a little spittle

May and June are truly lovely months in the Midwest.  Before the really brutal humidity hits...there's plenty of time for porch picnics...

...cats lolling in open windows...

...and easy bouquets from random corners of the yard.

It's not quite time for peonies yet, but irises are looking lovely.

Oh, little bits of color everywhere.  Especially my favorite...chartreuse green.

Despite zero effort on my part, winter sowing was a great success.  These are just the cooler weather flowers!  Warmer weather stuff starts...whenever I get around to it.

My goal is to plant one...container...daily.  I put on my grubby clothes, coat my pants in DEET (it's a bad year for ticks)...carefully weed a large space...plant...and water.   Long ago, I accepted that I cycle through hobbies with varying degrees of obsessiveness.  I hit a gardening peak two years ago and now it's on the decline, although I know it will come back again, hard.  So, I've mentally let go of the back plowed plot, thigh-high with weeds and a few straggly biennials.  I've let go of my expectations for the larger plowed plot, too.  Weeds have come roaring into the beds, and I just do a bit every day.  I have hundreds of sunflower seeds, lots of easy zinnias, cosmos, and celosia too.  All can be direct-seeded into the soil, late May.  Shovel up the worst of the weeds and just let the rest go.  Laying down new fabric paths will help.  

Since I'm so apathetic about gardening this year, I find little things to make it more pleasurable.  Digging up toads while weeding is a nice surprise!

Finding spittlebug nymphs in a froth of bubbles is, too.

The bubbles protect the nymphs from predators - even pesticide! - and keep them from drying out.  They're fairly harmless in the garden, and I always think that they look like they're lounging in tiny luxurious bubble baths.  

Todd spotted this luna moth on the porch.

They have no mouth parts, since they only live for a week and their sole purpose in that week is to reproduce.  Love them!

Claudia, of course, is always great company outdoors.

Our yellowwood trees bloomed this week.  They're odd ducks, sporadically blooming every few years.  Their distribution is patchy as well.  We live in that tiny northernmost circle...the only place in Indiana where they grow.  But they're everywhere here, and we even have a Yellowwood Forest locally.

The cascading white flowers look lovely in bud vases.  They dangle over our country road, neatly replacing the spent redbuds for color.  By the time the yellowwoods are done blooming, every tree will be completely leafed out, and it will truly be summer!  

Have a great week! 

I hear a symphony...

"Whenever you're near...I hear a symphony..."  Diana Ross said it first, but I have been saying it all week.  The Eastern Towhees, so elusive in early spring, are now everywhere.  I just can't say enough about their bombastic "CHA-WHEET" and "DRINK YOUR TEA!"s.

Have a listen.

It's hard to actually catch a Towhee outright, because they like to hang out in bushes and brush.  However, I caught a glimpse of a beautiful female recently.  She's brown headed, but has that distinctive orange and white coloration on her abdomen:  

Most of the time I see males, and mostly in the shade.  Their red eyes are so beautiful in the sunlight, but they move so fast through the underbrush, they're hard to photograph.  Usually I just get a glimpse, like this one. 

They are singing their hearts out now, and so many others are, too, including one mystery bird who runs through a dizzying scale of notes, over and over.  I have my binoculars handy and hope to catch him soon. 

The music continues at night with the frogs and toads.  I was working in the garden recently and saw this tiny Cope's Tree Frog.

Theirs is the predominant song we hear at night:  Cope's Tree Frog

But there's also this guy, who I found in a front flower bed, burrowed in the dirt among the weeds.

He's an American Toad, and also much heard:  American Toad

I would never, never disturb a nesting creature, even if it meant forgoing my only sun bed and leaving a protective patch of weeds in its center.  However, toads lay their eggs in water, so I knew he was just having a rest.  I weeded around him...

...and then built a protective cover of leaves.  I went back the next day and was happy to see that he stayed around:

I also saw a juvenile version in the brush:

!!Creature love!! 

There are so many others.  I caught a glimpse of a raccoon just outside my office window yesterday, climbing a tree.

 Up, up, up...

He watched me from his high perch until I went back inside...

...then climbed back down and ambled off into the woods. 

A White-Tailed Deer (that nuisance!) has been here, as if I didn't already know from my sadly chewed hydrangeas:

 More creatures down by the pond.  So many fish, from the numerous schools of "normal"-sized ones...

 

...to our monstrous three-footers.

 

So many turtles, too.  We just look for the "sparkle" on the water and inevitably, it's a turtle's head popped up.  

Now that summer is unofficially here, we can sit by the water and watch the scene unfold in front of us.

There's still more yard work...

...but we're enjoying the things that happen automatically, without any help from us, like the blooming of the irises. 

So beautiful!  It's no wonder that my baking and craft work has taken a back seat to nature lately, although I may try to squeeze in an extra blog post soon so that I won't fall so far behind on projects.

I hope you're enjoying the beautiful weather and lovely creatures somewhere, too.  Have a great week!

Toad-ally Amazing!

Temperatures, which have hovered in the high 90s, have dropped a bit this week, and there's been a nice breeze.  I like to walk around on days like this, and I bring my camera, because I usually see something interesting.

I'm used to seeing bits of hapless moths caught up in spiderwebs.  

But this week I saw a really beautiful (living) moth on one of our screens.  Identifying moths is tricky, because there are just so many different varieties, but this moth's unusual coloring made it easier.  He had a turquoise and orange-striped patch of fur, which helped me to identify him as Halysidota tessellaris.  "Tessella" in Latin means little square stone, and a pattern of little square stones laid together makes a mosaic - just the pattern on Halysidota tessellaris' wing.  Isn't he lovely?

I'm seeing many more cicada husks, clinging to tree trunks and leaves.

 

I saw a beautiful spider web, and the alternating dashes on the supporting threads was a dead giveaway.  At last, a spiny-backed orb weaver!

A little toad crossed my path. 

 I also found a dead bat.  I don't think it's a secret that I love bats - I've had a bat house for many years, and I've had great fun knitting bats. 

I think bats have a bit of an undeserved bad reputation.  Bats eat pesky insects, and they are wonderful pollinators.  This little guy is an Evening Bat (Nycticeius humeralis), very common around here. 

 

Hooray - my chives are getting ready to bloom!

Some of them, though, are afflicted by black bean aphids (Aphis fabae).  These little pests suck the sap from the plants and keep them from opening up.  They're tiny and cling to both the flower head and the stalk.

You can kill them by squashing them, or spraying the stalks down with a soapy water mixture.  I'm afraid there's still a bit of hands-on squashing involved, though!

My sweet autumn clematis is blooming.

The flowers are small, so it's hard to see in the picture, but they start down by the driveway and climb all the way up to the tops of the gardenia bushes.  They're so, so pretty!

 

Other flowers are doing well - my ginger lilies, the liriope, and even a large patch of marigolds that I planted in a bed that needed tough, unfussy flowers.

I've been baking, too, a great deal.  This week I wanted to try something unusual.  It sounds pedestrian at first - just another copycat oatmeal cream pie recipe.  But this recipe includes a packed cup of dried apple rings, and cocoa powder.  I decided to give it a try.  They were wonderful!  Super soft and chewy, but firm enough to hold up to filling and stacking. 

 My only modification was adding about 2 ounces of cream cheese to the filling, which I thought gave it a better taste.  If you want to give it a try, here is the recipe. 

Have a great week!