When I decided to dedicate one of my edible garden beds to flowers I was originally planning to make it half native and half zinnias or other flowers. That is what it is this year but I am planning to change that next year to an entirely native bed and move the zinnias to one […]
A Writing Habit: Step One – Get Out of Inertia
I’m going to attempt a not-quite-daily writing habit here this summer. It may be a few paragraphs, maybe just a few sentences, but the goal is to write more here which will hopefully lead to more writing outside of this blog. I miss the days when I could sit down and jot down a few […]
Tomato Season Begins
It was a bit of a rocky start to tomato season and unseasonably hot temperatures in May thwarted a lot of the production but we are finally starting to harvest some tomatoes. So far they are all primarily Chris’ tomatoes that he ended up buying not long in the planting season after the ones he […]
A Forced Slow Down
May was a very busy month for us and as I peered out into June and July, all I saw was busy, busy, busy. Don’t worry, it still looks like that, and with an ever growing pile of field work at work for a thin crew of field-bios-who-also-double-as-project-managers-and-other-indoorsy-type-biologist-job-descriptions, things are very chaotic. I was actually […]
20-20-20-10
Ah, how is that for a cryptic post title? As I was writing recently, I have a lot going on. Merge that with a lot of major anniversaries/markings of time in May and June and well, 2022 is full to the brim! 20 Years Post-College Graduation May 11, 2002 I originally wrote up a post […]
Life Lately | Mid-May 2022
Hello friends! Let’s make this a rambling post, shall we? I feel like summer is over. And by that, I mean, June and July is practically planned out and I can already see August and the start of school. Now, I usually keep a pretty good calendar in my head because I have a visual […]
Egg Bombed by a Pipevine Swallowtail Butterfly
A few weeks ago I had a momma pipevine swallowtail egg bomb our Aristolochia fimbriata plants. We have several different mounds of the plants as the original location has spread via seed to other locations in the garden, and this isn’t a problem because we get one or two generations of caterpillars coming through and […]
White-striped Longtail Butterfly (Chioides albofasciatus)
Over the weekend I came across a new-to-me butterfly in the garden while we were working on the edible garden fencing. It flitted from blackberry flower to blackberry flower and my first reaction was “oh, the long-tailed skippers are here already?” Then I did a double take and realized that wasn’t a long-tailed skipper and […]
Around the Garden | Late April 2022
Despite the delay in spring, things are slowly waking up and moving along in the garden. I still haven’t mulched all of the flower beds nor have I caught up on clearing the paths of weeds, but I’m doing what I can. Frankly, I look back at the energy I had even with a newborn […]
Field Findings | April 2022
Last week I was able to escape into the field for a few hours to a local field site and in between counting trees, logging dbh, and estimating height, I scoped out some of the things going on in the area. This isn’t a place anyone would regularly trek, especially given a lot of the […]
