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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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The Last Green Thread | FL Wildlife Corridor
If you’ve got 17 minutes today, hit play and watch. I have a lot of thoughts about this that I’ll have to expand on another day so I’ll leave it at this.
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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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Post April Showers at Burroughs Park
*blows dust off of WordPress* Hello there! There comes a point when I take these long breaks from writing here (which I haven’t taken one this long in many years) that at some point I start having a contest with myself to see how long I can go without writing. A week? Can I make it two? Two? Why not go a month? Paired with the sporadic posting from the previous two months before, well, the blog hasn’t really been a priority. Honestly, it still isn’t but I figured I shouldn’t let it lay here floundering in the internet wasteland. So, let’s go back to early April when we made…
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Friday Evening After A Rain
Loquats from our friend’s tree that I turned into jelly/thick syrup. The evening sun is blaring into the office while Forest whoooshes dinosaurs and blocks around the living room. He’s supposed to be picking up his blocks so that he can watch a cartoon or three but as always playing is greater than putting up the mess you create. I imagine in about thirty minutes when he tires of playing once again I’ll be getting onto him to put his blocks up. The refrain will be “But there’s so much! I can’t do it!” to which I’ll reply “Don’t get it all out if you can’t put it up!” The…
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Life Lately | Early May 2019
Thinking: Two pretty big controversial things: The First: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds @rareseeds is hosting Clive Bundy, the racist, violent, militia, anti-government, anti-public lands, anti-environmental activist to speak at its gathering of 10,000 gardners in May. Disgusting. Everyone should boycott Baker Creek immediately. RETWEET pic.twitter.com/svn6wnlQgx — Kierán Suckling (@KieranSuckling) April 26, 2019 You can click through and read the entire thread including background on Baker Creek’s previous interactions with Bundy and just exactly what knowledge they already had about him and his involvement in the Bundy standoff in 2014 as well as his familial association with the Malheur NWR standoff in 2016. Apparently Bundy is also an heirloom seed saver…
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Status Update: Life is Chaotic
I haven’t meant to go radio silent these last nearly two weeks. It’s just been hectic and I’ve lost all energy for writing and sharing here. Things started trending frenetic about two weeks ago when a coworker moved on to another position. We’d just lost a more recent hire a few weeks prior to that and losing this person who had been here for 16 years was rough. We’re very busy at work right now and now we’re down to just a few main office staff. Already that felt heavy. The same day our friend/coworker left we found out Baloo, the pup above, crossed the Rainbow Bridge. For those unfamiliar,…
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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…