nature

May 14, 2013

When I was in college, I worked at a nursery where I was in charge of the herbs in the area visible to customers. I loved that job so much that I thought that one day I would have a little nursery of my own. I would grow herbs and native wildflowers in my little greenhouse and sell them from my little home based shop. More than ten years later, and I don’t even have an herb garden anymore, because my chickens destroyed it. But last week, I couldn’t resist filling a little cardboard tray at the farmer’s market. I put a few herbs in a pot, and a few in the ground. We’ll see if they survive my birds.

I love this time of year, when things are growing and blooming and I can take little walks around the yard to say hello to all of my plants, and even those that belong to my kids. Some of them share my fondness for watching things grow as well.

We took an all day road trip yesterday to look at a house. The property was beautiful, but the house was all wrong. I am afraid we’ll never get over this house. We did lots of sightseeing though. There’s just so much prettiness to see in Virginia. I love it here. Around 8 p.m. we were still more than a couple of hours from home and hadn’t had dinner yet, having only packed lunch for the trip. There wasn’t much to choose from, and we passed a Waffle House. The kids all begged. “We haven’t been there in years! Please!!!” Jonny has a love for Waffle House. I liked it a lot as a teenager, but not so much anymore. Most of the kids ordered waffles and I embarrassed Jonny by asking for real butter. Evidently, you just don’t ask for real butter at Waffle House. (They don’t have it. In fact the teenaged boy didn’t seem to know what I even meant!)

Photos taken of the James River in Amherst County I believe, near the Bedford County line.

Every Seventeen Years

May 13, 2013

A couple of weeks ago, on a walk through the woods near our house, we kept seeing little mud tubes around the bases of trees. We had no idea what they were, and I wish now that I’d taken a photo of one of them. Over the weekend I discovered that they are cicada chimneys ,while I was doing some research on periodical cicadas. People in my area have been talking about these insects for months now, some claiming that they won’t be leaving their houses during the few weeks that the cicadas are out and about. These particular cicadas, that began emerging in our backyard a few days ago, are from the genus Magicicada and the neat thing is that they only emerge every 17 years. I am not well versed in the lingo, but each emerging generation of these cicadas is called a brood, and scientists are able to predict when and where they will emerge. There are four species with 13 year life cycles, and three with 17 year life cycles. They are found east of the Mississippi, and you can look for your state and the year that you would expect them to emerge on a chart such as this one.

These cicadas are supposedly some of the loudest insects, but I am not sure I’ve really noticed their songs yet. That may be because each morning as a new group of them emerge, my boys gather them up by the dozens in a bucket, and feed them to the chickens. The chickens clearly consider periodical cicadas to be a delicacy to be fought over. My girls are horrified at the injustice of it all, so the boys have to be sneaky when it comes to actually giving the chickens their insect treats.

I guess it’s possible that over the next few weeks our backyard will become something like a scene from a horror movie: crawling with large, red-eyed, winged insects, but right now we think this is really cool. As far as we can tell, the emergence of these periodical cicadas is pretty darn exciting. After all, this only happens every seventeen years. We’re making cicada memories here.