With my blogging taking a significant hit over the last year mostly due to a lack of desire to write, I now realize I have a lot of things I can post about now that the desire to write here is back. With that, today I’m going to share some random nature bits from the last year, mostly from my yard or neighborhood but also some other areas around the state! Let’s dive in! First up is a spring ephemeral that comes up in and around our yard (and the state), scrambled eggs, Corydalis sp.. There are a couple of species and this one is likely to be aurea or…

A few years ago I bought a Salvia madrensis plant from the local nursery only to have it never make it to its late fall/winter blooming period as it ended up being nipped by a freeze. This year our very warm fall, soon-to-be winter, has allowed a new plant I bought earlier this year to actually spike and begin blooming. While a lot of the garden is attempting to rest, many plants are trucking along, though a bit weary. Salvia madrensis is not weary, as you can tell, and is rather lovely. I know eventually winter will catch up with us (I think?!) and it will move on into the…

Well, it took a good six or so weeks of us putting our heads down on the weekend and just getting the work done, but the concrete beds are all poured! We finished the last one on Saturday afternoon and my back rejoices! The next steps will be to fill the remaining beds with soil, put some mulch down, and eventually get the perimeter beds done. Chris has figured out a way to make that work, I think, by creating smaller concrete sections and piecing them together. I’m just glad we can finally grow something out there once again! I’m really looking forward to a stellar tomato season! The beds…

Earlier this summer I decided I wanted to get back into using a FitBit. After finding a very basic and cheap model for $20 on NextDoor, I was set up to start walking challenges with friends again. I’ve had a Garmin watch for several years now and actually love it, but there are less folks I know in real life using it as their preferred fitness watch. I ended up having to switch to a better FitBit later on that I found, also for a steal, because the cheap, basic version was cheap and basic and fell apart. Suffice to say, I lept back into walking challenges this summer and…

This month has felt very long and also incredibly short. It kicked off with this momma wolf spider out in the edible garden. I was trying to pull the pennywort that had taken over one of the perimeter beds when she scurried out with her babies. I quickly took some photos and let her be. And it wouldn’t be a spring season without a little too much water. After a rather soggy May and then a week of some heavier rain that lingered in early June, we had some minor flooding of the yard and pond fringe. Then of course, as per normal, we dried out and had nothing for…

Coming out of the stupor of winter has been cathartic. February was a mess but even in February I felt a shift in life. Getting my first vaccine shot amplified that shift but the return to blooming plants and insects flying about has really set in motion this feeling of life switching again. Being able to witness the evolution of spring in the yard has been delightful this year for so many reasons. It is always something I enjoy but I think February just wore me down that everything in nature is a marvel. I was heading out to the edible garden on a walkabout with Forest last weekend when…

This is mostly a photographic post and a write-up at the end. These photos start Sunday afternoon February 14th and end February 19th. All of the snow was basically gone by Saturday and a few chunks of ice that had fallen off the roof and into the flower beds were gone on Sunday. The two photos above were taken about 3:30 am when I got up to see if it was snowing. The glowing in the background of the second photo is a heat lamp on our lemon tree. We had a similar set up on the three citrus in the backyard. What a whirlwind last week was. I think…