Settling in

Just got back from our trip to Michigan. In a word, it was lovely. I was sad to leave, but it's always good to be home. Good to see the dogs. Good to see the garden. Good to see our woods. In the words of my newly purchased t-shirt, "Life is good." (There's a Life is Good store in Petoskey that I always visit when we head up north).


Lots of photos to sort through, and then there's the business of figuring out how to craft the posts from the photos. And also the business of getting caught up with all of you and your blogs, and getting caught up with your comments! I missed you all while I was gone!

So bear with me if posting is slow for a little while, as I get settled in and get back in the groove. For the time being, I leave you with a Michigan sunset.

Beautiful Butterfly Weed

I love summer for many reasons, but one of those reasons is for the Butterfly Weed. I love seeing it along the roadside while driving around, but from far away like that it's hard to appreciate the true, delicate beauty of this flower. I wish I were a butterfly or bee so I could appreciate it's nectar - it must taste as sweet as it looks!


Baby Butterfly Weed




Getting bigger and bigger... looks like candy to me.


And - POP! Full blown flowers. C'mon butterflies, come and get it!






Viewing the orange against a blue sky...

Fabulous fungi

So the mystery substance from my last post, slime mold or not, definitely got me in the mindset for mushrooms and fungi. In fact, after I first spotted that stuff, I ended up going on a mushroom hunt around the yard, and found quite a few different things growing. Here's a sampling of what I found.

What IS this stuff?

Back in mid-June I found some funky-looking stuff on a heavily decayed log on our property. At first I said, "Ew, gross!" But upon further inspection I said, "Hmmmm.... interesting"

Here's what it looked like the first day I spied it. All I could think of was that it looked like something's eggs.

Look closely and you'll see 2 snails here, one to the right just above the mass, and another one more directly to the right, almost at the edge of the picture. (click photo to enlarge)

When I came back 5 days later, this is what I saw:

With some of this mixed in...

... and some of this by itself.

If anyone has any ideas as to what this might be, I would love to be enlightened. I've seen a few people talking about slime mold on their blogs recently, but I'm not sure if that's what this stuff is or not. I did see a picture on the internets of some stuff that looks exactly like the brown things pictured above on a page discussing slime mold, but that doesn't necessarily confirm that this is slime mold.

I should also note that the brown things gave off a kind of brown "dust" when rubbed (most likely shooting off spores to reproduce?), just in case that helps someone make an ID. Thanks!

Banding demo bust

This past weekend we went to Lake Hope State Park in the hopes of watching a hummingbird banding demo. Mother Nature had other plans.

Everything was all set up, and the park naturalist took down all of the existing feeders to try to draw the hummers into the location where the mist net was set up. But the birds didn't take the bait. We all sat there for an hour and 40 minutes, at which point the bander (Allen Chartier) finally threw in the towel. He said that based on past experience, the birds usually all rush in at once at the beginning and then dwindle from there on out. Since we started out with zero, well... it could only get worse, right? Funny thing was, as soon as he went in the containment area to grab the feeders, a hummer zipped right past him (outside the net, of course). Several of us saw it and encouraged him to reconsider, but he thought we were messing with him. Oh well. C'est la vie.

The "bait" - two feeders set up within the containment area.

Preparing the mist nets around the feeders.

Mr. Chartier said he had great success with this method of capturing the birds last year. I believe he said they caught 22 birds in 2 hours last year, up from 9 the previous year (when he used a different "trap"). And then down to ZERO this year. Bummer. The park naturalist said that the hummer numbers have been down in the last week or so, and Mr. Chartier theorized that one reason they may not have been interested in our feeders is because they are actively in the middle of rearing their young right now, and so are more concerned with getting insects for the babies rather than stopping in for nectar.

One cool thing we did get to see was the actual bands that they put on the hummers. Pretty tiny, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Whoops! Now we know a bunch of little hummer social security numbers!

Better luck next year!

Zucchini bounty

No, I don't have a bounty out on the head of some zucchini... but I might pay you to take some of these zukes off our hands!


This is the harvest I picked this morning. When I went down to the garden to pick, I absolutely could not believe the sheer volume of fruit that was waiting for me on those zucchini plants! You can see the one on the left is humongous. There's another one like that still over in the garden - didn't have enough room to carry it back with me!


Here's the huge one cradled in my arm, just to give you an idea how big it is. It weighs 5 pounds. I don't know what I'm going to do with it because it isn't going to be worth a darn to eat (when they get this big they become very fibrous and no longer delicious). I think it's destined for the compost pile, sadly.


This book has been getting quite a workout in our kitchen this year. We made up many jars of black raspberry jam about a month ago, Dave has done up some pickles, and I just made pickled zucchini. I've never tried them before, but I figured what the heck? What else am I going to do with all these zukes? Make a pizza with them? Yes, please. I made a lovely, sauceless pizza today with the tiniest slices of zucchini on top, and mushrooms, and fresh basil and mozzarella and provolone cheeses, and lemon juice and salt and pepper. On fresh, homemade dough (I was inspired by this delicious-looking nonsense over on Smitten Kitchen, my new favorite recipe blog). It was devine.

For photos of the pickling and the pizza pie, head on over to my new photo blog (pickle pics today, pizza pics tomorrow)!