80AcresOnline

Remember that garden post from May 11?   Well, we’ve had tiny harvests since then–a few radishes,  enough beans for a small “mess” of them–but today was the first Grand Prize for home gardeners–enough corn, beans, and tomatoes for a meal for two.

Oh, happy taste buds!  Happy stomachs!   The Chief Gardener said this made the work worth it.  Hurray!

And yes, a lot of wildlife have enjoyed the garden as well, from bugs to birds.   (So far the deer haven’t discovered it…)

The half-inch of rain last weekend brought out a few more flowers, and today the theme was purple and yellow.  The most intense yellow belonged to the claspleaf coneflowers, damp-ground lovers, here in the swale below the #3 gabion.  The lacy white in the foreground bears the unlovely name of beggars’ ticks, for its adherent seeds.

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We’ve all had the experience of visitors arriving just before, or just after, the best show of flowers/vegetables…the garden just isn’t looking its best the day they come, but it was right before (or after.)  We once spent a small fortune watering a patch of bluebonnets, trying to keep it in flower in a drought year for my husband’s aunt, who–when shown them–said “Is that all?  Why do people make a fuss over those?”

Well, we had houseguests this past week–late for one set of flowers and early for another–but the land graciously showed them something anyway:

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This is the season when all my plans for writing sensible, helpful, organized entries about this or that aspect of our project go blooey…because since we finally got some rain, the flowers (and their insect “friends”) are burgeoning and all I want to do is take pictures and say “Look!  Look at this one!”    For instance, stiff-stem prairie flax,  Linum berlandieri, gold from a distance, but up close decorated with delicate, precise lines of dark orange.

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Plains Nipple Cactus, Coryphanta missouriensis, is a small, inconspicuous ground-hugging cactus that almost disappears (shrinks a lot) after between flowerings.   Unless you know where you have a patch, you do not see it then.  But when it flowers, it opens elegant little flowers with long, pointed petals.  The lacy pattern of the spines on the plant, and the starry shape of the flowers, makes this one of the spring joys around here.

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Despite the way their roots attack the pumps, we plant water iris in the larger permanent water features: they offer desirable habitat for odonates  above water, and shelter for tadpoles, red-lined ribbon snakes, and other aquatic critters below the water surface.  And though the “land” iris isn’t native here, I enjoy the older varieties that still mark out house-sites and yards in fields where a homesteader’s house has long vanished.

This robust yellow water iris multiples quickly and once more we need to yank about half of it out of the big pond–but it’s attracted hummingbirds and butterflies as well as the odes that perch on it and (some of them) use the stems to lay their eggs in.

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Species lists are now live on the website.  When you mouse over the Species List, three choices appear: birds, plants, and “zoology” (which in this instance means non-bird wildlife.)

And each of these lists has three pictures of representative species up there on the top green line.

So if you’re been wondering what we have…there it is.

Though our prickly pear cactus has been hit by a disease or parasite, as well as the drought, a beautiful lace cactus, Echinocereus reichenbachii, that a rancher lady gave me off her place is thriving.  They used to be common on the gravelly-rocky hills around here, but they’re salable and have been pirated off some slopes where I used to see them every spring.

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Spring has leapt forward this week.  On the way to church in the city, I saw drifts of bluebonnets…but the following pictures are from our place, taken in the last day or so.     They’re small and scattered, but beautiful–and very popular with the local small wildlife (insects, for instance.)

I haven’t had time yet to look up which eager little eaters these are.

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Here’s the view we’ve had out the back door the past few days, minus the clothes on the line and the corner of the barn.

The pinky-purple is redbud, the green is roughleaf dogwood (not yet flowering), and the gold is a flowering red oak.  All are native, though these are yard plantings chosen to look good in (most) seasons.

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