vomiting russula rule-a

We're in "the end is near!" summer...just five weeks until September!  No rain, high humidity, and melting temperatures...pretty much August in Indiana.  Somehow new flowers are popping, like this hydrangea that I planted a couple of years ago and then forgot about:

The weather (and my apathetic watering) is pushing many flowers into seed.  I'm trying something new this year:  drying flowers for fall wreaths.  I've got my first batch hanging in the attic now!

I've got a fairly casual and even indifferent attitude toward this year's garden.  I know that I took on too much, cultivated too much land, and made a fatal mistake when I assumed that weeds germinating in the pathways would die.  There was only a tiny bit of decomposed mulch over the landscape fabric, and I figured that the weed roots would hit the fabric and wither away.  Well...not so much.  The white-marked places are the paths.  The weeds flourished and worse, spread quickly into my flower beds.

I can't mow the paths because too many flowers reseeded there from last year's garden and are starting to bloom, too.  So I'm going to let it grow, collect the seeds, and absorb the lesson.   I've gotten a lot of flowers and I'll get a lot of seeds, and I'll scale down next year...and cover these paths!  And in this tangled jungle are endless hummingbirds, bees, butterflies, grasshoppers, and seed-eating birds.  So it's still doing...something!

Last week I saw my first zebra swallowtail butterfly, and this week, my first giant swallowtail!  At first glance, it looks exactly like an eastern swallowtail:

eastern swallowtail

giant swallowtail

But if you look at their abdomens, you'll see that the eastern swallowtail is striped, while the giant swallowtail is plain.  In the top picture, too, you'll see that the eastern swallowtail yellow and black coloration is shown identically on the back of its wings.  But the giant swallowtail has an arresting pattern of deep black with bold yellow slashes.

Love!!

Last week, Todd pulled his old car around and temporarily parked it in our side driveway.  We were working at the kitchen table together when I noticed a darting shape by his front tire.  A groundhog!

(Photos taken through glass, so not quite clear!)

He checked behind the tire...in front of the tire...and then eased up into the engine!

When dusk deepened, he crept out to feed.

Groundhogs can cause a terrible amount of damage in a car.  They love to chew on wires!  We let him have his sleep the next day, but that evening, we opened the hood.  Sure enough, a thick section of insulation had been scratched out, but wires seemed intact, and the groundhog was long gone.  Todd promptly moved the car to a safer spot!  

We went geocaching this week...

...and saw something odd.  It's the time of year for a large concentration of harvestmen, or what most people call granddaddy long-legs.  They aren't true spiders, as they don't produce venom, spin webs, or have segmented bodies. This year, it seems like almost every one that I see has tiny red specks on their long, segmented legs.   

They're a type of red mite that feeds on the harvestman and then drops off.  Scientists aren't sure, but it seems to be a parasitic relationship (with the mites removing liquid from the legs), and the effect on the harvestman is unknown (but seems...minimal?).  

Harvestmen like to clump together and I saw something amazing this past week:  a mating pair!  I didn't have the right macro lens (aaarrrgghhh!), but my wider lens clumsily captured the action.

Harvestmen mate face to face, so that clear tube that you see above...sort of...is the harvestman's penis, which is another thing that marks them as not being a true spider.  True spiders store their sperm in pedipalps, like little stubby wands below the eyes.

So interesting!

More discoveries on our geocache hike:  a ton of fungus!  Here's what I think is an indigo milky cap mushroom, potentially edible but definitely gorgeous.

Woo hoo, snow fungus!  

It's hugely popular in Chinese medicine.  It's a popular soup-thickener and also used to make both desserts and cosmetics!

Yet another edible spotted is this white-tipped coral mushroom.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, this mushroom is known as the vomiting russula.  It won't kill you, but it will make you pretty sick, as the name indicates!

For us, it's a general rule to identify mushrooms but leave them alone, even the ones that we think are edible.  Better safe than sorry!

It's nice to take these little walks in the early morning, before the heat of the day comes on.  Just another month before we can get back to hiking in earnest.  

Have a great week! 

splashin' passion

 The rains have receded and the heat is increasing.  The same can be said for the activity level around here!

MORE butterflies, including this rare-to-me Zebra Swallowtail:

MORE birds, like hummingbirds...

...and this house finch trio, seen here from a distance during feeding time:

Oh, and daily turkeys, walking the fence line.  Not easily seen in the photo are the poults, or baby turkeys, blending seamlessly into the weeds.

From babies to makin' babies!  I heard a disturbance in the pond last week when I went out for Claudia's early morning feeding.  At first it was hard to make out what I was seeing...

...but soon I realized that it was two massive snapping turtles, engaging in a very rough courtship!

Whichever of these is the female will dig into the shallow bank of our pond to deposit her eggs.  She can delay laying for months, and the eggs won't hatch for up to 125 days, but I'll still be watching for any activity!  Snapping turtles are good to have around when they're eating aquatic vegetation, of which we have an abundance.  But they also eat fish, beneficial snakes, birds, and small mammals...like muskrats.  Gulp!  

Wild blackberries are ripening...

...and summer wildflowers, like this woodland delphinium, are in full bloom.

It's so warm and sunny, it's hard to believe that September is only 6 weeks away.

Have a great week!  

muskrat love

 We've had quite a few visitors lately.

Our apple tree is absolutely overloaded with apples...

...and is experiencing "June drop," where some of excess is discarded by the tree in order to focus energy elsewhere.  The little green apples are a perfect meal for a wandering deer.

At first horrified glance, I thought that this deer was covered in TICKS!!

Only by blowing up and sharpening the photo am I relatively sure that those are just flies.  Still...shudder.

Our goldfinches are back!  They are impatiently waiting for my flowers to go to seed.

Neither Todd nor I have had a single mosquito bite this year.  It's due in large part to the huge family of barn swallows nesting in the gutters of our barn.

A single barn swallow can eat almost 1000 mosquitoes per day!  They're busy swooping over the garden, and it's nice to know that they're taking care of our pest problem.

Well, some of it!

Hummingbirds are back in droves.  I love seeing them in the garden.

Hummingbirds are also great consumers of mosquitoes!

Other creatures who are beneficial to have around...we have muskrats in our front pond!  They are diligently working to take care of our overgrown cattail problem.  The former homeowner used chemicals to no avail, and we hired an excavator to scoop out as many as possible...but they still spread relentlessly.  Muskrats love to eat cattails and eat about 1/3 of their weight daily, so they're very welcome around here!

The 17-year cicadas are truly gone now.  Look anywhere around town and you'll see trees with dead patches.

This is done by the cicadas in a process called flagging, so called because the hanging dead leaf sections look a bit like limp flags.  The female cicada cut slits into all of these branches to deposit her eggs.  This kills the tips of the branches.  In a few weeks, the eggs will hatch, the nymphs will fall and burrow into the ground, not to emerge for another 17 years.  Here is a great video about the life cycle!

There's a new "life cycle" in the garden, too...PUMPKINS.  I'd collected  seeds for about 25 unusual varieties, but I just don't have the space for them.  I ended up planting a select few - too many, but I can't help myself.  Within a week, they'd outgrown their containers...

...and were up-potted into larger ones.

They are going to take the place of my sweet peas, which are rapidly going to seed.

So, too, are the poppies.  You have to let the seed heads dry completely, until the top starts to separate from the bottom.  Escape hatches curl open, and the wind helps the seed to fall easily to the ground.

I waited much too long to dug up my anemone and ranuculus corms.  Recall their earlier glory...

Like daffodils, you have to leave the foliage up to gather energy after the flowers fade away.  Mine multiplied like crazy - hooray!  I spread them out to dry this week.

After they're completely dry, I will store them away until next winter, when once again I'll wake them up around Valentine's Day to start the cycle all over again!  

Just like with the ranuculus, I waited too long with many of my dahlias and they developed dahlia smut, a fungal disease, certainly caused by endless weeks in a hot, humid barn.

Next year I'll have to be more diligent about getting them into the ground sooner.  Phew!  So much to learn.

Have a great week!