Exciting things are happening around the old Blockhouse School near Mahone Bay. The 1962 building has been abandoned since the local French Acadian school moved to its new location outside Bridgewater in 2010. That left the property in the hands of the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg (MODL). Plan B was to bulldoze the [...]
I always thought of Staghorn Sumac as a bush, not a tree – until we moved to our present house, where two gorgeous Staghorn Sumac trees grace our yard. They are particularly beautiful in autumn. The house is about 23 years old, and I presume the sumacs are around the same age. Sumacs generally sucker [...]
I just scored a truckload of chipped branches from a road crew trimming the area around the phone and power lines on our road. They were happy not to have to cart it back to Halifax, where the truck was headed, so I suppose I saved the contractor a bit of money in diesel. But [...]
Yesterday I went on a tour of Windhorse Farm, a sustainable farming and forestry operation located up the LaHave River from Bridgewater. I was most curious to see their brush walls. When I first heard about Windhorse’s brush walls last winter, a light went on in my head. Here was the answer to several of [...]
It’s the hardy kiwi, Actinidia kolomikta. The fruits are the size of a large grape, less fuzzy than their New Zealand cousins, and delicious, apparently. I’ve never eaten one or even seen one. But I hope to soon! I’ve got a boy plant and a girl plant in the backyard, and they seem to like [...]
A little more on the deer fence around my vegetable garden: It’s really working very well, as far as the deer are concerned. The biggest challenge to it right now is the squash, which will go to any length to get through to the other side of the fence. There has been some damage to [...]
It’s not the ribbons of flagging tape that are keeping the deer out. It’s the almost invisible black plastic netting that the ribbons are hanging from. It works – so far. This is my second year using it. (See previous post about the deer fence.) I regretted taking it down last fall, as it had [...]
Fog is really neat. I’ve been mesmerized by it out on the ocean on a sailboat, where it becomes your whole world – but that’s another blog post. The other morning after the fog moved in, I was startled by the colours of the flowers. It was partly the contrast between the saturated colour close [...]
So yesterday I put up the deer fence around the garden. I didn’t get around to pegging the bottom of the netting to the soil, but did bravely transplant my broccoli. This morning when I went to check on my baby brassicas, I was very surprised to see the leg and hoof of a deer [...]
The Victoria Day weekend is coming up, traditionally the time you can expect it to be safe to get your garden planted – though I wouldn’t put out the tomatoes just yet. But the potatoes are now happily buried in the new part of my growing vegetable garden. This area of so-called lawn (“so-called” because [...]
