Mostly trivia here, with a closing bit of amusement, but at least I’m posting some more. Now, if we could only get it to be something good…
Despite the up-and-down nature of the temperatures, actually requiring us to move a few things back into the greenhouse, many of the plants around Walkabout Estates are kicking it this spring. The largest butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii,) the Black Knight variety, has been especially happy with the new location after transplanting it from the old place. I thought it was doing decently there, but it showed me how much it could grow in the right conditions, having now just surpassed me in height and no slouch in width, either.
We didn’t actually know it had calla lily neighbors when we planted it, I’m not sure why not, since we planted it in October I believe and the lilies should have been well in evidence. Last year they were competing over the same space and we ended up trimming the butterfly bush back a bit from that side, which is hardly noticeable. If you look near the new blossoms on the left, you can see the lilies sprouting up behind, and they’ll get quite tall themselves.
One of those flower spikes you see there, by the way, has a small mutation.
I’ll revisit it when it’s in full bloom, but while the bush will flower all summer long, the individual spikes like this don’t last that long and will die off within a couple weeks.
I remarked last year that the almond tree, started spontaneously from the compost pile two residences back (making it 14 years old now,) had finally surpassed me in height – that would be 182 cm. This spring, however, it laughed at such feeble comparisons.
For years, we watched it to see if it would thrive, wondering if it would even take in this climate, and so we never shaped it as a tree, much less a producing one, which is why it looks more like a bush. Having discovered that its growth is stunted if it gets clipped by foraging deer in the spring, we began treating it before it even buds out with deer repellent, and this has made quite a bit if difference – the deer nibbled a small handful of leaves and realized it tasted like shit and let it be. Meanwhile, the soil here seems to make it a lot happier.
And you did see me peeking out of the tree in there, right? I hope so – I’d hate for all my advice about observation and patterns to have gone to waste.
We did a better sense of scale while we were at it.
We realized, sometime late last year, that we did not do enough initial photos on moving in, to show what it was like before and how big certain plants were, but I went back through Google Maps images and confirmed that the almond tree was perhaps a little over a meter tall at the old place, just shy of two years ago. So yes, it’s doubled its height in about 19 months, to say nothing of the volume.
Another comparison:
If you look closely right around my ring finger, you’ll see the knot on the brown trunk that marked the peak of the tree last year, turning to green above that to signify this year’s growth. I measured this: so far, it’s extended 60 cm above that.
Still, however, it hasn’t really produced almonds. Oh, it’s tried, and several times we had the fruits developing, but they’ve never actually matured fully, most of them disappearing before this occurs. This year it blossomed exuberantly, but I suspect the multiple cold snaps that we had since then stunted any further development of those, since I can’t find any on the tree at all. While it’s not like we’re hoping for a bountiful almond harvest, it would be nice to see it develop into a reproducing tree.
The other thing that’s been happening right now is the turtle onslaught. Abruptly, the yellow-bellied sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta) have entered laying season, and they go a pretty decent distance away from the pond to do this. Three days ago The Girlfriend and I watched one female closing off her nest after laying, almost exactly where one had done so last year, and the day after I found another in the laying process, not 30 cm away from that one. Notably, this is on the highest part of the property, better than 80 meters from the water no matter how you measure it. Then yesterday we saw one on the driveway, we think heading out to a nest site someplace. A little over an hour later as I was collecting damnable pine cones from the side yard, I encountered one again, this time heading back down towards the water. She hesitated of course, then made a slight detour to avoid me and made tracks down to the pond. Still later, as we were getting the pics above, yet another was found in roughly that same area (and direction of travel,) and this time we stopped to get pics.
About typical size for adult sliders, this one had a carapace that was roughly 25 cm long and 20 wide, give or take. She’d been out long enough for the duckweed that she swam through on her way out to have dried out on her back. We wondered if this or the previous one had been the one we saw heading out, but this one had a very distinct identifying characteristic that ruled her out.
That’s a hell of a missing chunk there, well-healed over so likely it occurred long ago. She’s lucky she didn’t lose a hind leg, but it was intact and quite functional. I felt the edges of this old wound just to see how the healing had gone, to which she took grave exception, which is where it gets amusing. I sat down in front of her with the smutphone to record her movement, if she would deign to do so for me, and nudged her in that portion of the shell.
Failing to follow my own advice about making sure one has a safe escape from any species, I sat down cross-legged, which put me at a distinct disadvantage when she blasted past the phone and dove headfirst into the region of my crotch. I used to be able to stand up without hands from a cross-legged position, but that was some time (and weight) ago. The Girlfriend’s scolding tone, as if I was ignoring the turtle, was amusing; meanwhile, the turtle was having none of this shit and had actually seized the strap of my sandal in her mouth. I dropped the phone to deal with this, regretfully since I would have liked to have gotten a pic or video of her savaging my sandal, but she soon relinquished it and I turned her towards the pond. Definitely far more aggressive than I expected, but it made for an amusing clip at least.
So, yeah, that’s what we’ve been up to. I’ll be sure to let you know if and when we see any of the nests hatch out – last year I had three marked and yet there was no evidence of hatching, not sure why. Hopefully we’ll fare better with these.