So maybe by now you're conserving on gas (these days, who isn't?), turning out the lights when you don't need them, using summer's heat to dry your clothes, using fewer pesticides and herbicides, composting, and lots of other "green" ideas you've been hearing about.I know I have. And yet every time I feed the herd of cats we've acquired and I toss yet another aluminum can in the recycling, or scoop...

Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards by Sara Stein (Houghton Mifflin, 1993).As interested as I am in gardening for wildlife you'd think I would have run across this a lot sooner. Noah's Garden is the narrative of the author's work to restore her 5 acre lot in upstate New York to something resembling native vegetation. It turns out that restoring a habitat involves a lot more th...

Bees, as you may have heard, are in trouble. Many hypotheses have been forwarded as to why honeybees populations have been dropping, including pesticide use (the most obvious), bee mites, lack of forage, and even cell phones. All these hypotheses have some evidence to back them up, and the problem may be a combination of them all.Some people plant bee gardens, just as one might plant flowers for hu...

I'm rather overdue on posting these pictures, since many of these flowers have faded already. The California poppies are still going strong, and the Columbine are hanging in there, but the true poppies are gone, and some strong winds took the last of the petals off of the Lincoln Constance climbing rose today:The crabapple that it's climbing on is dead and must be removed, but that would leave my r...

You start with some of these, fresh-picked from a local orchard;Take the pits out using a cherry pitter, if you wish -- or leave them in as my grandmother did to add a hint of almond flavor (and you never have to wonder if a cherry has a pit in it because they all do):Sometimes you get some "help" with the pitting. This is The General, having a fruity snack:Load the cherries into jars with some hot...