Tag: wildlife

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Looking to next year's exhale

Tis the time to think about the coming winter season. Time to gather up the garden edges and tuck them into the earth for a good long winter's nap. It is a reflective time of year. A breath of both relief and sorrow at the end of the growing season escapes the earth. Next a great inhale for the winter ready, preparing to exhale all the stored winter energy next year.

But we are already planning for next year.

The slow and constant march to expand out forest gardens is a never ending quest. Every autumn our neighbours bring over their leaves, away from their land and out of sight. Of course we welcome this influx of biomass and nutrition. Great piles of plant material wait under our trees. Waiting to be spread across the landscape in curvy shapes and beside pathways. Spread inches thick to protect the soil and the animals that hide in the litter all winter.

We don't know what these leaves hide. Conventional wisdom says we should not pile "strange" leaves on our land as they may harbour diseases. I suppose that is a valid reason to haul them off to the municipal compost, have them turned into compost, and then bring it home again. But we would rather bypass that whole cycle and the energy used to do it. We would rather compost in place. If there is a disease or insect hiding in the leaf litter, we feel it is our job to make the ecosystem healthier so it can resist the attacker instead of trying to get rid of the attacker. The healthier the ecosystem, the less likely the attacker is to have an impact on it.

So we let nature even herself out and become balanced. Less work and chemical free. It will take a while, but it does seem to happen. We are even beginning to see anecdotal evidence of that in our gardens.

We are grateful for the leaves from our trees, and for the leaves of our neighbours. It helps lay a great deep bed don for the next year. By the time spring rolls around often the soil critters have done a great job at breaking down the leaf layer. Of course the grass doesn't do very well, but that's the point, less grass to cut for the coming year.

Our gardens get similar treatment to the leaves. We don't do much once everything is harvested. All the leftover vegetation gives homes, and hovels for a variety of insects and critters over the winter. Dead plant heads are a wonderful food for so many of the winter birds too. the chickadees and juncos are already beginning to harvest the goldenrod, echinacea, and sunflower heads. Some will be good, some critters will be bad, but they will all end up as food somewhere along the natural cycle circle.

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Happy New Year

Another new year has started and I am happy to say I have  made it through the old one. It always feels like a fresh start when the New Year is rung in. January is not a slow month for us here though. Although the animals and gardens are not doing much other parts of our little farm are in full swing. The 29-30 of this month means the Guelph Organic Conference is here. This is probably the biggest organic event in the country. My other life as a designer means I am connected in various ways to the organic world.  I am very busy in front of the computer busily trying to get stuff done for the conference. January also means that the seed catalogues have come in and it is time to look at all the gardening and farming goodies. New animals idea have come up which also means a fair bit of research to see if it would all fit. The nicest time of this year though is the chance to observe things that I don't often get to see, at least not alive. The other day when putting the woolies away I saw a very unusual visitor to the paddock. The sheep were quite scared, but curious at the same time. In the middle of the paddock, at 4:30pm, sat a large opossum. The gender of the animals I don't know and really didn't want to find out. I did know that it was scared and the woolies were scared and I had to do something. It looked fine and I saw no injuries nor blood on it or the snow around it. Luckily I had a box in the barn for the potential, yet failed barn cat. So I pulled iut out, along with a bucket and trapsed out to the paddock. Izzy and Mr. Tufts were running around the poor opossum. It hissed back but wouldn't move. So I went over to it, put a bucket over it and slowly guided it into the box. I scooped up the box and proceeded out to the back field. Earlier I checked to see where the animal had come from. I followed the tracks from the neighbours bush, around the back and in our yard through a hole in the fence. Not knowing what it was doing, and not wanting to get it too lost just before dark I put the box down  just outside the fence line on the path the opossum had come. It was really only 50 feet away, but the animal was at least out of the way of the woolies and able to continue it's journey. I quite like opossums even though they look like large white rats. The are cute and North America only marsupial. Most of the time I see them dead at the side of the road. I feel very honoured that this creature decided to grace our yard. I just hope it was okay.