Trout Lilies and much more!

Today Meg and I planted more in the garden. We found that the Spaulding Spinach (planted on Feb 14) was coming up, the first of any seeds I've planted. The peas are all up, yesterday Meg found a huge snail eating its way down a row, she kindly placed it elsewhere. Planted today were red(new) potatoes, fingerling potatoes, Golden and red beets, rutabaga, turnips, mustard greens, Nelson Carrots, Meslin mix and more Bright Lights Swiss Chard. We also spread wheat straw over everything including the grass seed we planted the other night after the snow.

After planting we took a nature walk around the property. The driveway had our first yard butterfly of 2009 a Mourning Cloak, it was actually seen in the same place yesterday. There was not much to see along the driveway where one should start seeing butterflies and dragonflies in the next week or two, so we headed down to the spring at the lower edge of our property. As soon as we entered the lower woods we could see lots of American Trout Lilies, Erythronium, americanum, there hundreds in bloom, not quite in full bloom yet.

American Trout Lily, Erythronium, americanum

Here is a Virginia Spring-beauty, Claytonia virginica that we found at the local park today.

Below is Rue Anemone, Thalictrum thalictroides this is sometimes called Windflower. Just a few of these were found along the creek below our land. One surprise was finding first a half mussel, then about 150 ft up the stream the other half that matched. This mussel was just under 6 inches long and I'm not 100% sure but I think it is a threatened Carolina Fatmucket, Lampsilis radiata conspicua. This creek is pretty small and has little areas one would encounter a mussel in. It might have came from the pond directly above the creek, I don't know much about mussels.

Here is an female American Toad, Bufo americanus we found down by the creek. Here is a link to hear the male calling a female Funny thing is meg found an American Toad at our friend Roger's water garden last night. Roger had just told me he'd had 10 species of frogs and toads there and American Toad was on he'd not had yet. So meg helped him tie our 11 species record, by seeing this toad.

An early find in our woods a leaf-footed bug.

Just for fun one of our neighbors donkeys that wake us up when their roosters don't. It was rolling on the hillside.

And the bad news both of us found ticks on us today.....
One last thing, today I took all of these photos with Meg's camera and my lens thinking it was mine. Duh...