dead nettle mettle

I love this time of year.  Every time we walk, we see new things popping out of the ground and new green on formerly empty vines and branches.

My favorite right now is the ferns.  They are so beautiful as they slowly unfurl.

We're seeing so much activity, too.  Squirrels...

...geese...

...turkey vultures...

...and raccoons are daily visitors.

Chogs are back!!

Oh, hello!

We have a nesting pair of herons in our back pond!

It's a lot of excitement.  ;)  We've even got some insect activity!  Spiders have been making webs everywhere.

I've been frantically working in the back garden to try to stay ahead of the weeds.  It was cold, and then we had a week of rain.  Finally, it dried out, but the weeds got a head start.  This is the front of our side bed...

...and this is the huge weed patch in the middle of it. My perennial bee balm is growing up amidst the sea of dead nettle, wild cress, poison ivy, and other monsters.

So...much...dead nettle.

I've put in hours and hours and barely made a dent.  There's a lot of guilt, too, because in early spring, bees rely on dead nettle for sustenance...and I'm yanking it up by the handful.

I've left plenty for them, and besides...our crabapple tree is blooming.

Dandelions and violets are up, including some especially pretty varieties...

My late-blooming daffodils are still holding on, and vinca is blooming everywhere...

In short, they have plenty to eat right now.  

Claudia continues to come outside, briefly, on nice days...

...but she's definitely ready to go back in the barn after a few hours...and she never wants to be outside at night.  She and Todd have always gotten along...

...but he never thought they'd be roommates one day!  :)  She's always by his side in his barn office now, begging for attention or sleeping on her special mat.  She's definitely enjoying retirement!  

And, as usual, our indoor cats are enjoying...whatever.

Still not allowed on the table...but taking advantage of my distraction while working on a business project.

Spring is a busy time, but hopefully I can get the garden in shape in time for the hot weather.  Have a great week!  

...and bad mistakes, I've made a few...

Sweltering, humid, and no rain...hello, August!  At least the daily dew is really heavy.  

It's a good thing, because unless we actually get rain, this is the only moisture that my garden will be getting. My fatal mistake of expecting pathway weeds to die has pretty much sunk the garden this year.  The weeds thrived and spread into the beds.  It was hot and dry, and belatedly trying to pull them proved impossible.  Then, while we were on our trip, everything sprouted.  Now the flowers are like a museum exhibit - see, but don't touch.

Ticks, spiders, snakes...the paths are gone, and it's a jungle out there.  As much as I'd like to just mow it down, we still enjoy looking at the flowers (from a distance).  Of course, the pollinators and the birds are loving the smorgasbord.  When it finally cools down, I can take a weed whacker to the worst sections.

The newer garden isn't nearly as overgrown, at least!

I'm collecting a few seed types this year, but not many.  Multi-variety flowers like zinnias, cosmos, celosia, sunflowers, etc. will not grow true from saved seed in an open-pollinated garden, so I'll just order the varieties that I'm interested in.  The birds can have these!

I am saving a few types of flowers for drying.  Celosia, gomphrena, yarrow, and strawflowers are supposed to be great for this.

I've got a nice variety of celosia this year! Pink, yellow, cream, sherbet, orange, red...plume, wavy, and wrinkled...I hope they'll dry well.

Strawflower petals are already dry, so they retain their appearance well after hanging.

There are still beautiful things to be discovered in that tangled jungle, like an edge patch of zinnia with beautifully saturated petals.

I planted red, yellow, and white milkweed...none of which grew.  However, a stray wild milkweed is looking gorgeous and ready to provide for the monarch butterflies!

A painted turtle peeked out of the grass at the edge of the garden.

Just beyond the back garden, a fawn was surprised by the dawn.  In the fog, she'd gotten turned around...and Mom was on the other side of the fence.

She didn't appreciate my attempt to open the back gates for her.

I had to leave the front gate open for an escape route!

August is tough, absolutely my least-favorite month.  That's one of the reasons why I wanted to get married in August...so at least there was one good thing in it! I'm just focusing on getting through the next couple of sticky, hot weeks...working on winter projects...

...and dreaming of the day when I can finally open a window to let in fresh air.  September is coming!

Have a great week!

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!