Catchfly Commons

April Vistas

April Notes Growing Degree Days “Growing Degree Days are a measurement of the growth and development of plants and insects during the growing season. Development does not occur at this time unless the temperature is above a minimum threshold value (base temperature). The base temperature varies for different organisms. It is determined through research and…

Save the Date: JULY 5th Open Garden

The date is set! This year’s summer open garden will be on Saturday July 5, 2025. Watch for more details later. Hope to see you! Photos by Randy Litchfield unless otherwise noted© Randy Litchfield, some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC)

Open Garden in Celebration of Ohio Native Plant Month

Later this month we are hosting a spring Open Garden. Spring ground conditions limit our parking capacity, so we are making available several time slots across multiple days through a sign-up app, details below. Every season has its own beauty expressed in blooms, foliage, and forms. Seeing the garden in different seasons highlights how landscapes…

March Vistas

Growing Degree Days I will start including Growing Degree Days (GDD) as part of the monthly vistas post. This is a good reference point for tracking plant and insect development. “Growing Degree Days are a measurement of the growth and development of plants and insects during the growing season. Development does not occur at this…

Gardening for Wildlife – Preventing Window Strikes by Birds

As gardeners who value biodiversity, we enjoy seeing the bluebirds raising their young and eating mealworms we provide in the winter. We see woodpeckers (hairy, downy, red bellied) on the suet feeder most days. And many other birds frequent the garden looking for insects or nesting materials. When I heard a loud “thunk” last week,…

February Vistas

This year I am trying to follow through on a suggestion Terri made to document the backyard in photos and videos once a month. My intent is to do this on the same day of the month and from roughly the same locations. I will post the videos each month and occasionally a small number…

Bringing Nature Sounds Inside

Experiencing the garden includes all the sounds: birds, water features, frogs, wind, raindrops, and even a passing train. Of course, closed windows mean that experience is lost when inside the house. For a while, we have been wishing for a way to bring nature sounds inside and finally we did something about it! We found…

Starting Seeds in Winter Using Totes and Seedling Flats

Winter Sowing in milk jugs has been enjoyable and successful here for the past several years. Having a seed-starting project in January is akin to browsing the seed catalogs – an opportunity to plan for, and dream about, the next growing season, with the added benefit of actually working with seeds and planting mix. While…

Remembering for a Hopeful 2025

It’s often tempting to breathe a sigh of relief at the end of the year and eagerly turn to a new year. Yet being hopeful about the future involves, at least in part, remembering. When we remember our experiences of the good, the beautiful, the tenacity of resilience, and the empowerment of relationships, then we…

Gathering Thankfulness

The Thanksgiving holiday is a time for gratitude, but it is also all about gathering. We gather the fruits of the growing season. In this we express gratitude for food, the labor of production involved, and the earth from which it springs. We gather memories of times from the year that are full of grace…