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Dan’s Gardening and Birding Blog
Welcome to my blog. I have been blogging for about 7 years on www.dansgardening.blogspot.com. I decided to bring my story to Medium.
I became involved with vegetable gardening at a young age as my parents and grandparents were avid gardeners. I must admit my first introduction to gardening was weeding my parent’s huge vegetable garden, and I wasn’t too impressed at the time. As time went on I caught the gardening bug. By the time I was 10 or 12, I was growing my own sunflowers and entering magazine contests for the largest Mammoth Russian seed heads. Many years later my wife and I bought a house in the country in 1992, and I now have 3 vegetable gardens and many perennial flower beds.
At about the same time I also became interested in bird watching, as several of our neighbors were already feeding birds. So I built a bird feeder and my Dad helped with a pole made of half-inch galvanized pipe. Yup, he was a plumber. To this day I use pipe for my bird feeder poles. At the time, I even made homemade suet cakes by melting down suet and adding seed. Now, I buy my suet cakes.
Back in the 1970s we would get flocks ( 20 to 30 birds) of Evening Grosbeaks at our feeder where I grew up in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. These birds are far less prevalent now. Where I currently live, in Central NY State, I think I have seen one of these…
