Minty frog

American bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana)

I had to look this one up, and was a little surprised that she turned out to be a bullfrog. Not enough meat on this one to bother with gigging for fried frog legs.

No, I don't do that, but my grandfather did. As a kid I thought that eating frog legs was a real treat.

This one is a female; on a male the tympanum (external eardrum) would be much larger than the eye.

I imagine that this gal has no problems with bad breath, living in the ditch amongst the mint.

My sister's house

I sometimes accuse my sister of getting all the good genes.

She definitely got all our mother's good domestic ones: cooking, cleaning, neatness, general household industriousness.

I got the ones that need glasses and tend to gain weight after marriage.

She got the decorating gene too. And the one with green thumbs.


front porch


above a kitchen window


in the dining room


dining room again


back door

Lions, Lambs, and White Flowers

Between cool snaps and dark windy days, there are a few warm, sunny, glorious hours. Spring is sneaking in.

We've seen a few swallows, a bat, and lots of mosquitoes and gnats. (I've had two itchy bites already.)

It's not really planting time yet though. At the gardening conference, I tried tying my hands behind my back to keep me from buying any plants so early.

But they had Sun Golds. Last year after reading a book about a New York couple's adventures in market gardening, I looked everywhere for Sun Golds, the cherry tomato that they had praised to the heavens. No joy. I could find the seeds, but they need to be started indoors and there's just no room.

So when a vendor at the conference had Sun Golds, I had to get them. And then I figured I might as well get a few other things as well.

While the tomatoes are in an aggravating "outside during the day - make sure they're out of doggie reach - remember to bring them in at night" arrangement, the lettuce and broccoli could go in the ground right away.

Which of course was a powerful signal to mother nature, to unleash a hail storm and days upon days of rain.

I took these pictures last weekend, before all the bad weather came to town. If sound were an option, in the background you'd hear a husband and a dog begging me to hurry up and quit taking so long.


Bloodroot. One of my favorite spring wildflowers. Even the latin name has blood in it: Sanguinaria canadensis. It looks dainty, but it must be tough if it has the name "Canada" in it and can live in Alabama too.


Rue Anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides or Anemonella thalictroides). A magnified bloom. In real life it's less than an inch (2.5 cm) across.


Toothwort. The genus used to be called dentaria, alluding to the roots that look like teeth, but was changed to cardamine. (If you know why, clue me in.) There are lots of species of toothwort. I think this one is Cardamine concatenata. I've read that you can eat the peppery roots, but I haven't tried it.


Toothwort close up.

Southern butterflies and you

With a few days in the 70s, the butterflies have popped in during the past week.

We've seen:

Spring Azure
Falcate Orange Tip
Pearl Crescent
Hop Merchant (a.k.a. Eastern Comma)
Cabbage White

Butterflies have such cool names.

Even when the butterflies themselves are nothing to write home about, the names are often fantastic.

Thumbing through my field guide, some names I love include:

Satyr Anglewing
Hoary Comma
Ringless Blue Cracker
Mexican Eighty-Eight
Cloudless Sulphur
Question Mark
Antillean Dagger Wing
Flashing Astraptes
Whirlabout
Malicious Shady Skipper

and my favorite:

Redundant Swarthy Skipper.

There is an interesting Hans Christian Andersen story about a butterfly who wished for a bride.

It contains the sentence, "The pea-blossom pleased him most of all; she was white and red, graceful and slender, and belonged to those domestic maidens who have a pretty appearance, and can yet be useful in the kitchen."

Hmm.

After having "been too long choosing, which is always a bad plan," the indecisive butterfly winds up stuck on a pin in a box of curiosities.

"Now I am perched on a stalk, like the flowers," he says. "It is not very pleasant, certainly; I should imagine it is something like being married; for here I am stuck fast."

I really have to wonder about Hans Christian Andersen sometimes.

More chick lit

They are so tiny when they first arrive. This one is just two days old. I love the racing stripes but I'm trying to resist the temptation to name them all after Formula One drivers.



One of the most fun things in the world. To hold out your hand and have a horde of warm fuzzy little bodies crowd around to eat out of it.

A chick can't stand being left out of something important. And they're not as gentle as you might think. If one can't muscle her way in, she'll make a flying LEAP onto the pile of chicks in front of her. This goes for feeding time as well as nap time.

Their favorite way to sleep is all together in a little chick scrum. But they all want to be in the middle. So if one is late to the game, she'll LEAP into the middle of the pile. It seems hard to get much uninterrupted sleep if you're a chick.

The Marans are the shy ones in this group. They almost never leap, they just run around and around and around the outside, looking for a way in. They wait to eat until the others are finished. They sleep on the outer layer of the scrum. You want to send them to a Dale Carnegie course for a little self confidence.

Bluebell evolution

Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) are one of the first wildflowers to bloom in this area.

The leaves appear first, then spread open to reveal the buds.



The stalk gets longer, and soon the buds are too heavy to stand up straight.



Bud color goes from pink to purple, then the blue flower opens. When it fades, it will turn pink again.



Every now and then there will be a flower that is pink or white instead of blue. None in this bunch so far.

A stalk with several open flowers.



Among friends.

Chicky babies

We got our chicks!


Rhode Island Reds - we ordered these for someone else, but will probably foster them until they get a little bigger.


Cuckoo Marans - They seem to look a lot like Dominiques. But the eggs they lay are very dark brown. "Marans" is both the singular and the plural name.


Ameraucanas - Actually "Easter Egger" chickens. They all look different because they are bred for egg laying color (blue and green) instead of looks.

Cute huh?

Click the links above to see what they'll look like when they're older.

Gardening Conference

I'm at a gardening conference. Today we heard about "The Sensuous Garden" by Lee May, who's one of the best speakers I've heard in a long time.

The line for getting signed copies of his books was quite long.

We were also lucky enough to meet Penny McHenry, a real character, who founded the American Hydrangea Society, and had a hydrangea named after her. She brought several slides of her garden.

I learned a lot of new things about heirloom shrubs, hydrangeas, and roses, which wasn't difficult since I knew almost nothing at all to start with.

Tomorrow, it's the solar aquatic system for cleaning waste water, bamboo for gardens, and bulbs, corms, and tubers. Maybe they'll make a gardener out of me yet.

In the absence of flowers

I took a walk but couldn't find much blooming yet. There were two bloodroots coming up, but they were a little battered by the storm.

I had Jasmine with me and she battered one of them even further. She became very interested in whatever I was looking at. I don't think she sees the point of stopping to look at flowers.

Here are a couple of musical pictures from earlier in the winter.



Treble clef - I took a picture of the locust bean when the light was harsh. I continued my walk, thinking I'd come back later and get a better shot. But by the time I returned, a squirrel had stolen it away.



Quarter notes - Sycamore seed balls.

All Eggs Great and Small

My blog friend Shannon over at the Not So Virtual Homestead was writing recently about a huge egg that one of her chickens surprised her with.

We got a surprise too, but it was in the opposite direction.

One of the Dominique chickens must have gotten tired of laying normal eggs, and left us this tiny one.

A normal Dominique egg is on the left for comparison.

I didn't realize until I uploaded the pictures, that the depth of field on the macro setting was so shallow that to have the little egg in sharp focus meant that the normal one was a little fuzzy. Oops.

By that time my curiosity had gotten the best of me and I'd already cracked open the lilliputian egg to see what it looked like inside. So, no do-overs.

The inside looked pretty much like a normal egg in miniature.

(My sister recently made a comment about my liberal use of 50-cent words, so I had to work in "lilliputian" just for her.)

Decoys part 2

Decoys on the water.

They do look amazingly real from a distance. The last time our In the Army Now nephew was here, he came back from a walk to report that there were some ducks in the water... so it's not only other ducks that they fool.



I think this is what you call listing to starboard.

I'm itching to get out and see what other wildflowers might be coming up, but we've had nothing but rain since early Monday morning.

Really Big Shew

Show floor just after set-up

My feet are still tired, but we survived our first spring craft show.

We managed to achieve our two main goals, which were:
1) don't spend more than we make, and
2) don't eat the whole time.

It was fun chatting with old customers and meeting new people too.

Our next show will be outdoors, at the Bloomin' Festival in Cullman, April 16 - 17.

The show benefits St. Bernard Prep School, which is run by the Benedictine monks at St. Bernard Abbey.

The show is held on the grounds, and I love telling people how to find us at this show: turn right after the entrance and walk towards the back. We're just at the right hand of Jesus.

A brief hiatus

As promised, here is a summer view of the workshop.

It will probably never look this nice again. I took the photo when we were first thinking about buying the place.

The previous owners were paying about $300 a month for landscaping services, to keep everything looking manicured.

We tend to favor a more natural look, probably because it involves a lot less weed-eating.

Show set-up is today. If I don't have time to update here until it's over, I'll be back on Monday.

Note: It seems that "Hello", where I'm hosting my pictures, is having a little trouble today. If the pictures aren't showing, try hitting "reload", or just try again later... sorry!

Great Blue Heron

Jasmine loves chasing the Great Blue Herons. They're big and they squawk a lot when disturbed.

Herons are smarter than you might think... Normally a heron lands on the path and then walks around a bit, looking for a likely place to fish before walking down into the water.

The local ones have learned to land in the pond itself, below Jasmine's vantage point.

Idiotic bored hunters around here sometimes shoot at them, so this one wouldn't let me any closer to take his picture.