Another Nesting Season

I know that spring is here because the starlings are once again nesting in the attic of the workshop. The shop has metal siding and a metal, corregated roof. It seems that there must be a few gaps between the siding and the soffits because the starlings make several attempts at finding the gaps before disappearing under the eaves (presumably into the attic of the shop).
I watched this dance last spring, too. The females come to rest on whatever is available below the roof overhang (pipes, workbenches, blocks of styrofoam, whatever we've left there). At this time of year, they have nesting materials in their mouths, although later in the summer it is food for the young. With the added weight, they can't remain airborne too long. So they take running jumps at finding the gap their looking for. Literally, they fly upward with all their might only to discover they've come to the wrong place in the overhang (ie no gap). So they flutter downward and then heave themselves upward to a different spot. Over and over again until they have found the gap. They disappear into it (again, presumably into the attic where no doubt they have built an entire city, if the nest in the attic of our house is any indication) then reemerge a few minutes later to go off in search of more stuff. Then back again to start all over.
There is another clan of starlings that have found a gap in the shop's door frame, and I notice them disappearing into that hole - although there can't be much room in there for many.
The bird books describe the starling's "large roosting congregations" as problematic. Perhaps the giant nests in our attics are not uncommon. But the starlings do take nesting holes away from native species such as the Eastern Bluebird. Our nearby conservation area had an Eastern Bluebird Nesting Box workshop - these programs have helped the Eastern Bluebird recover. I couldn't make that workshop, but I've been thinking I'd like to learn to make birdhouses.
The robins haven't been nesting on our bedroom window, yet - I haven't seen the females around so maybe it's too early. Last year I loved waking up and watching the eggs and then the chicks.
The thing about living outside of the city - it's impossible to deny the power of Nature and of Life. Everything from the seeds growing into plants to the eggs growing into birds, it is much more obvious and unavoidable out here.

Free Dirt

After saving all sorts of money (not to mention space in the landfill) by creating raised beds out of whatever wood we had lying around, I had to go out and buy soil. We have a lot of peat moss (leftover from a job we used it on, and now that I read Andrea's posting on the environmental consequences of peat moss harvesting I won't be buying any more - you can read it at www.reclaimingdinnerproject.blogspot.com , posted April 18) and vermiculite in the shop, so I really only needed manure and soil. When I went to the gardening centre (where I have bought bulk 3-in-1 before) it was too early for the 1 yard bags. So I ended up having to buy those little 15L bags of 3-in-1 and 30L bags of manure. All in all, to fill 1 bed I spent $70. What???? I have consoled myself by thinking that the bed has now been properly built and so I'll never have to buy ammendments again, but I have 5 more beds to fill.
We're getting some free horse manure from a friend who lives on a farm ( a 2 1/2 hour drive away, but since we don't know any of our neighbour farmers yet and since I haven't been able to find a local source of manure anyway, it seems our only option). But the real issue is that we didn't build a compost bin last year.
Where we live, the municipality picks up the 'green bin' and so citizens are encouraged to fill the bins up with their kitchen scraps and 'food waste'. We've been diligently sending our greens to the city so THEY can compost and sell it to agribusinesses in the province. Last fall I didn't even think about what it would mean that I wasn't creating my own compost.
So now I'm in the position of having to buy soil and compost, instead of grabbing it from our handy compost bins. I'm able to wait now for the bulk soil to arrive (it is much cheaper to buy it in 1 yard bags, and even cheaper to have multiple yards delivered) so I can order it. Next weekend we'll go and get the manure and straw, so that I can lay a good layer down under the expensive soil and then use the rest to topdress our existing beds. But I am still feeling grumbly about the expense of the soil purchase.
We are all able to make free dirt (compost, actually) in a small space with a minimum of effort. My grandmother would be horrified to know that I went out and bought dirt. It is the simplest thing in the world to take the kitchen scraps and cardboard and tree leaves to the compost bin, then to let the worms do their work. My dad is now saving the leaves from his very shady backyard for me, since we don't have much in the way of deciduous trees on our property. Worms especially like cardboard, so even newspaper, boxes and papertowel rolls can be thrown in (cut up into smaller pieces beforehand). All added up, we can produce enough compost yearly to ammend the beds each spring and keep the fertility of our veggie beds in prime condition.
I appreciate that my purchase of soil and manure is helping employ farm workers, but it seems that buying compost goes against something fundamental - give away our kitchen and yard waste so we can buy it back again composted?
Not from here on in at this house.

Some good reasons to prepare new beds in fall

I wasn't organized enough to prepare the garden beds last fall. Or, maybe organization wasn't my problem and time was. Either way, I'm playing catch up now and trying to get some beds done up in time for planting (especially since I've got dozens of plants on the go in the pink bathroom that will need somewhere to live pretty soon).
I've built a few raised beds already (old cinder blocks supporting frames I made out of 2x4's) and have lined them with screening in an effort to keep the mice out of the beds as much as possible. There are more beds to make, though, and then the filling. I didn't think it would matter that I started in spring, but there are a lot of drawbacks:
1) The weather. Of course the weather.... it is often too cold or too windy or too rainy to do much effectively.
2) Materials. As of yesterday, I still have not been able to get bulk soil trucked in - the deliveries don't come in for a week or more. And those plastic bags of 3 in 1 (which would bankrupt me if I used them in place of a truck load) contain soil that is still partially frozen. There is supposedly an abundance of manure available, but I haven't found many farms selling it yet.
3) Time. Getting the beds ready takes time away from all of the other spring duties that are begging to be done, now that the temperature has suddenly jumped from barely above zero to high teens. The stones to rack off the lawn (courtesy of the plowing), pruning the lilac bushes, fertilizing the shrubs... it all needs time, too.
4) Ambition. The soil needs to warm up sufficiently before I plant all the tomatoes & peppers I've started, or the beans I've selected. This means that the time I'm spending on building the beds could have been devoted to building cold frames and the time delay in getting soil and manure could have been better spent with the prepared bed under plastic to warm it up.
5) Soil health. If I had done all of this last fall, the worms and soil organisms would have had all winter to enjoy the ammendments, and to start colonizing the new layers.

But it is what it is and I've learned my lesson. Should we decide to expand our garden dramatically, I'll start in September or something - or at least today I imagine I will, but no doubt I will run out of time and end up doing the same thing over again.

Recycling for Food

Last weekend I built the first raised bed of the season - a very HIGH raised bed, as it turns out. Since I'm enthusiastically embarking on growing a lot of food this summer (documented thoroughly at http://www.reclaimingdinnerproject.blogspot.com/) I'm going to have to create a lot of growing space.

I am fortunate in that we have a lot of space that is available for growing: part of the backyard near the garage (out of reach of our leaching bed), "The Back 40", our deck, and I suppose even parts of the front yard. In an effort to not bite off more than I can chew (or plant more than I can weed), I'm starting off reasonably slow: raised beds this year behind the garage and containers on the deck.

Since it doesn't make sense to me that I go out and spend tons of money on things to build my beds (apart from better soil and some hay), I've been trying to figure out ways to create sturdy beds with what I have. So, bed #1 was constructed using some old cinder blocks (leftovers, I think, from building the garage) and old 2x4's that we had lying around (not pressure treated so no doubt they'll disintegrate!).

I'm planning on building some additional ones this week, and have started to amass more wood. My sister is 'donating' old bricks for the cause. I'm also saving up liquor and wine bottles because I thought that somewhere down the road they would make a great border for a little garden (and an excuse to have people over for drinks!)

I've also started looking out for other interesting things to make containers and beds out of. I read an article in "Permaculture" about a girl that planted marigolds in an old pair of Doc Marten boots, which I thought was a tremendously fun and inventive way to reduce reuse recycle. Plus, they looked lovely on her balcony. I was thinking of making a raised bed using wine and liquor bottles, but then I realized that might really say something about me....

It would be an excellent way to live - repurposing things again and again so that the concept of 'garbage' changed entirely. But of course we would have to start to manufacture things that could actually be repurposed, as opposed to being created with built-in obsolescence. Can you imagine the 'antiques' from our generation, being sought out by collectors in the future? Plastic water bottles, cellphone shells, styrofoam packing peanuts. Nothing else that we manufacture is built to last, it's all now disposable, cheap to manufacture and thus cheap to throw out and replace with something newer and more exciting. Which leaves very little for a permanent raised bed to be built from.

Perhaps those non-decomposing plastic water bottles could be filled with sand and turned into an attractive perennial garden border....

Dog Desperation

Our family starts to become apprehensive during the spring because with spring comes thunder. Our dog (who alternates between his 'country home' with us and his 'city home' with my step-daughter) is profoundly phobic about thunder. I know that many people say that their dogs are afraid of thunder - shaking and hiding under beds. When I say that our dog is profoundly phobic, I mean that in the strongest sense - he has dug through plaster walls, chewed through glass doors, knocked over book shelves, unseated toilets. He has ripped out his own tooth and a toenail while obsessively digging and chewing during a storm. He has even gotten himself wedged between some steam pipes in the ceiling and a shelving unit.
We have tried to desensitize the dog, but have struggled because the causes of his fear expand as the season progresses. It STARTS with thunder, but quickly grows to include rain (which often precedes thunder) then by wind (which often precedes rain). Then, airplanes or motorcycles or certain trucks all sound similar to what thunder sounds like.... so you see, by September he is afraid of everything and we are exhausted. I don't even want to describe how he is on fireworks holidays or during an air show. In fact WE start to fear everything because everything could be a trigger for disaster. No matter where any of us are, the moment we hear thunder our first instinct is to panic and rush for home.

The vet has prescribed medication to give him before and during the storm - the pills semi-sedate him and turn him into a food junkie, scavenging at every spot on the carpet or corner of a room for missed crumbs. But he seems to be developing a tolerance to the pills, and they take an hour to take effect (during which time he can do a lot of damage). If noone is home when the storms start, he can be astonishingly destructive and unreachably terrorized by the time someone does get there to medicate him. It is becoming impossible to live with his phobia.

As predicatable as it may sound, I've taken to watching "The Dog Whisperer". If you haven't watched it before, it documents the efforts that Cesar Millan (the dog whisperer) makes to rehabilitate what he calls "unbalanced" dogs. The problems he tackles fall usually into the 'extreme' categories - aggression, neurosis, resource protection, fear. The viewer is often left with the impression that Cesar is the last hope for either the dog or the human (especially in terms of marriages and other relationships). Sometimes it seems the last hope for both.
His technique is pretty amazing to watch, because it doesn't seem to be about 'training' the dog to do things or not do things. He seems to be able to communicate with the dog in some unspoken way, and actually convince the dog to modify its behaviour almost instantly. Of course it's not instant, but even over the course of 15 minutes or an hour, he can completely turn a dog around, and can therefore show the owner how to modify his/her/their behaviour in order to successfully rehabilitate their dog.
I've been watching the show, desperate to see an episode that features a dog with the same extreme reaction as ours has. I finally saw one - a working dog ( a bomb sniffer for the ATF in the US, who had also done a tour in Iraq) had what seemed to me to be complete post-traumatic stress disorder. EVERYTHING scared that dog, even its owners. It took Cesar 3 months in his rehabilitation facility to help the poor dog, but the shows jumps ahead 3 months to the dog's reunion with his 'family', and the difference was amazing. Since that dog's fear was so similar to our dog's fear ( that dog didn't destroy things or himself, but was completely catatonic in fear so equally as overwhelmed) I thought that perhaps I could do something to help our dog from a behavioural perspective.
So I went out and bought his book "Be The Pack Leader". It is a GREAT book for dog owners (although I have never bought one before so I have nothing to compare it to) because it explained to me how I needed to be in order for HIM to be balanced (actually, WE since the whole family needs to be on the same page) . Without going into a full-blown book report on it, I will just say that I highly recommend any dog owner ( but also anyone interested in nature in general) to read this book. His observations and beliefs (which translate into his techniques) are very thought-provoking. Having finished it, I've now gotten "Cesar's Way" (which I think is actually the first book you are supposed to read), and I'm going to start reading that tonight.
On our walk today, though, I tried to put into practice the techniques that Cesar describes. It was raining and usually that puts our dog into the beginning stages of apprehension, but I consciously tried to project "calm-assertive" energy (Cesar's description) and also worked to have my energy reassure and calm our dog. The walk was great, considering the fact that it was raining, and tonight he has seemed less bothered by the wind that is gathering strength. In conjunction with MY behaviour modification, we've also been medicating him a bit differently - starting before the usual triggers set him off. So I think he's had a relatively peaceful day, which should, with any luck, translate into a relatively peaceful night.