NEWS
By SUSAN REIMER | April 23, 2009
Eliza Toomey's backyard is about the size of a postage stamp, and it is bathed in shadows cast by a thick canopy of trees. Clearly, if she were to have a vegetable garden, it would have to be planted in someone else's yard. So she passed out fliers, had a meeting and, now, Toomey is planting vegetables in the backyards of 21 of her neighbors in Murray Hill in Annapolis. The 25-year-old middle school teacher is planting the seeds and the seedlings and, though she is asking for a little help with watering, she will care for the gardens, harvest the vegetables and distribute the bounty to her 21 new friends every week this summer.
NEWS
By Andrea F. Siegel | February 22, 2009
Scouring Federal Hill, Don Smith and Bob Marciak hoped they would find a spacious rowhouse, a little different in style, that would accommodate their wish for a backyard as a soothing refuge from the bustling city. They looked at about 50 houses, Smith recalled, before opening the door to a renovated century-old residence where a gas fireplace exuded a welcome feeling, where the wide living room had a wall of built-in cabinets and shelves, and where a graceful staircase and decorative columns drew the eye toward the rest of the house.
NEWS
By COMPILED FROM NEWS SERVICE AND WEB REPORTS | October 13, 2008
The poor NHL. Even when the league ties a hard-rocking outfit to its opening games, some kind of glitch happens. As part of the champion Detroit Red Wings' first game, the NHL set up to televise a piece of a Def Leppard concert, also happening in Detroit on Thursday night, in NHL Face-Off Rocks. During the show, the Stanley Cup was handed to the band's singer, Joe Elliott, who held it aloft for the benefit of the crowd and then proceeded to put it on a pedestal - upside down. At least he didn't try to pour some sugar from the Cup. Fertile thinking Helen Barnes wants to compete in the Olympics.
NEWS
By DAN THANH DANG | July 15, 2008
The Q: Kathleen Chance wants to put an above-ground pool in the back of her Baltimore home, but she says that utility lines droop dangerously low through her yard. "The electrical line has been this way for 40 years and has prevented us from doing anything with our backyard," Chance said. "We have tried over the years to get this wire moved, but have failed. And not only does that electrical line cross over the backyard to the utility pole, but we also have four other wires that cross our backyard to that same pole from our neighbors' yards."
NEWS
May 11, 2008
The Maryland Department of Agriculture, with the University of Maryland Cooperative Extension's Home and Garden Information Center, has launched a campaign, "Take It From Maryland Farmers: Backyard Actions for a Cleaner Chesapeake Bay." The campaign offers easy backyard actions that homeowners can take to help the Chesapeake Bay. Tips for homeowners include: taking a soil test, reading a fertilizer bag, water conservation, grass-cycling, and proper mulching techniques for gardens and for trees, and integrated pest management.
NEWS
By Liz F. Kay | April 2, 2008
The predawn bang woke them both up. At first, Tom and Pat Walker were afraid that the other had fallen out of bed. The truth was more frightful: An intruder had broken a glass sliding door of their Pasadena home and was rifling through their belongings. The homeowners reacted quickly, and soon the pair -- he 74, she 63 -- had chased a man less than half their age around the backyard and through the house and held him for police. "I've hunted bear. I ain't scared of nothing like that," said Tom Walker yesterday as he and his wife cleaned up after the incident.
NEWS
By McClatchy-Tribune | October 14, 2007
Creating the ambience of a campfire with a fire pit is one of the hottest trends in backyard recreation. Jim Jarvis of Weatherford, Texas, owner of an online fire-pit accessories company, says the trend was sparked by the clay chimeneas that started showing up in Mexican import stores a few years back. Alex Bandon, multimedia editor of This Old House magazine, helped show readers how to build a fire pit from cast-concrete stone for about $500 in the September issue. "People are turning their yards into outdoor rooms, and a fire pit is better than a barbecue because it's generally circular, which makes it very social."
NEWS
By Melissa Harris | September 16, 2007
Glenn Colgrove awoke to the familiar thud of a car crash on Route 99 at the edge of his backyard. But unlike previous accidents there, he heard a driver screaming, "Help me." He dreaded what he would find outside. He locked the doors to his house and began walking to the wreckage of the head-on collision. A few minutes later, as he spoke with a 911 dispatcher, he watched the driver of the other vehicle, 20-year-old Doug Dellinger, die. The crash, which occurred about 2:30 a.m. Aug. 15, was not the first time smashed vehicles and injured people had ended up in Colgrove's tree-lined backyard.
NEWS
By RICK MAESE | August 26, 2007
When a headline leaps off the sports pages, squirms its way out of our world entirely and finds itself oozing out of the mouth of Bill O'Reilly or Nancy Grace -- visualize: gums flapping like a flag in a hurricane -- we're all in grave danger. Not because of any specific blabbermouth, per se, but because of their influence over an audience that generally can't distinguish pigskin from pork rinds. The unversed don't know better, and when the subject is someone such as Michael Vick, they're handed a painter's palette with a single color and one giant broad brush.
NEWS
By ROB KASPER | August 11, 2007
During a recent scorching evening, Peter Norman and I slipped into his downtown Baltimore backyard to watch his bees work. Like many residents of Baltimore, these honeybees were out on their "front porch," the lower part of their hive, where the air is cooler, Norman said. An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 honeybees reside in the 3-foot-tall hive, a squarish structure, ringed in handsome varnished pine. There is a hierarchy to the hive, he told me. The queen and nursery bees reside on the lower floor, or "brood"; the honey and its foragers can be found in the upper levels.