All posts by laurahinnj

Dog days, Pond

Got rocks?

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One by one he’s determined to remove every last rock from his personal wading pool (a.k.a. our little backyard pond). There’s no interest in the dry rocks on the shore; he prefers instead to snorkel for the choicest rock.


He runs around with it in his mouth like a prize, tail high in the air, before settling down for a good chew. (Yes, he eats rocks.)


He might even roll on his back some with it. Thank heavens he hasn’t discovered the joy of burying stuff yet! As it is, the DH’s patience is running thin.


Makes Luka pretty happy, though. I think he’s pleased to amuse and entertain us. (Well… me anyway.)


This is the fresh face I get should I be silly enough to reprimand him between fits of laughter. Have I mentioned lately how nutty this dog is?

Garden, Snapshots, Whatever

Spring in my garden

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The season of yellow is quickly giving over to the season of blues, pinks and whites. The neighbors are welcome to their garish forsythia; I’d rather wait for these in my garden:

Virginia Bluebells

Serviceberry

Meadow Sage

Quince (slightly garish, yes, but gorgeous anyway!)

So… what’s blooming your way this weekend? Still stuck with all that yellow?

😉

Birds, Dog days, In the neighborhood, Seasons

Bayside

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Today was the type of Spring day I wait for… perfectly warm, a Friday, payday… and a chance to sneak off work early and hit the beach for a couple hours…


Because it’s nesting season for beach birds, Luka could only run on the bay side of Sandy Hook, but run he did! He swam some, too, and came across a couple mating horseshoe crabs floating in the flooded marsh. I guess this is the first full moon of the spring and the tide was very high, and well, the horseshoe crabs were doing their thing. Nice to see. I don’t know what it is about dogs and horseshoe crabs, but Luka barked and growled and was afraid like every other dog I’ve ever had.


He was in his element there, in the marsh, tasting the prickly pear cactus and chewing sticks after I tossed them into the water for him. He really wants to be a bird dog, I think, and he certainly looks the part, finally, when he’s in the water.


I had to hold him by the collar for a pic of us two… he was sopping wet at this point and had just run off with two complete strangers… such a friendly dog; I think he’d wander along with anyone so long as it looked like they were about to do something fun.


Speaking of fun… a girl after my own heart… searching a tidal pool for hermit crabs. Look at those wellies! She was careful to warn me not to be fooled by snails.


One of my favorite sunset views… the osprey platform in the far distance is occupied, as is usual, but the residents went off fishing soon after I arrived. Some brant are still around, but the calls of oystercatchers have replaced those of oldsquaw echoing across the bay. I found towhees in the holly forest, but no willets overhead, yet. It’s not properly Spring without the call of the willet.

Whatever

Poem in your Pocket Day

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A favorite from Ted Kooser:

The Bluet

Of all the flowers, the bluet has
the sweetest name, two syllables
that form on the lips, then fall
with a tiny, raindrop splash
into a suddenly bluer morning.

I offer you mornings like that,
fragrant tiny blue blossoms–
each with four petals, each with a star
at its heart. I would give you whole fields
of wild perfume if only

you could be mine, if you were not–
like the foolish bluet (also called
Innocence) – always holding your face
to the fickle, careless, fly by kiss
of the Clouded Sulphur Butterfly.

Bluet image from Hilton Pond

Birds, Whatever

First looks

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Patrick invited us to share a bit about the first pair of binoculars that we used for birding. Unlike Patrick, I came to birding kinda late in life, when I was in my mid-twenties, and bought a pair of Kowa’s at the nature center where I would end up volunteering a few weeks later.

They were cheap and pretty awful, but nothing as bad as what I see some people trying to learn birds with. I used them for a couple years until I was able to appreciate the difference between a $100 pair of binoculars and a $1000 pair of binoculars. I saved up for the Zeiss 7X42’s I use now and still keep those old Kowa’s on the counter to grab when I see something interesting out the kitchen window. They’re always dusty, but I still see nice birds with them once in a while.

Now I’m trying to remember what my first bird was with the new Zeiss’… I think it may have been a prothonotary on the first day of the spring weekend in Cape May in 98 or 99.

Garden, Wildflowers

Wild flowers in the lawn

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The frustrated wildflower photographer (me) roamed around the garden this weekend looking for flowers. There was nothing new in the woods, so I settled for what I could find in the less well-kept corners of the yard. You might think of these as weeds, but it’s really a matter of perspective…

The bunnies were treated to their first dandy-lion adorned salads of the season!
 A bunch or two of grape hyacinths pop up in random parts of the lawn every spring and remind me of my mother who had them planted in a little bed with lily-of-the-valley.


I’m not really certain what this is, but think it may be bittercress? It’s blooming everywhere and must taste nice to someone.


The tiniest of yellow flowers, no bigger than the nail on my pinky finger, oxalis maybe, and nectar for a very tiny critter.


Purple violets, well before May Day, something else the bunnies like on their salads.

A couple years ago when my work schedule was flexible, I completed the classes and required volunteer hours to become a Master Gardener. If I remember correctly, I had to take 3 months of classes and *give back* 60 hours of volunteer work that first year. An awful lot of class time was spent learning things that I found pretty distasteful; mainly what sorts of herbicides would work to control broadleaf weeds like these in a manicured lawn. I’ve spent an even greater amount of hours pulling these weeds, and the summer weeds, and the fall weeds, and the winter weeds in the county parks where I do the majority of my volunteer hours these days.

The weeds always win. There’s always more of them. Why not find a way to enjoy them?

Garden, Pastimes, Pond

Count the fishies

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The first summer we put in our pond we were pretty conservative with the number of fish we provided for. I think we started with less than twenty and I worried that even that small number was too much for our 1100 gallons. There was, of course, some formula involving the number of gallons divided by the ‘inches of fish’ that confounded me, as does most math, so we sort of ignored it and hoped that we didn’t have too many fish to overload the filtration system.

Pond books also had me scared to death to actually feed them very much food. I had the idea that if I fed them too much, the pond would quickly go green and the goldfish would grow to monstrous proportions in just one season. So I fed them once a day, if I remembered.

However many years out now… 6 or 7 since we put it in… I’ve decided that most of what I read in books is baloney. Maybe you have to worry about all that crap if you have a really small pond and man-eating koi, or if you think of a garden pond in terms of an indoor tropical aquarium, or have no means of filtering it, but I’ve found that it takes care of itself pretty well so long as I just leave it alone!

And the fish, well, they’re taking pretty good care of themselves too and multiplying. We added three small koi two summers ago and they seem to really like it here. They’ve certainly added some color to the mix of babies. Somehow the twenty or so survivors that we started with last spring have turned into…

Well, I’ll let you guess. You can try counting them in the pic, but like those count-the-jelly-beans-in-the-jar contests, it’s much more fun to just eyeball it and make a guess.

The person who guesses with the closest number wins all of this season’s babies!

😉

Note: I’ve finally added a category in the sidebar for pond posts, so if you should ever be in the mood for reading more, go there.

In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Wildflowers

I fell in love today…

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Anything else like this wouldn’t ordinarily garner a second glance from me… yellow… not my type. Not my type at all.

But there was something to this yellow that caused me to turn my head and then captured me. A clear pure yellow on dainty pointed petals that completely stole my heart.

The shape to the leaves called to mind something familiar, some other love that I might’ve already met. Tumbling down a little hillside of dappled sun as it was, I was smitten, but can’t come up with a name. Anyone know this handsome little flower?