So my good Sam butt got run ragged trying to herd them when finally I called 911.  What's my emergency?  Cows.  

The officers are on their way.

I figure, if we can't herd them, maybe we can have a nice roast?

Anyway, as I get to know the animals, I notice that there are two cows, two nice calfs, and a young not-very-big (read young, but no longer a calf) bull.  They're nice, docile animals that like to kick up their heels when they run away laughing mockingly at the two legs trying to keep them from either running down into the woods or onto the road.

I meet two of my neighbors at the road, and they join in the happy hijinx.  I'd thought, earlier, that maybe late tonight I'd go work out.  I decided, while gasping as I climbed the hill behind my house for the fourth time, that that would be overdoing it.  As time wore on, I wondered if there was good karma coming out of me chasing someone else's livestock.  Maybe someday someone will chase my livestock for over an hour, keeping them out of harm's way and trying to contain them so I'd have a better chance of finding them.  Wouldn't that be nice?  I knew of at least two other fools, er, I mean, neighbors who, like me, were willing to slog about in snow, mud and blackberries to tend to someone else's problem, so I guess it's in the realm of possibility that someone might return the favor someday.  

In the end, though, the bull kicked up his heels one last time and danced, laughing, into the woods.  We called it a night.  I called 911 back and told them not to bother anymore.  We'd never get the cows out of the woods in the dark.

The Sea of Unconditional Love still barks, though sadly, toward the woods where the cows roam (or are probably bedded down by now) all alone in the Ravine of Doom.  The dogs remember the Ravine of Doom well.  They spent several days lost down there.  Poor cows!  Come home, cows, come home! the dogs call.

Soon I'll feed the dogs and they'll forget all about the sad (not!) cows dreaming in the dark woods.  The real sadness is that the liquor store closed while I was running around with the herd.  No Navan for Kami.  But at least we had beautiful, unusually late snow to adorn the Land of Mocking Livestock.

Anyone missing some disrespectful cows?

Cold Snap

Got the woodstove going again.  Cold weather has returned to our bit of paradise.  The greenhouse plants are shivering like chihuahuas, I'm sure.  Poor things.  I had to stay late at work to help shroud the annuals from the expected chill tonight.  This necessity torpedoed my hope to zip over to the INK meeting tonight before it got too late for some critiquing and planning of our writerly futures.  Weatherman says snow, maybe, down to 1000 feet or so.  I wonder if I'll wake up to the whitest April 19th I've ever experienced.  Questions I haven't had to concern myself with are popping up.  How will the peonies and clematis fare?  Will this stunt my poor asian pear trees?  Do fumes from oil lamps harm seedlings?  Shivering minds want to know.

At least we have water, and lots of it.  Turns out the new tank can keep keep our water running for some time once it's pressurized without the pump having to step in and work like mad.  I wonder, now that the pump's workload is much easier, if it might not give up the ghost, poor thing.  It's been overworked for who knows how many years and now, with a normal load, it may not just settle, but collapse.  

In the meantime, though, we have water, heat, shelter, food, all the niceties of modern life keeping us comfortable.  As for the wild things--good luck, and I hope you make it through the cold snap.

April Fools

I woke up to sunshine this morning.  I was so inspired by spring and growing things I've decided to walk out on my job, dye my hair green, and run around naked in my garden all day.

That was supposed to be the beginning of an April Fool's entry but you know what?  It really sounds appealing.  Well, the dyeing my hair green would be a pain, with the lightening first to a lighter brown or blonde and then finding and going to a salon that carries the right green for part B, and it would probably be expensive.  Maybe food coloring would work, but if it didn't, well, I'd have to live with the lack of success for a long time, being a long-haired weirdo.  I look really terrible in short hair.  Trust me.  

But besides that, the rest sounds great.  Someday when my garden is tall and all filled in I can garden naked or mostly naked if I want, no joke.  Right now there's too much exposure (ha ha) to the road and my neighbors, though I used to work topless when I worked in sheltered areas.  Ironically, we've cleared too many blackberries for me to work in a comfortable state of dress (or undress, in this case.)  But soon, soon now, the plantings will mature to a size that we'll have privacy again, without an invasive non-native species taking over what should be gardens and pasture and wildflowers and woods.

I'm reveling in my freedom today after reading about some real hardships.  A good and wise friend pointed me to her blog (waving hi!) and I spent about an hour catching up.  It pointed me to a wonderful and yet heartbreaking article about an all-woman village that both filled me with joy and anger.  My heart wants to react with counter-violence but I figure that's a no-win.  The men will escalate if the women fight back, and probably kill them all.  I'm so filled with feminine pride after reading about their success, and enraged by the poopyheadedness of the men.  When people can't see that beating women for being raped is wrong, they are more than blind and ignorant.  A blind man can understand.  An ignorant man can learn.  I don't think that these men can see, or learn to be other than what they are--a product of a culture that places blame solidly on the shoulder of people who can't or aren't allowed to defend themselves because they're too terrified to challenge the people who are responsible--the rapist, the abuser, and too often, the religion that they twist and interpret to condone, or that outright condones the savaging of their neighbors and kinfolk because they were born with a uterus.

Blessings on the women of the world who are suffering today, not for choices they've freely made, but because a glint of self-value shone in their eyes and an asshole couldn't stand it and had to crush it.  Blessings on the victims of rape, blessings on those who stand up and embrace courage and provide hope for their sisters.  Many, many blessings on the village of women that's growing around the world, and blessings on the women who haven't heard and don't know and need a place so much and will never live to see it.  May they be touched by peace, grace, and love.  

I think I know who the real April fools are today.  

P.S.  Katherine is doing great.  She's very kittenish and playful and is healing well.

In Flux

Katherine is settling in nicely.  She's learning the joys of chasing paintbrushes, empty dinnerplates left on the counter after a prime rib dinner, a steady food supply, toilet water (ugh!) and kitty laser pointer games.  I'm still worried about her.  She sits a little funny and her hindquarters aren't very strong.  Still, she gets around and has enough energy after a day-long nap to play, explore and knock things over.  I'm teaching her the joys of stealth, aka not knocking things over, and areas that are out of bounds.  She responds very well to intimidating body posture, so I haven't had to yell at her, which is great.  I just stand in her way and loom and she backs down.  She's not fearful, just responsive.
Such a perfect little kitty.  No calls yet in response to the ad or the Humane Society file.

Meanwhile, we've had more snow.  Right around dinner time we had a big fall that kept the big flakes coming until sunset.  We ended up with more record-setting snow and pretty sky colors despite the warmer temps today.  It's really fun, wondering whether I'll wake up to rain, snow, or clear skies.  After many years of dreary, rainy springs with non-stop cloudy skies from early March through early June, I feel like we're actually getting to experience a new season as opposed to enduring the long, drawn out death of winter.  

I celebrated by taking some pics, some movies, and I wrote some and painted some.  Technically I'm still painting.  There's a phase in watercolor called leave it the hell alone.  So I'm leaving it alone so that the color can dry and stabilize before I go play some more.  Katherine informed me that it was time to leave it the hell alone by hopping up onto the dining table and sniffing around the watercolor palette.  Something smelled intriguing enough that I was worried she might sample, so I picked up the palette.  She would have none of it.  She followed the escaping palette by climbing onto the chair.  When I swung it out behind me she made a jump for it and tipped the paint tray just enough to splash a little Hunter's green onto the soon-to-be-eradicated white carpet.  

Time for the kitty to go play with Orion.  She purred madly as I picked her up.  I let her play with the paper towel I've been using for blotting while I carried her down the stairs.  I let the boy know it was his turn to entertain the thing.  She has served her purpose.  She got me away from mucking up the colors.  Now it's time to get back to work.

I hope everyone is having good, or at least fun, weather!

ORC smash, orc burn!

Open Read and Critique, aka ORC.  I didn't realize how much I'd enjoy it until I'd been in one.  OryCon is a long way away, but I'm already looking forward to the ORCs--wondering what I'll bring to read, who will be there, what I'll hear, the dialogue that'll sprout up.  Good times.  Writing can be very isolating at times and I hunger for interaction with other writers.  INK is great for that, and ORCs are like a mini-convention within OryCon just for those of us who are willing to sacrifice schmoozing time to hone the craft that informs so much of our lives.  At our hearts we love to create whole worlds from nothingness and the critique sessions teach us how to create better, more badass worlds.

In contrast to today, which was satisfying in its own way but the reverse of a writing event that helps grow and create art.  In anticipation of the equinox (which, as far as the Earth's position around the sun, has will happen within minutes of my posting this, at 22:48 (10:48pm)) I did some spring cleaning today.  Not as much as I'd like, but still, there's less mess and best of all, we got to burn a bunch of stuff.  Two items in particular that went up in flames were the original print out and the agent-intended copy of Beggar Smith, the version that I definitely should not have sent to Donald Maass agency because it was so not ready.  Now that particular albatross, though still dead, no longer hangs around my neck.  It's all ashes, a unique something that has been reduced to its original form--a thought in my brain.  Well, not entirely.  I'm not that brave.  There's still a virtual copy, which I'll reference for the rewrite.  Some of the scenes I plan to steal whole cloth because they're memorable enough that I can almost recite the dialogue from memory.  I'll dye the cloth with some editing to hide the stain of my more primitive prose from that era.  The rest will be blue-screened.  Then again, I may read those old scenes and realize that they're better in my memory than on the page, in which case it'll all get blue-screened.  I'm game.

Much as I look forward to working on Beggar Smith again, though, I need to play some more with Masks.  Must ... reach ... end ... on this last (ha ha) edit.  It's polished, but there are some plot and characterization improvements that can be made.  I'm trying not to muck with it too much because I don't want mud, but at the same time I think if I'm careful I won't screw it up too badly.  

Oh, and yay!  I can participate in the writer's workshop this year!  Woot!

Creation, destruction.  It's been a very ORC-y day.  Happy vernal equinox!  Blessed be.

They're Here!

I finally snagged some pics of the grosbeaks.  Today was probably the most bird-diverse day we've ever had.  The grosbeaks mingled with juncos, varied thrushes, house finches, chickadees, robins, stellar jays, scrub jays and our lone nuthatch.  All at once.  Unfortunately it was raining when they all came so I could only sneak out once during a dry spell when the grosbeaks had chased the juncos out of the feeder.  By looking at our feeder it appears that we have only a slightly heavy sunflower seed mix, but looks are deceiving with this mix from Costco.  It includes quite a few shelled sunflower seeds.  It also has peanut pieces, but I don't know if the grosbeaks like those.  They're really picky about what they want as far as feeder food.  If you don't have enough sunflower seeds, they'll move on.  Our flock today was about ten individuals, mostly male but a few females.  I've seen as many as a dozen and maybe this year we'll see even more.  They tend to return to the same feeders on their migratory paths so there's an opportunity to get more and more each year as the chicks accompany their parents.

Also new today, hyacinths.  I'm sure they've been around for quite some time in the valley, but seeing them in full bloom here for the first time gave me one of those yay moments.  The low-growing tulips are stretching their necks, and all the early daffodils are open now.  The daylilies are tall enough that the fish don't look silly.  Roses are sending out their first leaves.  The tree peonies are opening their first flush of purple leaves and the regular peonies have buds peeking out.  Primroses are going crazy.  Hostas have their noses poking out.  Pansies have got their faces painted on.  The daphnes are getting ready to pop open while the lenten roses have been open for a good month and are wondering what everyone else is waiting for.  The place is starting to look up.  Maybe someday I'll have a garden that looks good year-round, but for now I have to wait until spring for my show and I'm so glad the opening act has started.

We had just enough sunshine that I managed to dash out and get our Christmas tree from this year planted, and I yanked more baby blackberries and put out slug food.  I know every year I lose quite a bit to slugs and most of the time I shrug it off, but this year I was very disappointed to see that slugs had destroyed several of those kewl tulips.  I don't know what's more heartbreaking--seeing a bud eaten down to just a little color showing or having the stem chewed through and the blossom laying in the mud.  The stub, I guess.  At least I can bring the blossom in.  Die slugs die!  I need to encourage more snakes, although this time of year the snakes are still napping most of the time and won't be eating much in slugs.  

The equinox is the day after tomorrow.  I don't know if I'll be doing anything special except welcoming the day.  I have to work, drat-0.  Maybe I'll celebrate by coming home to a clean house.  That means lots of work tomorrow.  Cleaning out the house is a semi-tradition here at the household on the equinox, not exactly a party, but really rewarding.  The mini-cleans I've done over the past weeks will help set the stage for a great spring cleaning, I hope.  Yay clean house, yay birds, yay spring!  Even when it rains, when the flowers are blooming it's a beautiful day.

Happy Shamrock Day!

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone!  Actually, I wish it was simply Ireland's Day, but that would be a bit silly--there's no Germany Day (though Octoberfest sort of applies) or Japan Day (although some folks like joining in the Obon Festival) -- okay, I give up.  Anyway, I'm not very fond of St. Patrick.  It's partially a pagan thing, although there are saints, like St. Valentine, for whom I have a certain fondness.  I'm very fond of Ireland, though, and I'm happy to wear the green.  Hopefully I'll be able to vacation there sometime.  

You know, that sounds kinda goofy.  I'm fond of Irish accents, Irish music both old and new, Irish art, and the Irish myths and legends.  Things get a little fuzzy with what's technically Irish and what's Gaelic of a mixed flavor and what's Norse and all but anyway ... I haven't been to Ireland, so I can't logically say I'm fond of the place and the people.  Hopefully I'll get a chance to find out if I do.  I'm plenty fond of my half Irish husband (from both sides of the family, oddly enough.)  If there's more like him over there, grrrroooowwwwl!

I'm going through another cleaning fit.  Maybe it's because the equinox is sneaking up on us, or the fact that it's raining and I'm in the mood to garden.  What to do with all that energy?  Clear clutter and vacuum seems to be the answer.  I have a desk that I'd planned to take to the dump, but it's been raining every day that both the dump has been open and I haven't been stuck doing something else.  I'd give away the poor thing but I don't think anyone would come all the way out here to take it away.  It's pretty beat up.  At one point it started to fall apart and we rather crudely screwed it back together.  It's solid again but certainly not attractive.

The workouts continue.  I plan to go this afternoon/eveningish, prior to dinner because I don't like to workout with a full belly.  If anything, I prefer to be a little hungry.  Which brings me all the way back around to St. Patrick's Day.  It's time to put the corned beef on to boil.  Got cabbage, got potatoes.  It's a much less expensive dinner to put together than, for example, Yule dinner or Thanksgiving or what have you, and much, much easier to cook.  

Be careful out there.  There's going to be a lot of drinking.  And Happy Not Orange Day!

How does your garden grow?

The grosbeaks have stubbornly refused to come back.  I think they know I'm waiting with camera in hand.  Either that, or someone around here has an all sunflower seed feeder out, rather than a heavy mix.  Guess I'll be getting sunflower seeds at work soon.

But even if I don't have sunshine on the wing around here, at least I have some flowers.  chionodoxa isn't grown as much as I'd expect considering how well it does in our area.  Maybe it's because it's a small flower, but I don't see that as much of an excuse considering how many people grow violets, snowdrops (the normal-sized ones) and lily-of-the-valley.  I have blue and lavender and they're both great to tuck into those small places where you can bend down and get a close look at them without having to put your nose to the ground, like in a rock garden or under deciduous shrubs in a raised bed.

This is the first year I've grown low-growing tulips.  I had no idea the variety I picked out was so early.  I don't have a hint of bud on my other 'normal varieties' and I have only a few of the early yellow daffodils, yet here are some Greigii tulips I got at work.  They're not the earliest of the tulips, either.  I may have to look into getting some Kaufmanniana tulips to add to my collection.  Or maybe these are Kaufmannianas.  That's the trouble with buying generically packaged bulbs.  Often the scientific names are left off, sometimes because the plant is so hybridized it's not truly one thing or another and is then designated generically species.  In this case it would be Tulipa spp.  I guess it doesn't matter.  What matters is that they're early enough that the slugs didn't get them all, and I get to enjoy a nice show to carry me over until the garden comes into its own.

Sunshine Kisses

The garden is starting to wake up.  I've been working like a maniac (when it hasn't been raining) trying to get the young blackberries pulled out of the wildflower garden before I run the risk of crushing too many volunteer seedlings.  I can't say that it's looking good, but except for one corner it doesn't resemble an empty city lot anymore.  The goldenrod that grew to incredible proportions (no fair! it was only knee high in the meadow and I would have never planted it so close to my Shakespeare 2000 rose if I knew it could reach 5') got moved into the wildflower garden, as did a chunk of bouncing bet (anyone want some bouncing bet? I got lots) and some daylilies donated by my sister last fall (ahem.)  

We've finally had the grand opening of the first few daffodils, aka sunshine kisses.  There are only about a half dozen that actually opened in a spotty fashion today.  In a few more days hopefully I'll have whole patches open, and then I'll take many pics.  As we get even later into spring (the pic was taken April 5, 2007) I'll have enough daffies up that I may even cut some to take inside the house.  That's always a good day, the first day with flowers in.  Sometimes I force forsythia, but most times I wait until my bulbs do their thing.  They last a long time and they're so darned cheerful I can hardly stand it.

Fifteen days until the vernal equinox.  I'm so ready for spring, and yet, the winter went by quickly this year.  Now that I have a little floral sunshine, I'm okay with things slowing down.  Any time now.  Go right ahead, world, slow her on down!

Knowing Your Plants

After a brief hiatus, here we are discussing Radcon 5 again.  

Apparently this panel has been extremely well-attended at other conventions.  Well, not at Radcon 5.  I brought an attendee with me (the unstoppable C.S. Cole) and Gayle, Gerald Nordley's delightful wife, decided the panel would be a great place to knit.  She was absolutely right.

Frieda Orsborn, my fellow panelist, had a wealth of herbal knowledge and she brought some magazines for reference.  I paged through one as we waited for others to show up (didn't happen, although two young men arrived, sat for a minute, probably realized we weren't discussing government moles, and left) and when Gayle asked about ephedra I got to laugh and tell her that it was being re-released to the public by the FDA and here's the article, enjoy!  (I do not endorse the use of ephedra, nor any other herbal product with a very few exceptions, and I'll explain why below.)

Despite the fact that the attendees of Radcon 5 weren't interested in the growing with roots plants as opposed to spy-type plants, we had a lot to say about them.  

For example, say that your fantasy has the characters moving from point A to point B or is describing village life and it sounds like every other fantasy.  You can spice it up considerably by flavoring your text with a healthy dose of what it's really like to  live off the land without modern agriculture and distribution/grocery stores.  

Your job as an omnivore is to be able to eat just about anything to sustain yourself.  A plant's job is to reproduce successfully, and there are several clever strategies by which to do this.  Edible fruit with an undigestible pit is a great one, because your seed gets distributed everywhere.  The trick is to not make your leaves and bark very nutritious or as many an orchard owner can lament to you, the deer (who have adapted to eat stuff that will give us the runs like crazy) will eat the whole tree down to a pitiful stub.  Other methods include relying on seeds that blow around, sprouting from the roots or tips that arch down to the ground and forming big thickets, or dropping seeds from toxic berries and letting those slowly spread your kind and being as poisonous as you know how so that hardly anyone wants to evolve how to eat you when there's a perfectly good apple tree sapling right there to nibble down to a stump (darn you, deer, darn you!)  There are strategies in-between, but remember this is developing with evolution and it's tricky to have totally toxic leaves and yummy fruit at the same time.  It's not something you can necessarily plan, as such, anymore than you can plan to have a boy as your first born without getting nasty (or lucky.)  

But I digress.  The point is that when your heroes head out into the wilderness, they need to find stuff out there that's edible to them that hasn't already been eaten.  If they're out there in the winter, especially in late winter, good frickin' luck.  Everything edible out there has been searched for and assaulted full time by the wild critters.  Also, think about hunting for a little bit.  We have an enormous abundance of deer right now (Kami shakes her fist at them helplessly from the house) and yet there's many a hunter with all kinds of equipment, including firearms, and all the time they can get off work, that will take days and days to bring home their deer.  Wild animals are great at running away from things that want to eat them.  So, your adventurers turn to living off the plant life.  They have options--pine nuts, certain leaves and needles that can make tea, some roots--but it takes a lot of time to find and collect enough of these things to get a halfway decent meal.  Yes, you can eat grubs, but finding and digging for them is time consuming and they're not very filling.  (If you want to try this, I suggest cooking them.  You don't have to eat them raw.)  Also, lots of green matter without starch is going to give them a nasty case of the trots.

Having your villagers wish for the first of the harvest in summer while they're picking greens in the spring can add a lot to your setting.  So can a real understanding of the cyclic nature of primitive agriculture and haphazard storage capabilities of a low-tech society.  It can also be great fun contrasting availability of items in a city where they have access to snow/ice year-round vs. a temperate city vs. the tropics where you can usually find something fruiting year-round.

You certainly don't have to include this stuff in your writing.  After all, folks read to escape the realities of starvation, feast/famine, and the joys of diarrhea.  But like I said, it can set you apart from everyone else and add some tension if you like.  

What about medicinal uses, Kami?  I want my herb wife to be able to heal my character who just got hurt.  I don't want to deal with infections and stuff like that.

You can do that.  But again, let's have some fun with this.  There's a lot of material out there with borderline or outright magical people who can heal heroes from the brink of death with a chocolate-coated magic pill.  The way to make things interesting is to take into account the guesswork involved in this sort of thing.  One of the reasons there are fewer herbs on the market than really ought to be has to do with how our bodies are only partially adapted to eating things that don't want to be eaten.  The gov tries to bring things down to the lowest common denominator, and therefore things get taken off the market or are never approved because an unacceptably large proportion of people are allergic or sensitive to what's otherwise a really good product.  When you use the whole herb rather than a refined extract, the chances that you're sensitive to one aspect or a combinations of an herb's profile of components is that much higher.  The combination/complexity can also provide more benefit than a refined version, or the components can cancel out the overall benefit.  Some systems, most notably the Chinese system of herbal medicine, maintain that medicines have to be crafted for each individual and can't be mass-produced for any real effect.  

Suddenly you can have a lot more fun with your herb wife as she hits and misses with your character's individual chemical tolerances and her local herbal availabilities.  Also, side-effects can be fun to play with.  Your character doesn't get an infection, but now he's nauseated, or groggy, or both and trying to fight the bad guy.

If you know your plants, you can also have a lot  more fun inventing poisons that don't exist.  They sound and act more nasty if you have reality to draw from.

We had a great time, the four of us, discussing plants and how to apply them to fiction (and real life too.)  We got a little bit into lore and how it develops (multi-use or very important core plants can become the center of an entire culture, even naming the people who use it) and chatted a bit about gardening.  (Why the heck is basil so hard for me to grow when everyone else can grow massive pots of it??!!) But mostly we talked at the edges of a really big topic, because an hour is not even close to being enough time to go deep with this stuff.

BTW, I'm always available to answer your plant questions.  I don't know everything, by any means, and I'll let you know if I have to research it because you may be better off researching it yourself.  But if your rhododendron is ailing or you want to know how hard it is to grow a camellia sinensis for tea, etc. I'm here for ya.  Know your plants.  Love 'em.

A moment of regret

I had a moment today. While I was walking through the garden I was thrown momentarily back in time to spring. I suddenly longed for spring, and the summer to come. I normally love autumn but I wished with all my heart that it was spring, and it made me sad to see just a very few bees humming among the very last of the flowers. Not so long ago there was so much activity in the wildflower bed that you could hear it a good distance away. When the sun hit it, you could see silver sparkles where the insects flew and leapt among the blossoms.

I had a hard time gathering seeds. The birds have really picked them over. But I got enough, I hope, a future garden in little zip lock bags.

We'll get our first really hard frost soon and I'll forget all about this, snug in a house that smells of cinnamon and spiced cider, taking pictures of frost heave, enjoying how fluffy the goats are, and being able to see the birds in the feeder when the leaves are all gone. But for a moment, I had regret.