Category Archives: Garden

Bee comb

Posted on November 25, 2012 by

This week I took advantage of what may be the last warm, sunny days of the season to tidy up the bee hives for winter. I removed unneeded boxes of frames from the tops of the hives and shuffled frames … Continue reading →

Posted in Apis mellifera, Garden | Tagged , , , , , | 17 Comments

Crab spider

Posted on September 20, 2012 by

Just under the petal’s lip sat a small green spider. The fly landed. The petal twitched. The spider’s tidy fangs sank into the fly’s crunchy exoskeleton. Next day, the spider sat on the same flower, but this time on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Arachnida, Garden | 2 Comments

Fall garden emerges

Posted on September 6, 2012 by

The slideshow shows a few snapshots of the emerging fall garden (and a gratuitous picture of a Seminole squash bloom — one plant has put on about 200 ft of vine and is still producing). It is very good to … Continue reading →

Posted in Garden | 2 Comments

“There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, / Lull’d in these flowers”

Posted on August 25, 2012 by

Now that late summer is upon us, bumblebee nests are full of worker bees. These bumble-workers often stay out in the field at night, sleeping in flowers. I found this bee in a dewy Yellow Cosmos bloom. She was completely … Continue reading →

Posted in bumblebees, Garden | 12 Comments

Ringneck snake

Posted on August 21, 2012 by

I found this ringneck snake (Diadophis punctatus) under a piece of firewood from the pile in our driveway. The snake either came as a free bonus with the wood or it colonized the new hiding place in the last couple … Continue reading →

Posted in Garden, Serpentes | 7 Comments

Carpentry

Posted on August 18, 2012 by

I’ve been using some salvaged wood to make repairs to the goat barn. One of the pieces seemed unusually light. I flipped it over and found a perfectly round hole on one side: the entranceway of a female Eastern carpenter … Continue reading →

Posted in bumblebees, Garden, Insects, Trees | 1 Comment

One more smutty webpage

Posted on August 7, 2012 by

These are healthy corn tassels, ready to shed their pollen: And these are tassels that have been infected by a fungus, the “corn smut” (Ustilago maydis; formerly U. zeae): Smut spores overwinter in the soil, then as the weather warms … Continue reading →

Posted in Fungi, Garden | 4 Comments

Snake

Posted on August 3, 2012 by

While walking down the garden path, I was stopped by the sight of a black rat snake, its body woven loosely through the low weedy plants. The snake was a youngster, too young to have the heft and scratched hide … Continue reading →

Posted in Garden, Serpentes | 6 Comments

Little blooms

Posted on February 19, 2012 by

Gray, gray day: you will not win. As an antidote to the unrelenting rain and murk, here are a couple of tiny beauties that I photographed earlier this week. Both were growing between lettuce plants as “weeds” in my cold … Continue reading →

Posted in Garden, Plants | 2 Comments

Cabbage beauty

Posted on December 10, 2011 by

Cabbage is not high on the list of plants that get mentioned in botanical love poems or odes to nature’s beauty. “Beloved, thou hast brought me many cabbages” — not likely. Stand aside and make room for hosts of daffodils (so … Continue reading →

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