WHERE’S HOME?
Migration
“Ladybug, ladybug fly away home…” Whoops, she did! And she’s made my home, and perhaps your home, her home. With spring just around the corner, she’s awakening and coming indoors.
Ladybugs are such lovable creatures that we — or I, at least — can’t call them a pest even when they act like one. Just now they’re creeping on windows along with cluster flies, also benign creatures but “pests” not at all welcome in my home. Ladybugs do get even peskier indoors: I occasionally find them marching across a pillow just before I lay down my head or scuffling along the edge of a teacup just before I take a sip.
It’s not your imagination that the annual ladybug migration indoors has increased from years’ past. Read more
OLDIES BUT GOODIES
Varieties and Aesthetics Past
You’re rummaging in the attic, in your greatgrandma’s steamer trunk, and you come upon a dusty, old packet of garden balsam seeds. An heirloom! This heirloom’s probably more valuable for the picture on the packet than for the seeds, which probably have lost their vitality. You could, though, if you wanted, get your hands on heirloom plants seeds or plants that would grow.
A WINTER FAIRYLAND
The Goodness It Brings
If we’re going to have cold temperatures, we might as well have snow. You might think that snow has nothing to do with gardening, that once a white blanket drops over the landscape, all garden activity and thoughts of gardening cease. Not so: Your gardening activity might cease and my gardening activity might cease, but a lot goes on gardenwise.
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