Thursday, July 23, 2009

We had rain recently so I decided to buckle down and remove some invasive stuff while the soft ground made pulling easier. The tansy flew, the Queen Anne's Lace succumbed, the thistles surrendered ... and then I set a new personal record for ant bites, and I gave up and went home. If one of those little demons crawls into your shirt and panics (or, more likely, goes on a suicide mission to inflict as much damage as possible), you're in for a bad time. Now I'll be trying to ignore the itching for a few days.

A baby snail is a much friendlier creature:


I realized earlier this season that I've seen snails everywhere my whole life and I know very little about them. I turned to Wikipedia, usually a good first step for quick research, and found the snail entry extremely interesting and informative.

The tansy is forming flowerheads now:




These will soon turn into bright yellow buttons, taunting me from every corner of Beechwood:

Taunting me, I tell you!


The cup plants are beginning to provide a more welcome splash of yellow everywhere:

That "cup" feature still works perfectly:

We're expecting a lot more rain over the next few days, so stay tuned for some soggy posts from your watersoaked wetlander.

4 comments:

Donwatcher said...

If you can find some, the juice from Jewelweed is supposed to be a good curative for red ant bites.

Marnie said...

We used to have some on the site but I don't see it any more -- too bad.

mossy said...

How did you get that little snail to stick out his/her head?

I pick those things up all the time and they never talk to me!

eepy

Marnie said...

Didn't you learn the song in Brownies? "Snail, snail, come out and be fed, first your feelers, then your head, then your mama and your papa, we'll feed you fried mutton." It's better than the Muskrat Love song that keeps playing in my head when I go near the pond these days, believe you me ...