Weekend Things ~ Summery

We had beautiful weather over the weekend.

The kind of weather we wait all winter for.

The kind of weather people move to California for.

High 70s. Sunny. Dry. Virtually bug-free.

Z turned the front yard into a beach.

M mowed the lawn with our new battery-powered electric mower--for the last 13 years we've made do with a reel mower, scythe, and occasional borrowed mower--I feel much better letting the kid mow the lawn without worry about him going deaf or breathing gas fumes.

We got out this giant bubble-making tool that we've had forever, but have never used before.

The limiting factor has been the soap--it requires the real-deal dish detergent to work, and we use the natural hippie stuff.

I finally bought a big bottle of the smelly blue stuff--and it worked!

W also made a trek to the river.

Most years, we wait until at least July or August to wade in the river.

But the air was warm enough and the water shallow enough and the bugs at a low enough ebb.

We didn't walk upstream, like we do when C is along, but chased bugs and caught frogs and just explored in our little patch of river.

When we got tired of the frogs--or vice versa--we headed cross-country in search of the best part of summer...

Wild strawberries! There weren't many, but the ones we found were divine.

Whenever we found a prolific patch, we'd call it "the mother load," only E said, "motherly load": "Here's another motherly load!"

On the way home, I picked a little bit of summer to bring inside.

And I've decided on my Summer Manifesto (a la My Bit of Earth):

1) Always have fresh flowers on the table

2) Always have Popsicles in the freezer

3) Play in the water
4) Make bubbles
5) Pick berries
6) Hang in the hammock

Duckies!

Introducing Mrs. Feddle, Duckie-Duck, Fatsykins, Buttercup, Striker, Sir Eatsalot, and Godzilla, aka Admiral Drake.

This was going to be a nice little post about our seven new family members.

And then C took E and Z to a baseball game and left me with the task of fetching the ducklings from their outdoor pen where they spend the day, put them into a box, and carry them back inside into the large Rubbermaid that is still their nighttime home.

By the time I rounded them all up (after finally giving up on keeping my work clothes clean and crawling into their shit-strewn pen), the D in "duck" had been replaced by F and an "er" added to the end of the word. With "mother" for a prefix.

Anyway, Z has been begging for a duck for months and months and months.

So I showed C a picture of a duck house, from a book that shall remain nameless, which suggested that eight full-grown ducks could live inside and be wheeled around the yard, eating bugs and fertilizing the lawn, with nary an iota of human input.

After C built the house and we informed E and Z that they were getting ducks for their birthday, I ordered a duck raising book which said, in not so many words, "Don't be fooled by charlatans and four-season gardeners who suggest that ducks are really easy to take care of. In fact, they're quite a lot more maintenance than chickens."

Call me had. 

But E and Z are really, really happy. 

I guess that's what it's all about, right?

In any case, say "hello" to our ducks.

Wildflower Wednesday ~ June 10, 2015 ~ Dandelion Mimics

Now that the summer wildflowers are blooming fast and furious, I realize I could quickly overwhelm both you and myself if I try to cover them all, so I've decided to try to stick to a theme each week. 

This week we're going to look at some flowers that are sometimes confused with dandelions. These are flowers that grow in fields and sunny places, like my lawn. Just as Z, E, and I were on our way out the door to go to the Fiber Frolic on Saturday, C started cutting the grass. I grabbed my camera and ran ahead of the mower, snapping pictures before the flowers got gobbled up in its maw.

The common dandelion (Taraxacum official) has passed its heyday around here. There are a still a few lingering here and there, but nothing like the yellow-dotted lawns and fields of a few weeks ago.

Dandelions are members of the composite or aster (Asteraceae) family. These "flowers" are actually inflorescences, or clusters of many flowers that look like a single bloom. They may be made up of all ray flowers, like the dandelion, all disk flowers, or a combination of ray and disk flowers, like the ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare). 

Several flowers that bloom throughout the summer have a similar appearance to dandelions--low growth, bright yellow inflorescences  made up of all or mostly ray flowers. The first of these to appear, soon after the snow melts, is coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara). By now, these little flowers have released their tufts of seeds to the wind and been replaced by leaves the size and shape of horses' hooves. These flowers' early appearance, the presence of disk in addition to ray flowers, and the very different leaves (which appear after the flowers have passed), distinguish coltsfoot from dandelion.

Just starting to open up now are the hawkweeds. This is yellow hawkweed (Hieracium caespitosum). Hawkweeds are taller than dandelions and have fuzzy stems and leaves, while the dandelion's stem is smooth, almost sticky, and the leaves are also smooth-surfaced, and sharply toothed. The inflorescences also grow in clusters at the top of the stem (while dandelions produce a single bloom per stem).

No one would mistake an orange hawkweed (Hieracium aurantiacum) for a dandelion, but it's so pretty, I had to include it here.

Finally, also just starting to bloom now, is meadow goatsbeard (Tragopogon pratensis). This plant is much taller than your average dandelion--the one here was a good 18 inches at least--with long, narrow leaves growing from the stem (while dandelions have basal leaves--leaves growing from the base of the stem).

It also has many fewer, but larger, rays than a dandelion.

A few other dandelion-like yellow composite flowers will make their appearance in the Northeast over the summer. If you're wondering whether a flower head you see is a dandelion, look for flower type (all rays or rays and disks?), leaf shape and texture, and season of growth. Either way, bright yellow flowers are cheerful companions on a summer's day.

P.S. My lady's slippers are still going strong in the woods, which makes me really happy. I also learned quite a few new woodland flowers on a birdwatching expedition a couple hours northwest of here Sunday. I didn't have my camera with me (camera plus binoculars is too much) and didn't even take pictures with my phone (sometimes it's nice to take a break from documenting), but I'll be keeping my eyes out for those flowers to appear around here.

My main source for keying out wildflowers is Newcomb's Wildflower Guide. But because Newcomb's is out of date, I use GoBotany to cross-reference the Latin names (and also compare to photographs if I'm unsure of the plant's ID).

Weekend Things ~ Fiber Frolic

E and Z and I went to the Fiber Frolic Saturday--our yearly tradition.

E and Z especially wanted to go see the angora bunnies. They haven't yet successfully talked me into getting them one.

The fair seems to have downsized quite a bit over the last few years--there used to be whole barns full of sheep and goats and alpacas, and now there are just a few animals. They also don't have the llama parade and llama drill teams anymore. They didn't even have the sheepdog demonstrations this year! I was a little disappointed by that.

But they did have the falafel tent.

And ice cream.

And while I refrained from purchasing any yarn because I need to use up my stash first, I bought another one of the gorgeous dish towels I got last year, because I love it so. Also a basket, a book, some natural insect repellent, and lots of food.

I think we did our part to keep the fair from downsizing any further!

Momentous

M played his last baseball game of his elementary/middle school years last night. Maybe it was his last baseball game ever, if he decides not to play in high school. I remember noticing somewhere around the preschool years that lasts began to outnumber firsts--the last time your baby crawls, the last new tooth, the last time he says "skabetti"--and yet lasts were so much more elusive; you rarely knew when a last was a last until after the fact.

Now that M is in his teenage years, I sense that the lasts are going to come flying at us like balls in a batting cage (so, too, no doubt, will new firsts; some of which I don't want to think about right now).

M graduates from eight grade in a little over a week. It will be the first (if you don't count preschool graduation) of hopefully many graduations. I'm really excited for what high school has in store for him, and I'm pretty ready to be done with some of the headaches that come with middle school (done for one year anyway, before E and Z start). But still I can't help feeling the bitter-sweetness of this moment--M moving on from the school where he's spent the better part of nine years of his life. NINE years (that's 64.2 percent of his years so far). It feels momentous (to me anyway; when I ask M about how he feels, he responds, in typical 14-year-old fashion: "I don't really care.").

I don't really know what to say about this all...or even what to think about it. I'm too much in the moment to really process and reflect. Instead, I think I'll leave you with the poem I wrote on the occasion of M's first baseball practice, when he was in second grade.

First Practice
I glance up
from my book
slumped on the
hard corner of
the bleachers
to see bat smack
ball hit floor bounce
into the black
glove we brought
home less than
24 hours ago.
Milo's eyes,
astonished,
meet mine,
my arm reaches
out, thumbs-up.
We leave the
gym into blue
sky day. Him,
ecstatic; me, terrified
my Saturdays will
be swallowed whole.

Maybe I need to write a poem for his last baseball game...if it is the last.

Garden Things ~ Early June

I don't feel winter is truly over until I eat something grown in the garden. Last week, our first harvests came in--spinach, chives, mint, and lots and lots of radishes. 

I can't take credit for any of it--I'm not the gardener around here. I didn't even plant the garlic--my domain--last fall. I used to love to garden, before I had land of my own, but nowadays I'd rather spend April, May, and June wandering in the woods looking for birds and wild plants. I haven't been able to motivate myself to want to work in the garden at all (Sunday I spent a few minutes weeding my sad little flower bed and the whole time I thought about how much I don't like to weed--which a bit too much like my 9-to-5 life--with added mosquitoes--for comfort). 

Luckily, C loves to garden, and the minute the snow melted from our garden beds (and a considerable while before it had melted elsewhere), he put peas and radishes in the ground. They're well on their way to a fourth-of-July pea harvest.

And this year we're going to finally have tomatoes, after a couple of years of mishaps with the seedlings. I hope they don't succumb to blight. Do you know how to prevent that?

The spinach is coming along nicely, with lettuce and chard close behind. I've bought my last box of greens for the season. I forgot how much I love the meaty denseness of raw spinach leaves. I know some people say it's not good for you due to the levels of oxalic acid, but it tastes so good. 

After the three days of rain we just had, things are going to grow even wilder out there.

How does your garden grow? And what's wrong with me that I don't care for gardening? Am I just lazy? And if so, am I the only one?

Wildflower Wednesday ~ June 3, 2015

I completed my Maine Master Naturalist Program training last week. It was such a great experience and I can't believe how much I've learned over the past year. I will certainly miss the people in the program and the regular structure, although it is a great relief to not face homework anytime in the near future.

I thought I'd bring a little of what I've learned--and what I will continue to learn--over to the blog with a regular post featuring wildflowers in bloom during the preceding week. Selfishly, I hope this will give me practice keying and photographing flowers (and help me remember them!)

First up, a couple of flowers of open areas, and two of my favorites. I love it when the blue-eyed grass appears in our "lawn." Something about this plant reminds me of the west and prairies. I hadn't realized there were multiple species when I photographed this guy. I'll have to go back next time I'm home in the daylight to key out exactly which one it is.

The pussytoes growing in our neighbor's field have already gone by (or been mown down), but we still have a sweet little row of them growing along the edge of our gravel pit. These I think are field pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta).

Late May into early June is the time for woodland flowers to bloom--before the trees have completely leafed out and blocked all of the sunlight. Canada-mayflower (Maianthemum canadensis) is one of the most common flowers we have growing on the forest floor.

With starflower (Lysimachia borealis) running a close second.

Feathery false Solomon's seal has just come into bloom in the last week or so. I hadn't realized it was related to Canada-mayflower until I saw the Latin name, but that makes so much sense when you look at the flowers. Edited to add: I just realized I forgot to include the Latin name, for you to see for yourself. Good thing I reread my own blog. Feathery false Solomon's seal is Maianthemum racemosum).

This is a new flower to me this year. I think it's a blunt-leaved grove-sandwort (Moehringia lateriflora).

We have a lot of violets growing on our property. I've never taken the trouble to key them out before. This one is an American dog violet (Viola labradorica).

More elusive, and so very strange and beautiful, is the Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum). One of my fellow naturalist graduates told us that she read that scientists think Jack is evolving to become a carnivorous plant, due to the long and complicated route of pollination he entices flies into. How cool is that?

I've been traipsing off-trail quite a bit in search of wildflowers and I found a nice big patch of bunchberry (Chamaepericlymenum canadense), which I didn't even know we had growing here. I've always associated it with Baxter State Park and other really wild places.

On one of my off-trail wanderings, I came across a pink lady's slipper (Cypripedium actual) hiding out in our woods. 

I've never seen one of these enchanting orchids on our land before. I stomped around the area quite a bit more, hoping to find others, to no avail. And then I took a walk on our trail and found a pair of them growing right next to the path, and then another pair, and another single orchid. Farther along the trail I found two more and in an off-trail foray, I found an eighth one.

Are the lady's slippers new migrants to our land, just appearing suddenly this year? Or have they been there all along, and we never noticed them, because our attention hasn't been on the ground at our feet (or because we avoid the woods during black fly season)? Even now that I know they are there, I still have to look closely to find them, so I can see missing them, but I'm astounded we've missed them for 13 years. And I'm delighted I finally found them. 

My main source for keying out wildflowers is Newcomb's Wildflower Guide. But because Newcomb's is out of date, I use GoBotany to cross-reference the Latin names (and also to cross-reference against photographs).