Season's first asparagus

 

Pines before and after hail

Every time I go outside and expect the lushness of mid-April greenery, I see a lot of sparseness instead.  The dogwoods look pitiful.  The pines look skimpy.  There is a lot of openness where I normally see foliage.
The two pictures below show the pines across the street before and after the hail damage.

 

 

The yard is full of craters.

(This one looks like about 1 1/2" in diameter, almost golf ball size.)

 

It will be interesting to see how much the trees recover.  I have a fairly young dogwood that got barked pretty well.  The same with a red cedar I was trimming into a topiary.  I wonder if they have sustained enough damage to be life threatening.

 

 

Even the mailbox (plastic) has a hole in it!

 





Frog Fest

This afternoon I hopped on down to Apex to the Crowder District Park Frog Fest.  I did see a few frogs there.

Saw some snakes.

I actually learned something, too.  The strange bug-like critters I found in the bottom of my rain buckets were dragonfly nymphs.  I had wondered how in the world they got in there.  Now I know.

 

I saw the Sylvan Heights Bird Park display booth with the "four-days-old, do-not-touch" Sebastopol goslings.  I'm looking forward to visiting this bird park with my friend Lea sometime soon.

 

 

I walked the trail around the lake and enjoyed the view of the trees, the turtles, and a duck.

 

 

Saw a band and heard some mean mandolin picking.

 

 

Quite popular with the kids was the mascot, Wally Pog.

 

Ribbit.

Snake plant for clean air

Years ago, I worked for a company that maintained indoor foliage.  We were given literature that explained how NASA had done studies on how the plants cleaned the air.  More recently, I came across an article about very small houses and air quality.  In the comments, someone mentioned that certain plants give off oxygen during the day while others such as snake plants do it at night.  That was new to me.  Even more recently, I read an article that suggested putting a snake plant in the bedroom for better sleep.  Okay, I'm convinced.  I've taken the two little snake plants out of the kitchen window and placed them in the bedrooms.

 

Here is a link to a TED talk that describes how the concept of using plants to "grow air" was used in a building in Delhi.

http://greenspaces.in/blog/ted09/

 

 



 

Mushroom moxie

Any day that I spend with my friend Lea is a good day.  She is game for trying new things, and we decided to try our hand at inoculating some logs with shiitake mushroom spawn.  She fed us lunch, and I obliged her by helping clean up the Easter candy.  Then it was off to work!
I enjoined her to sing a song while I sawed some properly sized pieces of a red oak her husband had felled for us.  She relieved me on the saw when I got tired (and she didn't even make me sing).

 

 Then we made lots of wood shavings drilling little holes for the mycelium plugs.

 

 

We tapped the plugs in with a hammer.  Cubs watched from atop the fridge.  It was somewhere along about this time Lea made a pun about plugging away.

 

She had beeswax melting on the stove, and we sealed the plugs with the wax.



 

The gray kitty, Ghee, was absolutely thrilled with the finished product.  What a fascinating scratching post, and let's have a lick of beeswax!

 

We took a walk afterward.  I thought Lea was picking up all the ticks, but I found two on me when I got home.  Lea kept one log and I took one home.

I enlisted the taller help to take the log from the car and put it in a shady place under the Leyland.

 

Hopefully we'll have some shiitake mushrooms come fall.

It was a great day (even though I almost backed out because of the cracked windshield).  Thanks, Lea, for the lunch and for a great time.





Damage pics

I can't believe how much ice is still around this morning from the hail storm last night.

 

The air still has a piney, rosin and tree sap smell.  The pine trees look half naked, and their branches are all over the ground.

 

You can see the dogwood blossoms amongst the litter of the buckets.  What a mess!  I had some used lawn mower oil in the bucket.  Now, I've polluted the ground.





 

"It planted a tree in our yard," said ds.  There was a maple branch that had broken off and was sticking into the ground.  Around it are pear tree leaves from the neighbor's tree.

Pear leaves from the neighbor's ornamental pear that had already leafed out.  Fortunately, a lot of trees hadn't completely leafed out yet.

 

The dappled pattern on the sidewalk shows where the hail pressure washed it.

 

Lots of damage to vegetation, buildings, and cars.

 

Good thing I took a picture of my Sir Winston Churchill daffodils a few days ago.  Now they look like this.

 

A big mess and big headaches for lots of folks in our area.



 









Damage

I just went out and checked.  The siding on the end of the house is obliterated.  Of the three vehicles, two have broken windshields. 
Bummer.