Design

We've been admiring a fabulous vegetable garden carved out in 'vacant' space under a bridge in our neighborhood in the mountains. Montford is a designated historic neighborhood and one that's undergone up and down changes, with the fortunes of Asheville. It's a vibrant neighborhood, now, with an active community association and a recently refreshed website, probably thanks to a new tech-savvy volunteer. We were delighted to discover an article about the hidden vegetable garden and accompanying chicken coop in the online posting this evening. It's the vegetable garden under the bridge. I wish I had some good photos to post; my gardening companion took some on our small camera, but hasn't shared them, as yet.  And my 'big' camera is too heavy to drag along on my morning walks so I haven't taken any myself. But it's an inspirational place -- empty sunny land that's been converted to a productive vegetable garden.  How cool is that!

Normally, I think of encouraging toads, woodpeckers, box turtles, chipmunks, dragonflies, butterflies, and owls as a desirable consequence of creating wildlife habitat in our gardens. Seed-eating birds of all sorts enjoy visiting feeders, of course, and hummingbirds readily slurp up sugar water. There are plenty of adaptable critters, too, that are well-suited to suburban life and can be pesky (think skunks, opossums, and squirrels). Much to our surprise, though, just before lunch, an unexpected visitor discovered the black oil sunflower seed feeder outside our small house in the mountains. It didn't take long for this young Eastern black bear to bend down the feeder pole (I should have bought the cast iron one, not the aluminum one) and deftly help himself (probably 'him' not 'her') to the entire contents of the feeder, mouthful by mouthful. There is a heavily wooded ravine below, but we're at the highest point, and there's not much of an obvious wildlife ...