March 10, 2025

A ladybird came inside to sit on the ivy in the bathroom :)

March 16, 2025

Something has been eating my strawberries.
I hope it's the lizards. I forgive them if it was, they're pretty cute, and they need to get strong before winter.

I decided to learn more about how to grow good strawberries. It seems to come down to enough fertilizer and the right amount of water. The crown of the plant has to sit at the surface of the soil so that it doesn't get too wet and start to rot.
I have two varieties. A tarpan, which has dark pink flowers, and a pink, which has very faint pink flowers, almost white.
I seem to be getting a lot of flowers. Not all of them grow into strawberries, but the plants seem very healthy.

Friday, March 21, 2025

A little while back, when I first started trying to learn how to grow strawberries well, one of the tips I read was to paint some rocks red and scatter them among the plants, so that birds and animals learn that the red things there aren't food. It's a bit late to start conditioning the wildlife, something has definitely learned that they are food, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway, if nothing else I can get a head start on the next crop.

It must be autumn, because a mushroom came up in one of the tubs I grow veggies in.
But in true late-summer fashion, the rabbits got to it and took some bites out of the cap. A second one came up as well, but only the stump was left of that.
I guess they know what they're doing. I don't and eating a random mushroom sounds like a good way to get a trip to the hospital.
It did look pretty, though, and I took a photo of it before it got munched.

The rabbits tend to leave my veggie tubs alone, maybe it's just too much hassle to climb up there until the end of summer when there's not as much grass around.
They've been eating the red kale as well, but that's okay, I have enough of it.

I let the perpetual spinach go to seed, and now I have a lot of little spinach seedlings growing. I guess that's why it's called perpetual spinach.