Butterflies & Bees

Click on Image to Enlarge
Mattie-Belle and I
Playing Butterflies & Bees

The Butterflies & Bees version of Tic-Tac-Toe I crafted, is getting quite a bit of use in our front garden, these days.

It all began several months ago, with the acquisition of a round outdoor coffee-table, which I covered with clear vinyl to protect it from the elements. The table made it's way to the front garden patio, where it sat, waiting for a purpose.

A little while later, I discovered internet pictures of outdoor garden themed Tic-Tac-Toe games, and thought I might have a go at creating a set for our house and garden.

The base of my version is a small piece of sheet metal decorated with MACtac, and the game pieces - Butterflies and Bees - in honour of our pollinator patch, are carved out of weather-proof orange and yellow Flip Flops. After gluing magnets into the underside of the pollinator pieces, I decorated their top side with fade resistant Sharpie Marker.

Outside, I carefully pealed back the vinyl table covering and tacked the metal game board to the round coffee-table and reattached the protective covering. I stacked the Butterflies & Bees in a recycled peanut butter jar, and waited to try the game out with a small child, or a young-at-heart older person like myself.

I've played Butterflies & Bees with my granddaughter, who quickly mastered the concept of getting three of the same insects in a row, and has become fairly competitive. She's since played the game with a friend from school, with neighbours nearly twice her age, and she "taught" her great-grandma how to play.

Tonight, I introduced a simplified version of Butterflies & Bees to a very young neighbour, who mastered identification and verbalization of "butterfly" and "bee" in minutes. He also volunteered to help me stack the pieces in the storage jar when we were done.

Note: Flip Flops are pretty tough to cut through, and memories of my bruised and battered fingers make me protective of the little critters I created. To protect them from being lost or stolen, I keep the game pieces just inside the front door of the house when they're not in use. 

All in all, Butterflies & Bees has turned out to be a pretty good idea, as a fun all-ages learning activity for the garden. It's also proven to be an environmental component, of sorts, to an unintentional outdoor education program: The game invites conversation about beneficial pollinating insects, their habitat, and the benefits of recycling.

Drop over sometime and we'll play a rousing game of Butterflies & Bees. Who knows, I might even let you win!

The Fence and Path

Click on Image to Enlarge

My husband and I erected a sixteen-foot-long, three-foot-tall fence along the north side of our front yard garden, adjacent to a section of the neighbour’s driveway.

It's not that we have a problem with our neighbours - we don't. It's not that the fence is visually restrictive - it isn't. It's just that we got tired of uninvited strangers traipsing through our garden with nary a thought to the plants they were destroying.

Specifically, postal and flyer delivery people, and electric and gas meter readers seem to feel completely free to trample lawns and gardens even when they've been politely asked to stop.

I was beginning to feel like a hall monitor, watching for transgressors, expecting the worst. I was becoming seriously stressed about the rudeness and laziness of these trespassers, and impatient with myself for being so bothered by them.

The idea of a fence was already on my mind because I'd been researching the French Potager and noticed that border fencing was considered integral to the traditional kitchen garden.

I hadn't originally considered a three-foot-tall fence for the Potager purpose but eventually reasoned that anything shorter wouldn't deter people from walking through rather than around.

In addition, I suggested to my husband the idea of creating a flagstone pathway that would lead from our front perennial Potager to the side pollinator patch, mostly eliminating the need to use the neighbour's driveway to tend our side garden.

The new pathway ironically offers a direct route for foot-traffic to and from our electric and gas meters and our neighbour's mailbox through our garden; but, at least it's a deliberate hard-scape path and the fence clearly indicates where their feet shall not tread.

An irritating negative has become a soothing positive; and, though I couldn't have known that erecting a fence and creating a path would sooth my frazzled nerves in such a dramatic way, I'm certainly happy to have let go of the destructive obsession that had been upsetting my equilibrium.

It does still bother me a little that we had to go to all this work and spend the money to move plants, relocate flagstones, mulch, and install the fence; and, I wish these unwelcome intruders would take the long way around, as they should.

I must admit, though, that the fence and path look amazing and really enhance the garden; so, it’s a win-win!

The Tidy Up

Click on picture to enlarge

I've been careful not to disturb the earth in my garden in the early spring because I've heard that life cycles of ground dwelling and nesting insects can be disrupted or ended completely by even minimal disturbance.

Having learned that natural mulch is best, I'd left fallen leaves to decay, and small branch and stick debris fallen from my large Little Leaf Linden tree to become ground-cover and nesting fodder.

Once I was certain that the critters had hatched and made their way up out of the ground and from under debris, I decided it was safe to move plants, till the soil and otherwise perform garden maintenance.
 
My garden tidy up involved, finally raking last autumn's leaves from around the new spring growth, bagging them to dry thoroughly, cleaning out winter plant decay and unattractive weeds, crushing and redistributing the leaf bits over the garden soil to enrich the growing environment, splitting perennials, and relocating plants to better locations before they get into serious expansion and flowering mode.

With the help of my husband, I'm also creating a flagstone pathway from the front Potoger garden to the side pollinator patch, so that I can travel back and forth without using the neighbour's driveway.

It's work that's both arduous and satisfying. Ironically, I'm finding this garden of great turmoil to be a multi-purpose sanctuary of sorts: A place to sooth my frazzled nerves, encourage and sustain pollinators, and grow beautiful flowers, foliage and delicious edibles.

I've come to love the rather rustic look my garden's taken on, and I feel as though I'm making a positive commitment to the natural environment. Most of all, I'm happy to have found the tidy up to be as rewarding as other aspects of life in the garden.

Thief

Saturday Evening / Sunday Morning
Click on picture to enlarge

Last night, between the hours of 9 pm and 9 am we became the victims of a thief.

Our first ripening strawberry, that I've been carefully tending for several weeks, suddenly disappeared overnight.

The thief could be two-legged or four. Either way, it's disheartening, and I'm uncertain how to deal with it. 

If you have any suggestions as to how I can protect my ripening strawberries from surreptitious thieves, I invite your input. 

Ironically, when my husband jokingly attempted to eat the strawberry, just last evening, I guess I should have let him. 

Transplanting

Click on Image to Enlarge
Dill Seedlings

Ready for Transplant

I've spent the last few days transplanting seedlings that I've been growing over the last few weeks and months.

I'm now growing lettuce, kale, romaine, broccoli, beets, carrots, pickling cucumbers, and mammoth dill in containers on my front porch and in my potager garden. Some of them are a little straggly and could possibly need to be replaced with garden center plugs, but I'm going to give them a chance.

When the rain stops, I’ll be moving the container of lettuce, kale and romaine to an elevated rot iron stand, to help keep rabbits from eating them while they fill out in the garden.

Annual and perennial milkweed, calendula, clematis, and campion plant-lets, all grown from seed, have also been transplanted to larger pots for hardening off. Some will make their way to the garden in a week or two: The Maltese cross campion, some 36 healthy plants grown from seeds of a plant I received as a gift last summer, will mostly be gifted forward.

Transplanting is strangely cathartic. It’s soothing to see the tiny seeds you’ve planted and tended, grow big enough to be moved to larger pots or straight into the ground out of doors; that said, it’s all-the-more intriguing to think how fulfilling it will be when these sprouts eventually produce flowers and produce.