Lazy Summer Post

Now that it's high summer here (and I haven't drowned in the night in yet another pouring thunderstorm), here are some pictures I took Sunday.

The grass by the path south into the little maples is getting long. (I went out and mowed after I took pictures.)

Inside the little maples it's cool and shady and absolutely zinging with mosquitoes. I could barely stand still long enough to take two pictures, and then I swatted five in two slaps.This is the kind of deep shade (and mosquito activity) I grew up in. All summer I used to wear jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and Deep Woods Off mosquito repellent. I never came back to school with a tan.

Just past the little maples you pop back out into the bright sun. But there are so many mosquitoes, they don't care. They just keep chasing and biting you.

This picture is looking south, before I get to the loop path.

I can't believe the goldenrod on the loop is this tall already. If you click on the picture to see the large version, the spiky grass bits are reed canarygrass, Phalaris arundinacea. Canarygrass (all one word) likes wet soil and will grow over seven feet tall.I don't really like it when the grass gets that high. I guess I fear lions in the bush or something.

A lot of the loop either has standing water on it, or else is brown squooshy mud covered with deer tracks. Can't stop to take photos! Mosquitoes will eat me! This shot is at the end of the loop looking north towards the third photo.

After I took all these pictures, I went out and mowed the whole path again twice around, as well as the yard around the house. Then I had a shower, drank about nine gallons of lemonade, and complained about my wrists hurting on Twitter.

Now I need to go fling my things into a heap and get ready for Origins.

A Walk with Panoramic View

I was reading old posts on Antonia's blog while I was sick, and she mentioned this cool program called Autostitch. It automatically takes your adjacent photos and stitches them together without leaving a messy blur where they overlap.

As soon as I felt a bit better, I took a walk with the camera along the path I keep mowed and took some overlapping pictures.

Here is our son walking south ahead of me, very self-conscious.

If you turn left just past the tree, you come to our fire pit. My husband decided the fire ring was too big and made it smaller, but the extra rocks haven't all been dragged away yet.

This is looking back at the house. No, we can't see the house when we camp out in our back yard.

If you take the path to the left of the fire pit and turn back, this is what you see.

And if you follow that path to the top of the rise and look back again, here is my mossy path I love so much.

When you come out of the trees, you're on a hot, sandy hillside. It was hot dry sand and some moss when we moved here, but slowly the grass is taking hold.

This is the south end of the loop, already looking green and overgrown. I'll have to take a picture later in the summer when the grass and the goldenrod is nearly as high as my head!

The only drawback to these pictures is that Blogger wants to post teeny tiny versions of them, and I had to hink around with Picasa to make them post bigger. But Autostitch sure is a fun way to show a wider-angle view!

Leafs

But you have to say it in that earnest tone that small children use: "Leeeeafsss". Get your lower teeth right on your lip, "Leeeeeafssss."

Hops, Humulus lupulus.

Columbine, Aquilegia spp.

Lily, Lilium spp.

Strawberry, Fragaria virginiana.

American beech, Fagus grandifolia.

Poison ivy, Toxicodendron radicans.

Lunch, Asparagus officinalis.

Another Part of My Path

My husband created this trail four or five years ago with the lawn mower. I turned back and took a picture after I had walked down the rise. This is a really beautiful place to walk at any season of the year, but especially when the moss has had enough rain and is green and soft.

I think these bright orange mushrooms are some kind of Hygrophorus. When we were first married, we used to drive up to Ludington, Michigan, for meetings of the West Michigan Mycological Society, and go out on their mushroom forays. We learned a lot about edible mushrooms, deadly poisonous ones, and pretty ones. Most of the waxy cap mushrooms are described as "edible" by my field guides, but for my taste, they are too small to bother gathering. I prefer to enjoy them with my eyes!

Here is the same trail, at the bottom of the little rise. When it is hot in the summer, it is beautifully shady here. My husband tried edging this path with logs that were too punky to burn in the soapstone stove, but the raccoons and skunks think of them as a buffet! They tear them all up with their claws to get at the grubs inside them, and roll them all over.

Decades ago, this was a small farm with sweet cherry trees, peach trees, a few apple trees, and Concord grapevines. The peach trees were mostly pulled out before we bought the property, and only two of the sweet cherry trees survive.

But the grapevines have run wild. It wasn't a very good year for grapes. First they got frosted just as they were blooming, then the weather turned wet at the end of the season, and even the grapes in cultivated vineyards suffered from mildew. In many years, I can pick a bunch of grapes and eat them as I walk, but there were only a few this year.

One year we gathered them in paper grocery sacks, and I made a grape pie, which is truly a labor of love: first you squish each grape out of its skin, saving the skins. Then you cook the pulp and strain out the seeds. Finally you put back the skins and bake them with the pulp. It actually makes an excellent pie, reminiscent of a blueberry pie, but it's a lot of work.

Obligatory Knitting Photo

The fiber fest socks are nearly done. It felt weird to think I would have no socks on the needles, so I rooted out a skein of Wool-Ease from the stash and started some more. It was amazing how much more quickly the knitting went, with bigger yarn and bigger needles. I knitted three or four inches of two sock toes in odd moments yesterday afternoon.

I'm not sure what I'll be knitting next. I have to think about a medallion for the West Michigan Lace Group exchange. That will probably be tatted. Or would a small knitted doily count as a medallion? Hmmm.

Take a Walk with Me

Our property is an old, grown-over farm, a 10-acre parcel a quarter of a mile deep. This is the two-track that leads to the south end of it, all grown over by seedling maples from the five big maples along the western property line.

A lot of the grass is little bluestem grass, sometimes called "poverty oats" because it will grow in our sand-dune-y soil. The goldenrod will grow anywhere.

On either side of this trail are thin little maple trees that all grew up competing with each other for the sunlight. They are great for making a quick trellis for growing morning glories or beans on. And the dead ones are good winter kindling, too. Because they are standing up, they don't get so wet, and can be broken off and carried back to the house in the winter.

The sandy ground is thick with moss and next year's hawkweed plants. When the frost comes this moss will be even more beautiful. Under a thick snowfall, the moss will grow happily. It always looks amazing to me when the snow melts away, this under-snow greenhouse of low-growing plants.

I got back to my socks yesterday, and I worked a little on the Sampler M pattern. It is an interesting one, embossed leaf-like shapes on a purl background. I want to finish that one before the weekend.

The loft bed progress is slower than I expected. We took home over half the cut parts, and the plan was that my husband would paint them during the week. Well, I finally hauled them out of the van this morning! My dad is coming down tomorrow to bring the rest of the parts. And the assembly directions!

Not Another Dishcloth!

Sorry,yes, one more dishcloth. I had a few yards of the green crochet thread from the Pi doily left on the cardboard tube, so I thought I'd use up all the odds and ends and remnants I could find. I have thrown out three of those cardboard centers so far.

Look at all those knitting needles. When Hobby Lobby had their latest half price sale on knitting needles, I bought another set each of size 0's and size 1's. With the 0's and 1's from the Susan Bates sock set, that meant I had nine of each, so if I get that brave, I can knit two socks at once on four needles each!

The sock set comes with five each in size 000, 00, 0 and 1. Last night I used my Joann's 40% off coupon and bought a second sock set. Now I have ten each of size 000 and 00, and fourteen each of size 0 and 1!

Visions of very fine knitting are dancing in my head.

Outdoors, spring is rolling on like a big green bulldozer. Yesterday I noticed that my lilacs are blooming. I heard the indigo buntings singing, and the orioles whistling "sweet sweet sweetie bird". (I am always amazed that such a tropical-looking bird as the bright orange and black oriole lives in a relatively northern place like Michigan.) When I took a walk out to the south end of the property, I saw that the jack-in-the-pulpits and trilliums are blooming.

When we bought this property 15 years ago, it was an old, farmed-out farm, starting to grow brush. It came complete with a farmhouse with the roof caved in, and a barn with the floor rotting out. We filled the big dumpster that is delivered on the back of a semi-trailer at least three times, and the small one more times than that.

Over the years, trees have been growing back. The property had a few odd-shaped steep-sloped places where the farm tractors had not been able to reach, and in those grew beech seedlings from a tree that blew over in a windstorm, wild ginger, trout lilies, blue violets and yellow ones, and even a stray morel mushroom or two.

Spring and early summer are great times to take walks on the paths we keep mowed. So many plants are coming into bloom, and so many birds are out. When we first moved here, I had my binoculars and field guides out constantly. These days I don't do as much birdwatching as "bird-listening". I can pick out most of our birds by song. By spring, my skills are a little rusty, and it's back to the bird books until I have the songs identified again. The US Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
maintains a list of bird songs as .wav files in its migratory bird research section.

(The resources of the web are indeed vast!)