the fungus among us

My unfinished to-do list is growing longer every day and the blog has fallen by the wayside!  I will try to keep caught up, because I have a massive photo backlog.

We've had an insane amount of rain.

The weather has been delightfully cool - 70s during the day and 50s at night (it was 57 degrees this morning when I woke up!).  This is great for heat-hating humans like me, but terrible for small seedlings.  I got fairly nice germination, at last, and then the rain and the cool...everything stagnated.  And it's too late in the season to play more.  Thankfully celosia filled in the holes in the annual garden, but it does look like I will mostly have a million pink celosia plants despite all my work this year...sigh.  

One interesting garden anomaly...I did not plant sunflowers this year because it was so cool for so long and sunflowers hate cold, wet soil.  I repeat:  I didn't plant ONE SINGLE SUNFLOWER SEED.  Sunflower seeds are large and distinctive...it's not like I could've planted them by mistake. Yet...dozens and dozens of sunflowers sprang up in my greenhouses.  I used NEW soil that rarely had old soil from old greenhouses mixed in.  This old soil sat outside in the freezing snow all winter long.  Sunflower seeds do not last in weather like that.  They rot easily, and our many little animals would've rooted out any that lasted.  Squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, even birds.  Yet...somehow...I have almost a hundred sunflowers.

I planted one last set of greenhouses last week and unbelievably, MORE sunflowers grew.  How is this possible?  Where are they coming from?  Well, in a sea of hot pink celosia...I will take it. 

At least the yellows have filled in in the perennial garden.

...and in all the other gardens around the house.

In front of the garage

Along the front walkway

one of the front-facing beds

I got the very last peonies this week for house bouquets.  They didn't last long...they know that it's June.

Our tree frogs are LOVING all the rain.

Cope's grey tree frog

Our wild animals are loving it, too, from new fawns to a gaggle of raccoons!  :)

The spillway from our back pond to the forest streams that run from it are roaring loud all the time from so much rain!

A rabbit can have 40 babies in a breeding season, and we're seeing it!!  These rabbits were playing in the side yard the other morning.  It was too dark to get a good picture, though!

Wild strawberries are ripening...

...ditto with blackberries.

Lots of busy insects...

winged carpenter ant

leafcutter bee

fall webworm moths mating

chrysophilus velutinus mating

...and insects whose lives have run their course, like this fly infected with the entomophthora muscae fungus.

The name in Latin literally means "insect destroyer."  It infects their brains, kills them, and compels the corpse to climb to a high location for maximum spore dispersal.  Pretty cool!  

The cold and wet has kept me out of the garden...and the rain has interrupted a lot of our walks.

Even bundled up in a sweater and wearing jeans yesterday, I 10000% prefer it to a normal Indiana June.  

Have a great week!  

weather most fowl

 Rain...at last.

It's been insanely hot this past week, with temperatures reaching 100 degrees.  I've been seeing this meme a lot lately and Devil's Front Porch sounds about right.  Or maybe we're in Second Summer?  

When it rains in the summer here, we tend to get torrential downpours.  Unfortunately, it absolutely flattens my flowers.  You can see some slumping in this picture, taken earlier in the summer.

I took this photo a few days ago...

...and all the tall plants (amaranth, apple of peru) are twisted and bent in half. Two of my dahlias were ripped off at the roots. Zinnias, cosmos, celosia...anything that's over 2' fall...bent over.  Next year, I have to run rope the length of the rows, both sides, to help prevent flop. 

Lots of interesting faces in the garden.  So...many...katydids!

Colorful leafhoppers...

Too cool for school spittle bugs...

...and quite a few spiders.  Many people don't like looking at them, so be sure to...

...scroll...

...past...

...the...

...next...

...five...

...photos...

...if they creep you out! 

Okay, are we ready?

I was really excited to see this beautiful female garden spider (argiope aurantia) this week.

And just a few beds away, a loosely-related garden spider (argiope trifasciata) was nestled amongst the scabiosa.  Males are much, much smaller than females, so this one was easily identified!

I've seen several crab spiders in the garden...they're my favorite!

Like the venusta orchard spider, this beautiful long-jawed orb weaver looks like he's been decorated with gold flake!  

We've also seen the chogs out in the barnyard...the older parents who've maintained their home under our back barn are still there, but not outside very often.

The "babies," now grown, have gone further afield.  We see one especially chunky one by the front garden quite a bit.  I think he's got a nest down by the stream that bisects our property.  As long as he doesn't burrow under our porch!

After our insane rain storm, a flock of turkeys inspected our back yard for insects.  Two parents and...nine(?)...babies!  Well, like the groundhogs and our wood ducks, they aren't babies any more.  They're nearly full grown.

see the babies standing on the fence post?

Our county is doing a turkey brood count and I've been able to document several sightings this month.

Todd and I are still taking short hikes before breakfast almost daily.  So much to see in the forest!

This beech tree is covered in beech blight aphids, aka the "boogie-woogie" aphids, so named because they appear to be dancing on the branches.  We saw quite a few of these in South Carolina!

A lone luna moth wing, nearly bleached of color...

Interesting fungus, like this Chicken of the Woods...

...and so many wildflowers, even this late in the season.

goat's rue

The days are busy as we slowly fade into fall.  I'm looking forward to resting up once things slow down.  The kittens are leading the way.

Have a great week!

waiting for a star to fall

 After several mostly-dry weeks, we finally got some rain...

...and an absolutely gorgeous hard frost.

Still, it's mainly on the warmer side, even though there's usually a skim of ice at the edges of the front pond.

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and as usual, I made a feast.  In college, I used to carefully recopy my notes to get the contents straight in my mind, and I do the same thing with recipes...just a bit messier.

We ate...

...and spent the rest of the day like this:

Oh, I did find a real gem.  I made 6 mini (single-serving) pies - apple, cherry, and chocolate.  I'm not much of a pie person, though, so I added a half-batch of cookies  Now, I've tried dozens of oatmeal cookie recipes in my lifetime, and this seemed unlikely to overtake my beloved oatmeal/coconut/chocolate chunk one.  Somehow, though, it did.

Sally's Baking Addiction Iced Oatmeal Cookies

Plain and unassuming, sure, but with crispy edges and a soft center.  Pulverizing half the oats is a genius move, and the icing that tastes too sweet and sharp on its own somehow elevates a not-very-sweet cookie into something special.  This is going into rotation around here!

Otherwise, we had a bit of excitement this week.  I was outside at dawn, taking photos, when I noticed something unusual in the sky beyond the barn.

I used my Zoom to get a bit closer:

And more:

This was no airplane trail!  I submitted it to the American Meteor Society and got this terse response:

Not a meteor/fireball.  Someone online suggested falling space junk.  I'm dying to know what it was, but googling "strange things falling from sky" produced some, well, strange results.  Hopefully I'll have more time after the holidays to delve into this mystery!

Until then, I'll just keep an eye on the sky.  It's awfully pretty this time of year.

Have a great week!