Home & Garden
The Beauty in Nature: Converging Birds and Horseshoe Crabs
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
In May of some years, I’ve traveled to Delaware Bay beaches in New Jersey and Delaware to experience the convergence of many thousands of spawning horseshoe crabs, nesting laughing gulls, and migrating shorebirds, including red knots, ruddy turnstones, dunlin, and semi-palmated sandpipers.
Melinda’s Garden: Spring into the Growing Season
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- Written by Melinda Myers Melinda Myers
Spring-flowering bulbs and perennials are filling our landscapes with color.
The Beauty in Nature: Peeping Peepers
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
I visit the shallows of certain ponds and wetlands in, and bordering, woods in southeastern Pennsylvania a couple evenings every April.
The Beauty in Nature: Waterfowl in Flight
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
Winter and early spring are the times of waterfowl (ducks, geese, and swans) in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Melinda’s Garden: Managing Gnats on Houseplants
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- Written by Melinda Myers Melinda Myers
They flit across your face, hover near your houseplants, or gather by the window. Fortunately, these fungus gnat insects are more annoying to us than harmful to our plants.
Melinda’s Garden: Grow Herbs Indoors for Year-Round Enjoyment
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- Written by Melinda Myers Melinda Myers
Add garden-fresh flavor to your meals year-round. Grow a few of your favorite herbs indoors, harvest, and enjoy.
The Beauty in Nature: Winter Colors
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
Winter seems drab to many people in southeastern Pennsylvania. Gray skies and deciduous trees, brown fields, and cold, ice, and snow dampen human spirits. But bright colors in nature beautify winter landscapes and lift people’s emotions.
The Beauty in Nature: Wintering Harriers and Short-Ears
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
In winter, over several years, I’ve seen wintering northern harriers, which are a kind of hawk, and short-eared owls hunting mice and small birds in marshes and tall-grass fields in southeastern Pennsylvania, including at Middle Creek Wildlife Area and Gettysburg National Park.
The Beauty in Nature: Native American Farming
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
Beside hunting, fishing, and gathering, Native Americans living in eastern forests had a unique, interesting, and ingenious way of growing crops in small fields in those shaded woods. Their only tools, before the coming of European settlers, were stone axes and sharp-pointed sticks.