Parakeets and Brambles

As you can see, the parakeets are adapting to the new suet balls. I devised a trick to make them more palatable -- I break them open before I put them in the feeder. They really are ROCK hard. Tiger Woods could tee off with them. Dave's theory is that they're old and they've been hanging around Homebase for a while, which is certainly possible.

Don't you love the ballets the birds perform on the feeder? I love their perfectly balanced poses -- in this case, like a Valentine heart.

We get as many as three at a time, but I've seen more in the trees. The magpies and the starlings also like the suet balls. I haven't seen the little birds eat them much, but maybe they can't get past these linebackers blocking the way.

Here's what I did yesterday. It looks like a picture of nothing, but believe me, it's something.

See that tangle of brown growth atop the white yard waste bag? It's all old, dead blackberry vines (or "brambles," as the British so quaintly call them). I cut them out of that area just behind them and slightly to the right, next to the fence. I wanted to get that dead growth out of there to let more light reach the ground, where we have daylilies and bluebells. The poor daylilies didn't even bloom last year because they were so shaded out.

Cutting blackberries has to be the most miserable job in the whole garden. They fight back every step of the way, snagging on clothes and skin, drawing blood. I finally got them all cut up and packed away in bags for the rubbish guys to remove, but even though I wore gloves I am a scratched-up mess. I also cleaned out some other dead undergrowth (foreground) and pulled a bunch of ivy out of the bed at rear left, where the borage grows in the spring.

You can see how thin and muddy our lawn looks at this time of year. It's a sight.

There is plenty more to do, but we have a couple of months before anything starts growing again so I can pace myself. Dave and I have concluded that in our earnest desire to "re-wild" the garden we let it go a little too untended last summer. This year we're going to try to better balance the re-wilding with weed-pulling and trimming.

I don't see any sign that our burdock plants re-seeded. Maybe that's just as well. They were a fun experiment and certainly big and impressive, but a pain in the neck when they developed all those bristly seed heads. On the other hand, we have plenty of teasels.

Oh, and you can see my foxgloves, potted up and waiting out the winter at right. Some of them look better than others, and a few have died, but I think we'll still have plenty by the time we plant them out in the spring.