Bob thought his Cinderella pumpkins were the prettiest pumpkins ever until he saw these heirloom varieties at the Farmer’s Market.
The two in front are pumpkins he plans to grow next year, with one of his Cinderella pumpkins behind.
This is the Australian butter pumpkin, small and pale orange. Instead of a smooth ridged pumpkin skin, the Australian butter looks like it had acne in its youth.
This is the Jarrahdale pumpkin, from the town of Jarrahdale, New Zealand. It’s much heavier than the other pumpkins. It’s supposed to have golden, sweet and nonstringy flesh. It’s truly a lovely shade of grey green. Prettiest ever.
{The word “squash” is from askutasquash (a green thing eaten raw), a word from the Narragansett language (documented by Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, in his 1643 publication A Key Into the Language of America).}
We’ve had a light frost when the tomatoes died, and a middling frost when the eggplants and beans were scorched.
We brought in the onions a few days ago, and they’re too big to braid! I braided up all the garlic and we’re planning on planting 2 beds in October. We’ll use the largest bulbs from this year’s harvest, a hardneck red garlic bred by Peg George that she’s calling Hesperus Red. I ordered the rest from The Garlic Store in Fort Collins: I got some high altitude extra sweet elephant garlic, and a high altitude big-bulbed white softneck garlic.
The catalogue had descriptions of the different flavors of garlic embodied in each bulb, with a disclaimer. The description might say a garlic tastes creamy with a hint of pepper, they caution, but it might not taste the same to you. To you it might just taste like garlic.
The cattle are being moved from the high mountain pastures where they spent the summer to the lower elevations where they winter.
There were four cattle in the front yard, and this young heifer in the back. As we shooed them along, I couldn’t help noticing
that she’s both pierced and scarified. A few tasteful tattoos and this little heifer’d be a poster child for inappropriate bodily adornments, or, What was that rancher thinking?!
Published by Alice on September 27, 2009
in water.
This is the far end of Missionary Ridge, near the edge of a 73,000 acre fire that burned in 2002.
You see that band of scrub oak blazing yellow and orange? It’s the same tree as the ones framing this shot, but quite a bit higher.
These photos are taken really high, near the top of the ridge. One of the peculiar things about forest fire is that not all of the trees burn. Here’s a Ponderosa pine that was scorched while its neighbors died.
Here are two dead pines near a stand of untouched trees,
and here you see scrub oak as the real winner after this fire: it was scorched and the big trunks were killed, but today scrub oak predominates in many areas that were previously mixed.
Here’s a little watershed denuded by the fire: the big scrub oak in the foreground are dead, and so are the aspens halfway up the slope.
Here an aspen forest stands burned and dead, with a new aspen grove rising from the roots.
and these really tall little aspens came from the root system of the really tall dead aspens, scrub oak in the foreground. Fall hasn’t hit these baby aspens yet, but it’s coming.
The sun sets behind a mountain here, and these clouds were backlit after it went down.
As the night fell, the clouds in the west were firetipped,
and soon the underlight followed the curve of the sky
until it looked like dawn on the eastern horizon.
Have a good weekend!
The beaver diverted the river through this section of land months ago…
you can see the cottonwoods are still leafy, but the grass in the middle of the flow is either silted over or dead. There’s a new, casually constructed dam on the right in this photo, and the water is starting to back up. Is it good enough terrain to develop into a pond? Time will tell.
I know a lot of people who aren’t afraid of hard work, but these beavers beat all.
This mourning cloak butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa) spent half an hour flying from place to place on the driveway, probing the rocks and soil with its proboscis.
Here’s the same butterfly
from the ventral view, still sampling the soil. I think it’s collecting minerals and salts.
The proboscis doesn’t look like it’s moving in these photos, but instead it’s constantly probing and poking the rocks and soil like a curious finger.
When humans eat soil for it’s mineral content, it’s called geophagy. When butterflies collect their minerals from puddles, it’s called mud-puddling. And when they collect their minerals from the driveway, it’s called mud-puddling on soil (you’d think I was kidding but I’m not).
There’s a horse herd on Ute Mountain Ute land near here of one stallion and a passel of mares and foals. The herd can be anywhere in a large area, and I’ve been missing them until yesterday.
Here’s Thankful, and you can see that she is still a runaway girl.
She’d be captioned “Least likes to be photographed” in the highschool yearbook.
(Here she is in Jan 2008, so her real title would be “Most Improved”)
Here’s the stallion, and he’s what makes this horse herd seem like high school: he’s a total stud. He sees us, and sticks out his penis. You can’t really see it in the photograph, but in real life you’re caught between his dangling pinkness and his big blue eyes.
These are a few of the summer foals. They had been shy to see us, but as we left they followed us
out of the trees and into the field. That’s Thankful trotting up on the left.
The dog can barely walk this evening, but that’s the way of old age.
Published by Alice on September 20, 2009
in birds.
Here’s a black-capped chickadee
eating sunflower seeds. I had high hopes for this photo, but it didn’t quite do it (I’d ask my photographer guru, but he’s off teaching a wildlife photography seminar in Yellowstone.)
Perhaps this version is better? It’s an almost-good photo of a bird we’ve all seen a zillion times.
Here’s a photo of a slime mold. Can you see it glisten? See how much this species looks like snot? Slime mold was classifed as a fungi until recently, when it was discovered through DNA analysis that it isn’t. This multicellular version is a myxomycetes, the only slime molds that are large enough to see. (That’s myxo - a combining form meaning “mucus” or “slime” and mycetes - a combining form meaning “mushrooms, fungi”. )
In a plasmodial slime mold like the one above, many individual cells are attached to each other forming one gigantic cell membrane. This “supercell” is a bag of cytoplasm that contains thousands of individual nuclei. It’s a plantlike creature that moves. It is supercool.
A so-so photo of a regular old chickadee, or an in-focus photo of the rare and elusive slime mold? I couldn’t decide, so I posted both.
I’ve misplaced both of my camera cards; there are five people coming for the weekend (including Sam and a friend); the washing machine just gushed water (which took the entire household supply of towels and filled the wet/dry vac); we’re having someone over this evening. And he just arrived.
Which is to say, I have neither pictures nor post today, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
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