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Ionopsis utricularioides | Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park
I’m digging through the last of the Florida photos from March and have several orchids I want to share with you, this species being one of them. This is a tiny, epipyhytic orchid with small purple flowers resembling the purple utricularia, a species of carnivorous plant that lives in the water, hence the species part of its name. There’s some other interesting information about this orchid in the Dade chapter of the Florida Native Plane Society’s newsletter here if you scroll down about 3/4 of the way. It’s a sweet little orchid that is easily passed by if you aren’t looking for it.
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100 Happy Days: Days 8-15
Day 8: Pulled all of the lettuce for the season. Day 9: Harvested the first tomato of the season, a Tomande variety. Day 10: Last minute self portrait before I got into bed. We had our Bradley birth class that night and were exhausted when we got home. Day 11: Oops, I forgot to take a shot! Day 12: Blue Beauty tomatoes….looking forward to trying this new variety. Day 13: Received my issue of Taproot in the mail. I love getting this quarterly and look forward to a slow read each time. Day 14: My hard working husband busting his butt to get the closet renovated in the guest bedroom…
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Tribute To My Favorite Trails: National Trails Day 2014
Today was National Trails Day and I was unable to get out and enjoy a local trail as we were working on house related activities. I thought I’d take a few minutes and share a photo from some of my favorite hiking trails and areas over the years. The Florida Trail in Ocala National Forest…you might see a black bear! Caprock Canyon State Park, Texas The view down to the Lake of the Clouds Hut from Mt. Washington. White Mountains National Forest, New Hampshire. Appalachian Trail From the trails at Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, Florida On the Crosstimbers Trail. Lake Texoma, Texas From the trails at the St. Sebastian…
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Zoe’s Garden Gloves | Wordless Wednesday
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Fanciful Foxgloves
The foxglove blooms peaked back in April but I have sat on the photos for a month now. I meant to write about the wonderful blossoms that dotted the flower garden several weeks ago but time passed and other posts went up instead. It really was glorious there for awhile. We would pull up in the driveway to purple, pink, and white spires of flowers poking up from around the garden. There was definitely a cottage garden feel about the landscape. Now most of them are in seed, the stalks flopped over and the leaves slowly rotting away. The last several photos document a strange foxglove we had growing. We…
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Tomatoes: Coming Soon
Patiently waiting for dreamy delightfulness of ripe tomatoes. -ML
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100 Happy Days: Days 1-7
I started seeing the tag #100HappyDays pop up around the internet a month or two ago and thought it was interesting. The gist is to snap a shot of something that makes you happy for 100 Days. I was watching the photos my cousin Elizabeth posting and remarked that it sounded like a project I might do but wasn’t sure if I felt up to taking a photo a day for 100 days. My track record with any kind of photo challenge hasn’t been all that great. I attempted the 365 portrait challenges that were popular on Flickr 5 years ago and even tried a Summer in Photos two summers…
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Zoe & Grayson
I got to see my niece and nephew, Zoe & Grayson, two weekends in a row after not having seen them since the very end of January. It was quite a crazy two weekends, the second weekend especially since they came down to see me. Zoe’s moving on from kindergarten to first grade! I can’t believe it! And Grayson, well, he’s a little daredevil. I’m afraid for my future in dealing with having a boy of my own…I think my hair is going to turn gray fast! (Still haven’t really found a gray hair yet. There’s one or two that I can’t tell if they are white or just really…
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Toad Song
It’s been a rainy 2.5 days here in my neck of Texas. Between 11am Monday morning and about 5pm yesterday afternoon we had 4.7″ of rain. We’ve had even more since then and my backyard is more flooded this morning than it was last night. There’s even more of a swimming pool in my front yard than you see in this video. The chorus you hear singing is from the eastern narrow mouthed toad! At one point last night I asked Chris if he was playing this video and he said, “No, that’s the toads outside!” So, that’s how loud they were! Usually we get a lot of green tree…
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‘Lauren’s Grape’ Poppy Season
Another one of my favorite garden plants is the ‘Lauren’s Grape’ Poppy. Last year I wrote about them over on Sprout Dispatch and they bloomed at about the same time last year as this year, maybe a little bit earlier last year, though, since we got them in later this year. I swore I saved seeds last year but couldn’t find them and we ended up buying a new packet of seeds from our local nursery instead. We had a mix of some coming up on their own from last year and then Chris sprinkled the seeds about in various places in the garden. I’m hoping a few of the…