A Garden Tour

It's been very hot here lately and I haven't strayed too far from the house.  So, I thought for a blog post... how about a garden tour?  

Early mornings are the best times to be in the garden.  It's a little cooler and the gnats and flies aren't out yet.  That's when you are apt to find me wandering around the yard looking at flowers and snipping off dead heads... or sometimes with my coffee cup in one hand and camera in the other.  My trusty companion, Gizmo, will be around somewhere, too.

You can see the long flower border behind him, but you can also see that we like flowers in our grass.  Honey bees like the white clover.  It's shady on that side of the house in the early morning, but gets quite hot once the sun comes over the trees.  Then it's best to head over to the shadier side of the garden.

This year the deer have not eaten off the hostas, so they look pretty and we've seen a hummingbird sipping their nectar. 

  There are more hostas, along with ferns and violets, in the shade along the side of the house.

The bed you can see in the background of that photo is part shade and part sun.  You can see the sunny side in the above photo.  In the next photo, is the shady side, with native dwarf crested iris, Japanese silver fern, plus a few annuals that like shade... begonias, blue lobelia, and torenia.

Something has caught Giz's attention...

... there are a couple of bunnies down in the driveway (past where Giz can go).

"Hi Gizmo" one seems to wave a greeting!

"It's okay if the bunnies are down there, Gizmo... just don't let them come up here and eat the flowers." I say to him.

Along with blue lobelia and pink begonias in the partly shady spots are yellow corydalis, which is another native plant.  They have seeded themselves into quite a few places, including cracks between rock.  I don't mind them self-sowing, because they are so attractive-- and easy to pull if they do happen to grow somewhere I don't want them.

With the disease problems with impatiens the last few years, I've had to change what I plant in the bed right in front of our house.  Early in the spring, my husband brought me some beautiful violas, which did well until the summer heat got them.  So I went to our local Agway and got some clearance annuals.  They are a little small yet, but they are coming along and I think they are going to eventually fill the spot nicely.

Sweet Alyssum, blue lobelia, torenia, and begonias

Near them, but in the full sun, are my hens and chicks.  The soil was not so good in this area and I got tired of struggling with other flowers.  Plus, I do think the hens and chicks are neat.

Looking up, you can see the deck boxes.  I love Geranium 'Vancouver Centennial' and so do hummingbirds.  I wasn't sure what to put with them in the planters.  I usually have regular geraniums in there and these geraniums have rather unique colors.  When I saw some yellow calibrachoa plants at the garden center, I thought they might work.  

Kind of a different color-combination, but I like it!

I also have three pots of 'Vancouver Centennial' on the kitchen deck.  Typically, we have hummingbirds coming to them like crazy... this year we don't seem to have as many (yet? I'm still hoping more will show up!).  Click here for a post from last summer of our hummingbirds.

I think it's too late this year for them to need spider web material for their nests, but there was plenty of that available at our house!  I read recently that for hummers to like your yard, besides flowers, it's good to have spider webs and sapsucker trees.  They use the webs in nest-building and like the insects which are attracted to sap dripping from the holes made by sapsuckers.  You can see in the above photo that we have spiderwebs, and if you look at some of the tree trunks in this post, you will see lots of sapsucker-drilled holes. Back in 2008, I took this photo of a female ruby-throated hummingbird at a sapsucker tree.
Hummers also like a spray of water.  While I don't have a sprinkler, we have natural showers from time to time... like the day it rained hard from one dark cloud while the sun was still brightly shining.

It has been a very dry summer here and if not for my husband putting a gravity-fed hose from the pond for me to water the gardens, the plants would be dried up by now.

In the past, we've used the pond to water our vegetable garden (you can see it inside the fence to the left of Gizmo), but at the beginning of the drought he bought extra hoses so I could also water the flowers.

Another change in the garden this year is that I started switching this bed from an herb garden to one for pollinators.  So far it's been used by bees and butterflies and....

... a thirsty dog!

Gizmo is not always the only dog in the garden.  On Thursdays, his cousin Ruby comes to visit for the day.

After a romp around the yard, Giz, Ruby, and I came back inside the house so they could take their first naps of the day.  Just before I started writing this post however, I happened to look out the back door and saw one more thing I want to show you.

The scarlet passionvine had a flower!  These flowers only stay open for one day.  My vine has not had a lot of flowers yet, so it was good timing that it had one today.  We bought it at a nursery in Florida and brought it home in the back of our car on our last trip.  It will have to live in our sunroom over the winter as it's not hardy here, but I think it's worth the work of digging it up and replanting in spring and fall. 

The gardens do take time and effort, but I enjoy them so much.  Giz, Ruby, and I hope you enjoyed our tour! 

Birding and Butterfly-ing in Bucks County with my Brother

I went 'home' to visit my family over the weekend.  I think when you grow up somewhere you really love, no matter how long you live somewhere else and love that place;  your childhood home will always have a special place in your heart.  This is true for me.  I love our home now, but I love the farm where I grew up, too.  Luckily, I can still go back and visit!  And even more than that, when I go visit, I can do some of the things I love; with my brother!

He's out pretty much everyday, watching birds on the farm or working... or a combination of the two.  So, he knows where to watch for special birds.  The last few years he's had rather rare Blue Grosbeaks nesting on the farm!

We patiently waited awhile for them to appear, but after a bit the male perched on this wire.

He preened and showed off his rusty wing patches.  Then the female came and sat a little closer to us.

She is the perfect color to not-be-noticed when she sits on a grassy nest.  This pair had a nest in some weeds a few feet off the ground, and we were hoping to see the babies, but a recent storm had knocked the nest sideways.  My brother thought the babies may have been old enough to survive on the ground.  Since both parents were still hanging around the area, hopefully that is true.

Maybe the Willow Flycatchers we saw also had a nest somewhere. 

You know it's a Willow Flycatcher when it says, "Fitz-bew" like this one did.

There were two adults, and one was carrying food in its bill.  There was also a lot of scolding going on as we walked by a certain tree.

Indigo Bunting showing it's not sky blue, it's indigo!

We saw Indigo Buntings galore and lots of other birds as well.  Our ebird list came to 48 species when we got back to the house after almost 4 hours of birding.

A pair of American Goldfinches

I probably would not have seen this Wood Duck mom and 3 babies in the 'back creek' if my brother had not spotted them and pointed them out to me.

Wood Duck hen on the left, 3 juveniles to her right

We walked a big loop around the farm-- luckily part of it was thru the woods.  It was nice to sit on a log in the shade for a little while, listening for a cuckoo!  (Turned out to be just crows making a funny noise once and awhile, we decided).

Then we headed on back toward the house, up thru the cornfields.  My brother said, "You can't get a photo in that direction - the light's not good".  (Oh, yes, I did, and you are in it!)

Looking back the other direction, you can tell that a farmer who loves birds lives here.

We had seen a Great Spangled Frittilary on our walk and talked about going 'butterfly-ing'.

My brother said it's good to get a photo of their underwing if you can... it can help with identification.

That butterfly co-operated for another photo, though it didn't matter too much since he had already identified it for me!

I didn't have to rush off for anything, so.... we decided even though it was really hot, we'd go to Bowman's Hill. 

It's not far away, only about a 10 minute drive.  You can see the tower from the farm (and vice-versa). Bowman's Hill also holds a special place in my heart.  My family used to have picnics there and several members of my family have volunteered or worked there (including myself).

The area we were headed for is only a small part of the wildflower preserve, and it is a part that has changed a lot since I worked there.  It's now a native meadow with a pond, which is a whole lot better than the mowed lawn it used to be!  Butterflies, bees, and dragonflies think so, too.

Tiger Swallowtail

Black Swallowtail on Wild Bergamot

Tiger Swallowtail on Button Bush

Bumblebee on Wild Bergamot

Honeybees on Mountain Mint

Besides butterflies and bees on the flowers, there were dozens of dragonflies by the pond.  

Paths wound thru the native plants in the dazzling sun but were occasionally shaded by beautiful old red cedars and other trees.

It was worth it to be a little hot, just to be with my brother and see what we could find.  One butterfly we were looking for eluded us until we were leaving.  Just a small one, but exceptionally beautiful... a Juniper Hairstreak.  Try as I might, I was not able to get a photo of it.  Well, that's a good reason to go back.  And, you know I'd love to!

 

Our Trip to Trinidad & Tobago: Links & a Few More Photos

We experienced so many wonderful things in Trinidad and Tobago that it took me 11 blog posts to cover the highlights.  To wrap them all up, I thought it might be helpful to have a post with clickable links to all eleven posts, especially if you are planning a trip there.  

If you've already read all the posts, then I hope you enjoy these photos which have not been on the blog before.  Usually my photos 'go' with the words, but this time they are just sort of random!

(I usually use between 15 and 25 photos per post, but I have 762 photos from our trip... so I still have a lot of photos you haven't seen!)

Purple Honeycreeper

My very first post about the trip was an introduction; with a variety of my favorite photos.  It is called, "Ten Days in Trinidad and Tobago".  I'm going to end my blog report the same way I started, with a few more of my favorite photos.

Post number two was about the Asa Wright Nature Centre.  Click on the title to read "Asa Wright - The Place and the People".  

Barred Antshrike

Then it was on to the Hummingbirds.  As I wrote in this post, "T & T Part 3: The Hummingbirds" we saw 12 of the 18 possible species of hummers while we were in Trinidad and Tobago.

White-necked Jacobin preening

In post number 4, I wrote about the amazing trees we saw on Trinidad in "T & T Part 4: The Tremendous Trees".

I think the birds were having a party in this tree!

Next was a post called "T & T Part 5: The Bird Magnet" about one particular kind of tree that attracts many beautiful birds.  Most of the photos in the post are of brightly-colored tanagers and other birds that eat the fruit of the Wild Tobacco tree.

Violaceous Euphonia

Number 6 was also about birds, but this time it wasn't the 'pretty birds' it was "T & T Part 6: The Bizarre Birds".  That one is about an Owl, two birds with beards, Oilbirds,  Chachalacas (that say their name), and Flamingoes.

Great Antshrike

"T & T Part 7: The Nests" is pretty self-explanatory.  I might have set a record with that one though, using 33 photos.  I tried to include photos of not just the nests, but the birds that made them.  Although the last photo in that post leads into the next post... about turtles!  "T & T Part 8: Leatherback Turtles".

Caligo butterfly

Then I wrote about monkeys and other animals in "T & T Part 9: The Critters".

Green-rumped Parrotlets

Post 10 was called "T & T Part 10: Cuffie River Nature Retreat" which was about our lodging for the 4 days we were on Tobago (and the things we saw there).

Orange-winged Parrots in a rain storm

Finally, the last post in the series was called, "T & T Part 11: Caroni Swamp".  Our visit there was the 'grand finale' of our 6-day stay on Trinidad.  It included another owl, beautiful scenery and lots of birds, including Scarlet Ibises and 2 Flamingos!

One post I thought about writing but didn't, was about birds taking baths!  When it rained, that seemed to be the time for birds to get cleaned up!  That was fun to watch-- whether it was a 'shower' on a perch...

White-necked Jacobin taking a shower in the rain

or a bath in the birdbath!

Palm Tanager taking a bath

Another post I thought about doing was about the many kinds of flowers we saw, but I knew so little about them it would have been hard to do more than post photos. 

Frangipani or Plumeria flowers, very sweet-smelling!

Though our trip was specifically a birding trip (and we wound up seeing a total of 170 species of birds) we really enjoyed all the aspects of nature we experienced on Trinidad and Tobago.  

Butterfly on Hibiscus flower

I hope my blog may have inspired some of you to travel to "T & T" yourselves, or at least that you enjoyed this virtual 'field trip'!