Spring Flowers!

Yesterday after beekeeping class Meg and I went for a walk at the local nature park. One hillside had lots of Trout Lilies in bloom. No other spring flowers were seen. It was a lovely walk  along the Little River on a 78 degree day.  Not had the chance to see if our Trout Lily hillside is blooming...

Oh, BTW the complete bee hive that is being given away to one student in my class, I have a 1 in 8 chance of winning it!

 Above is our first ever anemone bloom at Paradise. I planted these late last fall and forgot I planted them. What's new I forget things once in a while, hush Meg... The others I planted in the backyard garden in January are up with leaves! The fall anemones I ordered from Holland last year one is showing signs of life. I feared all were dead including the gallon pot purchased locally.

OK, I miss IDed the crocus featured below as Crocus vernus 'Jeanne d'Arc', not sure what it is?? The crocus above is Crocus vernus 'Jeanne d'Arc. Both these crocus are big for crocuses!

Squirrels are in big trouble here! Saturday morning I filled 3 suet feeders, Sunday afternoon all have been chewed apart leaving the suet feeders empty..

Rain is coming tomorrow, well needed here. The Spring Peepers are finally making some decent choruses. Sunday night we left a door open until about 8 pm and enjoyed a level 4-5 concert on a scale of 10.

Also our first spring butterfly showed up today. I say spring as it emerged this spring unlike some of the butterflies that wintered over. It was a Spring Azure, lovely and it landed next to me in the garden.

Spring Wildflower: Cut-leaf Toothwort

On Sunday Meg and I took a nature walk together at the old Occoneechee Speedway Park. This was one of the first two NASCAR tracks that opened in 1949 and it closed in 1968. Our parks have been working on preserving it.

Last year our first visit there we saw thousands of Cut-leaf Toothwort, Cardamine concatenata just past its prime. So we hoped to see this  spring ephemeral fresher this year. Well I think we hit the target this year. Below are some examples of what we saw.

You don't normally see such full blooms like this one!

More of a normal plant, see the cut-leaf leaves?

Some plants can have a purple tint, not many were this purple.

These two Trout Lilies were trying to out show the Cut-leaf Toothwort. Lots of Trout Lilies were seen as well!

Thousands of Spring Beauties were seen as well. Normal Spring Beauties have five petals like these. On another post I'll show some with six, seven and nine petals.

Meg also found a Letter Box hidden under a hollow tree, we looked it up at http://www.atlasquest.com/. The box had a handmade stamp of a 49 Oldsmobile the first car the win a race at the speedway! There was also the letterbox with stamped notes from others that had found it.

Spring's Arrival

Sitting back relaxing on our porch the evening before spring is to start we enjoy the first calls of the Pickerel Frog in our pond.

The first day of spring was very pleasant here it was sunny all day and reached 76 degrees. We actually had a butterfly list going 1 sulphur species, 5 Spring Azures, 1 Mourning Cloak and 2 anglewings that did not stick around for IDs. The pond had at least 12 Eastern Painted Turtles basking, 30 or more Eastern Red-spotted Newts (likely hundreds), Pickerel Frogs as well as Spring Peepers were calling. Along the pond I saw Northern Cricket frogs, Bullfrogs and Green Frogs.

Funnest thing I have seen in the pond was an Eastern Red-spotted Newt riding cowboy style on a frog twice its size. I think since we saw other newts mating, this one was trying to mate the stunned frog.

The peacock next door started calling again, great! I was hoping they had tired of the peacocks and gotten rid of them. If you were reading here last spring that male peacock called all hours of the night for months. We like having the windows open at night and the peacock is very loud.

No dragonflies or damselflies were found, they should be out now.

We took a short wild flower walk into our woods.

Wind Flower or Anemone
Just a few blooming in our ravine.

Trout Lily or Dog-toothed Violet, Erythronium americanum

These were just a few of hundreds in bloom on our property.

Bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis from our woods.
Meg found 4 blooming plants, usually that is about all we find. One of my favorite wild flowers!

Lesser Celandine, Ranunculus ficaria

Thanks to Edith Hope and Anne Tanne for IDing the mystery plant in my garden! These yellow flowers told the entire story. From what I have heard it is terribly invasive and it will likely be removed from the garden.

Crocus 'tricolor'

Crocus 'bluebird'
Just a few more crocus from our garden, I just had to show these off a little.

Daffodils opened today finally

Finally some of the daffodils that came with our property opened today.! The new ones I planted last fall are getting close. Below is one of the smaller daffodils that almost opened today.

On Sunday Meg and I walked into our woods and found 3 Trout Lilies in bloom. This is our first native wildflower this year!

My work at Julia's has been very pleasant this week. While I've been finishing up the porch I constantly get the aroma of this Daphne at the front door.

Can you smell that? I get it from 50-60 foot away all day long.

A little walk around the corner and you find this hellebore, could there be 100 blooms maybe?

Julia's snow flakes, Leucojum aestivum! My first snow flakes, thanks to Darla for correcting me on this plant.

I took some cutting from Julia's garden on Tuesday, black fig and paper Bush (Edgeworthia}! Hope I can get something going on these cuttings. The black figs are supposed to be real tasty too.

Back in our garden the Hyacinth are getting ready. This one is one that was here when I bought the place, I think I'll have 5 new ones this year!

 Here is the Clematis armandii "snowdrift" I bought last year. It never grew at all last year, nothing!! This photo was taken 6 days ago, that new growth has grown at least a foot in the past 6 days! We intended on having it cover to back porch railing, it is now touching the railing, YEAH!

Here is our Camellia japonica 'Crimson Candles' I bought it last fall, it had nearly 100 buds on the 3 foot bush back then. On Tuesday it started opening up those blooms! What a delightful bush all these 2 inch blooms. Julia has a slightly bigger one and it was blooming like crazy on Monday when I got to work.

Last thing the veggy garden. We have been eating arugula and mustard greens all week. These were planted last fall and somehow managed to live through out the winter. Two and half weeks ago I planted Sugar Snap Peas today I found my first pea sprout. Now where is my Swiss Chard?

Eastern Redbud, Cercis canadensis

Where we live Eastern Redbud grows wild all along the roadsides, some places a lot others very little if not at all. Our driveway is loaded with it, and it reminds me of my time growing up in Ohio where it was all along the roadsides as well.

Above is an Eastern Redbud from today by our garden, the buds will open any day now. We'll be seeing a lot of it in bloom and the usual spring butterflies that visit the flowers. One butterfly of special interest is the Henry's Elfin a tiny gem of a butterfly that can be found along our road and in the redbuds in the yard. You have to look hard for these tiny 1/2 inch butterflies, it takes a lot of serious looking for them. Henry's Elfins are reported to use American Holly flowers as a host food in the southern US and Eastern Redbud in the northeastern US. We have very little hollies in our woods and I've never found any in flower in the woods. I've been told over and over again that the use of redbud as a host foodplant is a northern thing, but given one can find 6-8 of these little guys in a walk here makes me wonder.

We have another Elfin too, usually is emerges a little later than the Henry's it is the Eastern Pine Elfin as seen above. In the 11 seasons I have lived here only 3 times the Eastern Pine Elfin has been found, so it is one of the rarest butterflies found in our garden. If you didn't know we have had 76 species of butterflies in our garden. After a long time stuck at 75 species a Gulf Fritillary made number 76 last year.

Above is from a few years ago, our driveway. Below is the road out to our mailbox.

Below is a close up of redbud in full bloom.

Yes, my first butterfly photo of 2009

Male Falcate Orangetip perched on tall grass above our pond. Notice that the butterfly is holding on with 4 of it's 6 legs the other 2 legs are called pro legs you can see them folded next to the eyes. I've friends that have tried for years to get a photo of this butterfly, it just moved a little and caught my attention. It was chilly and we had overcast skies so to my good fortune it stayed perched for many photos. It remained in place even after I walked away.

Last thing: I walked down into our woodlands and took this photo of an American Trout Lily and Wind Flower. Lots of Windflowers coming up and the trout lilies are at nearly full bloom.

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...