JANUARY BENCHMARKING
Updated: Jan 23, 2022
I think this older post captures the intent of this blog - to know my neighbors on the land and the cyclical rhythms of the year they are a part of. To benchmark changes and build relationships with the birds, plants and others! Here's what's been happening lately:
Kiddo and I saw woodpeckers on two walks this week! Not to mention the woodpecker we saw on this walk a couple weeks ago. One was in Colonial Heights Neighborhood on a corner lot high up in a leafless oak tree. We heard the call and looked around until we saw him. We've been hearing and seeing lots of hummingbirds and flocks of bushtits.
Second woodpecker we saw another tree just like the bee tree (bee video here) in our neighbor's yard (willow?) and stopped to see if it was also loaded with bees. It was not. But it did have a Sapsucker (that's woodpecker right?) in it and, I think, a kinglet flitting about. This is a low tree and we had a great time watching the sapsucker "close up". Was a delight to see how interested kiddo was! Close up of the tree for future identification below and kind of captured the sapsucker in the next two photos.
Kiddo has also been super interested in mushrooms lately! We have a big, old mushroom field guide, probably from the 1960s or 70s that we picked up years ago in a used bookshop. The guide has pages of "color plates" and they you have to flip back to the text pages to read about the mushrooms. Kiddo loves paging through this book and asking which ones are edible.
To stoke this interest we have brought a few mushrooms in lately and made some spore prints. We've also seen a lot of mushrooms on hikes lately pointed out by kiddo! He even found some under a little bridge in a dry creek on our last hike at Dave Moore Nature Trail. There were a lot of mushrooms popped up on this hike and I photographed a bunch of them to look up later in our book with kiddo (we also have a modern mushroom field guide that we'll cross check!).
Back at home today, I harvested lemons, thyme and rosemary. Front yard manzanita is blooming. I'm sending the lemons off to my parents, juicing a few for the freezer. They thyme is going into the dinner Kevin's making and the rosemary is going into a hair rinse (report on this hair rinse to be added to the collection of herbal hair rinse / no 'poo reports one and two soon!).