![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Instant ecosystem
Jun. 23rd, 2011 11:09 pmThe spot where I feed ferals is just outside one of my bedroom windows. In an effort to amuse my indoor felines, I set up a birdfeeder--currently a long shallow dish--on the window ledge so the (mostly) sparrows will come and be interesting just on the other side of the panes.
Below the window is a bricked-in opening at ground level, with a cement sill where I put the ferals' water dish. It has one of those sheet-metal protectors sunk into the ground, a half-circle that's actually below the sill. Within the protector, not much grows; a few blades of grass, some low weeds maybe, a twisted root that's probably left over from something else.
I admit I'm not tidy in filling the feeder--it's above my head--and the birds certainly aren't tidy in their eating. Which could explain why I'm suddenly growing sunflowers. What astonishes me is not only their rapid and considerable growth in a period in which there has been almost no rain, but the almost simultaneous arrival of bugs to eat the plants, judging from the holes in the leaves, and a strangling ivy of some kind to wind up the sunflower stems.
None of this appears to have slowed the sunflowers down any.
They're nice to look at, and they make a good screen in front of the water dish. And it's easy to toss the old water their way when I rinse out the bowl. I suppose the maintenance people will take 'em out with a weedwhacker eventually, but in the meantime--
--Sunflowers!
Below the window is a bricked-in opening at ground level, with a cement sill where I put the ferals' water dish. It has one of those sheet-metal protectors sunk into the ground, a half-circle that's actually below the sill. Within the protector, not much grows; a few blades of grass, some low weeds maybe, a twisted root that's probably left over from something else.
I admit I'm not tidy in filling the feeder--it's above my head--and the birds certainly aren't tidy in their eating. Which could explain why I'm suddenly growing sunflowers. What astonishes me is not only their rapid and considerable growth in a period in which there has been almost no rain, but the almost simultaneous arrival of bugs to eat the plants, judging from the holes in the leaves, and a strangling ivy of some kind to wind up the sunflower stems.
None of this appears to have slowed the sunflowers down any.
They're nice to look at, and they make a good screen in front of the water dish. And it's easy to toss the old water their way when I rinse out the bowl. I suppose the maintenance people will take 'em out with a weedwhacker eventually, but in the meantime--
--Sunflowers!