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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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Enjoying Lamb’s Quarters
Try eating Lamb’s quarters instead of weeding and tossing them out.
What is a Weed?
Weeds Brighten Our Lawn Too many people worry about lawn weeds and spend money to buy and spray toxic chemicals. We take a different view. What many call weeds are actually beneficial and we find fascinating. The often-uninvited plants that diversify our lawn connect...
How Can You Attract Birds?
Find ways you can create a yard or deck that welcomes birds year round.
What Do Baby Owls Look Like?
A Tale of Baby Owls Guest Blogger, R'becca Groff The first sign of an owl living back on our acreage happened late last summer when I heard a rabbit being taken late one night. A rabbit sounds like a human baby when it’s in trouble, and it is the painful reality of...
How Does a Controlled Burn Help Forests and Prairies?
We see wonderful results from prescribed burns on our property.
Why Do Stinging Nettle Sting?
A delightful swatch of color flitted by as we sat on our back deck on one of spring’s first warm sunny days. It was a red admiral butterfly that landed on a post just a few feet from us. It appeared to be enjoying the weather as much as we were. We’ve since...
Are You a Weather Spotter?
Guest Blog by Jacki Hull of Bedford, Virginia Written about April 19 and 20 storms "Well, two ugly storms in one week is enough for us for a while. Today has been full of dark clouds, winds, rain. Then as we were sitting on the porch for a quiet read of the daily...
How Do You Relieve Stress?
Kid Adventure Nature reduces stress. We saw it in action at Winding Pathways on an early April Sunday morning. About 15 kids from the Faith Formation Group of Peoples Church Unitarian Universalist visited. Most were five to ten years...
What is Spring?
What is that? A Patch of green! This spring the upper Midwest languished in browns, blacks, and slate landscapes underneath piles of grimy snow with grey skies blanketing overhead. Meanwhile, the South was vibrant in green expanses of fields and brilliant bursts of...
Wren Antics
As lingering snow banks melt we look forward to the arrival of our favorite spring guests. They arrive in late April, but we put out the welcoming mat a month ahead. For many years a pair of house wrens have nested right outside our dining room window. We laugh at...
Canada Geese
Learn about the cycle of goose courting and parenting.
Do Birds Like Milo?
We recently bought a bag of cheap wild bird seed. It contained mostly milo with some sunflower, cracked corn, and millet mixed in. We should have known better but dumped a scoop of it on top of our platform feeder at Winding Pathways and watched what happened. Birds...
How Do I Raise Baby Chicks?
In the past few years, thousands of Americans have begun tending small flocks of chickens in their backyards. For most folks, it’s a new hobby, but we’ve been at it far longer. Rich began raising chickens in his suburban backyard when he was eight or nine years old -...
What Kind of Cherry Trees Should I Plant?
Catalog Dreaming While subzero cold enveloped Winding Pathways we discovered delightful seed and nursery catalogs in our mailbox. Leafing through their photos of rosy ripe tomatoes, peaches, and sweet corn made us dream of warm days as the frigid wind whistled around...
Urban Coyotes
At 2 a.m. one frigid February night we were startled awake by coyotes yipping and yapping right behind our house at Winding Pathways. The next morning, we discovered their tracks all around our snowy yard. It explains why we haven’t seen many cottontail rabbits in...
Walking the Labyrinth in the Snow
The subtleties of walking a labyrinth in fresh snow or in the dark have not been lost on me. Muscle memory, night vision, and simple observation help navigate the terrain when obvious landmarks are obscure. Before the snow fell, when I walk the labyrinth in the dark,...