This is my friend Kathy's window. And that is a bird nesting right there. Yes, it's a real bird, not a sculpture.

It started with the nest, which went up the last week of May, when the weather was nice enough for Kathy to crank open the louvered window. It's a lovely nest with a classic cup shape. Kathy lives in Seattle, Washington, which is still rainy and emerald this time of year. The nest was fashioned with a layer of twig in the center cushioned by an impressive gathering of  juicy green fronds around the outside.

When the pics first popped up on Instagram, I recognized the window from hanging out at Kathy's place in Seattle, Washington (excuse me while I feel a pang of longing for friends, flora, and fauna back in the Pacific Northwest!) This is her main floor bathroom window; I once spent a good amount of time clutching the commode underneath this window when I'd had one-too-many of the tasty Moscow mules Kathy will serve you in a copper mug when you're lucky enough to be a guest in her home. Not my proudest moment, mind you, and those mules are not to blame, but I spent enough time in Kathy's bathroom to recognize it in a photo.

The nest was special enough already, but then one day Kathy noticed an egg.

The next day, another egg appeared, and so on, for a total of five days. They're gorgeous, speckled eggs, blue and brown and white. 

Kathy thinks this little uninvited but nonetheless welcome guest fits into the category known as "little brown birds," or LLBs for short. She might be a sparrow - or else a house finch, to get more specific (if you can ID her, please post in the comments below!). The bird comes and goes with no problems. "I haven't heard too much chirping," Kathy says. "She seems to be pretty content to just sit on her eggs."

This is the first time Kathy's ever had a nest in her window. She usually opens it wide, but due to the unseasonably warm weather for Seattle, she had it cracked a bit this time, which seems to have encouraged the mama bird to nest there.

Kathy rigged up a wifi camera to her phone so she could watch the Big Hatching Event even if it happens while she's away visiting friends and family in California.

She's shared stills on Instagram and Facebook, and her friends and followers, including me, are obsessed. The Big Hatching Event will likely happen in about two weeks, and then the chicks will mature in the nest for another two weeks. 

Suffice to say, she's kept the window open.

All photos, credit: Kathy Samuelson. 

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Insect Week at the Dragon Flower Mini-Farm

An insect hotel, a wild hydrangea.   

Last week, we revealed our grand plan to screen the apartment buildings neighboring Dragon Flower Farm with a row of 'Taylor' juniper trees, in keeping with the spirit of our native-plant focus. This week, we can let the "green screen" intention go and focus on trees and shrubs for their own sakes.

We're still in the throes of a long-term project to replace turf with a blend of plants that are ideally both native and edible, or at least one if both can't be satisfied together. I'll describe the very important turf remediation project in a future post dedicated to one of my favorite topics, mulch. But for now let's talk about the super fun part of gardening: putting in new plants. While we slowly deal with the turf layer on the ground, we've begun to carve out the green infrastructure of the garden, the really big plants that give the garden its bones. That means trees and shrubs.

As briefly mentioned last week, we got a jump on the planting when we put in two important trees in the fall: 1) a serviceberry and 2) a grafted persimmon. The two trees satisfy both criteria in being simultaneously native and edible. The serviceberry (Amelanchier arborea) produces white blooms in spring, followed by red berries that look a lot like blueberries when they ripen in the fall. The birds will eat them, and so will we. The persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) will provide year-round interest, with its characteristic broken-block bark, greenish-yellow blooms, and deep orange fruit, also edible for both humans and animals. If you haven't eaten a ripe persimmon fresh off the tree, I highly recommend it.

Serviceberry.

Also last fall, I took time off on my birthday in November and spent the day planting a blueberry patch. The whole affair was prompted by a 75 percent off sale at Home Depot, which really means I rescued four withering blueberry bushes leftover from the summer rush. These were 'Spartan' blueberries, AKA Vaccinium corymbosum, and since blueberries need another species nearby for cross-pollination, I ordered four of another, compatible variety, the 'Dukes,' from Stark Brothers, a Missouri grower recommended to us by the St. Louis Audubon Society. So it's the Dukes vs. the Spartans here at Dragon Flower Farm.

Lisa's birthday blueberries.

Sadly, the blueberry bushes nearly met a tragic end over the winter, when the rabbits saw them as tasty treats. The Spartans (from Home Depot) suffered the most damage, not surprisingly, as they were far weaker. So early this spring, we cordoned off the patch with netting, and that has kept the rabbits at bay. However, we think the bushes are lacking something. After a bit of research, the list of potential amendments that could do the trick is pretty long: pine needles, citrus peels, lemon juice, sawdust, epsom salt, and even a horseshoe, though that last one seems to be as much for the iron as for the luck. Wish us some of the latter as we try these out.

One of the Dukes has already produced a bit of fruit. So the Dukes win.

That was that for the fall. Our spring planting began with a trip to the Butterfly House for the Wild Ones native plant sale - I mentioned this sale excursion previously when I went on about daffodils in April. (I told you I'd go into more detail later about the native plants we scored. Look at this, promise kept!) Channeling our inner Monty Pythons, we judiciously chose three shrubberies, all natives, of course: 1) New Jersey tea, 2) hazelnut, and 3) wild hydrangea.

The New Jersey tea leaves have been used as a non-caffeinated substitute for tea, the hazelnut is exactly what it sounds like, and the hydrangea has some known medicinal properties. So while the hazelnut squarely satisfies both the native and edible criteria, arguably, the other two do as well.

This plant will produce hazelnuts!

Our next wave of plantings happened over the past two weekends. This is a bit later than we would have liked, but we had that epic trip to Helsinki, Finland, in early May, and it took some time to get back into the routine after that. 

The man and I have been talking about pawpaw for about a year, but we had trouble finding any last fall (we looked, we called, we scoured the web). It's native to Missouri and in high demand, as it produces a delicious fruit most people liken to banana custard (yum). Anthony sometimes lapses into a Walla Walla-by-way-of-Oklahoma mode of speaking he inherited from his father, whose people were Okies who up and decided at one point to head even further west. One of Anthony's country sayings involves a pawpaw and a prickly pear (which, incidentally, is another native, edible plant):

When you pick a pawpaw or prickly pear,

And you prick a raw paw, next time beware.

Don’t pick the prickly pear by the paw;

When you pick a pear, try to use the claw.

Of course, the Internet tells me this is from the Jungle Book, which makes sense, since my husband knows all the words to "I Wanna Be Like You," and now you can see why I adore this big Baloo.

Back to the plants. We wandered over to Sugar Creek a couple of weekends ago, and lo and behold, they had a mess of pawpaws. The only problem was, they didn't have the sexes marked, and you need both a male and female in order to get fruit. Apparently, telling the sex of a pawpaw is known to be difficult, at least until it flowers. We took our chances and picked two, but if we end up with two of the same, we'll just add a grafted pawpaw later next fall. Like our aforementioned persimmon, this would have both a male and female grafted onto the same trunk, so it will be self-pollinating, and it will pollinate the other two, because science.

Pawpaws (Asimina triloba) like a bit of shade, so we planted them where the neighboring building on the other side casts a shadow all day except in the morning. Here they are next to a funky little water bath I made for the birds, to Audubon Society specs. Birds like shallow watering areas, with places to perch. We haven't had any takers yet, and they prefer moving water, but a friend told me to wait a month before giving up or moving it.

We scored two other lovely natives at Sugar Creek: 1) a vernal witch hazel and 2) a chokecherry. I was really impressed with the sheer number of natives this garden center had on hand, double what I'd seen there in the fall. The staff mentioned the interest in native plants had certainly gone up, which is great to see.

The chokecherry got a bit beat up in a dramatic thunderstorm. Hail pummeled it, knocking it over, and when we went to plant it, the leaves had curled. It seems to be recovering now, but when it went in, it looked a bit in shock.

Chokecherry, or Prunus virginiana.

This lovely tree will grow to 30 feet, eventually screening the back part of the garden from the apartment building as well. Its berries are too astringent to eat off the tree, hence the name, but they do fine in jams, sauces, and the like, and the birds find them delicious.

We have a weird little corner that slopes down, receiving more water than other parts of the garden. It's directly under telephone wires, too, and this is right where we'd removed a stunted, diseased willow tree that had been topped too many times. So in this spot we put an Ozark witch hazel (Hamamelis vernalis), which will only grow to 6 feet. It will give us our first blooms of the new year - bright orange, ribbony crinkles appearing on bare twig as early as January.

Last came a few fruit trees. We opted for pears, as they work marvelously for my arbitrarily-sensitive-to-everything eating situation; I've never reacted to pear. A full-sized Bartlett variety called 'Moonglow' went in right at the end of a long sidewalk path out our back door. The path was bad feng shui without the tree, draining energy out of the house, so the tree placed there blocks and balances instead. Its pollinator pair is a semi-dwarf Bartlett.

Fruit trees just look like twigs when they go in as bare-root saplings, and that's OK.

These pears aren't native, of course, but we made an exception in light of the future food value. Closer to native though not truly native is the Arkansas black apple we planted nearby. Its flesh will be dark red, nearly black, and it's rust-resistant, which is a good thing in light of the red cedars we have on the property, a potential source of rust disease. 

Arkansas black apple.

So there you have it. Since fall, we've planted 17 trees and 14 bushes on a property that had zero trees and only a few ornamental bushes. I realize this is a lot of plants already, but the reality is that we'll wait anywhere from three to five years before we see any output, so we wanted to get these bearing plants in as soon as we could. They also form the garden's main structure. We needed the bones in place before we can layer on flowers, vegetables, herbs, and other plants. So far, nothing has failed to take root and grow. We think that's a great sign.

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A Natural, Native Privacy Screen

Honeysuckle, You Really Suck

Please Fence Me In

I apologize for leaving you hanging - on the fence, so to speak, over the winter, when I mentioned we had another solution in the works to screen the view of the apartment building that looks down into our little 1/4-acre. But here it is: trees.

From the get-go, even before we made the decision to replace the zigzaggy chainlink fence, we knew we wanted to screen the apartments with a row of tall, skinny evergreens. We had a bit of a dilemma, though, as the usual recommendations for an evergreen privacy screen just weren't suitable. Arborvitae is often used - too often, as it turns out, and the plant is suffering opportunistic disease as a result. We considered for a moment the lovely 'bracken's brown' magnolia, with its velvety undercoat of brown fuzz on the leaves and distinctive cream blossoms, and we nearly got talked into it by folks at our local garden center. However, we really wanted to stick to our guns on the native plant mission, and neither magnolia nor arborvitae is native to Missouri.

A good native evergreen is eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), but unfortunately, it grows too tall and wide to work as a screen in our narrow strip. However, remember when I told you about the St. Louis Audubon Society's Bring Conservation Home program? Through that program, the Audubon Society gave our yard an assessment, and sharing our green screen wishes with them, they came up with a great solution: Juniperus virginiana 'Taylor.' That's the tree you see here.

The Missouri Botanical Garden designated 'Taylor' as a "Plant of Merit," and its history I'll quote directly from their plant finder listing:

‘Taylor’ is an upright narrow columnar eastern red cedar that typically grows to 15-20' tall but to only 3-4' feet wide. Silvery blue-green foliage is attractive throughout the growing season. Foliage may take on some bronze tones in winter. 'Taylor' was reportedly discovered in Taylor, Nebraska as a chance seedling and was released in 1992 to the nursery trade by the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum. Release information does not list a sex for this cultivar but it is believed to be male. 

I love that this "chance seedling" from the native eastern red cedar is the perfect narrowness and height to soften the fence line and help screen the view from the neighbors' balconies without overwhelming the yard. Here they are going in.

I realize the Taylors might look dinky tiny from above like this, but late this spring three of them had already crested well over the top of the fence, and the others are right behind. In a few years' time they should provide a better sense of privacy as well as soften all the hardscape we've got with the tall apartment building and its parking strip of residents' cars.

They're already providing important habitat, shade, and food for birds and insects, and that was our goal number one.

I've always loved the look of juniper berries. What really sold my husband, Anthony, on the Taylors is the fact that juniper berries are not only good for the birds, but they're useful to humans as well. We've seen red cedar fronds laden with berries used to smoke salmon in the Pacific Northwest, and the berries have numerous culinary uses - from the obvious gin flavoring to the more obscure addition to fruitcake. 

This is important to us because we want to accomplish two things with the Dragon Flower Farm project:

1. rescue our 1/4-acre from exotic invasives and resource-intensive grass lawn and reframe it as an oasis for native pollinators and
2. blend that mission with our need to become much more self-sufficient with homegrown food and other products.

There's an aesthetic benefit here as well. The trees smell good, feel good, look good.

And guess what? We managed to squeeze in a couple of true eastern red cedars as well, finds from a native plant sale in our neighborhood last fall. They're like miniature trees right now, they're so tiny, but eventually, they will grow to 65 feet!

Note we planted all of these red cedars in the fall. It seems a lot of people don't know you can plant that time of year, but it's actually better to put in trees and shrubs in autumn because they can go dormant and rest all winter, and then by spring, they're already established and rarin' to go. 

While the row of juniper 'Taylors' were a great start on that native, natural privacy screen, our plan was to fill in around the house for even more privacy, not to mention the attractive aspect of shade. Our yard has exactly no tree shade at the moment, and this ain't the Pacific Northwest, people! It gets HOT.

So, nearer to the house, we added two more plants last fall: a persimmon and a serviceberry.

The persimmon is a special kind of fruit. I'm not talking about the Asian ones you get at the grocery store, but these yummy Midwestern natives. We pretty much gorged ourselves on persimmons from our neighborhood farmer's market last summer and knew we had to plant a persimmon tree at Dragon Flower Farm. The trick is that the trees are pretty dang tall, growing to 60 feet tall and as much as 35 feet wide. Plus, you need two, a male and a female, to ensure pollination and fruiting.

To the rescue: a grafted variety from Stark Bros. When we planted it last fall, it looked like a stick in the ground.

Seriously, I had to keep telling the fence guys when they came to install the other side that this was a tree and not to maul it. 

The serviceberry we picked up at the same neighborhood native plant sale where we got the two true eastern red cedars. We planted it where we'd be able to look out the kitchen window and see its snowy white shower of blooms in the spring. It has the added benefit of filling in the space to further screen the view of the apartment building, AND the berries are edible for both humans and critters! It had been around a bit longer than the persimmon graft, so it went in already with some leaves, looking more like a tree.

Of course, it lost all its leaves come fall, but this spring, the serviceberry was the first to awaken, and it seemed triumphant!

That's one of the other cool reasons to plant in fall - so you can watch this little gift to yourself and the world unwrap itself in spring. 

We were worried about the persimmon, though, as at first it didn't seem to understand it was springtime. But then it budded out as well, slowly and with more determination, it seemed, which is befitting for a tree that will take its time but eventually stretch up past 60 feet.

It will be a couple years, at least, before we get to reap the fruits of these labors, but in the meantime, the birds and bugs already seem pleased. 

And as for the green screen, we've got a succession of canopy layers that will do the job better than anything else. The serviceberry will fill in faster than the fence line trees, and it will give shade before the persimmon does. Where the juniper Taylors stop, the persimmon will eventually fill in, growing taller than the serviceberry and likely filling in to provide a remarkable tower of greenery, offering itself as a host for pollinators of many kinds, and providing valuable shade as well as a bounty of tasty fruit for us and all. 

We ask a lot of trees, and they give it.

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Inspiration Garden: My Father's... Grandmother's Garden...?

This past Saturday we had a spare moment to catch our breaths and wound up at a place called Architectural Artifacts St. Louis. I follow them on Instagram (@architecturalartifactsstl), where I'd found out they had a crate of bricks salvaged from the St. Louis Arena, unearthed after 20 years.

Built in 1929 and demolished 70 years later, the St. Louis Arena was a sport and concert venue, a place where memories were made. The Blues hockey team played there, so I suspect many of the folks picking up a brick of their own are motivated by the current Stanley Cup playoff. I'm not a huge hockey fan, but even I can appreciate the fervor; the Blues haven't been in the Stanley Cup finals since 1970, haven't won since 1967, and this is the fourth time in history they've made it this far. All over the city, there are signs saying, "Let's Go, Blues!"

But my motivation for combing though the array of blue, yellow, and orange Arena bricks and choosing one to take home was different.

In 1980s St. Louis, The Arena was the place to see a rock concert.

I saw Whitesnake and Poison there, and both L.A. Guns and Guns 'n Roses. I crushed on Joe Elliott when Def Leppard played at The Arena "in the round" in 1988. My boyfriend and I were close enough to marvel over Richard Allen's deft skill in playing the drums with one arm and both feet. Next came Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood tour in 1989. Tommy Lee's drum kit extended out over the crowd, turned him upside-down, and spun. Yeah. I'd played in the rhythm section of my grade school band, so you could say the drummers stood out to me for that reason, but they certainly had their own draw.

I regret missing KISS when my parents grounded me for what I protested at the time were unfair reasons: When my boyfriend and I went to The Arena to get tickets, he parked in neighboring Forest Park to save on the parking fee, and we returned to find the windows on the car broken, his expensive stereo system gutted, huge baseball bat-sized holes in the sides of his Grand Prix. Dealing with a police report and taping up the windows against the cold winter air, we returned home well past curfew, and the grounding was my punishment.

In 1999 when The Arena was imploded, I walked from where I lived just a few blocks away to watch it. I still remember the birds emerging from holes in the ceiling the second the detonation went off.

As many of you know, I've moved back to St. Louis after 20 years away, so this brick marks that occasion for me, too.

While picking up the brick was my main goal, my husband and I also just wanted to check out the salvage finds at Architectural Artifacts. We hope to add some choice pieces as focal points and sculptures as we create Dragon Flower Farm. We have dibbs on a couple of items, like these triangular tiles, large-scale letter blocks, and a sphinx.

Want.

I think I would prefer "We."

Recovered from an elementary school. The church that bought the building didn't want the Egyptian icon. AASTL has two of them, the other in a bit better shape.

Speaking of getting in touch with one's roots... this year marks my 25th reunion from college (undergrad). As part of the reunion observances and festivities, SLU is creating spotlights on alumni and publishing them in the alumni email newsletters. I mourn the loss of one important professor in particular, so I focused on her for my spotlight:

In other news, my yogi detective series, the Dreamslippers Series, has received a couple of features, the first from indieBRAG, as all three books in the series won that institution's medallion, awarded to only the top 20 percent of books submitted. May was mystery month, so the series was included in that.

The series was also included in a roundup wiki of top 10 paranormal mystery series, with a video intro here, the Dreamslippers reel starting at 4:04.

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You can see a bit of the Infinity Neck Pillow here, draped over one shoulder in the 'down' position.

One of the reasons I decided to devote this whole week on the blog to Helsinki is that as a travel noob, I often felt overwhelmed when trying to find basic information online. A lot of travel blogs seem to cater to seasoned travelers, and since, as I reported on Monday, less than 5 percent of Americans travel overseas, that approach doesn't seem to make sense. I thought a more detailed, simplified breakdown would be more helpful. It also allowed me to give a deep dive on Helsinki, which I think is pretty rare, but I rather get to really know one place than go on a dizzying whirlwind tour of too many.

Anyway, for this last post in the series, I thought I'd share the top 5 travel necessities that have made the trips much easier for me. I highly recommend all of these products, and if you get them, please do so from the links below to help support this blog. Thank you.

They're all equally great, so this list is in no particular order.

Forest & Meadow's Jet Lag Formula

I suffer from terrible jet lag, as I've mentioned on the blog previously. When I flew to Copenhagen last year, I tried to adjust slowly a week ahead of time, by wearing a watch set to Copenhagen time and psyching myself out that it was actually that time. This is enormously difficult, as your body tends not to buy the ruse - 'What are you talking about? Go to bed NOW? It's totally daylight.' But my jet lag WAS mildly better on that trip, so the effort wasn't for nought. 

Still, I knew there had to be a better way, so I asked my herbalist, Amanda Jokerst of Forest & Meadow, if she could craft a formula to specifically counter the effects of jet lag. She's been helping me with a host of conditions due to Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), and I've been impressed by how much more helpful her "doctoring" has been for this issue than the years of frustration I've experienced via the Western medicine route. Amanda was intrigued by the request, and she came through valiantly, with a formula that gave me my mildest jet lag yet.

Amanda is offering all Cat in the Flock readers a 15 percent discount on the formula, so feel free to give it a try. All you have to do is email her at this link and mention Cat in the Flock. Soon she'll have an online store where you can purchase her array of organic herbal formulas. But for now, email will work.

Infinity Neck Pillow

I can't say enough good things about this neck pillow/scarf hybrid thingee. It's basically a möbius strip of fabric, like an infinity scarf but with some soft filling to give it a pillow-like feel. It has multiple uses. When you double-wrap it around your neck, it allows you to rest your head comfortably in any direction. I've experienced my best in-flight sleeping with this on. It also provides excellent lumbar support if you fold it once and place it between you and the plane seat.

It's an added layer of warmth both on the plane and off; I was really happy to have it on during the freak snow on Suomenlinna. Northern Europeans wrap enormous scarves around their necks, so wearing the Infinity Neck Pillow, you'll look like a local. It can seem a bit bulky during everyday wear if the weather's nice, but if you want to keep it with you without feeling like you're wearing a whiplash collar, just string it across your body. This way, it's rather stylish, and you'll totally fit in.

 Fochier Carryon Spinner Suitcase

I've never been one to invest in luggage - that's always seemed like something more for rich people, I guess. I used the same midsized bag I'd purchased in high school on my J.C. Penney discount for a couple of decades - until it literally fell apart during a trip in 2008. I found myself stranded at my sister's house without luggage, so I "splurged" on a wheelie bag at Target. That bag has kept both me AND my husband in luggage ever since, and we still use it.

But one bag isn't enough for both of us, so we have to supplement with backpacks or crossbody packs, and my scoliotic spine just isn't keen on traveling like a pack mule. Plus, I've noticed while traveling that people with spinner bags seem to be moving through airports like la-de-da, while my unidirectional wheelie bag is bulky and awkward. So, I splurged on this carryon spinner, and I haven't regretted it for a second.

The soft shell gives the bag sturdiness, the handle seems a bit stronger than the average, and the wheels stood up to Helsinki's cobblestone streets. There is a TSA lock, but I'm skeptical about how secure they are. I went for turquoise, my favorite color, but there's a wide range of hues from which to choose.

Mad Hippie Cleansing Oil

One of the annoying aspects of travel these days is the big dilemma of how to fit all one's toiletries into a plastic quart bag. Of course, you can't fit everything, so you have to pick and choose. Is it more important to have toothpaste, or facial cleanser? Can I find a travel-sized deodorant that doesn't make me smell like baby powder all day? These are the questions that try women's souls.

But coming to the rescue is this incredible cleansing oil. Ostensibly, it's a facial cleanser. But I found it had other uses: I added it to my bath, and I massaged it into my cuticles and even my hair. The fact that it both cleans and moisturizes means that it earns its space in that quart bag. Mad Hippie, you're so sane!

Plug Adapters

The first time you travel overseas, the fact that other cultures use different types of electrical plugs will kind of astound you. I devoted a whole blog post on the subject after my first trip abroad, to Barcelona. But now it's old hat for me, and I've got a great supply of adapter plugs to use when I go. Thankfully, my E/F type worked in Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Helsinki, so I've only ever had to have these. But definitely check out what the setup is in your destination land, because wherever you go, things could plug in differently.

I hope this roundup of travel aids is helpful to you. Safe and happy travels!

Other #HelsinkiWeek Posts:

That Finnish Lifestyle Is Hard to Beat

5 Cool Things to Do in Helsinki

Heading to Helsinki? Here's What You Need to Know

Thinking About Taking Your First Trip Overseas? Try Helsinki