Kamikaze Gardening. Antler Camp. Black Flies.

At my Moosehead Lake home (camp) I’ve been Kamikaze Gardening.

Kamikaze Gardening is my term for intensely swooping down to remorselessly attack every garden job before black flies drive me indoors. (They know we gardeners are in a time crunch that fits their arrival and dining habits.)  I am planting, weeding, composting, sprinkling Milorganite to discourage deer foraging, and this year, furiously hoeing out an invasive that’s choking out flowers I know I can save from the deer.

Good to Know: black flies only breed in clean running water. If we have hordes of them, it means we are actually lucky to live here. (Sometimes that consoles. Often it does not.)

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Smart fish. Tiny home.

My husband and I have been on the road for almost a month, exploring creeks for wild trout (very smart fish), and staying in North Carolina national park and forest service campsites. I’m used to Maine camping in remote places, so sharing a campground with other travelers (sometimes over forty of them in tents, small campers, and very large generator-chugging RV’s) has been a new experience.

But first, the important stuff. As if there weren’t enough barriers to writing a novel in a small camper-trailer, this morning I mistakenly took the dog’s Benadryl tablets instead of my meds. The fog descended. I have yet to stop staring at a spider that seems to be staring back at me.

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Mud Month. Big Night! (Not What You Think . . . )

It’s mud month in much of the Northeast. I’m washing off my snowshoes and waxing my X-skies to rest them for a while. What to DO when it finally does melt off the high-up slopes?

Distancing is still with us! Here’s something very cool to do. (And then find Maine’s mud anthem, “I Love Mud,” at the end of this post. Sing along with Rick.)

Big Night!

Roads, Rain, and Amphibians. Big Nights are fascinating and unique natural events that occur every spring. With spring rain and warming temperatures, frogs and salamanders move to their breeding grounds by the truckload. However . . .

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"All night, in happiness, she hunts and flies . . . "

I know we’ve got lots more winter, but recently I read the opening of my novel Deadly Turn to a book group (the story opens with a bat) and realized I was thinking ahead to a spring without bats. I miss the great clouds of them winging over the cove at dusk, zig zagging over the water after smaller clouds of mosquitos. So much life in the sky just when the rest of the world is settling down for night.

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