The Nature of Things
It is now already five years since the Christmas of 2016 when we last gathered fully as family in Niagara, some three months after Stiny de Jong's funeral. We were drawn together to hang on to that sense of belonging that only a matriarch can supply. We gathered for a
Ontario Native Plant Gardening Facebook Group Shares
The Ontario Native Plant Gardening Facebook group regularly shares links to informative and interesting articles. But only members have access, and the links are hard to find back, so I have determined to share them again.
Music Visualizations
Music is primarily an aural experience. But of the other senses, the visual is next in line. Listeners have long been fascinated with ‘watching’ the music – seeing musicians ‘get into it’ with body and soul, focusing on flying fingers, following along with a score, and reveling in synchronous dance
1 – By their names
For keeping track of plant names, after sketching and scribbling on sheets of paper, I knew there had to be a better way, and that it should involve my phone in the field, still tied in somehow to my computer in the office. I'd been exploring possibilities for Windows and
2 – Getting the lay of the land
The Plant Recorder app is actually elegantly simple and the built-in help screens are more than enough to navigate it. But of course, the app is quite useless until you can get it to relate to your gardens, and getting this setup seemed a bit daunting at first.
3 – Putting Plants to Ground
Once the plan was in hand, it was time to get the plants to ground. I was pleased to be looking at a Plant Recorder plan that matched my reality and that had 84 plants neatly arranged in my driveway.
4 – The Ins and Outs of Plant Data
With a Plant Recorder's fully functioning and up-to-date XML file it is easily possible to migrate this out again. Excel will open an XML file and present it as columns with headers. From there I can delete columns and/or rows and export to other interfaces, like my Table Press list
5 – Weeding and Watering
There are plenty of pots to fill in the Plant Recorder app. Some I wont bother with. Since the focus of my gardens is plants that are native to Ontario, there’s little point in filling out Country and Region. Habitat is being used for the code ‘N’ to specify Native.