random scenes from recent days.

It’s been a whirl of travel and work since my last post. Visits with lots of old friends. Followed by a ton of work. Today I delivered mass of permit applications I’d been immersed in for weeks on end to state offices (for my job), and then handed out samples of yogurt to college freshmen (also my job) for a few hours, and drove a total of six hours to make all this happen. I’m so tired, I’m in my PJ’s…at 7:20 pm on a Friday. YESSS!!!

Here’s that weird day lily leaf-stamen thingy again. This was our last day lily. Tis a shriveled mess by now.

 

A purple-flowering raspberry. As tasty as it looks. Let’s not forget that fruit…is fruit. By which I mean, that stuff we eat? That’s flower-bits. In this case, you can see the original burry bud that originally held the flower…and an unripe fruit to the right.

 

A chipmunk carrying something up an ash tree. It was so alarmed at our presence that it rushed up and up and up, and dropped its payload. Turned out to be a chunk of mushroom. Sorry, little buddy! I’m sure you’ll retrieve it later when I’m not looking…

Indian tobacco, aka lobelia.

Pale smartweed. Tiny guy. You probably have some of this in your lawn.

Ah, the mysterious Closed Gentian. Mysterious, because it demurely never opens those flowers. Lord only knows how it gets pollinated. Well, I’m sure botanists know, which means the google borg knows. But let’s leave it as a Great Unknown for now. Hey: I’m in my PJ’s. You can’t expect me to work.

Hog peanut, how kinky thou lookest this fine eve.

Yawn. Yay, weekend!

when left to their own devices, lawn weeds will overthrow the world

All summer long, I’ve been idly observing a random lawn weed here at home, but I haven’t had any luck in keying it out. It’s a short guy with a raceme of teensy pink buds. As near as I could tell, those suckers were never going to open, I was never going to get a petal count, and its identity would remain a mystery.
Well, today, for the first time, I went for a run in the woods near where I work, and on the way back, I swung by for a closer look at the mess of stuff growing along a stream that runs through the industrial campus. (Yep, here in Vermont, we have woods and trails and streams in our industrial parks. Why would you want to live anywhere else?)
When I took a closer look at this stuff – a thicket of three and a half foot tall things…

…I about jumped out of my skin.

It’s my random lawn weed! In fact, it appears to be two versions of it: the darker pink kind with the reddish stem (drooping down, above), and the pale pink kind with somewhat larger flower buds.
So I ran inside to get my camera, and my coworkers thought, judging from the way I was bouncing up and down, that I’d experienced something really exciting, like maybe running into a bear or something. I said, “I DID! I FOUND OUT WHAT THIS LITTLE LAWN WEED IS WHEN YOU LET IT GROW!” …and they all moved away from me on the bench there...They don’t know about my little nature girl gig, see.

Some of those teensy flowers were open and tonight, with the help of my trusty Newcomb’s, I finally nailed this down as a knotweed, in the buckwheat family. Gotcha!
I also got one of my best pregnant jewelweed shots yet:

(If you’re new here, you might have missed my various odes to jewelweed. All the jewelweed you can handle, right here, or here, or even here. Go on, check it out, we’ll still be here when you get back.)
Finally, we have some exploded thistle.

Mmmmmm.

and so the season turns

Tis mid-July. You know what that means, right? Time to prepare for winter. Really.
I picked about 30 pounds of blueberries last year, and we’re down to our last bag. Just in time for this year! Yippee! Yesterday I saw the PYO (Pick Your Own) sign up on the corner near my favorite local orchard. So today, off I went.
(Imagine blueberry picking: a beautiful warm day, not too hot, puffy white clouds, the sound of quiet conversation in the other rows, nothing to do but select the biggest, bluest, ripest berries…ho hum… sound of birdsong… sound of mothers calling to their children, or instructing them in the fine art of berry selection… imagine the taste-testing necessary to calibrate the level of blue in the berries, to the level of sweetness…you wouldn’t want to accidentally be selecting the wrong ones, so better safe than sorry…)
Six pounds of berries and $11.82 later I was done for Day One.
When I got home, I saw that Kevin had been making his own preparations for winter:

He’s set out some of the pallets and brought over an initial load to stack on them.


One of the last bluets of the season?


It’s so much fun to avoid mowing your lawn. How else would you get to see this?


Our easiest to find jack-in-the-pulpit is busting out all over. Positively salacious.