You’re living on top of history, your story standing on others before it. If you live on the water, that history could be middens.   Chesapeake Country is dotted with thousands of the old refuse heaps built up of trash left behind by pre-Europeans. Our middens are mostly eastern oyster shells — plus tons of bones, shells, pottery shards and chipped stone that survived thousands of years.  

While azaleas were blooming mid-month, I passed a home in the Deale area where the bushes were so large that it must have been impossible to look out through the lower part of the front windows. They must have been sheared at some point because the middle of the plants appeared very bushy.     This is a common problem and one that is simple to correct — once you get out the pruners and get past fear. 

On the village Earth, we have many neighbors. As Earth Day turns 44 on April 22 — Bay Weekly’s 21st birthday— we propose 10 bright ideas to make our time in Chesapeake Country more Earth-friendly and our future more sustainable.     Some you can do in your home; others will take the will of cities and counties, with you behind them pushing. Bringing them home is a job for each of us, and the more of us there are, the better results we’ll get. To think globally and act locally this Earth Day, start here.

Since the last Ice Age, monarch butterflies have followed the path of the glaciers in their annual migration. The orange and black creatures are more fragile than the magnolia blossoms now in their short season. Yet in September, tens of thousands of monarchs fly from the midlands of the United States all the way to southern Mexico.

Just because you have a rototiller or a Mantis doesn’t mean you have to till your soil until it is pulverized into dust. The more you till the soil, the more damage you do to its structure. The finer you pulverize the soil, the faster its organic matter is destroyed.     Here’s how to do the job right.     Pray for perfect conditions, as soil should never be tilled when too wet or too dry.

A lot of people out there are trying to sell you weed-and-feed fertilizer. Don’t buy them — or you’re buying trouble. Here’s why they don’t always work — and may cause problems.     Two different types of weed killers, aka herbicides, are blended with lawn fertilizers in formulating the so-called weed-and-feed blend. One kind is advertised to kill broadleaf weeds; another to kill crabgrass.

You can reduce the amount of water you use for your vegetable garden by 70 percent and count on a bountiful harvest. If you lay out your garden in rows, trickle irrigation can make a world of difference.

America goes green on St. Patrick’s Day. From beer to dress to hair (and once upon a time, the Chicago River), green is the color of choice.      In putting on the green, we’re not alone. St. Patrick’s stomping grounds is doing its own greening, returning to its roots to recapture a way of life and an economy rising from the Old Sod.

Larger seeds — such as those of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, eggplants, marigolds, peppers, tomatoes and zinnias — can be direct seeded into the containers in which they will grow until they are ready to be transplanted into the garden. This eliminates the shock associated with transplanting. Direct seeding requires more space initially, but these large seeds do not require the tender care essential in germinating small seeds.     They will germinate easily providing you keep the rooting medium moist but not wet.

It takes a village of vessels to build an oyster reef.     Two barges do the heavy work. One, the construction barge, bears a GPS-guided crane. That barge is anchored to stay a while in Harris Creek, just beyond Knapps Narrows on the Eastern Shore. Another barge holds tons of fossilized oyster shells awaiting the crane. That barge travels back and forth to Curtis Bay, on the south side of Baltimore Harbor, where it meets a freight train of hopper cars full of more fossilized Florida oyster shells.