ART PRINTS FLOWERS

I couldn’t sleep I was so excited, thinking about carrots, butter lettuce, mesculen and radish seeds that can go into the garden soon. There are potatoes that I can put upstairs in egg cartons under the skylights to get them to sprout in 6 weeks, there is an equestrian center we can get horse shit to amend the soil, hot peppers and summer savory and sweet onions that I can start in seed trays this week.

Oh the joy and boon from a generous neighbour willing to share her garden with us. We’ll have to weed and water the entire thing for two months while she goes to Brazil, and in exchange we get three prime rows of garden with wonderful rich soil. We dug up some beets and Jerusalem artichokes with our hands and the soil was like brown velvet of a colt. Those tubers will stay there as they come back each year. She and I are like minded and want to do lasagne style gardening, mulching, seed collecting and planting fruit trees. On two large expanses of grassland she asked me what I thought she should plant. A walnut tree she said on one side? How about a Fuji persimmon on the other side? “Oh yes!” she declared with a big smile, “that would be beautiful.”

The back part of the garden is herbs and flowers in the shape of an Arabic star, a walkable labyrinth. She is an herbal scholar, retired teacher and world traveller who walks through her travels. She already has nectarines, apples, three types of plums, big purple figs, three pomegranates, hazelnuts, and many canes of raspberries, cassis and red currants. The center of the garden has a big cistern for catching water and leading to the riverside pipes and hoses attached to a pump fill up the supply in the dry months. I can grow Indian corn! Bean dreams and snap peas fill my head as I sit down now to make a garden plan. What a dream come true.

Advice anyone? What to do first and things that have worked well for you?

Bats make up one quarter of all mammal species and are the only mammal that can truly fly. Despite a common myth, they can see quite well.

Bats hibernate in winter for 6-8 months. During this time, their heart rate slows down to 20 beats per minute, respiration decreases, and the body temperature drops within one degree of the surrounding air temperature. They can also save energy during heavy summer rainstorms, high winds, or cool temperatures by going into 'torpor', which is similar to hibernation.

Bats control insect populations (eating up to 600 mosquitoes in one hour), pollinate flowers, and disperse seeds of many forest trees. Their droppings (guano) even support an entire ecosystem of organisms that are useful in detoxifying wastes, improving detergents, producing a fuel called gasohol, and antibiotics.

Although little brown bat populations are secure, 40% of North American bat species are threatened or endangered. Around the world, bat populations are droppping at alarming rates. Four Canadian bat species have been listed as vulnerable by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC): fringed myotis, keen's long-eared, pallid, and spotted bats. Reasons for decline include loss of habitat, pollution, pesticides, disease, and predation (hawks, owls, trout, and small carnivores).