snails
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Snail tales, part I
My Brooklyn backyard is a wall- and fence-enclosed concrete rectangle some 14 by 25 feet in size. A metal balcony and stair overshadowed about one third of the space. Very little sun reaches it during the winter, but come spring it is much less like the bottom of a well. In summer, it’s hot and…
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In the Back 40
A little proto-spring cleaning in the Back 40 reveals some early signs of life. Just in time! Some greenery, mostly tenacious sunflowers just popping up, and a little patch of moss. But there were some creepy-crawlies in the mix: Earth worm. Found under a pot, moved into the compost bin. I think these are spider…
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Learning from Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau didn’t particularly like cities, including New York, all that much. “The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population,”he wrote while visiting in 1843. Thoreau was a country mouse at heart, not a city rat. He was neither the first nor the last to believe that there was a…
Backyard and Beyond 