Summer round-up/photography, 11/22/14

A few more picture-stories I didn't finish telling when it actually WAS summer...

Garden
We had a pretty good summer garden this year! I'd planned to have a cool-weather garden for the first time, too, and went as far as buying seeds, but there was no chance to get it done during the fall planting window. Next year, maybe. That's the nice thing about a seasonal garden, there's always another chance to get it right.

We'll definitely plant these tomatoes again. They're yellow when ripe, look like tiny pears. And talk about prolific! There was just one plant of this variety, and we got a good handful every day June through August.

Impressive size, right? Unfortunately, these Mr. Stripey tomatoes never reached ripeness, not a single one. They all either outweighed their stems and fell off and burst, or got eaten from the bottom up by insects while they were still green.

Hidatsa red beans growing up the trellis

bear paw popcorn

Most of the ears didn't reach full size, but this one was close. See now why it's called "bear paw"?

more popcorn. A typical ear from one side...

...and typical flip side. We had a cool, wet summer and sopping wet fall, so mold was a lot bigger problem than usual. I didn't take a picture, but powdery mildew took every one of our melon vines from lush and healthy to dead in three days.

Still, what lived did very well!

 Okay, so these two are not garden pictures. But they're related!

3-bean (Hidatsa, lima, and Calypso) chili

Crunch!

Yard Critters

We had more frogs this year than I've ever seen before. The garden was full of them. They turned up hiding in the flip-flop bin on the porch. If you drove at night, you'd see them hopping out of the street in front of your headlights. A couple times, one or two hopped into the house when we opened the front door in the morning. And every night at dusk, half a dozen regulars would climb up the sliding glass door of our living room and let us watch them catch the insects that gathered. I suppose the fact we had so few mosquitoes this year is no coincidence!

Bloodsucker-eater, and photogenic, too!

This...

...and this are the same dragonfly a few seconds apart. The only difference was using the flash vs. turning it off. Weird effect!

By now you know I like taking dragonfly photos.

the real reason our birdfeeders are always empty

I'd read about this many times, but this was the first time I'd seen it in person. The green caterpillar is a tomato hornworm, and it's a voracious garden killer if it's uncontrolled. But it's not uncontrolled here. The white things attached to it are braconid wasp eggs. The wasps are parasitic and feed on the caterpillar from the inside out. Mother Nature is vicious!

another critter I had never seen before this point: a wheelbug, named for that gear-shaped thing on its back. It's considered a beneficial bug because it preys on destructive insects.

It also bites in defense, which is why I didn't dare get closer to show scale.

toad!

We get lots of swallowtails, but I'm almost never able to get close enough for photos.

 

Do you spot him? Almost every evening this summer, I could walk through the corn and count on seeing at least one keeping watch.

still not as big as the ones we used to get in our yard in Miami, but by far this is the largest grasshopper I've seen here. And I was frankly very glad to be on the inside of the screen. I know it's irrational, but I think they're kind of scary.

Trips
We took a few small local excursions throughout July and August.

to a big, big, big playground in a neighboring city

to pick blueberries in a church friend's big backyard patch

to a couple of livestock farms

to a friend's pool party

to the local splash park

Ordinary Fun
everyday moments around the house

Cat Whisperer

Garden Girl

Acrobat Boy

More photos in another catch-up post very soon!

Photography (and stories), 7/10/14

I'm extremely behind on sorting photos, so in the interest of just catching up, I'm going to try to keep some of the "stories" parts of this post brief. On with the photos (which do most of the telling anyway)!

Another field trip
Boy 1's class went to a petting farm (as opposed to petting zoo), and Girlie, Boy 2, and I tagged along. The kids had such a fun time that we did again what we'd done with the aquarium field trip: signed Boy 1 out when his class was ready to go back to school, and spent the rest of the day at the farm together.

donkey

Boy 2 (orange shirt near left) sat right down among the first graders and CLEANED UP in the tour guide's local bird trivia game.

in the demonstration garden: ant on squash blossom

These kids had been born just a few hours earlier.

We were collectively too short to enter the alpaca and llama enclosure. Apparently, these animals can't see anything lower than their own neck level, so small people are in danger of getting accidentally kicked or stepped on. But we did enjoy petting them--they're super soft--from the other side of the fence.

A small aviary had quite a collection of domestic and exotic birds, including this crowned crane.

There were several different colorful varieties of pheasant, unfortunately quite hard to photograph well from outside the wire mesh. This was the only pheasant photo I caught.

pig

goats

Why tortoises make good pen-mates with goats, I never heard, but there were several large ones. This one was the smallest, around 15 inches.

This pretty goat suffered no fools. He posed peacefully for a picture, but when Boy 2 got a little loud near him, he butted Boy 2--which of course the wild child thought was hilarious.

But apparently the best thing about a farm is chickens. We discovered we are quite fond of chickens. (I don't know why that's funny, but somehow it is.) Boy 2 loved catching them. Girlie loved petting and holding them. Boy 1 loved holding them, too, so much so that every time we left another animal area, he immediately said "May we go see chickens again now?" I liked the gentle clucking background noise--calming in the same way as the sound of trickling water. I can see why people like having a chicken or two around.

a polka-dotted tail!

More polka-dots: Guinea fowl live in the chicken coop, too...

...and also a couple of blowsy, self-important turkeys.

Is that not a classic rooster profile?

The coop had lots of ordinary egg and meat chickens but also fancy breeds. A few of the ladies have fluffy feathers all the way down the legs, like this soft gray girl. They look like they're wearing petticoats.

This fellow strutted up and down the rail (apparently put there just for strutting purposes), letting out a loud squawk and peck if anyone put a hand near the ladies in the egg boxes. He's unquestionably the flock's sentry.

Look at the fluffy crown of feathers on this guy! (The rooster, not the boy.)

In the backyard and garden
a mixture of mid-to-late spring and summer (so far) pictures

common wisteria. You never notice it wound around the pine trees the rest of the year, but it explodes in color and fragrance in spring. It can be invasive, but I leave it alone. I've never seen it intruding anywhere else in my yard, and I love the smell.

Bees love it, too!

The kids built and painted this birdhouse during spring break.

It was rainy most of that week, but we did get one perfect outdoor weather day.

Whee!

Clever use of a bunch of stumps! This is at our school's playground.

We planted Calypso beans (similar to pintos in flavor) in the garden this year. We call them "killer whale beans" for obvious reasons.

The garden as of late May still didn't look like much.

But as of a few days ago, much more promising!

in hills: Schoon's hardshell melon (similar to cantaloupe); trellis: Calypso beans. A few volunteer tomatoes are scattered around, too. We love tomatoes, so I let them grow where they will.

bear's paw corn (a type of popcorn) with Henderson lima beans

4 types of tomato, green bell peppers, and some volunteer marigolds

Staked in foreground: nothing but a few weeds. We sowed Utah celery too late in the season, and it didn't take. On trellis: Hidatsa red beans. Between:  marigolds

strawberries. These plants are now three years old, and we got berries for the first time this year.

sweet corn of some variety I don't recall. As you can see, that last row gets far too little sun. I won't be planting corn in this section again.

Carolina jasmine. It was an enormous, tangled, thickety mass last fall. After a very cold, very long winter, I cut away all the dead vines and found there was absolutely no healthy wood. Lo and behold, it sent up new shoots from the root!

black-eyed Susans--great for attracting goldfinches

daylilies

bachelor's button

dogwood fruit. The tree is covered with them this year. Turns out, they're edible. I found a recipe for dogwood jelly that I'm thinking about trying once they're ripe.

 

Funny how up close, this dragonfly looks like he has a beard.

Easter 2014
Told you I was behind on photos!

basket full of eggs, mouth full of candy

Woo, what's that?

Do you think I have enough?

 

Reunion weekend
These are just a few pictures from the annual Independence Weekend trip to T's family picnic. There were several other good ones of the larger family, but something went wrong when I downloaded. If I can figure out how to fix and resave the files, I'll put those in the next photos post.

We left town not long after Hurricane Arthur started pounding the shore a hundred miles south of us. The Chesapeake Bay was a little stirred up.

(No, I don't snap pictures while driving. This was taken from the passenger seat, thank you.)

I imagine for someone who gets motion sick, this 17-mile bridge-tunnel was off the agenda that day.

my brother-in-law and my newest nephew. I don't think I've ever seen a more contented baby. He got passed around quite a lot and never whimpered. Not even when I held him--and that's saying something.

Hammock! You can't quite see it, but the boys are eating watermelon, too--a perfect summer scene.

craft time with Aunt S.

Sun feels pretty good after going down that water slide filled from the very, very cold well!

Girlie driving the kid-sized ATV, two of her cousins picking raspberries in the background

This and that
a few stories that don't fit in a larger photo category

Boy 1 said he wanted spinach, carrots, and sunflowers seeds for dinner one night. I told him that sounded like salad, something he insists he does not like. He considered that for a long moment, then repeated his request. I shopped accordingly, and he ate it--a feat for which I required photographic proof.

Girlie and Boy 2 went strawberry picking with me (but not Boy 1 as school hadn't let out yet). I like what the offset center does to this picture.

Boy 2, the real Spider-Man

Boy 2 and Girlie took swimming lessons.

Boy 1 took lessons, too. They all loved it. We'll be back.

Blackberry picking. We found out quickly that picking blackberries is a much different kind of work than picking strawberries, but we were determined. That huge bucket was almost all the way full before we gave up--and only because it started raining, hard.

Boy 2 entered a hula-hoop contest at our neighbor R's 7th birthday party.

The focus is awful, but it's a fun picture anyway: Girlie and the birthday girl.