The Farmhouse Gardens NC

06/09/2026

Flowers are a timeless way to show affection or simply to say, “I am thinking of you”.

06/04/2026

Dreaming of Dahlias! These beauties always amaze me every year!

Tubers are growing and it will not be long before I can start sharing them in bouquets and arrangements!

The Farmhouse Gardens NC

05/12/2026

This is so interesting. Read when you have time

The blue jay screaming in your yard right now isn't just being loud. It's running a security system.

Blue jays are one of the most informationally useful birds in any backyard. Their harsh, descending "jeer-jeer-jeer" call is a mobbing alarm — they've spotted a hawk, owl, or snake, and they're broadcasting the location to every animal within earshot. Squirrels, chipmunks, smaller songbirds, and even deer respond to it. The whole yard goes on alert because the jay called.

A clear, bell-like "queedle queedle" is the opposite — relaxed contact between mates or family members. A soft, almost musical warble heard up close is something most people never notice: jays sing quietly to themselves and to their partners, with a vocabulary of clicks, whistles, and whisper-songs.

Then there's the famous trick. Blue jays imitate hawks. A perfect Red-shouldered Hawk scream from a jay can clear a feeder in two seconds, leaving the food for the jay alone. They also use it to test whether a real hawk is nearby — if no answer comes back, the coast is clear. The same bird that just sounded a genuine alarm an hour earlier might be running a con this time.

🪶 How to read the jays in your yard:
- Harsh jeering aimed upward into a tree — there's a predator perched. Scan the branches
- The same jeer aimed at the ground — usually a cat, fox, or snake. Look low
- A sudden hawk scream with no other birds reacting — probably a jay bluffing the feeder
- Soft warbling between two jays close together — pair bonding. They're settled and safe

The jay isn't yelling at you. It's telling you what's in your yard 🌿

05/08/2026

This is so interesting .

She Sealed the Door, Then Lay Down to Die
In late April, in a hollow stem behind your shed, a small metallic-blue bee is finishing the last act of her life. She has spent six weeks alone, building a single column of mud chambers, each one stocked with pollen, each one holding one egg.
Now she walls up the entrance with mud. She will not see her children hatch. She will be dead within days.
We swat her at the porch light. We seal up "wasp holes" in the eaves. We assume any bee that doesn't live in a hive is somehow wrong.
In reality, the native Blue Orchard Mason Bee (Osmia lignaria, Status: Secure but in regional decline) is one of the most efficient pollinators in North America. A single female pollinates as many apple flowers as 100 honeybees. She is solitary, she is stingless in practice, and she will be entirely dead before her own offspring chew their way out of the mud next spring.
Leave the hollow stems standing through winter. Drill no-pesticide nest blocks. Her motherhood is a single sealed door — and we keep painting over it.
References: Xerces Society pollinator profiles; USDA-ARS Logan Bee Lab (Osmia lignaria); Cornell Cooperative Extension orchard pollinator data.