Let hover flies be your pest-killers

If you’re going to nurture wildflowers and plant flowers to help the native bees, it doesn’t make sense to kill them. Unfortunately pesticides are only chemicals, and they’re not smart enough to know which bugs not to kill. Fortunately, a nice bonus that comes of planting for bees is that many of the same flowers […]

Wildflower planting for the bees

While it’s fun to plan flowers for the bees, I find the bees like even better the flowers that come unplanned, unheralded, and unasked. Especially in spring, wildflowers fill in the gaps before the “official” flowers bloom. If I had to pick a favorite wildflower, I think of fall and pick wild asters (with goldenrod […]

Planting flowers for the bees

It’s easy enough to say “Plant flowers” for the bees, until you ask which flowers? If I had to pick one to start with, I would say Purple Coneflower. Bumblebees and honeybees love it. Other native bees, too. As a bonus, the seeds will feed goldfinches. But then, they’re coming into their full color right […]

It’s National Pollinator Week again

With the sun shining until 9 p.m. everyone knows today is the summer solstice. But if it weren’t for Bug Girl, I wouldn’t have noticed that today is the first day of National Pollinator Week. How did I miss that? So what shall I do to celebrate?

A Plenitide of Pluripotential Plums

The plum tree that flowered so enthusiastically bent over under the weight of its fruits. I think every single flower set fruit. That exact same branch with all those flowers was drooping the deepest. The whole tree looked it was going to break.

Too hot to post

It was too hot to post yesterday. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. It was so hot, the lilies exploded. They opened all at once in flares of color like fireworks. Boom!

Bumblebee mimic

There’s so many bumblebees around but they move so quick, I’m often complaining about not getting a good picture of them. Then I saw this one, just sitting around on some flopped-over daffodil leaves. Cool! I thought. I hope it doesn’t fly away when I get close. And it just sat there. Very not like […]

Tomato, baby tomato!

Every year, there’s the long anticipation from the first tomato flower to the first fruit to set. This is almost two weeks later than the first fruit set from last year. I think it’s because we’ve had a lot of cool nights. Tomatoes won’t set fruit if it goes below the mid-50s Fahrenheit overnight. Don’t […]

Berry seasonal

I like how the berry season overlaps. The first raspberry is ripe…

The goldfish tank is dark

I’ve mentioned my goldfish a couple times, but always in the context of how I came to the guppies. The goldfish tank kept going for years, growing big, graceful fish with flowing fins. Every time I wrote about the guppies I would think I owed the goldfish a post, and now, as last week, they […]