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 [...]
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 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 [...]
This cannot be a good survival strategy. Snapping turtles lay eggs in June and July uphill from a water source. This snapper has found some gravel right by the side of the road, a foot or two from the pavement. The water source, as you can see in the picture, is a human-excavated pond some [...]
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 [...]
Like the fox last week, this raccoon came up the road from Oak Island, saw the houses up ahead and decided the woods behind our house were a better bet. In six years of living here, it’s the first raccoon I’ve seen. A neighbour told me he saw a black bear just down the road [...]
We get a lot of wildlife where we live, but this was our first sighting of a fox. It came down the road, crossed our front yard and disappeared into the woods. I was lucky to get a photo at all. My husband saw it later the same morning, going the other way.
I woke up this morning with my family aboard a sailboat at a peaceful anchorage in Mahone Bay just a couple of hours sail from home. And shared my thoughts: “We are so privileged to be doing this. Not just having the boat, but to be able to sail where we want and drop the [...]
Dennis Robinson writes: This butterfly came to me yesterday. He started out by alighting on my knee and ended up drinking generous quantities of cranberry juice, strawberry juice and Welches grape juice from concentrate. I think he (or she) liked the grape juice best. He sipped it off the end of my finger but later [...]
