A crow has showed up in our backyard a few times now to eat seed. We’re that much closer to our goal of making friends with a corvid…

Beautiful lavender. Also, the grapes are doing something new! Turns out they’re flowering. What I noticed before were not actually grapes but flower blooms. (Which I would have know had I thought about it a bit more carefully. What can I say? I was excited.)

OFA on how to garden vertically. Because of our limited space, we’re trying to do more of this. For example, this year we put up a PVC arch on which we’ll grow some cucumbers and melons. We already have a pergola for the grapes and honeysuckle. The malabar spinach will be growing up a fan shaped trellis. And we’re going to try a three sisters planting again this year, where pole beans climb corn stalks. (It didn’t do well last year, we theorize, because 1. we planted it too late and 2. corn doesn’t like raised beds.) As Adam Savage says, “there’s always room on the z-axis.”

A good weekend for cheap, reused stuff:

1. I came across a thrift/junk store (location: secret) with a large selection of old tools. I didn’t have time to look around much but I will go back next weekend.
2. My in-laws gave me a couple of old garage cabinets. Ain’t nothing fancy—but it freed up a lot of room.
3. An acquaintance gave us one of those roller composters. We’ve struggled with that kind of composting in the past but we’ll definitely try it again for free.
4. We found a bathroom cabinet for $10 in good condition. Rachel has had an eye out for one for a long time. Minor repairs, replaced a bit of hardware, painted it black.

Sugar snap peas, sweet alyssum, lettuces. We started planting sweet alyssum because it is a good companion plant for vegetables. We keep growing it because it’s such a lovely little thing.

I mentioned over the weekend that a tree frog has been hanging out at our pond, calling late into the night. (Click that link for audio.) He’s at it again this morning. It’s a wonderful sound, one of those I would describe as homey. Other examples: chicken chatter, the chorus of crickets and katydids on summer nights.

I suspect our frog is a Cope’s Gray tree frog, both because of the sound of its call and because our DNR says it’s more likely here in southern Indiana.

I don’t recall hearing tree frogs here in our neighborhood until we put in our wildlife pond two years ago. I may be misremembering. Maybe it’s that I’m paying more attention, now that we’re more engaged with trans-species collaboration and increasing relatedness on this small, city lot. I hope that we are creating an increasingly diverse and thriving niche. Even if we’re not changing the world, or even our city block, we’re (to link to myself one last time) changing the world inside our heads–and that’s not nothing.

Could these actually be tiny, tiny grapes? This is very exciting.

There are far worse ways to spend an hour of your day than picking four cups worth of lilac flowers. I’ll be using them to make lilac simple syrup.

Our lilac bush is blooming and the scent makes me so happy. You can smell it all around the house. It’s always one of the highlights of spring. And then I walked up to my favorite coffee shop this morning and caught the scent again. They have a bush there also. Wonderful, wonderful.

I know…it’s a TED talk. But trust me, this one is good: “Let your garden grow wild.” Relatedly, this presentation by Doug Tallamy is the very thing that got Rachel involved in my fledgling garden project two years ago—and it has improved immensely since she got involved.