August 2011

This year’s seeds

I’m going to plant seeds in pots that I haven’t before, less common plants like Munro’s Globemallow (cool orange flowers), Blue Columbine and Yellow Columbine, Hooker’s Onion (small plants, pink flowers) and Harsh Paintbrush. The usual seeds – all the camas (small, light blue, white and large purple), Chocolate lily, Leopard lily, etc will be planted around outside. Sometimes the planting in pots is just interfering with their best chance, just ending up in the right spot in the ground, but sometimes its worth it, plants occasionally do better in the pots. This is true of Wild Blue Flax and camas.

Below is Harsh Paintbrush, a bright orange red. The bright orange parts are actually leaves, not petals:

Now I’ve seen it

Saw a coyote on the way to work. It ran across the road and just into our back yard. It stopped for a minute so I got a good look at it. It is the second sighting in our yard, a wooded suburb near a green belt.

Tree frogs are out and about!

First week of August and the Pacific northwest tree frogs whose nursery is our front pond have “evolved”, though only some of them….the eggs hatch at different times. They also hatch and mature faster in warmer weather, so some literally mature faster than others depending on when they hatched and if they spent time in the warmth of the sun (some of the tadpoles hide among the rocks more than others). Its been unusually cool ALL summer thus far, so their development could be a little slower than usual. This little dude is about 1.5 centimeter length, nose-to-butt. No wonder 3 of us adult humans couldn’t find the little (father) beast back in May when he was still here croaking, despite using flashlights and trying to bait him with recorded tree frog sounds from some website.

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