If it doesn’t frost, I’ll be picking tomatoes on Christmas day. All my gardening friends have been eating and enjoying their tomatoes throughout the summer and many have pulled up their now withering vines. Not me. My tomatoes are just starting to come in. I have cherry tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, Better Boys and grape tomatoes gushing forth. Some, I don’t remember planting, but in the next few … [Read more...]

My son and his family live in Atlanta - about 500 miles from Charlottesville. We think that's a 'fer piece, but a hummingbird would think nothing of making that kind of trip. Hummingbirds, you see, fly some 3,000 miles across the Gulf of Mexico for their winter migration, and they're packing right now, getting ready to leave. The tiniest bird in our backyard, is without a doubt, the most … [Read more...]

By Elaine Callahan Elaine is a “Frog Lady”. She loves to have them in her ponds, to observe and appreciate. She shares this piece on Bullfrogs with CvilleBuzz readers.   “Everything has an awareness.” We learned this from the indigenous people on a recent trip to Alaska, where their ancestors gave thanks to the spirit of the whale or moose they had just hunted, thanking the animal … [Read more...]

We planted a dozen cucumber vines back in the spring, hoping for a crop large enough for my wife Nancy to be able to can some of her special pickles. Unfortunately, a groundhog had other ideas about the potential cucumber crop and single-handedly destroyed all but four vines. But the vines remaining did their best and ultimately delivered us about a half-bushel or so over a six-week span. They … [Read more...]

Why do backyard gardeners even bother? We plant seeds that don’t sprout. When and if they do, the rabbits, deer or groundhogs decimate the young plants. If they don’t, we have a late frost or a hot, dry summer that will. And if somehow the gardener dodges all those bullets, invasive insects put the nail in the coffin. Last week, my wife Nancy went out to check on her pepper plants and three of … [Read more...]

I have not picked the first tomato from my garden this year, but I will soon. This has been one of the strangest growing seasons for backyard gardeners in recent memory. It was chilly and wet early, with a killing late frost, and then extremely hot and dry. But it appears August and September will be tolerable. I put out my tomato plants in late April and the vines prospered (except for one … [Read more...]

I couldn’t decide whether to write a piece on mowing grass or an update on Uh-Huh our resident baby bullfrog, so I decided to squeeze both into one article for the Backyard Birds & Buds section. First, grass bags - the kind that attach to lawn mowers. For the past dozen years or more, I have owned lawn mowers with grass bags. Naturally, all the grass clippings find their way into the bag … [Read more...]

There are now a few more bluebirds gracing our neighborhood than before. Our resident pair managed to raise a family despite the sweltering days of late July and early August and the young ones have fledged. Unlike previous bluebird families that used our bluebird box, this family stayed in the yard for several days after the chicks fledged, taking advantage of the free meal worms I put in … [Read more...]

What would an edition of CvilleBuzz be without an update on Uh-Huh the Frog? As I mentioned a few weeks back, Uh-Huh (named after Froggy Went A’ Courting) materialized in our small lily pond. Don’t know where he came from or how he scaled the walls on the side of the pond, but he’s there nonetheless. At first, he was about the size of the tip of your thumb. The little fellow is now much larger, … [Read more...]