Noticing Nature
| October 21, 2009 | Posted by Issa under Nature |
Ever since moving into The Wallow, I’ve been noticing the little details of nature more often. Are there more spiders in this house? More birds in this yard? More bugs in this grass? Maybe. Or maybe I’m just paying more attention to these kinds of details. In any case, I am happy to be settled into a place where I notice the growth of life all around me.
I keep finding spiders in the house. The big ones are wolf spiders, and I relocate them outside, just because they can be very startling to come across. The smaller ones remain unidentified, and I leave them where they are.
Woodpeckers and blue jays seem to be the common birds of residence here. The woodpeckers will have to change their pattern, because Joshua and I don’t like them putting holes in the side of our house. We might try to feed them elsewhere in an effort to lure them from the house. If we try any more active deterrents, it will be the kind that lightly scares them away (like moving shiny things), not anything that might harm them.
It seems like every time I step outside, I see another bug or other animal of some kind that’s interesting to stop and watch. A couple of days ago, Joshua harvested some sage from his own sage plant. As we pulled the leaves off in order to dry them, Joshua came across this little cutie:
We put it right outside, but not before standing there watching it crawl along inch by inch for a bit. I guess it’s just that I’m newly in love with my new home, and every single little detail about The Wallow simply delights me to no end, even itty-bitty inch worms.
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I know what you mean. I can spend hours squatting in my herb garden just noticing the little things…
Today I hung out under the gum tree, examined some koala poo and spotted a ladybird.
Good times.
Your sage looks lovely btw. Mine’s not doing too well this year for some reason.
I had a sage plant two years ago that didn’t do very well. It grew okay, but didn’t grow strongly and the leaves turned brown and fell off. I’ve since learned that it’s normal for the bottom leaves of a sage plant to turn brown and fall off like that. I still don’t know why my top leaves were doing it.
I gave that plant away and this year’s plants are entirely new. I bought three of them, two of which turned out to be an entirely different type of sage than the salvina officinalis you see above, so I scrapped them because they were producing lots of lovely purple flowers and tiny little leaves on woody stalks–not good for my purposes at all.
This year’s plant is going bananas. It grows so fast and produces beautiful, large, silky leaves like you see above. The lower leaves are still small, turn brown, and fall off, so I make sure to let the upper leaves develop until they’re as big as I want them. The plant is in a container filled with Miracle Gro organic potting mix. It’s a self-watering container, so maybe the consistent moisture is a factor? I haven’t particularly fertilized it, except to dig in some Miracle Gro organic fertilizer when I first planted them.
Joshua, what do you use your sage for? I have 2-3 plants running wild in my back yard, but I rarely use it in cooking. I’ve been wanting to do something with it, but am not sure what else it’s particularly good for! I know white sage is commonly used for smudging, and I like the smell, but this is the common kitchen variety.
Also, you might want to read up a bit on woodpeckers. We live in an untreated wood house and our pest control company advised us to keep a close eye out for woodpeckers going after the house. They said first it isn’t a good sign if they’re finding food in your home, and second once they start going to a place as a food source it becomes difficult to deter them. If they make a habit of poking holes in your house they also create openings for other pests to get established, which is a downhill slope. Surely his perspective is somewhat biased, but he has been with his company for a long time, and his company was one of the first in our area to offer considerably less toxic treatment options for home pest problems, served my parents well for over 15 years and has treated us very well since we moved in. I haven’t followed up on his comments because I only know of one incident where woodpeckers came after our house, but if you’ve caught their attention it couldn’t hurt to make sure they aren’t doing serious damage!
@Leah If you haven’t already, check out this post – http://lovelivegrow.com/2010/01/woodpecker-madness/ – which is the follow up on the woodpeckers. The short version of the story is that they were doing some serious damage to the house. We sprayed for wasps, plugged the holes, sprayed bad-tasting stuff on the house, hung mylar strips, and hung suet cakes and a woodpecker house out in the trees. It’s been a full year now, and the woodpeckers haven’t returned, so some combination of those things worked out.
I like to put the dried sage in scrambled eggs. I think the flavors compliment really well. I’ve made herb butter with fresh sage, and it’s nice too. Pasta with sage butter and maybe some other veggies and parmesan cheese is good. Honestly, though, the plant produces way more sage than I know what to do with, so I end up giving a lot of it away. If I made sausage, that would be a good use, but I don’t.
I don’t like the sage in eggs so much… it’s too “creative” tasting for me. The sage butter with pasta, though, is super-yummy!