Welcome to Winding Pathways
Winding Pathways encourages you to create a wonderous yard, whether that yard is an expansive acreage, a suburban lot or a condominium balcony. Go outside and play!
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How Does Our Prairie Garden Grow?
In early July we sat on our front porch watching delightfully splashes of color dance in the breeze. A restoration triumph stood stoutly in the wind-blooming compass plant. Restoring prairies takes patience. We began ten years ago by converting a former mowed lawn...
Why Did the Frog Hop to Winding Pathways?
Outside our dining room is a tiny pond crafted by our home’s previous owner. It’s smaller than a compact car and is the regular home of water lilies, dragonflies, and a few goldfish we stock to eat mosquito larvae. One morning we were astonished to spot a large frog...
How is Getting a Colonoscopy Like a Woodstove?
We’re of an age when every few years our doctor prescribes a colonoscopy. It’s not something to look forward to, but it makes perfect sense. Early detection catches cancer while there’s time to take effective medical action. The same goes for wood stoves. Wood is our...
Where Were the Worms?
When we moved to our home in 2010, we immediately began changing the landscaping. The former owner had mowed nearly our entire two acres. It was clipped, manicured, and lacking in diversity. The soil was sand, rock hard, or dense clay. From this sterile, unnatural...
Have You Noticed the Forest Magic?
Winding Pathways borders 110-acre Faulkes Heritage Woods, a primeval woodland that changed dramatically in 40 minutes last August 10, 2020, when a derecho roared through Eastern Nebraska, all of Iowa and into Illinois. Prior to the storm, the view from our back deck...
Where Will You Find Berries?
We take a walk every day, sometimes through urban and industrial areas. Other days find us on prairie or woodland trails. Everywhere we’re spotting an abundance of summer fruit being devoured by birds, woodchucks, chipmunks, and even deer. Last August 10 a terrible...
What is the Great American Campout?
Kids love camping. For a youngster a night of camping, even if it’s in the backyard, is an adventure. This summer the National Wildlife Federation is encouraging people to go camping in national, state, county, or private campgrounds or even in the backyard. They...
Busy Pandemic Year+ for Winding Pathways
For the past fifteen months Winding Pathways has been busy with writing features for the Cedar Rapids Gazette and blogs for Hoover's Hatchery and FB Live monthly events. Catch up with our stories in The Cedar Rapids Gazette online. Hoover's Hatchery. Click on Flock...
The Reptile Adventures of a Suburban Gardener
reptiles
Can You Radically Welcome Moles to Your Yard?
It’s that season again. Recently we spotted a symmetric dirt cone poking up in our lawn. Fortunately, it wasn’t an early-stage volcano about to erupt. Rather, a mole pushed dirt out of the way so it could continue tunneling. People hate moles for forming similar dirt...
What is an Easy, Delicious Food for Dinner?
For years we’ve added wild foraged plants to our diet. They’re free, available, often delicious, and give us the satisfaction of knowing that we can find food close to home. After years of foraging and trying many wild foods, we now place them into three categories:...
What Happened to Mallory Mallard and her ducklings?
Report from the Montessori School duck hatch: To review, the school saw a mallard sitting on an urban planter box. So, the staff and children made a project of watching the duck, noting its behavior, drawing pictures, and journaling about this experience. When the...
Late Night Noises Keeping You Up?
Starting about mid-May when days and evenings began to warm up we'd hear off tune, extended croaking in damp spots around the yard, high in the trees, tucked into the woodpile and even on the side of the house. A few days later, high-pitched off-key trills burst from...
New Oak Signals Hope
May’s first few weeks are the most delightful time to be outdoors. Warm days combine with the delicious scent of spring. It’s the peak time for birds that wintered far to the south to either settle in to nest or briefly rest and eat before winging further north....
What Do You Do About City Ducks?
In mid-April, we got a call from a concerned Montessori teacher. Her school is in downtown Cedar Rapids amid office buildings, restaurants, and taverns. Cars constantly buzz by. She’d spotted a hen mallard duck nesting in the school’s playground and asked what she...
Prairie Renaissance Part 8
Springtime on the Prairie This spring we anxiously await the emergence of prairie flowers in an area that had been traditional lawn. This is a periodic continuing blog about the process of converting the lawn to a prairie. We’ll have a couple more updates this season....