Month: June 2021

  • |

    Spring Green

    In spring our woods transform from an overall brown appearance to a lush green. It seems to happen overnight, but it isn’t quite that quick. These photos were taken in the last few weeks.

    In May I had to get the chainsaw out and cut small trees and brush along the edges of the garden. If we’re lucky we won’t have any trees fall across the road and I won’t have to use the chainsaw again until next winter when I cut firewood.

    In the previous post there’s a photo of the rocks road. This is closer to home but gives a good idea of the transformation the woods undergoes in spring.

    I begin mowing the yard, the garden, and some of the roads in May. Our yard is mostly moss because we’re heavily shaded when the trees leaf out. This year there was a large area to the north of the house where Indian Pipe began to emerge.

    Indian Pipes are fragile little plants that have no chlorophyll. They depend on fungus in the soil which supplies them with nutrients from nearby trees.

  • Late Winter

    Our previous post was about the ice storm that we had in February. After the storm we had sunny skies and warmer weather.

    Winter is when we can see the sky at our home. After the ice storm the tree limbs were covered with a thick layer of ice, almost like clouds in the blue sky.

    The start of spring has us looking for morels in the woods. This year wasn’t a good one for finding morels. They seem to be getting rarer and rarer for some reason. Still, it’s always wonderful to be out in the real world..

    Everything is so brown in early April. A closer look finds the maple trees are budding and there are early spring flowers, especially down in the hollows. This is the Rocks road. One of the Sheep Rocks can barely be seen in the distance. There’s an army survey map in Winfield, our county seat, made during World War II of the coal field here owned by Raymond City and the map shows the Sheep Rocks and down in the hollow, Yankee Camp, where a unit of the Union army had a camp during the Civil War.

    Bluets are tiny flowers that appear in our yard in early spring. They bloom for a little over a month.

    I like to take photos of vernal ponds with their layers of light and color and, when the tadpoles are hatched, life. This year the reflected sky through the trees shows as pale blue bands on the pond surface.