Feed the pollinating insects! No blooms cut before their time!

Hello everyone,

I hope you are well, and the 33 degree celcius temperatures (London, Ont. and Ontario) haven't taken too bad a toll on you.

I was out in the garden this morning, looking around at the varied plants in bloom.  Catnip grown to the size of small shrubs have taken up residence between the burgundy day lilies in what is - or was - an almost formal perennial flower bed several years ago.  This same bed also has a plant called Elecampane.  It should be called Elephancampane, from the size of its lower, largest leaves: 70cm long and 30 cm wide.  At almost 2m tall it's beginning to flower.  For all the leaves it produces the flowers are maybe 10cm across, multi-petal yellow. They are in bloom and they stay.

The herb garden has an established hedgerow of agrimony, which sends out long stems and blooms with yellow flowers all along. I'm discovering it would be a weed in another location.

So alkanet might be described as a weed in a farm field locale.  Bugloss, it's called too.  It has the most astounding blue flowers on long stems. 

Avens spreads and blooms.  Another weed by another name.

There are also daylilies in yellow, burgundy, and organge standard blooms, blue balloon flowers, parsley about to come into flower, catmint getting to a second flowering, red burgundy, what I call sun drops (not sure if they are a form of evening primrose).  Two rescued butterfly weed are recovering and taking on size.  I'm hoping for bloom.

Everything is about bloom right now. Everything is about food for pollinating insects.

Without getting into reference articles - a first for me! - if a plant is blooming or about to, it stays.  Never mind that usually I'd prune back things for show-off space, or wider paths, or just because it's invading (like the Jerusalem artichokes!).  If there's pollen and nectar for the pollinating insects, the plant stays. 

A week or so ago the Ontario Beekeepers Association actually called for a halt to the use of Neonicotinoid pesticides.  This adds their voice to many others in Canada who want to get rid of a bee-killing herbicide.  Colony collapse disorder continues.  European countries are several years ahead of us in banning these pesticides.

The important thing I can do in my own yard these days is to let the plant life happen, and wonder at the  dozens of fat bees that feed in my purple burgamot and the insects feeding throughout the various other blooms.

Very best regards,

Why's Woman

Ecological Gardening, Marjorie Harris and James Hansen

Hello everyone,

Here in London, Ontario, we had a pleasant day.  Temperature in the low 20's celcius.   No heat wave of the sort in British Columbia and in the U.S. where some areas are having temperatures in the 40's celcius ... which is beyond ridiculous into scary.

And I happened to take off my bookshelf a copy of Marjorie Harris' book Ecological Gardening: Your Path to a Healthy Garden (revised and updated 1996 from its 1991 first edition).

Seventeen, or perhaps even 22 years ago, Harris put a section about xeriscaping in her book - gardening for drought.  And included this quotation by James Hansen, (then) Director of NASA's Goddard space center:

"As the greenhouse effect increases we will see hydrological extremes. Some areas, especially mid-continental regions, will have more frequent and extreme drought."

Harris is a garden designer and writer, and a proponent of organic gardening.  She's Canadian!  She's just started posting some new garden videos (done for the Globe and Mail newspaper) on her website  www.marjorieharris.com 

Harris is always ahead of the trend, or, more accurately, she knows when a trend isn't a good idea and tells us something useful instead.  She obviously knew who James Hansen was well before many environmentally savvy people (me included!) had any inkling who he was, and before his name began to really be associated with climate change - global warming.

Hansen's recent book, Storms of My Grandchildren, is in the London Public Library.  I've mentioned him before too: http://savingtheworldinmysparetime.blogspot.ca/search?q=James+Hansen

Thanks Marjorie Harris and James Hansen.  Even if you are talking about things that scare me.

Sincerely, and with best regards,

Why's Woman

Go read Stephanie's blog for Canada Day

Hello everyone,

I hope this note finds you all well and that you had some down time this Canada Day. 

I seem to have taken a month off.  Not that I didn't have anything to say.  It's more that I've had so much in my head that I haven't been able to find where to start ... or how to continue in a succinct way when I did start writing.

And I'm taking an easy way back in to blogging, by referring you over to Stephanie Pearl McPhee's blog Yarn Harlet.  She's talking about the positives of Canada's health care system, which - despite problems and some slowness - does give us all health care we don't have to pay for.  For me and my family, that means a lot too.

She says it way better than I will tho' so check her out ... www.yarnharlot.ca/blog

Very best regards,

Why's Woman

Paul Hawken on optimism

Hello,

I hope you are well.  Did you get any of the wonderful rain we had over the last few days?  Here in London, Ont. we had over 6 cm over 2 days ... quite a lot ... altho' we'd had almost no rain for the earlier part of the month.

I've just run across a great quotation by Paul Hawken, and wanted to jot it down for you and for myself:

"When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”


Which makes a short post, but a good thought to sleep on.

Very best regards,

Why's Woman 

Transition movement ... moves because of the people

Good morning,
(early, early morning!)

I hope you are well and happy, with something interesting ahead for today.

If you live somewhere that needed rain, I hope you've gotten some.  Here in London, Ont. we finally had a bit of rain on Wednesday, and some more today.  I haven't yet checked what was gathered in any buckets 'round the garden, but I got gloriously wet while out on my bicycle and it was a lovely thing after the hot weather of the last couple of days.

Last evening I attended a gathering out at The Living Centre, an eco-spiritual centre not far out of London.  Sally and Christine of Transition Guelph were down for a visit, talking about their experiences setting up a Transition group.  We who came from London and Middlesex County had a good visit and heard the kind of stories that will keep us going.

In its shortest description, the Transition Movement is about the resilience of communities, about the ability to adapt to stresses that might come from changing fossil fuel resources, climate change and economic stress.  Beyond this, it is about people who have visions of a future that is kinder to the environment and to people, where resources are not throw-away in the way they are now ... where we have learned again to do more things for ourselves and each other, using fewer resources, and using more local resources.

Everyone at the gathering agreed that more and more people we know have a sense that our contemporary pace of constant rush is too much.  People are hurried and stressed, expected to get more stuff all the time ...
...where do people get the money for cell phone set ups and the non-cable t.v. options that let you tape many shows at the same time and record 100 movies (or something)?  If one person records 4 shows every evening, when is that person going to find the time to watch the shows?  It could become some sort of electronic hoarding ... altho' I suppose it would take up less room to have dvds or memory sticks scattered around ...

...got distracted there about the tv and movies ... I've seen too many of the dumb cable versus internet commercials lately.

Back to Transition ... change. 

How will we come up with visions for 2030? 

Are you able to dream of future?  Have a vision?

I'd better get myself to bed ... do some dreaming in a more literal sense.  I can't seem to tpe two words without a typing mistake.

Best regards,

Why's Woman



Transition London Ontario: www.transitionlondon.ning.com
The Living Centre:  www.thelivingcentre

Photographer's daughter posed as five strong, real women

Hello again,

The world heard my plea for something positive and strong. I was just browsing a news site and found ...

Photographer Jamie Moore's daughter Emma just turned 5.  Ms. Moore took photos of Emma dressed and posed as 5 different strong, influential, real women.  This is a wonderful contrast to the story in the news about Disney changing one of its characters so the princess doll will be older looking and sexy.

One of the real women Emma chose to be is Jane Goodall (certainly one of my heroines), with Goodall's quotation:  "My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money, because Africa was the "dark continent", and because I was a girl.   ... what you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of a difference you want to make."

Moore's photos don't copy ... so please check out http://www.jaimemoorephotography.com/2013/05/09/not-just-a-girl/ to see the wonderful photos.

Thanks Jamie Moore and thank you Emma, for ending my day more positively. 

Best regards,

Why's Woman

Gardens and bees

Hello,

I hope this note finds you well.

Over the last few weeks I've been doing a lot of gardening, at my own place and for other people.  I'm continually amazed at how every bare space fills in with something growing and green.  This is what Nature wants to do: grow, expand, cover territory, be green. 

I've still got swaths of dead nettle in some vegetable beds, letting the blooms feed whatever insects happen by.  The lilacs are coming into bloom, and holding up under the drop in temperature we've had.  The pear tree bloomed, was pollinated we hope.  The apple tree is blooming , absolutely covered in bloom which has not dropped in the overnight hover-on-zero C temperature.  The crabapple tree is blooming with a much darker pink blossom. 

Suddenly we cannot see across the yard and across the street beyond any more.

Nature wants to create beauty, life.

And this evening's news on London's CTV channel just carried an item about a beekeeper living near Melbourne whose bees started to die within hours of the farm next door spraying its corn with a neonicotinoid pesticide. 

I wonder how long it'll take for the test results to come back, and if the news will carry a confirmation that that pesticide is what killed the bees.

The European Union has just put a moratorium on some of the neonicotinoids.(altho' I've got a feeling it won't take effect immediately, so there'll be a use season ... need to check)

What will it take here in Canada?

Who are the people who develop the chemicals and the business systems that are bent on destruction of a world which only wants to grow and be green?

Over the last few weeks of not posting I've been reading a lot of different things, thinking about a lot of topics ... a lot of sad, depressing news on many fronts. And I've not had the energy to post or write or think. 

Gardening is good to maintain a hold on the green and growing goodness that's out there ... helps me bide my time until the energy (the anger? the determination?) comes back.

... and did I say how much I love compost?  Layers of green and brown, a bit of water, and billions and billions of micro-critters transform vegetation in such a way that billions of other micro-critters living at the interface of soil and roots can transfer life to plants.

It is all flow, one living organism.

We're such a small part of it, with too much power to harm.

I'd better just keep gardening.

Best regards.

Why's Woman