“I plowed the peas under,” said one of my farmer friends glumly at the market. “They weren’t doing anything but turning yellow.” The farmers in stalls on either side nodded. One does rabbits commercially, and has a garden rather than a farm, but she added “Lost all the broccoli too.” More nods all around. Unfortunate [...]
About Ursula Vernon
Ursula Vernon lives in North Carolina where she gardens for wildlife with her cats, her boyfriend, and a beagle, and is still astonished when anything comes back at all in the spring. She is also part of the team at Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens.
Ursula is a freelance writer, artist and illustrator. She is best known for the Hugo-award winning webcomic Digger and the children's books Dragonbreath and Nurk: The Strange, Surprising Adventures of a (Somewhat) Brave Shrew. Ursula is also the creator of the Biting Pear of Salamanca, a work which became an internet meme in the form of the "LOL WUT" pear. She was nominated for the 2006 Eisner Award in the category Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition for her work on Digger.
The Garden By Ear
This last weekend, a friend and colleague of mine came out on business. We put him up for a couple of days (and he was very gracious about the beagle and the extremely friendly cats) and he did me a great and unexpected service. He birded my garden by ear. Most birders (that’s “birdwatchers” for [...]
The Case of the Burrowing…WHAT!?
So last year, I found this hole in the flowerbed near the house. It could have been anything. Snake, packrat, chipmunk…anything. I did notice a sort of muddy front porch, where the wet yellowish clay was pushed out, which would imply that it was a rather wet burrow, but I didn’t think much about it. [...]
Looking For A Sign
This has been a weird-ass year for weather. Seventy-degree days are followed immediately by snow, balmy days have hard freezes at night, and the plants don’t know what to make of it. After last year’s year-without-a-winter, having an actual winter is nice—more-or-less—but it would be nice to have it in one large chunk instead of [...]
Thrush-Bob
“So there’s a thrush that lives on my deck,” I said to another birder, in the course of conversation. (She is a much better birder than I am, and we had just been out after a Northern Lapwing, which was her 600th ABA listed bird.) “Uh-huh,” she said, flipping through photos on her phone. “It’s [...]
Cache and Carry
I was poking around in the garden a few weeks ago, doing that thing where you wander around to each of the questionably hardy plants and stare fixedly at the dead stems and trying to divine whether or not it will come back in spring. Gardener’s divination. “Hmm,” I thought vaguely, “the Salvia koyamae is [...]
Keeping A Yardlist
So I’m currently staring out the window in my studio, pretending to be working, and a small flock of birds has descended on the finch feeder. Normally, I’d think they were goldfinches. Goldfinches overwinter in this area, although they tend to make themselves scarce about the time the dark-eyed juncos show up. But since birds [...]
The Frivolous Gardener
I am, when you get right down to it, a fairly frivolous person. I wander about having odd notions about dragons and potato salad and then scribbling them down, and largely in defiance of logic, money exchanges hands for this service. It is fortunate that this line of work is available, because I would be [...]
The Twelve Days of (Wildlife Gardening) Christmas
On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… …a replacement for a Bradford pear tree! On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… …two mourning doves! On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… …three moorhens! On the fourth day of Christmas, my [...]
Domesticated Land
So this is the view over my back fence. I live on the edge of…let’s call them “woods.” Woods is a good word. This is a mixed pine-and-hickory forest starting to turn into oak forest. I would put its age somewhere in the sixty-to-seventy year range, and I’m being generous because there’s a few bigger [...]
The First Cold Day
Thanksgiving is over, leaving us only with several Tupperware containers of stuffing, ham, and the memory of gluttony. I spent Black Friday wandering around the garden, muttering to myself and contemplating What Is To Be Done About The Raspberries.* Today is the first really cold day of the year. The high will not crack fifty, [...]
