cairistiona's place

The air is finally turning cooler, and there's a definite change in the weather pattern--we're getting rain about every week, which is much needed. I wish the rain wasn't hitting on the weekend every time, but beggars can't be choosers.

The native wild flowers are all but finished, save for a few white asters here and there and some chicory:



Bees, butterflies, and most everything except grasshoppers and crickets have all gone to wherever they go in the winter. On our trip to Kansas City, I saw a couple of monarchs, but not a single one here this year. We also saw a bald eagle on that trip, which is always a treat.

Hubby gets up at 4 am every day these days, because he likes to get to work early when no one is there to distract him, but man, it's wrecking my sleep. We're both going to bed around 8:30, but it always takes me about an hour of reading to really get relaxed enough to sleep, plus I get woken up several times during the night by Pip coming and going (and closing the door on her would NOT work--she would just sit on the other side and yell all night). I think I've reached that age where I'm not old enough to only need six hours of sleep but too old to be able to function on only six hours of sleep. Oh to be young again, right? LOL Sleeplessness and asthma/allergies are combining to remind me that I am no Energizer bunny. :P I expect I'll be taking a nap this afternoon.

Happy Thursday, all.

... and is an example of how nature is messy.

This is a robber fly:


It looks fearsome and could be if you tried to pick it up (who would??) or accidentally put your hand down on top of it (ouch, nasty bite), but it's fairly docile towards humans (thank God). It's a predatory insect that goes after just about anything from aphids (yay) to butterflies (boo) and, rarely, even hummingbirds (BOO) (see what I mean about nature being messy?). I see them every summer and while they've never bothered me, looking at them still... bothers me in that same way that the movie Alien bothers me. Not my favorite insect, but I still recognize its overall importance in the ecosystem, so... live and let live. (It helps that they really aren't aggressive at all. If they accidentally land on you, you can just lightly brush them away. They won't automatically go into Murder Mode the instant they land on you like horseflies or sweat bees.)

Now back to the pretty side of nature.

We really do have a right swarm of Great Spangled fritillaries right now.



They love the swamp milkweed. Everything seems to love the swamp milkweed. If you're on the bubble about whether to grow common or swamp milkweed and don't have room for both, go with swamp. Also let native violets take over your lawn, since Great Spangled lay their eggs exclusively on violets. You will reap a harvest of lovely brown spangled flutterbies all summer.

They also really like the coneflowers:



I'm not deadheading the coneflowers, sacrificing additional blooms this year in the hopes for lots of seedlings next year (plus leaving the seedheads all winter will give birds something to eat). Supposedly coneflowers spread easily via roots and freely self-seeding. *fingers crossed* Since this is basically a chaos garden planted with the idea of letting nature do its thing with minimal assistance from me other than maintenance like weeding and putting down compost in the fall, I'll be thrilled if the garden turned into nothing but coneflowers and milkweeds. But there are other plants in there that will likely hold their own against a coneflower/milkweed onslaught, like black-eyed susan, ironweed and goldenrod. My plan is to let them all battle it out and see what wins. *g* I might occasionally step in and thin something out, since I do want a season-long succession of flowers so there's always something for the butterflies to eat, but laziness will work in my favor, methinks.

Happy Thursday, all.

On Labor Day, hubby and I went to our local botanical garden. It's been years since we've been, and back then it was mostly a Japanese stroll garden and a hosta shade garden and a lot of dreams of growing bigger, which it definitely has. Free to the public except for a small fee for the Japanese garden, it's very lovely, even late in the summer when a lot of plants and flowers are starting to look a little tatty. There's also a wee butterfly house! Nothing exotic, just local butterflies in a quonset-hut style netting-covered greenhouse that's only about 30 feet long. But still some beautiful flowers and flutterers:

https://instagram.com/p/BnRqysKn5B5

https://instagram.com/p/BnRqmQtngR6

https://instagram.com/p/BnRYrLLHNVn

This is a huge stained-glass window in the botanical garden's resource center/gift shop building:

https://instagram.com/p/BnRq9XnnL1i

It was very warm and muggy, but there was a stiff wind blowing, so not too terribly miserable. We were sweating by the end, though. We also paid to walk through the Japanese stroll garden, which is a separate entity from the botanical garden. I have photos on my "big camera," but I haven't had a chance to look at them yet. If there's any worth sharing, I'll post them.

I've had a couple requests for a synopsis after I go see Captain America: Civil War Sunday, so I'm thinking about creating a custom filter for that, just to ensure only those who want to read it do and no one else is accidentally spoiled (even though I'd put it under a cut). If you want to be included in that filter, let me know so I can add you.

Now for pics!

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Sometimes you glance out the window at just the right time, and on a really lucky day you'll actually have the camera handy. This was a really lucky day.

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... and all the spectacular foliage is finished, but sometimes you can find subtle beauty on the forest floor. Snapped this morning while waiting on Domino to do his business!

I sauteed the morel mushroom just now. Actually ended up a sort of cross between saute and frying, but whatever the mixed method... it was sublimely, wonderfully delicious. Everything I've ever heard about how wonderful morels are is absolutely true. My dad loved his half and then ordered me to go out in the woods to find more! I think I might do that this morning, though I already checked the place where I found this one, and nada. But maybe there some elsewhere. *fingers crossed*



I'm amazed my woods aren't swarming with hobbits....

While I was driving my daughter to school this morning, I drove past a corner of our property I can't see from the house, and to my dismay and alarm, I saw a puff of smoke coming out from the trees. I slowed down to look, but the smoke dissipated and there were no flames anywhere that I could see. I dropped off my daughter, drove back, and still saw no more smoke nor flames, so I wondered if it was perhaps pollen that I saw. I remember being in the Rockies during pine pollen season and seeing green clouds of pollen wafting on the wind, so I thought maybe this was juniper/cedar pollen. So I googled, because Google Knows All, and discovered that yes, cedar or juniper (same tree, different names) puff out clouds of grey pollen that look exactly like smoke:



That video, taken in east Texas, is far more dramatic than my little puff of "smoke", but you can see how, if you didn't know that was pollen, you might be calling the fire department (and that makes me wonder how many calls the fire department gets from people who don't realize that's pollen and not smoke!). I also wonder how many times I've looked out at our hills, which look pretty much like these in the video, and thought I was seeing mist rising when it was actually pollen.

Nature be crazy!

Went outside the other day and found Ms. Happy trundling along the driveway with a piece of bark in her mouth.  I followed her into the trees and she kept on going, proudly holding it up like it was the Best Thing Ever. There are bits and bobs of tree bark and branches everywhere on our property, so I wonder what it was that was Speshul about this particular piece!



There's no fathoming the mind of a turtle...

After several days flying out to branches and often spending the entire night on the branch, the two oldest eaglets have fledged!   This doesn't mean they've left the nest for good, but it means they've flown away from the tree into the "wild blue"... or at least around in the sky above the tree and the farm and the hatchery.  I believe they'll actually stay around the nest for up to a year as Mom & Dad teach them how to hunt.
( D13 takes off, and other photos and news from RRP... )