By LYNNE IRONS

Many thanks to Abigail Higgins for chairing the monthly meeting of Homegrown. This was our third meeting attended by 20 or so would-be gardeners. We had the table heaped with seed catalogues and had a lively discussion about starting seeds indoors. Abigail encouraged us to purchase our starting mixture as opposed to using plain garden soil, to discourage damping off, a fungal problem caused by too heavy or too wet conditions that kills emerging seedlings.

Don’t look now but those large gray and white geese out in a field near you may not all be Canada geese. It is worth checking through those flocks carefully just now. The reason is that several unusual but similar species have appeared in our region recently that are most likely to be found mixed in with the Canadas. A greater white-fronted goose has been seen on Nantucket within the last week. This western and Midwestern species has been found here five times, the last record in 1995. More surprising, a pink-footed goose which nests from eastern Greenland eastward into Europe, was seen on the Cape a few days ago, apparently the first Massachusetts occurrence of the wild bird. To top that off, a flock of 24 cackling geese was seen at Salt Pond in Falmouth within the week, in easy sight of West Chop. This species looks like a miniature Canada goose, not much larger than a mallard, also from the west. The most recent issue of North American Birds, published by the American Birding Association, has a fine article on how to distinguish the three races of cackling goose: Ridgways, Aleutian and Richardson’s. We know of only two records for this species here, in 1958 and 1987. I’ll settle for any of the three forms. And while on the subject of possible vagrant goose species, it should be remembered that barnacle goose, another wanderer from Greenland and Europe, turned up in both Rhode Island last winter and other years in Massachusetts. While we seldom see geese arriving here from the Cape, the recent spate of very cold weather may be just the kind of conditions that would prompt their doing so.