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.
Nearing the end of May, looking back on the month, it’s hard to decide what to focus on. The weather started out the month on the decidedly cool side with the rain being on the generous side without being a gully washer. This encouraged plants to grow, though slowly because of the cool weather. The raised beds have been cleared of dead leaves and various weeds trying to get a head start ahead of my planting. A garden trowel is very useful for discouraging this. I now have garden peas, carrots, spinach and potatoes poking up, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
The old flower gardens I’ve inherited from my mother are badly in need of renovating. Lily of the Valley has been making a power play to take over the front garden, crowding out everything else. The side garden, which is dedicated to daylilies, also needs a make-over. Last year, they looked like the picture below.
This year, it’s wall-to-wall daylilies and I can’t see any sign of the daffodils I planted there a few years before. Visits to gardening websites recommend thinning every three to five years to keep them under control, something I’ve been very negligent about and will have to correct.
Monday was Memorial Day, and my small town (population just over 6000) had a parade. A few years ago, the parade had been canceled due to lack of volunteers and an aging honor guard. This produced a loud enough howl of protest that efforts were undertaking to quickly bring back the parade. Yes, the honor guards are getting a bit long in the tooth, but they marched anyway.
The American Legion did their bit, carrying their banner.
And including a small float.
The local Knights of Columbus also marched.
An outfit called the sons of the Revolution put in their own float, along with cosplayers.
The parade wound up with the local Fire Rescue Squad, complete with a dalmatian dog.
A modest affair compared with larger towns, but it drew a good crowd, nonetheless. The weather was clear and mild, making for a perfect Memorial Day.
Not much happening locally this month. It’s been quiet, which I consider a blessing these days. The weather has gradually been warming over the course of April, with temperatures yesterday up in the sixties, about normal for this time of year in Northern New Hampshire.
Spring violets have just popped up.
Snowdrops bloomed and have gone by now, being quickly succeeded by spring crocuses. For some peculiar reason a few have somehow mysteriously migrated from inside to just outside the border of the garden, where I most definitely did not plant them. Another one was out in the middle of the front lawn. It’s most likely that a squirrel dug them up and reburied them (I’ve seen them do this with acorns). So I am marking their location, to dig up in the fall for replanting back into the garden, where hopefully they will stay.
Well, the robins are once again at it, checking out the garage door opener unit in the unused part of the garage. This makes the third year in a row they have scouted this as a possible nesting site. As usual that gets a big ‘nope’ from me, so I am keeping the main garage door closed whenever possible. It’s kind of a shame as they clearly have their little hearts set on this spot. I can see why it’s tempting: it’s quiet (I’m rarely noisy), out of sight of egg-eating predators, and no cat patrolling the premises. Unfortunately robins are messy nesters and I want to keep the opener unit clean and functional for the occasions when I need to open that side of the garage. So my would-be boarders will have to house hunt somewhere else.
Last but not least, the next door neighbor has a whimsical streak.
I spotted this huge tree conk about a month ago growing out of a tree on the edge of my property and was amazed it had escaped my notice. It’s well over a foot in length. Info on the web states it is very difficult to age bracket fungi like this but I can’t believe this popped up overnight. Well apparently my neighbor also took note of this fungal prodigy and set up a little gnome house with attendant gnome with a white rock for decor.
