Finally the close has come to a really crazy year. Not much to write about as I have been busy with Christmas and other things. But I thought it would be worth looking at the pictures from this past year.
January, the earliest I’ve seen a robin.
February, an attempt at making home-made saltine crackers.
Results of the second try at home-make saltines
March, volatile weather to say the least. Going from this…
….to this a few days later….
Just an FYI, the snowdrops did recover nicely once the snow melted off.
April, warm weather did bring some fresh greenery and early flowers.
May, Memorial Day brought the usual parade.
June produced a surprise hatching of baby spiders.
July burst with a profusion of flowers.
August produced more flowers.
In September came a cornucopia of acorns, much to the delight of squirrels, chipmunks, birds and deer.
October, of course, brought out the Halloween decorations.
November gave us the first hints of winter to come in the form of hoarfrost.
December is coming to a close with Christmas on the 25th and an ice storm today on the 29th which left a quarter inch of ice on everything, bringing down some tree branches.
Here’s hoping the coming year will be quiet and uneventful.
Our first light frost happened in early October and hard frost in mid-October. We’ve gotten some light snow in November though, so far, it’s melted soon after it falls. While it’s been a bit colder than usual, it’s not out of the norm for northern New Hampshire.
While I’m sorry to see the frost take its toll on the few green plants still lingering, frost itself can be a source of surprising beauty. Hoarfrost is very striking to see. It forms when the air is moist enough and temperatures are below freezing. Moisture will condense directly onto any surface area, creating tiny thorn like spikes during calm conditions unlike rime ice which is rougher in shape and forms under windy conditions such as the summit of Mount Washington.
Hoarfrost has a more dainty appearance, turning bare branches or brown weeds into glittering sculptures.
I had some recently when a heavy fog settled in overnight and the temperatures fell under 32 Fahrenheit. It left the spent vegetation with a frosty facelift.
Bare stems turned into prickly wands, as in the pictures above.
Withered leaves developed a punk-style hair-do.
Old bee-balm flower stalks got a make-over.
Even the lavender plants in my garden sprouted their own tiny spikes.
It all melted away once the sun got high enough but while it lasted, it made for a lovely show, a final hurrah in the fall season before the snow seriously starts to fly.
Halloween has rolled around again. The weather for this Friday looks to be a bit damp and distinctly raw. Not sure if that will cut down on the trick-or-treaters but I have a bag of candy ready. As always I try to pick out candy I like so I won’t be stuck with a dish of candy that I can’t bring myself to eat.
Leaf raking has begun in earnest. I rake the old fashioned way, preferring to eschew the ungodly banshee howl of one of those leaf-blowers in favor of the much quieter lawn rake. The aerobic workout that goes along with hand raking is a big plus as well.
Of course, Halloween decorations have gone up around town. Many are tasteful and low-key such as the ones below.
Inflatable figures seem popular, ranging from enormous witches and ghosts to smaller ones such as the charming little cat-ghost below.
Spider webs seem to be making an appearance, complete with spiders.
And where would we be without everybody’s favorite, the skeleton?
This last fellow seems to be losing his britches just a bit. I suspect a pair of suspenders is in order. Nice to see people expressing a bit of creativity with some cheerfully ghoulish lawn décor.
Midsummer can slip past you before you know it. So it helps to have a camera to capture some of the garden flowers before they go by. I’ll confess that my gardening skills are modest, with some things succeeding admirably but others sinking out of sight like the Titanic. The garden phlox is coming but is still in bud. Ground phlox has come and gone but put on a nice show. For some reason I forgot to take pictures so will have to wait until next year.
Echinacea does well. I have two types, a medium pink shade and a second which is much paler. The medium pink is in full bloom while the light pink (which is in a more shady spot) is still in the bud stage.
The patch of daylilies beside the foundation put on a decent performance but the plants really need to be thinned out. The trick will be to find a spot to plant them, most likely along the bank in front of my home.
I have several different beebalms.
The red variety seems eager to escape the garden for some reason. This one is sited in a weedy spot; several others insist the front lawn is the place to be. I mow around them, as I want to dig them up later on and place them back in the garden.
There’s also a lemon-scented beebalm, which is a delicate lavender color, though to be honest, I cannot detect any lemon scent from the leaves. The bees find the blossoms very attractive so that compensates for any lack of scent.
Potted plants are doing well. A mix of petunias as well as a colorful geranium bring a nice splash of flowers.
Here’s another pot of petunias. The black-eyed Susans are in the foreground rather than the pots.
Here are some purple bee-balms (similar to the red) which are behaving themselves by staying in the garden where they belong. If you look carefully, there is a bumblebee on the second blossom from the left.
There’s still all of August to go, so stayed tuned. Be well, all.
I saw something interesting this past month which I haven’t seen before. I have some chamomile growing in a large pot out front. During the spring, surrounding maple trees (and probably others) began shedding huge numbers of catkins, which covered the lawn, driveway and any plants I had growing. One morning I noticed what looked at first like a clump of catkins draped over the chamomile blossoms which were just opening up, but found when I came to brush them off, that it was really a cluster of baby spiders just hatching out.
Since spiders devour nuisance insects and serve as baby food for hatchling birds, I let them be. Since the chamomile had just grown this spring, the egg mass must have been laid in the leaves and I hadn’t noticed. There was no sign of the mother spider, so I have no idea what species they were.
Now I’ve seen plenty of baby spiders just hatching out from their egg mass plenty of times before, so spiderlings are nothing new. But the next day I saw something I hadn’t seen before. The mother spider must have been still around, because a long thread, too large to be the doing of the tiny babies, had been spun all the way from the chamomile to a foxglove plant growing nearby in the garden.
My camera is an old digital Panasonic but I managed to capture the thread which in the picture stretches just barely visible from the flower head across to the center and down to the left where the chamomile flower is.
The distance between the flowers was over four feet so it was an impressive achievement. What was even more surprising was that the baby spiders were migrating over to the foxglove along the thread. They looked like tiny tight-rope walkers. Unfortunately, my camera couldn’t really resolve the sight as they were so little. You can see them beginning to congregate on the foxglove below.
By the end of the day, they had all moved over to the foxglove and when I looked the next morning, they were all gone, with only a little webbing to show they had been there.
Once baby spiders hatch out, they spin a long fine thread which acts like a parachute. When a breeze blows, they will float away, attached to the thread, and take up residence wherever they land. This is called ballooning or kiting. While they usually will travel only a few meters, a strong wind can carry them quite a distance, often miles if the conditions are right.
This behavior has been noted for quite some time, all the way back to the ancient Greeks. More recently the 19th Century poet Walt Whitman wrote a poem with a kiting spider as its theme.
A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory; it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them – ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, – seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d – till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my soul.
