Greetings, Manor Hors! Periodically, "The Roving Pecker" presents urgent missives from filthy esteemed guest writers. Today's post is written by D'Hermitage! ----------- Horlettes, stay with me, it’s a bit much. When Covid happened, some people began to realize how much they’d like to have a little greenery inside their house, since they were no longer able to go outside and ignore them on their walks because of lockdown. A lot of people experimented and shared their experiences online. This is a distilled version of that. THE WHAT: Just wood chips or pine bark and perlite - we’ll refer to this combination as substrate from hereon. You can add or mix coconut chips, pine bark, fern fibre, your old wooden sculptures or grandma’s bones but the basics are wood chips (like those for orchids) and perlite. My wood chip to perlite ratio is one bag of wood chips/pine bark + 1/3 of a bag of perlite. FYI: You can also just buy a bag of orchid soil then add 1/3 of the perlit...

Greetings, Manor Hors! Periodically, "The Roving Pecker" presents urgent missives from filthy esteemed guest writers. Today's is from D'Hermitage! ---------------------------------------------- Peckers! Welcome to the virgin issue of "Morning Wood," the latest addition to the manor where we start your day in green - meaning nature matters, the birds and the bees, the moss and the trees, famous people adjacent, and some-such morning activities. But not the numbered ones! We are not savages after all. I know, I know, when you think morning wood, Judi Dench is not what comes to mind, but today, we change that. Why-the-trunk-not? Because Judi Dench (Dame to the monarchists), loves wood all day long. Yes, the living one. Judi Dench is a hor for trees! Shush your hor mouth you say? Au contraire. She has lots of trees and other vegetation, and she names her trees in memory of her friends. I don’t know how the Linnaean nomenclature peeps feel about that, but she’s...