Ohai! Here are some things I've been talking about at my annarbor.com gardening blog:

~ Make your own suet cakes for birds
~ Survive the long winter as a gardener
~ Learn how climate change will affect our gardens
~ Rebloom your amaryllis in six easy steps
~ Try something new in your garden this year ('cuz 2011 is gonna bring it!)

Thanks for all your wonderful comments on my last post. I'm trying to keep the blog alive, thanks to some ideas many of you have given me.

This photo is gratuitous, but if you're interested in growing grass indoors for your cats, it's entirely cheap and easy, and cats love it.
 

Folderol Friday is just like Mish-Mash Monday, only on Friday. I know this is my third post in under a week, so please don't faint or have a heart attack! Today's topics are sparklies, spring, seeds, and fuzzy friends.

Ooh, Sparkly
The tree, adorned with sparkly strands, hanging from the ceiling at the Chicago Flower & Garden Show reminded me of some cool sparkly strands hanging from the ceiling in a hallway at the Detroit Institute of Arts. See?

Spring Comes in on Little Cat Feet
Around March 5, we still had lots of snow, but it was sunny and getting warmer.

The very first signs of green in my garden (this year on March 5) aren't aconites, snow drops, crocuses, or hellebores, but tiger lilies.

On March 9, I saw the hyacinths, the first bulbs to come up in my garden.

By March 11, all the snow had melted. Still, I admit spring is the worst time to have blogging friends in warmer climates. It makes weather that is natural and normal in Michigan seem stunted, lagging, and like it should be riding the short bus.

Fortunately, I have a close friend in Finland, Jaana, who sent me these photos of what her world looks like in early March. Here she is at her mailbox....

...and here's her hubby Matti shoveling their roof! That makes me feel a lot better, LOL!

Here, it's been really warm, in the 60s, but it's supposed to cool down and possibly snow next week. Which is entirely normal because it is still March and it is still Michigan.

A few years ago, I bought a little stick of a witch hazel for $8 at a fund raiser. Now, even $8 seemed like kind of a lot, all things considered, but it was for a good cause and I'd been wanting a witch hazel. It hasn't grown much over the years and is still more or less a stick. I wasn't expecting it to bloom this year, either, until Garden Girl showed her similarly sized witch hazel blooming, which forced me to go out and look at mine.

Jackpot! She is blooming! The flowers are only about half an inch in diameter. I'm not even sure what kind of witch hazel this is. It was labeled Hamamelis vernalis in handwriting as I watched, and only after I asked, by two amusing older gentleman who were arguing with one another in hushed tones about the species and each other's competency. They finally agreed to "just mark it Hamamelis vernalis and be done with it."

I had wanted the witch hazel native in Michigan, Hamamelis virginiana, and even called ahead of time to ask which species would be available. I was assured that, yes yes there now, that is what they had. At the time, I therefore thought I in fact did have a virginiana and that the confused gentlemen just mislabeled it vernalis. But now that it's blooming, I can tell I have neither, as both virginiana and vernalis have yellow flowers. I suspect I have a hybrid, probably Hamamelis x intermedia 'Diane'. I still like it a lot, but, well, um, oh never mind.

Fuzzy Friends
James was excited to check out dried plants in the cat garden on March 5.

Fiona was pleased to be able to sit on wood, as opposed to snow. (She loves that old chair, which is her scratching post.) She had the cutest pose on the top of the chair, but by the time lumbering hooman came back with the camera, she had moved on.

Speaking of which, here's a rare instance of Fiona holding a pose until I got the camera!

I get lots of ducks at the feeders. They're nature's vacuum cleaners.

Also, the groundhog is awake from hibernation.

Seeds & Sprouts
This photo couldn't be more boring, but it shows a rare phenomenon here at Garden Faerie's Musings, one that hasn't happened in over 6 years: indoor seed starting. I've been happy winter sowing and had no intention of setting up the grow lights or clearing out room in my closet for seed flats (my house is small and I have very few open spaces elsewhere). A friend once grew Mary Jane in the closet and so I have vague fears about cops knocking on my door thinking I'm growing pot... when it fact it's cactuses! Yes, I couldn't resist a packet of mixed cactus seeds. I did try two with winter-sowing, but broke down and sowed the rest in a warm (actually I keep my house embarrassingly cool) bright environment.

Winter-sowing tip: If ice or snow turns heavy enough to bow down the lids of winter-sown flats, remove the snow. Otherwise, let it melt on its own.

Winter-sown sprouts: Of the 75ish variety of seeds I've winter-sown this season, here's what's sprouted so far (in order): turnip 'Purple-Top, White Globe' (above), pasque flower, annual baby’s breath ‘Convent Garden,’ lupine ‘Russells Prize Mix*,’ grass ‘Bunny Tails,’ catchfly ‘Carmine Pink,’ and morning glory ‘Ensign Red.’

Have a great weekend, everyone! I'm having dinner at my friend Pete's this evening and tomorrow my friend Amy and I are off to the Growing Great Gardens conference in Taylor.

*As an Arrogant Worms fan, I always parse this as Russell's Shorts, but that's just me!

Today I'm mish-mashing about a book giveaway, backyard wildlife, wisteria pruning, and my buckthorn song.

Book Giveaway:
Fun with Winter Seed Sowing
Jane Marie, a fellow Michigan garden blogger at Thyme for Herbs, recently contacted me to see if I would donate a copy of my little book, Fun with Winter Seed Sowing, for a giveaway she wanted to host. Well, of course I was interested, and she quickly got a post together. For details and to enter, just stop by Jane's post, Book Giveaway - Winter Seed Sowing. You have until midnight on Friday, March 5th to enter.

Cooper Trouper (Earworm for ABBA Fans!)
I've been having new wildlife visitors this winter. The other day, I spied with my little eyes what I believe to be a Cooper's hawk sitting on my utility wires. I didn't get a good look because I rushed to get my camera right away.

The hawk saw me approach the window, so this is the photo I got. (Sorry for the grainy quality; it's max telephoto through a thick glass door.)

A few minutes later, the hawk had perched on a tree limb, even farther away. This is the best shot I could get. I used to see Cooper's hawks more frequently two houses ago, where I lived in a more open area. This is the first time (in nearly 8 years) I've seen a hawk at my current location. No other birds or squirrels were languishing at the feeders during the hawk's short visit.

Pruning Wisteria
On Thursday, in about a foot of snow, a few intrepid volunteers and I joined Kathy Squiers of Washtenaw County Parks and Recreation to do a little pruning at County Farm Park in Ann Arbor. I don't mind the snow at all and I try to earn most of my master gardener volunteer hours in the off season, so I can spend gardening months in my own garden! The main task was pruning a very overgrown wisteria, which had never bloomed.

The most commonly planted wisterias are Wisteria sinensis (Chinese wisteria) and Wisteria floribunda (Japanese wisteria). It was uncertain which kind is planted at County Farm Park. There's also American wisteria, Wisteria frutescens, which is native to the eastern half of the U.S., including Michigan. That's the one I'd grow, if I had enough sun or something sturdy enough for it to grow on.

Wisteria is a climbing vine that can reach 60 feet. Its base twists around its support (trellis, arbor, house) and then spreads outward. Wisteria grows quickly and can get quite heavy and large over time, sometimes overpowering its support.

This arbor is plenty strong, but the wisterias had too many competing main vines (or trunks)...

...and way too much tangled, or as A Chef in the Garden so aptly put it, Medusa-like top growth.

We started by removing thinner vines that were competing with the main vines (those shown with the horizontal fuchsia mark above), using saws or loppers. If a weaker wine was wrapped around a stronger one, we got rid of that, too. These vines were short and did not yet reach the top of the trellis. We only want them to grow up, not out at this point, so we also cut off side growth (vertical line above).

Then we moved upward, getting rid of weaker vines and cutting off buds that would create lateral growth. We only want lateral growth (or "arms") extending from the trunk once it reaches the top of the arbor.

Next, I got on that yellow 8-ft. ladder, standing on the very top step so my body was up and through one of the trellis squares. I was pruning back all the "arms" (lateral growth) that had reached the top of the trellis. No one else was coming forward to do this bit, and it was admittedly a bit higgledy-piggledy because I had to lean and stretch in somewhat precarious positions, and snow under boots on a metal ladder can be slippery, but, honestly, I really enjoyed myself up there. (I like run-on sentences, too.)

Up there on my sky perch, I cut away more lateral growth, taking out unwanted shoots altogether and trimming back remaining growth to 3-5 leaf buds per "hand" (the structures growing off the "arms," which will eventually also have flower buds). See?

If these wisterias had had flower buds (which tend to be fatter than leaf buds, and are located at the base of the shorter branches or "hands"), we would not have pruned those. There still would have been plenty of shoots with flower buds to remove, however.

Even if your wisteria has previously bloomed, you still want to prune it in winter (February is ideal in Michigan). It's easier to see the vines when they don't have the leaves on (trust me! It was very confusing even in winter to determine where one vine started and another ended) and it's important to open up the canopy so the sun can get in in spring.

These are a small portion of the pruned vines (we had just started loading them up). Clean up is somewhat anticlimactic after the thrill of pruning, I can tell you.

In early to mid summer, the blooms will have died back and the vine will again become unruly and Medusa-like. You can now prune the new growth back to 6 inches to create the short branches that will create next year's hands or blooms. We hope our wisteria will bloom in spring, 2011.

Scorn of Buckthorn Video
And, finally, in case you missed my post on Saturday (I know! I don't normally update so frequently!), check out the video recording of me performing Scorn of Buckthorn. If you dare.

Addendumy Footnote
I'm back to using the old Blogger editor. Yay! Spell check rules (even if I do make up words), as does loading five photos at a time.

Happy March Mish-Mash Monday, bloggers and bloggettes!

Welcome to another Willy-Nilly Wednesday. It's like Mish-Mash Monday, only mid-week.

Like many of you, I enjoyed taking part in the Great Backyard Bird Count over the weekend:

Locality: 48108, Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, MI
Snow Depth: 2 - 4 in (5.1 - 10.2 cm)
Habitat(s): deciduous woods, scrub, suburban, freshwater
February 14, 2010, 10:00 - 11:00 a.m.
    Mallard - 15
    Downy Woodpecker - 1
    Northern Flicker - 1
    Blue Jay - 1
    Black-capped Chickadee - 1
    White-breasted Nuthatch - 1
    Northern Cardinal - 2
    House Sparrow - 7
February 15, 8:30 - 9:30 a.m. 15, 2010
    Mallard - 12
    Red-bellied Woodpecker - 1
    Downy Woodpecker - 1
    Northern Flicker - 1
    American Crow - 1
    White-breasted Nuthatch - 1
    Dark-eyed Junco - 3
    Northern Cardinal - 3
    House Sparrow - 12

Comments: I normally also see mourning doves.
The other afternoon, out of the corner of my eye, I spied a brownish, cat-shaped movement near my bird feeders, and yet the brownish cat-shaped lifeform who lives with me was stationary by my side on the couch. My brain slowly came to terms with the idea that the groundhog may be awake form hibernation and my butt  left the sofa to check outside.

Whew! It wasn't the groundhog, it was just an opossum. Wait, what?! In the nearly 8 years I've lived in my house, I've seen an opossum only once before, by chance, at night.

Well, that didn't change the fact that this opossum was eating in broad daylight. I'm always honored when wildlife visits my yard, and I think opossums are cute. Look at its cute pink nose, hands, and toes!

Until the other day, anyway, where an intrepid pioneer found it more advantageous to simply insert most of its body directly into the feeder. It's apparently a magic squirrel with a collapsible ribcage!
While the rest of the country has more snow than it knows what to do with, we had our first real snowsotrm all season here in southeastern Michigan.

We got about 7 inches (here on my winter-sowing containers), but it has melted and compressed a lot since then.

A while back, I won a reusable grocery bag, hand-knit by Aunt Debbi! Here it is. It's hard to see the subtle color gradation, but the bottom of the bag (which you can't see at all) is primarily black with some beige, the bottom shown is more primarily beige and black, and the top is primarily white and black. Cool, huh?

As long as you're admiring the bag, feel free to also admire my cool, retro metal canister and spice rack, but please ignore the crumbs on the counter!

Thanks also to Country Mouse who recently tagged me with an Honest Scrap / 10 Things You Don't Know About Me award / meme. I've previously posted 7 Things You Don't Know About Me, so I'm going to say that's close enough for rock 'n' roll. Do stop by Country Mouse's blog, though, as Duncan, her canine companion, wrote an amusing post about himself!


Here is most of the model put together. It was really helpful being able to use all of Pete's supplies and having him on hand to answer a quazillion questions I had and share his expertise and tips. I don't think I ever would have attempted this on my own.

Here are all the first-coat painted parts. The gloss silver enamel paint didn't coat as smoothly as I would have liked. (Advanced modelers use spray paint, but I didn't fancy masking all those tiny windows!)

Here's the almost-finished version (only missing the decals). Most of the colors are accurate--the body was most often metallic silver, the propellers were black with those yellow edges, and the navigation lights and location of numbers (next photo) are accurate. But I took some liberties, because I was doing this for fun. Hence the orange tail (though both paints are Testors' gloss enamels, though the orange has 100x better coverage and a much smoother look. I'm now wishing I'd painted the whole thing orange, and apparently some Dutch versions of the plane were entirely orange, but I wanted silver for a more retro look).

Apparently, adding the water-transfer decals is sometimes tricky, but for me that was the easiest bit. I had some awesome rabbit decals for the rudders, but they had disintegrated due to age. Fortunately, Pete had some Flying Tigers decals, which are just as cool. The rest of the decals are those from my Grandmother. 

The only one you can't see in the previous photo, on the port wing, is this one. Ignore the crappy painting job and instead marvel at the cuteness of the decal and how nicely it lays over a three-dimensional surfaces!

I enjoyed the process, overall, but don't think I'll be making any other models any time soon! (Though I am fascinated about creating landscapes for train layouts...) 

Jean recently posted some photos of very bad planting and pruning techniques. I suggested she post them to Billy Goodnick's Flickr group, Crimes Against Horticulture, which she did. That reminded me there was a house in a nearby neighborhood whose photo I was meaning to take to add to the group myself.

Not only are the Mugo pines planted too near the foundation and ridiculously in need of pruning back, that poor poor cedar was not only planted way too close to the house as well, it suffered a very very bad haircut as the "solution" to the former. Arg!

After fixing the "Read More!" that Blogger was automatically adding to all my posts, I switched to the new editor, assuming new was synonymous with improved. HA!

Where the heck did the spellchecker go, and why can I only upload one photo at a time? I used to be able to upload 5 at a time, and the spellchecker icon was obvious.

And I had this post almost completely done, when I went to hit return and somehow the whole screen went blank/all content was erased. No big deal, I hadn't saved it, so I navigated away from the window and came back... to an empty screen. Blogger had automatically saved the cleared screen, which meant I had to re-do the whole post. Where do I set the timing for autosaves?

Also line spacing seems to be randomly weird.

Topsy-Turvy Tuesday is just like Mish-Mash Monday, only a day late. If you're wondering, there's also:
- Willy-Nilly Wednesday
- This & That Thursday
- Folderol Friday (thanks, Rose! Much better than my original Frivolous)
- Salmagundi Saturday (ooh, I learned a new word!)
- Sundries Sunday

You're welcome! :)

Incidentally, the squirrels are not related to anything in this post, except them being topsy turvy and willy nilly. I love how the snow and sunflower seed were caught mid air in this shot.

Seed Swaps Underway
I had enough participants and seeds for two separate rounds, each with over 50 seed packets. (Yep, that was how I spent my Sunday.) I sent them off to what I'm calling Team Muhly and Team Bee Balm on Monday.

Blahs and Grumblies
I make a point of being positive and humorous online, but it turns out I'm human (nooooo!). I seem to have come down with a major case of the January blahs. Not in terms of hating winter, as I love winter, especially this early in the season and especially with the snow cover we have. It's that a lot of November and December was fun and busy with holiday activities and other diversions. And now things have slowed down into a big, dull blah.

And as a diversion from feeling blahy, I've branched out into feeling grumbly (all I need now is an Old Fogey button and to yell at kids to get off my lawn). I have spent a lot of time recently on the phone with customer "service" people, trying to explain and resolve what should be (but aren't) straight-forward inquiries. Lots of being passed on to other people (once seven times, only to end up where I started, though with a different person, who did finally address my issue!) and getting contradictory information. But I'm hoping that's settled now.

Technical Assistance Needed
Does anyone know how to remove "Read more!" links added automatically by Blogger? For some reason, Blogger has automatically added "Read more!" links at the end of every single one of my posts (old and new)! Only there is nothing more to read, and I really want to remove these links. I'm using the old editor, and can see no code for these links in html mode, so I can't remove them. Has this happened to anyone else?

Update: Thanks to Premarati who suggested I look at the HTML template (which I forgot existed, even though I've edited it in the past!) and Garden Girl whose comment made me go back and re-read something I thought I'd read clearly enough the first time, but had not! It turns out the reason I couldn't see the jump code in my template was because I had not clicked the Expand Widget Templates option so I could see all of the template. I then found the code I added years ago, before Blogger had the automatic "read more" feature, and could delete it. I think that when Blogger added its "read more" feature, it took my old template command (which previously was used only when called out/coded in individual posts) to mean I wanted every single post to end in "read more" automatically. Yay! Problem solved.

Does anyone know how to delete a blog from Blotanical? I'm trying to remove my older blog, Full Bloom, which has been inactive for over a year. I can see no option under MyBlogs to remove it.

Update:  Thanks to Barbee and others, I'm pretty sure we cannot remove blogs from Blotanical, only Stuart can. I've emailed my request. Thanks!

Action to the Rescue
Well, the opposite to moping must be to do something, so I've decided to walk to handle today's errands, instead of driving. It's only 3 miles round-trip and the brisk air should do me good! This afternoon, I'll make a nice cup of tea and gather my winter-sowing supplies and do a little of that. (I need to clean out the trays from last year. I always mean to do it right after I transplant out the seedlings, but there's so much to do in spring, and, well, you know!)

What do you to do distract yourself from blahs and grumblies??

New year and old traditions! Welcome to another Mish-Mash Monday. Ahoy maties!

Seed Swap Starting Soon
If you expressed interest in joining my seed swap in my preview post back in September, it's time now to officially sign up. Update: Sorry, the seed swap has reached capacity.

Looking Back
Some cool things happened this year:

• In February, I quit my job to pursue Garden Faerie full time.
• In May, I attended the Garden Bloggers' Spring Fling and met old and made new friends.
• In July, I visited my niece in CO and the Denver Botanical Gardens.
• In August, I visited MOBOT, one of my favorite gardens ever (you didn't miss the post... I've been saving it for winter).
• In December, my blog was named one of Horticulture magazine's Top 20 Gardening Blogs.
• All year, I steadily removed buckthorn, large and small, from the south side of my backyard and at the end of the season had made some real progress.
• I went public about being a curbside shopper.
• I enjoyed the freedom to arrange my days to suit my own needs and spending more time in my garden.
• Wonderful things came in the mail:
  
• Cheryl, Esther, and Liz sent packages of British tea, which I'm still enjoying.
• Gail, Randy, and Shady sent me great plants (and Beckie, Linda, Lisa, and MrBrownThumb gave me seeds or plants in person).
  
• Genevieve sent Wicked Plants, which I won on her site, and some free items in a promo for her OpenSky store: 3 pairs of Atlas Nitrile gloves and a Fiskars soil knife that I adore.

Looking Forward
You might even say putting your best foot (or paw, as the case may be) forward! Hyuck! I'm in town all week.

My biggest goal for 2010 is mundanely mature: I need to find stable employment. I've loved my near year of being the Garden Faerie (speaking, teaching, gardening, garden coaching, and garden writing), but the reality is, it can't support me in the long-term. I've worked over 20 years in corporate communications (technical and marketing writing, editing, and web content management) and am looking to draw on those skills to move in a slightly new direction. Possibly user interface design, project management, or instructional design/training. I don't know how realistic a change in career focus is in the Michigan economy, but I'll soon find out!

Footyprints on My Nice Clean Snow*
The east and south side of my backyard borders on a nature area, so my snow never stays pristine long, as various furry and feathered friends make their way to my feeders.

The usual suspects include, of course, birds...

squirrels (which I love!)...

and ducks! I love their tracks!

Who's visiting your feeders?

Happy Mish-Mash!

*I swear Yosemite Sam once said "Who put footyprints on my nice clean desert?" but can't find the sound file.