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Dinosaur Plants

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.