Practical Herbology: Nature

Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts

Monday, February 28, 2011

Storms, Woodchips and Blossoms.

Our bad weather continued: hail, high winds and sheets of water. Very exciting. And even more exciting a forecast of snow for last Friday night. Sadly, by then, the storms had passed and we had a hard freeze but no snow. I had very disappointed children on my hands. Snow in sacramento... what is the world coming to?

The View From My Office.

The hard freeze though... we have those regularly and it is a big threat to farmers in the valley. Almond trees are very sensitive to frost and so are plum trees. Unfortunately, our plum tree was in full bloom when the cold weather hit. Hopefully we will still get a few plums. Usually we harvest more than 40 lbs of plums so it would be a great loss.

Plum Blossoms.

Plum Blossoms

Luckily most of the apricot blossoms were still shut tight. Last year was not good for apricots, maybe this year I can make apricot jam again.

Apricot Blossoms.

It was most definitely not hammock weather.

The Hammock Over The Swamp.

And the yard was a swamp so nothing got done in the garden.
Well, almost nothing... Mark put wheelbarrows full of wood chips on the new-future-vegetable garden and the chickens went to work: in 2 days they had spread all the wood chips around.

I love team work.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Tires, Birds and Batteries.

On Sunday was The Great Backyard Birdcount so we decided to go to The Cosumnes River Preserve like we did last year. It is an area of marshlands and you are garanteed to see thousands of birds of hundreds of different species. We saw a Golden Eagle once but at this time of the year the area is famous for the gathering of the beautiful and graceful Sandhill Cranes.
And so we left. Later that was intended but we left. As we were driving I was getting quite excited. We had had a lot of stormy weather in the past week and the skies were spectacular especially since we were getting close to sunset. We were 5 miles away when we got a flat tire. Fun, I tell you. Thankfully, my husband knows how to change a tire in 15 mns flat and it gave me time to take this:

Flat Tire.

So, after that little interlude, we continued on and arrived to the river just in time for all of this.

And it was at that point that my camera's batteries died. Yes they died. Just as the skies were turning orange and red, just as dozens after dozens of the beautiful big cranes passed over us to land gracefully in the water perfectly silhouetted in the orange skies.
And I won't even talk of the bunnies by the pier that the sunset illuminated just so that their ears were glowing softly.
Nope, I won't mention it.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Faeryland.

I did not have the intention of posting 2 posts in a row about our walks along the river but we went back on a very foggy morning and it was so beautiful, I thought I'd share.