Strawberries!

Just a quick blurb about the two delicious strawberries I got off my strawberry plants today.

They were very sweet and soooooo good! I can't wait until more are ripe!


Also, I'm trying out the Blogger app for the first time. Ergo, this post was published from my iPhone. I uploaded two pictures but I have no control over their placement. :(

Baby birds

There is this type of bird that I usually only saw at cemeteries when I was growing up that we always called ground birds because they make nests on the open ground. I supposed I mainly saw them at cemeteries because it is quieter there than your average open ground. According to the Internet their official name is Killdeer, though ground bird makes a lot more sense...

Anyway, a pair of Killdeer made a nest in my front yard a couple months ago. About one month ago the female bird laid some eggs in what I guess she thought was a quiet serene location. Little did she know all the moving that was about to take place.

She ended up laying four eggs which I helped her protect. I mowed far from the nest (though she still tried to attack the mower several times) and I kept vehicles from running over the eggs as the nest was in the path of the truck we used to carry my parents' furniture from the trailer to the newly rebuilt house.

Killdeer have evolved into great ground-nesters. They are beautiful birds that blend in well with ground foliage and have an aggressive nature for scaring away predators.

This is the female spreading out her plumage as I approached the nest:

They also have a great tactic for luring predators away from the nest. If I got too close for comfort, the bird would scurry away from the nest and then flap around on the ground as if it were hurt a few feet away. It would also stick out one wing and lay there like it's wing was broken. If I moved closer to the bird it would scurry a few more feet away and fake injured again.

I know this picture is small. I couldn't get very close to them without them running away, but the bird on the left is faking injury and the bird on the right was just squawking at me:

And here is one bird flapping around on the ground:

After a month of being sure not to run over the nest, I was beginning to wonder if the female had just laid a bunch of duds. Then one day last week my parents and I noticed a little baby bird running around alongside it's parents. The next day, all four eggs had hatched and the little Killdeer were running around the yard exploring. If was the first time I had seen them in baby form. They had the same markings as the adult birds only they were fuzzy as all get out, probably the cutest baby birds I have ever seen.

Again it was tough to get a picture of them, but I tried:

Here are some cropped images:

Eventually I decided to ignore the birds' warning cries and risk getting flogged to examine the nest. I'm glad I did because there was one little baby snuggled down doing it's best to blend in.

I'm also glad I took pictures when I did because the next day the adult birds led the little babies across my yard and my parents' into a field with high grass. I'm sure by now those little babies are flying.

Organic Gardening

So I'm trying my hand at some organic gardening since I have a yard this summer. I'm pretty excited about it. I've tried to do a good bit of research about what seeds to buy and how to avoid Monsanto related companies. I live in a rural area, so organic products aren't very easy to come by. I was surprised to see this at my local Wal-Mart:

I needed some organic soil to use in my strawberry planter, so I bought some and used it to plant some strawberry plants before I found out that Scotts/Miracle-Gro has some pretty strong ties to Monsanto, a company that deals some pretty serious damage to the environment with products like Round Up and genetically altered seeds. Oh well, now I know. The strawberry plants I bought weren't organic anyway. Like I said it's tough to find organic products in my area. But I'm going to raise them organically from now on.

I think they will do much better than my previous tries since they are actually out in full sun versus being on a shady apartment balcony like the previous two years.

It was a rainy day and the bones were pretty upset that they couldn't help me plant the strawberries!

I also did some research on organic herbicides and decided to try out the suggestions I found for using vinegar. Some sites said to mix half vinegar and half water, but to use straight up vinegar for stubborn weeds. I opted to try straight up vinegar because I wasn't so sure how stubborn my weeds were.

Here's the before picture:

24 hours later:

So the vinegar worked pretty effectively as and herbicide. I don't think a vinegar/water mixture would have worked as well, but a gallon of vinegar was only around $3 so it didn't seem like an expensive project. I plan on filling the area to the right of the stepping stones with mulch and flowers, that's why I needed the weeds dead.

I also found some organic seeds at Wal-Mart that I plan on using in my garden. They were produced by a company called Plantation Products under the NK seeds brand. Their website assures that their seeds are not genetically altered in any way. They also appear to have no affiliation with Monsanto so I'm going to plant them. I got cantaloupe, beans, and squash. I also want to plant okra, corn, and eggplant so I'll be on the lookout for those seeds.

I can't wait to eat all my own yummy organic vegetables and fruits!