Gardening
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Spring Monarch Season
Spring monarch butterfly season is now several months in the past but I thought I’d take some time to write about how it went overall. This season I opted not to use the tent mostly because I didn’t have a lot of tropical milkweed left from winter and by the time the monarchs started flitting through here we didn’t have a lot of new growth due to a late freeze in March. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop two females from egg bombing what milkweed I did have and I had somewhere between 40-50 eggs when I counted. I started the season attempting to be hands off. Most of the milkweed I…
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Zoe & Grayson Tree Updates
Right after we moved into our house we planted trees for our niece and nephew, Zoe & Grayson. I’ve taken photos with them over the years though we hadn’t done one in a while so when everyone was here for Memorial Day weekend I had them go out and take photos. They are growing up so fast—the trees and the kids! Zoe’s tree, a loblolly pine, planted March 9, 2013. She was 4.5 here! May 24, 2014, 5.5 May 26, 2019 at 10.5! You can also see our new house paint on the back of the man-cave in this photo. I know, I need to update on that soon. Grayson’s…
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Parsley Hawthorn | Flower Friday
Blooming gloriously just a couple of weeks ago, the parsley hawthorn, Crataegus marshallii was the centerpoint of the front flower bed. Positioned perfectly in front of our window on the stairwell, I’d peer out every time I went upstairs. A favorite of the pollinators for a short while, too. Happy Friday!
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Pollinator Friends | Wildlife Wednesday
Last week I took out the macro lens to get a different viewpoint on the world in the garden. I wasn’t expecting to take photos of wildlife but once out in the edible garden where the full-sun was during the lunch hour, I came across several interesting individuals who got their photos captured. First, there was this Eastern Yellowjacket, Vespula maculifrons that someone on iNaturliast identifed as a queen. Pretty nifty! I’m not sure what she was searching for on the ground but that’s where she landed after buzzing a few flowers. And then I noticed one of our honeybees sipping the sweet nectar of the cilantro blossoms. This is…
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Potting Bench Seedlings
The potting bench is full of seedlings and other plants in various stages of grow-out but I’m going to showcase three plants on the bench simply because that’s the ones I took photos of! Poke milkweed seedlings, Asclepias exaltata Native to the eastern third of the US, poke milkweed is a shade loving milkweed growing in dry to mesic forests. I attempted to grow this milkweed last year and had a few seeds sprout where I directly planted them in the garden but the deer trampled them and they died. This year I bought four or five packs of seeds from Prairie Moon in an attempt to stratify and establish…
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By the Pond: Iris virginica
I don’t get down to the pond shoreline nearly as often as I would like. The tug of the gardens is where I’m usually heading—weeds to pull, plants to sow, poking about needing to be done. I try to make a big tour of the yard a couple of times a month but sometimes it is less than that. However, this is the season for the iris and the Iris virginica are blooming along the far north east part of our portion of the pond shoreline. Chris saved these from a pipeline project years ago and they have continued to spread and stabilize the shoreline in an area he’s been…
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Early Spring Edible Garden Happenings
Right on cue, the cilantro began bolting in January/February and now blankets the back section of the garden in dainty white flowers. It is a pollinator attraction with bees, butterflies, and small flies congregating for their share of nectar. I always let the cilantro self seed so it pops up in the garden randomly as well as in the middle of the paths. Some years I move it out of the way, others, like this year, I leave it. I sowed several calendula seeds but only one plant has really thrived, putting off several branches of flowers and creating this bright yellow spot in the garden near the blackberries. I…
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Welcome Spring!
I would post a more original entry here for the spring equinox but my computer is currently on the fritz. It seemed to be working fine last Thursday and then we went camping over the weekend and when I came back and tried to log in—I was excited to try to share a not-so-great photo of my first zebra swallowtail butterfly—I found that my keyboard wanted to type double characters or the wrong characters. Some reboots, installation of updates, and finally hooking up a USB keyboard later, my keyboard is definitely fried. That and it also randomly turns on and off airplane mode. So, I’m using my computer sparingly and…
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First Luna Moth of the Season | Wildlife Wednesday
After work on Friday evening we were all relishing the later evening light before we went in to make dinner. Chris was fishing on the dock and Forest and I had just released the last pipevine swallowtail that eclosed in the tent. Forest and I walked down to the dock where Forest threw some sticks into the water and then proceeded to walk back up on shore to find more sticks, and as I was watching him I happened to notice a giant light green object on the side of a pine tree. My eyes focused and there it was, a luna moth! So exciting! Everyone was waking up after…
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Bat House Update!
I did a search for posts here but I couldn’t come up with anything that talked about the big bat house Chris built about 3.5 years ago. Chris had installed some smaller bat boxes to our pine trees when we moved in and one or two sometimes later—and we have bats in most of those as well—but the big bat house was meant to house lots of bats. Anyway, I realized I had never posted any videos here of the bats leaving (or coming back) and it is really pretty cool! We *have* reached the point where you can smell them in the heat of the summer when the wind…