A Wilding Project

It will be bitterly cold this week, all the way down to 13 degrees on one night! That's nearly unheard of. Thankfully, we'll be back to milder temps come Sunday when we can return to working on the gardens.

We've been rewatching Clarkson's Farm on Amazon Prime, a must see if you're at all interested in how farming works. A word of warning, there's an awful lot of cussing. Much of it deserved considering what happens as Jeremy Clarkson tries to make his farm sustainable.

Anyway, there's a section on Clarkson's "wilding" efforts, where he converts a piece of land not used for farming or cattle into a wildlife habitat. It got us to wondering whether we could attempt that on a much smaller scale.

We've got a little pasture in front of our perennial garden that isn't put to much use. Every spring, Greg lets it go fallow so birds, bees, and deer can feast on the wild flowers.

We wondered if we could do even more. We're still in the thinking phase. This particular area is devoid of trees so we can populate it with vegetation and perhaps some hardscape, like boulders and trees.

What I'd like to do with this quarter acre is to create a little wildlife sanctuary. 

It does invite deer and raccoons awfully close to our garden, but hopefully the standing fence will continue to be a good deterrent. 

Do you landscape for pollinators and wildlife? Do you have any suggestions on what we can add? I would love a pond but I'm afraid that'll snatch up a lot of valuable land. If I can find some ideas for a smaller water feature though, I think that would be doable.

Sadly it's last on the list of a long line of projects, but that'll give me time to gather ideas.

Have you heard?

The media has been yammering on about the asteroid that will hit Earth in 2032. It's only 2025, and already they're starting a panic about something that may or may not hit us. Furthermore, the US (as well as other countries) can disrupt or diminish its trajectory (if it wants to) by many means long before it gets here.

Why alarm the public about something that is out of our hands? Why speculate when the writer himself has no expert knowledge on the subject? Let the experts study this thing and deal with it when it returns in a few years. 

I hate getting on a soapbox, but I get exasperated with the way the media (social and legitimate) starts panics. There's an entire generation who have never gotten the news any other way. That's got to twist their psyches.

I've never been one to panic. I get annoyed, and then I figure it out.

But there are times when I can't fix something, like death. In that case, regardless of how I feel, I stay immutably strong, for my pets, my husband, or my friends. I'll break down, but only after it's over. I won't let the person or pet see me struggle. It's the least I can do as they journey away.

In the meantime, I'll keep on gardening.

 

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I had some friends over for dinner yesterday and I let them try some of our freeze dried food. I think it turned them into fans.