After 12 years of trying, we finally got our first paw paws today! I am beyond excited.

 

 

It’s  April and the back of the yard is full of flowers. Yellow daffodils, purple comfrey and the beautiful white bell-shaped flowers on Solomon’s Seal make for a nice mix of spring colors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pitcher plants are thriving and making little ones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The yard is teeming with life.  L. and I have been doing a lot of digging in the backyard and occasionally we will leave a worm or two on top of the bluebird house.  The babies fledged over the weekend.

The frogs have multiplied and made themselves at home.

 

Where there are frogs, there are herons.   Last week I pulled open the curtains around 7 a.m. and there was the biggest heron I’d ever seen, beak in the water looking for his frog fix.

 

I lifted L. up on the kitchen counter to take a better look. We watched as the heron raised is head up out of the water, front feathers blowing gently  in the breeze. He looked right at us,  stood up and  flapped  his enormous wings.  Next
thing we knew, he slowly lifted himself up from the pond and flew right towards
our window.  He got so close to the window we could see the inside of his mouth, which was open.  Then suddenly he swooped up and over the house and out of sight.

Our turtle, Mr. Fast, has risen up from the muck of the pond to make daily appearances.  He has grown over the winter.

We have our own little wildlife habitat now!

It was a long, wet winter but eventually the sun came out. The yard is squishy in  spots, but it has never looked more fecund.  Clover, chickweed, moss, daffodils and other flowers dot the yard now. The blueberries are budding. I saw my first frog of the year hop into Farthing pond today.

 

 

The pitcher plants survived the winter but some have turned bright red.

Since last year we’ve expanded our bog, which is part of an overflow area from Farthing Pond. That means more mixing of peat and sand.

We built a smaller, T-shaped pond and connected it with the bog area Levi calls “Mielke Creek.”  We have a surfeit of rocks and are thinking about things like building a set of stairs around the pond and a bridge across the bog.

We went over to Uncle Darren’s and got a bunch of horsetail plants a few days ago. They are a very aggressive plant and Darren had plenty to thin out.  I took a bunch back to our place but put the plants in pots so they wouldn’t spread everywhere.

 

My goal with the horsetail (or scouring rush) was to use it to bring more dragonflies to our yard. They love to perch on them. Not that we’ve had any problem seeing any dragonflies—they love our pond and I’ve seen a number of different species, with different colors.  But you can never have too many to help keep the mosquitoes at bay. Mosquito eggs are a favorite dish of theirs.

Horestail have been around for almost 350 million years ago, when Durham was near the equator and Pangea hadn’t started busting at the seams.

The dinosaurs loved to eat them, I told Levi.  A resilient plant, it could take chomps from a dinosaur because the rhizome would stay intact underground.
It also reproduces with spores, like ferns.

Later that evening we built a fire next to Mielke Creek.