Author Archives: maryjane

I don’t care that it’s everywhere.

Yes, yes, it is tactlessly thumbtacked with to-do lists and flyers.

Photo by Benjamin Stone via Flickr

It is perfunctorily plugging bottles from here to farfoodle.

Photo by Ccyyrree via Wikimedia Commons

Again, I don’t care.

Cork is cool, my friend—cool with a capital C.

I mean, really, just the whole cork tree harvest situation is pretty awesome in terms of sustainability. (When the World Wildlife Fund says, “The harvesting of cork oak offers one of the finest examples of traditional, sustainable land use,” you know it’s a good thing.)

But, when you stop to look at a simple bottle cork, to examine its little woody intricacies and feel its once-living, spongy-soft texture, you come to appreciate this marvelous (yet often cast away) material.

Photo by cPinoB via Pixabay

We have a thriving community of mail-art enthusiasts on my chatroom (you must get in on the movement!). Mulling over myriad ideas, I started thinking about ink stamps because stamps are an easy way to add creative touches to any loving letter, dontcha think?

A quick online search of DIY stamps led me to corks (you knew I’d eventually come full circle here), and I stumbled upon the sweetest little stamp tutorial, complete with corks.

Sound fun?

Come on, I’ll show ya the way …

DIY: Cork Stamps by SweetSpotCards.com

Just promise you’ll send some cork-stamped mail our way, k?

We toured a bevy of beehives around the world …

and found the variety to be voluminous (good word, eh?).

Yet, there always seems to be a glorious stroke of genius cropping up among the ever-inventive community of conscientious beekeepers.

The latest?

German apiarist and sculptor Guenther Mancke presents the Sun Hive, which brings beekeepers another step closer to hives built by bees in nature.

“The underlying idea is that by tailoring hives to bees’ natural tendencies, they are apt to thrive and thus, be bolstered against factors causing bee colony collapses,” explains Kimberly Mok of Treehugger.com. “The Sun Hive is meant as a conservation method, rather than for lots of honey production. It’s a beautiful, bee-friendly, and even bee-therapeutic design, made with the bees’ natural inclinations at its very heart.”

Take a peek:

“You know that feeling you get when you’re being stared at?”

This question, posed by social psychologist Ilan Shrira of the Loyola University in Chicago, is one we can all relate to, right?

“Out of the corner of your eye, even outside your field of vision, you can just tell someone is checking you out, sizing you up, or trying to make eye contact with you.”

Yup.

Let’s say you’re out grocery shopping,

perusing the produce,

when you suddenly feel as if someone is looking at you

(and it’s not one of those heirloom potatoes).

Now, don’t get jumpy.

I don’t mean the creepy kind of looking—just, you know, looking.

photo by Shelby H via Wikimedia Commons

And you know they’re looking without even looking to see that they’re looking.

Maybe your neck prickles a bit,

your cheeks feel a slight flush,

or you just KNOW, but you don’t really know why.

Then, you dare to glance around,

and sure enough—there’s a looker.

photo by Steve-h via Wikimedia Commons

Zoiks.

Young, old, male, female … kitty-cat.

Doesn’t matter.

The point is: you knew.

How?

“Sometimes it almost feels like ESP, this ability to detect another person’s stare, because it often comes at the fringes of our awareness. But far from being ESP, the perception originates from a system in the brain that’s devoted just to detecting where others are looking,” Shrira explains in a blog post on PsychologyToday.com. “This ‘gaze detection’ system is especially sensitive to whether someone’s looking directly at you (for example, whether someone’s staring at you or at the clock just over your shoulder). Studies that record the activity of single brain cells find that particular cells fire when someone is staring right at you, but—amazingly—not when the observer’s gaze is averted just a few degrees to the left or right of you (then different cells fire instead).”

Who knew?

You knew.

Photo by Ksnordstrand via Wikimedia Commons

If you farm in the Midwest, you may be able to help monarch butterflies next year and get paid in the process.

Photo by Kenneth Dwain Harrelson via Wikimedia Commons

Monarchs make their way to the United States in the summertime, and in recent years, these ecologically important (and oh-so-pretty) pollinators are having trouble surviving the season due to a lack of food.

Seems strange, especially during the summer months, when green things abound, but one of the monarchs’ main food sources is the native flowering milkweed plant, and it is rapidly disappearing in the wake of herbicides.

Photo collage by Pixeltoo via Wikimedia Commons

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service is taking action to target milkweed restoration and management on private farms and ranches in 10 states that provide critical habitat for monarchs (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin).

“We’re focusing efforts in the southern Great Plains and Midwest—two regions at the heart of the monarch’s migration,” announced the USDA last month. “In the southern Great Plains, our work will focus on rangelands and ways to improve the health of pastures so they provide good forage for livestock and food for monarchs. In the Midwest, we’re focusing on integrating plantings into croplands and making improvements to wetland areas.”

As with its other cost-share programs, the NRCS will offer financial assistance, incentives, and technical guidance to landowners whose property meets the specifications for monarch habitat establishment and/or improvement. The agency’s goal is to partner with farmers and ranchers “to voluntarily establish habitat for the monarch on working lands while ensuring America’s farms and ranches stay productive.”

Pollinators, as we know, are a vital factor in that equation.

If you’d like to get a jump on establishing healthy monarch habitat this spring, get in touch with your local USDA service center for details.