Rainy/Slushy Days and Birdhouse

Birdhouse "Before" photo

"After" (porcupines) photo

The slushy rain is coming down sideways out of the north in icy sheets against the newly washed window panes. So much for getting a head start on the spring cleaning! So we're house bound right now and which is fine with me since it gives me time to catch up on my reading ( just bought a new book on Tuesday) and my quilting projects. The rest of the household is less impressed though. Hard to stay cheerful with

A) a grumpy husband who is going through golf withdrawal, and mumbling about wishing we had moved further south instead...

B) a couple of cats who keep pleading at the door to be let out, but then when the first wet blast hits them full force causing them to back up quickly into the house again, they give me a scathing look as if I am personally responsible for this ugly weather!

Yes, we DO need the moisture out here, (although it's turning the gravel road into a soupy mess,) so the rain that started late Tuesday afternoon and continued all that night and all day Wednesday was very welcome. But the snow this morning was far less welcome!

The forecast is looking pretty grim, too. It pretty much indicates that

A) we should have left the snow tires on the car for a few weeks longer and

B) we were quite optimistic with the window washing this early...

I felt sorry for the 2 bedraggled looking deer who wandered into the yard yesterday looking for some breakfast. The pan under the bird feeder was full of only water, and icy cold water at that; no sunflower seeds left to speak of. I felt like poking my head out and telling them to come back later when I had time to get dressed and put some seeds out. But they would have only been spooked and run away seedless anyway.

Plus I had visions of any seeds I might have braved the weather to put out being A) blown away and scattered by the 60 km per hour north wind which was blowing horizontally or B) being hidden under 12 inches of sloppy wet snow that was threatening to fall and accumulate before either A) the deer or B) the birds or C) the marmots or D) porcupines had a chance to eat any of it.

(Did I mention that the porcupines were eating our birdhouse?)

Here are the 'before' and 'after' photos:

Did I mention that I'm having problems with my downloaded (or is it uploaded?) photos on Blogspot all getting dumped at the top of my blog posts instead of though out the post where I would like them to appear, next to the appropriate paragraphs?)

If anybody out there in blogland knows how to make the photos behave, would you please be so kind as to leave me a message in the comment box explaining how to do that? Much appreciated!

Okay, back to:

A) reading (Kate Atkinson's "When Will There Be Good News"... a GREAT book... kind of an appropriate title right now, too, don't you think?) and

B) machine quilting the baby quilt for my niece who is due in 5 weeks, or maybe

C) baking banana muffins out of the bananas that I took out of the freezer to thaw yesterday in the hopes I would find some ambition to bake them into muffins.

Pasque Flowers and Morden Roses

One of the first flowers to bloom in my flower bed is my beautiful pasque flower. It looks a lot like a crocus, but darker purple.

We got a skiff of snow last night, but it quickly melted by 10 am this morning. We got quite a bit of yard work done today. my husband worked on the veggie garden, digging out weeds and re-edging it with large 4 by 4" logs. I dug grass in huge quantities out of one flower bed today, plus removed a lot of white daisy clumps that are trying to take over.

Good news! All 4 of my rose bushes survived the winter and show signs of life!! Having spent so many gardening years living in northern Manitoba, I never had much success with roses. Now with the climate a bit warmer here in central ALberta,(zone 3 A) I'm thrilled to grow roses!

I have 3 of the Morden rose bushes which were developed in Morden, Manitoba and are winter hardy on the prairies; Morden centennial (a medium pink blossom), Morden blush (a pale baby pink), and my newest one Morden Fire Glow ( a beautiful orangey red). I also have a Winnipeg Parks rose bush, which is very hardy as well, and its a deeper pink than the others. Out of these 4 rose bushes, the Morden Blush is the most prolific bloomer and has blossoms for most of the summer.

The only down side (and isn't there always a down side?!) is that the pale pink flowers fade to almost pale white in the hot sun of July. The Winnipeg Parks blossoms are a very pretty color, but it doesn't seem to get as many blossoms, or bloom for as long as the Morden roses.

I have high hopes for the Fireglow. It spent most of last summer in a pot on my deck and only had a few flowers, but it was still a pretty small plant. The blossoms lasted quite a long time, though. I planted it in my flower bed in September and covered it with mulch and peat moss and then put a big pot on top with a brick on it to hold it there through the winter. It is showing some green stems now and I'm hoping it grows well in that spot and gets lots of blossoms.

I have a multitude of plants and seedlings in pots now that are destined to be planted outside eventually, once the weather warms up for good, but right now I'm carrying them all in and out, onto the balcony off the living room every day to start hardening them off. (A bit of a chore but well worth the effort.:)

There are 3 pots of large cactus dahlias, 3 pots of canna lilies and 2 pots of calla lilies all of which I over-wintered in bags of peat moss in our laundry room.

There are 8 geraniums as well. I dug them up last fall and put them in pots in the living room. I have lots of big windows on two sides with east, southeast and west exposures, thus lots of sun, so they all survived and some even bloomed during the dreary winter months!

I also started a few things from seeds: I have a couple of pots of pink lavatara, some bachelor buttons (also called cornflowers), some hollyhocks, and some Red Durango marigolds (not up yet) and castor bean plants (not up either...) Supposedly if you plant castor bean plants in your flower beds, it deters the pocket gophers from digging tunnels near then as they are poisonous. The best deterrent for the pocket gophers seems to be our cat Phoenix, though. He has caught (and eaten) 2 of them already this spring!

I started 4 spaghetti squash plants from seeds as well, which I saved from a squash that we ate for supper over the winter. I'm hoping to give them more sun this year so they don't get as leggy as last year.

I planted 4 bartlett pear seeds in a pot, too, in the hopes that one might sprout so I could grow another pear tree in the yard. We have one lone pear tree at one end of our acreage which gets hard green little pears, but they never mature into anything edible. My understanding is that you need to have at least 2 trees to cross pollinate, then maybe they will produce some decent fruit. But sadly it could also just be that our growing season isn't long enough here.... :(

But the pear tree does get a multitude of gorgeous blossoms in the spring and for that reason alone is worth having! :) I'll post photos once that happens...

Marmots

Our brave little resident marmot made it safely through another winter and was seen poking around under the bird feeder this morning scrounging sunflower seeds. He and his mate are gutsy little creatures. He often sits within a few feet of the cat, Phoenix (who is a hunter extraordinaire) or the dog, Spirit (who has also been known to catch mice and gophers) calmly eating seeds. If either makes a move to get closer, the marmots manage to disappear in a twinkling!

Two summers ago he was coming right up on our deck and when Spirit would chase him, he dived into the huge juniper bush next to the deck. It took me quite a while to realize that there were two of them and even longer to figure out why they were constantly sneaking around on the deck.

I had a brand new 15 pound bag of bird seed parked at one corner of the deck more or less out of (my) sight. We kept the bird feeder filled up regularly and the sparrows, chickadees, finches, nuthatches and downy woodpeckers visited it frequently. Once the old bag of oiled sunflower seeds was used up, I went to use the new bag, but found most of the seed in the bag was gone! The sneaky little marmots had bitten a loonie sized hole on one side of the bag and kept coming back every day to help themselves until the bag was nearly empty!

This pair of marmots, which live in the ravine next to our house, contribute to my garden every year. They are responsible for all of the sunflowers that grow there!

The marmots gather up sunflower seeds in their mouths (which they find on the ground under the bird feeders, or in carelessly left bags on the deck... LOL!) and then hide them in various locations, mostly in my flower beds. They dig some of them out later to eat, but mostly they forget about them since there is always a fresh supply of seeds falling off the feeder to keep them fat. Consequently the stashed sunflower seeds then sprout and I end up with several dozen sunflowers growing gracefully, but haphazardly in my flower beds.

I usually move some of them to pots to enjoy on the deck and some to better locations in the flower beds, but most of them I leave be, to grow wherever they have sprouted. Then in the fall once the sunflowers have produced seeds, the chickadees and other seed eaters enjoy the fruits of the marmots' labors. My only contribution is some water on a regular basis and allowing them their space to grow and mature into seeds. :)

Trees and Blossoms

As you look out at the numerous poplar trees around our acreage, you notice there is a faint green veil on the branches right now. The buds have popped open and the tiny leaves are peeking out, getting ready for the warmer weather. It's my favorite time of the year right now when everything starts out looking so fresh and new in the spring. Mother Nature gives all new growth the most beautiful green color here in Alberta in May. But it's still only April, so right now we are still only anticipating all the beauty about to come.

The chokecherry trees have huge flower buds on them now which are threatening to burst out any day! That's about 2 weeks earlier than usual around here. (The photos at the top are last year's.)

I love when the plum trees, apple trees, chokecherry trees and saskatoon bushes in the yard and surrounding area are in full bloom! That's Mother Nature at her most spectacular! If I remember correctly, the chokecherry trees are usually the first to burst! LOL! (Will keep you posted about that. :)

I couldn't imagine life without trees. I think they are highly underrated. Not only do they provide wood for building materials and logs for fireplaces, they give shelter for birds and other animals as well as shading us on a hot summer's day, protecting us from the sun's intense rays and also from the blasts of the fiercest winds! Trees are the 'lungs' of our planet, producing fresh oxygen for us to breathe and absorbing carbon dioxide, something that humans all seem to take for granted. The lowly tree, after providing us with so much, asks for little in return other than that we let them be and allow them to grow. What's easier than that???

Speaking of carbon dioxide, how do we counteract all the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Well how about planting MORE trees instead of cutting down acre after acre of rainforests, which is what is happening on our earth every single day by narrow minded, money greedy companies!

Okay, you've figured out that I'm a tree hugger! And proud of it, too! No I don't go around chaining myself to trees to stop logging companies from destroying great tracts of forests, (but the thought HAS occurred to me!) I do support Greenpeace, and admire the courage and tenacity of the young Greenpeace activists who are trying to make a statement and bring atrocities to light. I wish that I would have done more of that kind of brave and exciting life changing action when I was younger. Now I just support them in my heart and mind (and on my blog) as well as financially now and then.

Prairie Crocuses

Prairie Crocus – It must be Spring!

One of the first visions of early spring is discovering a patch of Prairie Crocus (Anemone patens). They are a low-growing perennial, with pale blue or mauve flowers, and fuzzy sepals and yellow stamens. The Prairie Crocus is found mostly on 'virgin' land (unbroken) prairie but also in dry, open woods.

They popped up here at the beginning of April on the hills by our house and I spotted the earliest ones on Easter weekend. Since then they have increased in number and have braved 2 spring snowstorms. Last year I tried digging up a few and transplanting them to my garden but I doubt that they will come up there this year. I did buy a cultivated Pasque flower at a local green house which is turning green right now so that's probably as close as I'm going to get to crocuses in my garden.

Like many flowers, the Prairie Crocus has a number of other common names: Pasque flower (because it tends to bloom around Easter); Prairie Anemone (because it’s actually an Anemone, in the Buttercup family, not a true crocus, which is in the Lily family); Prairie Smoke (for their long, feathery seeds); and Windflower (“Anemone” is from the Greek, meaning “wind”; it was once thought that anemones only blossomed when the wind blew in spring).

Signs of Spring 2010

The tree swallows are back!

Tundra swans on the nearby ponds

The tree swallows have arrived back again and have claimed some of the bird houses here on our acreage. They arrived suddenly (as they usually do) this past Monday morning. It's great to see their return! They are our diligent mosquito patrol for the 2 months that they are here to raise their young. So far they are just claiming nesting space. The swallows have to compete for space with the sparrows which have been back for several weeks already. Through the kitchen window at breakfast we saw a swallow fighting with a sparrow who was also trying to lay claim on the same location. Looks like the swallow prevailed!

One of our bird houses in the front yard has been claimed by a squirrel, the discovery of which almost gave me a heart attack! I noticed some pink insulation peeking out of the hole and thought that was strange since we had cleaned out most of the birdhouses in the fall. (The old nesting material may contain parasites, which you don't want the next springs birds to get, so it's best to let the birds start nests from scratch each spring.)

I walked over and curiously flipped up the lid on the birdhouse and suddenly this furry thing came bolting out of the hole, jumped on top of the birdhouse lid, (which I had dropped shut in my surprise) and leaped to the willow tree behind! It clung to the trunk for a while, not moving, probably as shocked as I was!

Unfortunately Phoenix, our big orange cat saw it and so did Spirit, our husky/ shepherd cross. Now they know the squirrel is there. Phoenix curiously went over to the tree trunk where the squirrel was clinging a few feet up. I quickly picked Phoenix up and walked away with him to another part of the yard and made Spirit come with us so the squirrel could escape. I think she went back into the birdhouse soon after that because both Phoenix and Spirit sneaked back over there and kept looking up at the birdhouse. Luckily there is a steel pole on that house so the cats can't climb it, but I don't know how the babies will get out later on... Will be interesting to watch the progress.

The Canada Geese were the first birds to arrive in mid March. The ponds were still frozen solid and you have to admire their determination. They like to claim the best nesting sites so they try to get here as early as possible. What they find to eat that early in spring I have no clue! They braved 2 vicious snow storm before the weather warmed up.

The beautiful white tundra swans have been here on the ponds in our area for about 2 weeks now, but they have started heading for parts further north, since the warm sunny weather has arrived. They are magnificent to see in full flight. I love their elegance and beauty as they float across the water and wish they would stay longer. They will make another brief appearance in the fall on their way south to the USA.