Margaret Roach

IT’S ALWAYS a treat to hear “The Washington Post” garden columnist Adrian Higgins’s voice on the other end of the phone. He rung up because he’d received an early copy of the new redo of my 21-year-old book “A Way to Garden

I’VE WATCHED BIRDS for decades, but in one matter, the matter of sparrows, I mostly took the lazy route, simply marking down “sparrow” in my eBird checklist whenever I saw a streaky little brownish bird, not trying to figure out which sparrow. If I’d had the new book “Peterson Reference Guide to Sparrows” back then, maybe I’d have behaved better

make a bed with cardboard or newsprint MAYBE the easiest and most economical way to transform an area of lawn (or some weedy spot) into a planting bed for ornamentals or edibles capitalizes on the magic of two recyclables, corrugated cardboard and newsprint. I simply place over mown lawn or an area I’ve cut back, then moisten and pin or weigh down (with earth staples or stones) and cover with mulch. A CENTURIES-OLD, sustainable way of making raised garden beds called hugelkultur, or hill culture, is “like sheet mulching or lasagna gardening,” says Dave Whitinger of National Gardening Association, but in hugelkultur, “wood is the first level of your sheet-mulched bed. One way of Craig’s to prep a bed that I haven’t tried myself: growing not in soil at all, but in straw bales.

And then there’s puffballs and then there’s little tiny cluster, tight little things like clusters of things that are tight on the ground, maybe on mulch or something that I sometimes get, like if I get a load of mulch. But when you’re mushroom hunting, especially when you’re starting out, it’s great because a lot of these mushrooms you can cluster into groups, just like you’re doing right there. There’s certain mushrooms that grow on trees that are bracket-like fungus, and horse hooves, and then there’s other ones that grow in mulch. The one that I think you’re talking about is called a Bird’s Nest Fungus, because when you look at it, you’ll see it’s a little tiny cup with maybe three or four what look like eggs in there.