August 30 Asters Begin

August 29 Raccoon DOR

August 28 Green and Yellow, some Brown

August 27 Chelone Genus?

August 26 Purple Coneflower to Seed

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August 25 Skunk DOR

August 24 Prairie Dock

August 23 Big Bluestem on the Breeze

August 22 Highbush Cranberry

August 21 Young Green Frog

August 20 Summer Triangle

August 19 Grasshopper Love

August 18 Willow Leaves Turn

August 17 Canada Wild-Rye

August 16 Teenage Heron

Once again we've run into a green heron, or I should say we tried to stay perfectly still after noticing one fishing very close by. This happened on University Bay this time in the late afternoon. The heron is a first year bird, born in spring, and identified by its brown streaks on a white front. Jack thought about taking off (I named it Jack) right away, but folded his wings back and climbed up this willow branch, nipping at the leaves every now and again. I think he was probably grabbing insects of the leaves, because no leaves went down the hatch. After some food, he started a round of feather preening and kept eyeing me to make sure I wasn't getting any closer as I watched. With very little bird action this time of year, especially after seven in the morning, it's nice to see green herons fishing on lakes and ponds every couple days.

August 15 Golden Prairie

There are several goldenrods making their appearance this mid-August and I believe this one is canadian goldenrod (Solidago canadensis), our most common species. With short green leaves whorled around a green stalk, it is extremely variable in height and arrangement and number of flowers. Something to look for on these is a round bulge in the stem about the size of a walnut, which is an insect gall. A fly, wasp, or moth will deposit an egg in the stem which will co-opt the plant's growing mechanism to grow a secure shell around the egg. While not detrimental to the plant, its clearly and invasion or privacy, but a smart one. These galls can be seen throughout winter on standing plants. For now, the new flowers on canadian goldenrod are attracting big orange beetles and tiny black beetles and bumblebees alike. They will be the stars of the prairie show for the next month.

August 14 Crab Spider Waits

Did you know? That not all spider spin webs to catch their prey? The family of spiders known as crab spiders sit still on flowers or leaves and simply wait for insects to show up, looking for nectar. Their specialized first two pairs of legs are super long, allowing them an extended reach to grab those pesky flying bugs that have incredibly fast reaction times. Those legs are also what gives them resemblance to crabs and hence the family name. There are so many hundreds of spider species in the state and thousands in the world that many do not have common names. Using the three dots on a white abdomen I figured out that this one is a Missumesus oblongus, but three-spotted white crab spider is fine by me too. If you visit a prairie soon, or the flowers at your house, take a close look and maybe you will see a tiny crab spider hunting.

August 13 Wisconsin Kite

At Warner Park today I saw the rarest of raptors - a wisconsin kite (Stuckius rufus) high up in an oak tree. The kite was impressively perched atop a small branch and swaying back and forth looking for prey. With a wingspan of four and half feet, this predator can swoop down with speedy speed to catch rabbits, gophers, or unsuspecting dogs off the leash at Warner Park. Its brightly spotted wings serve as a warning signal to all mammals below, not to mention its oversized beak for tearing meat into pieces. I highly suggest a visit to the park to check out this rare bird and check it off your life list!

August 12 Wow

What I've been able to discover about this insect is that it is a planthopper of the genus Acanalonia, based on the shape of its head, leg color, and wings. Green cone-headed planthopper sounds like a good name to me, but it's OK not to know the species. What's important is what they do, which is sit still most of the time, but when hungry they may make a leap of several feet to the nearest plant. They eat from a variety of plants, which is a bit rare for such a small creature. They will rest on a stem and bite a hole into it, releasing the sap directly into their mouths. They quickly digest the nutrients and then excrete the rest. Just another amazing creature that goes about life, drinking sap, and jumping really far.

August 11 White Water Lily

I was moving along the Wingra Creek Trail this afternoon and noticed two flowers among the lily pads. White water lily (Nymphaea odorata) is its obvious name, and this plant enjoys still water. It forms dense colonies since it has the ability to spread through its rhizomes (roots) as well as from seeds. The roots must anchor to the bottom, so it will grow in water up to 5 feet deep. This is why they form a dense mat near the shoreline of Lake Wingra, and grow throughout Wingra creek. The plant provides cover for a variety of fish and macroinvertabrates. The flowers will bloom any time during summer.

August 10 Cumulonimbus

It seems as though it hasn't rained in a long time, but August is typically the driest summer month, only dropping 2.1 inches of rain in Madison on average. It rained overnight on August 7th, but other than that it has been a hot and dry couple of weeks. The late summer humidity is trying hard to produce giant thunderheads like this one, known as cumulonimbus clouds. Cumulus clouds are the big puffy ones that move across the sky in groups and look like gumby or a cat or your great uncle. When humidity reaches them and condenses the clouds will grow and become denser, blocking more sunlight and starting to look very dark to us below. When the moisture is too heavy for the cloud, down it falls onto us. And hopefully the precipitation is accompanied by supercharged cracks in air pressure, sending electricity through the vacuum and breaking the sound barrier to produce thunder. I'm hopeful for a storm soon.

August 9 Pokeweed Flowers & Fruits

I was walking around in Olin Park today, waiting to enter the Great Taste festival, and enjoyed the complete quiet for a few hours. Well, quiet with the occasional fishing boat moving down the shore. I stopped many times to stare at this bright pink anomaly, wondering if I had ever seen it before and heard its name. It turns out to be American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana), a native plant of the eastern United States. Some reading tells me that although native, it can spread rapidly into disturbed areas and dominate the forest understory. It does however produce a large amount of fruit, which remind me of fruit snacks but are toxic enough to humans to be deadly. Birds, on the other hand, gobble them up in fall and winter, so that's another positive. Search for large long leaves and these bright fruit stalks and you can't miss pokeweed.

August 8 Goldenrods Begin

This week the cup plants are still sending out their last flowers and the culver's root in the lower right corner is somehow still out. Many of the yellow and purple coneflowers have gone to seed and lost their petals, while late blooming flowers like ironweed, brown-eyed susans, and cardinalflower are in full flower. The various goldenrod species of the prairie are slowly coming out, with a few samples here and there and hundreds of plants with the first signs of flowers. The dog days have started drying the prairie out finally, but its density keeps the soil shaded and moist.

August 7 First Signs of Fall

Today when I was walking through the Lakeshore Preserve towards the garden I noticed this burst of color along the trail. Four woody shrubs of the same species have already begun sending sugar out of their leaves and back down towards the roots. So far, I think the most likely candidates are chokecherry, juneberry, or nannberry, but I need to go back and get a leaf sample to be sure. This means that with the shortening days, trees and shrubs are starting to think about dormancy and will base their response on thousands of generations' wisdom - those that grow the longest but still send their energy underground before the frost will survive and thrive. How many weeks of growth left? 11? 9?

August 6 Candleflame Lichen

This specimen is sitting on a downed white birch trunk on the ground at the Lakeshore Preserve just a minute in from the trailhead. Lichens are difficult to identify, just like fungi, but they are different from fungi because they associate with algae, and sometimes a bacteria, in order to grow and live. Using my field guide, my best guess at this point is candleflame lichen (candelaria concolor). It grows on trees and has bright yellow rosettes which overlap. So far, lichenologists have found 14,000 species of lichens on earth, and they are present even when you don't see them - their spores are floating and flying on the wind, ready to grow on their preferred surface (they either like only rocks, trees, or soil) under the right conditions. A single tree may have twenty lichens on it, so go and count!

August 5 Purple Archflower

This morning I went for a run in old Hoyt Park, admiring the tight valley of jewelweed next to limestone cliffs as I climbed to the top of the park. Mostly quiet, the sounds of chickadees and an indigo bunting came through the branches as I traveled and found myself in the small restored prairie on the east end. I was impressed by the wash of color, not having seen the spot since May. Compass and cup plants line the trail and purple coneflowers are everywhere, along with bee balm and goldenrod. The coneflower petals are fading, but the bright orange porcupine seed heads are as interesting as ever, especially with a sedge arch over the top. This is one of the best spots in the city for color right now if you need a strong dose of flowers in your life.

August 4 Happy Summer

It was hard not to feel happy about my short adventure to the Lakeshore Preserve this morning. Just in from the trailhead, an incredibly colorful rain garden greets every runner, dogwalker, and tai chi artist that enters. Flycatchers and chickadees flit around, grabbing bugs for breakfast. And the flowers smile at you as you walk the trail.

August 3 Farewell, Library Elm

One of my favorite trees in Madison has lived a long and prosperous life, serving as a gateway to downtown from the south. Or a gateway out of the city, depending on your direction of travel. Its last neighbor was the south library branch, but this American elm sprouted around the year 1900, when park street was just a dirt road known as "Oregon Ave," and the closest buildings were a half mile away. Land was subdivided and sold in the nearby Bram's Addition in 1908, bringing humans closer and growing activity on the road. Golfers could be seen in this same view in the 1920's and 30s, swinging their clubs on the Burr Oaks golf course. Then in 1948, park street widened to a paved, 4-lane road in anticipation of the south beltline expansion. The bowling alley opened nearby in the 1950s, and the original Villager Mall was built along with the Burr Oaks neighborhood over the course of a decade. For fifty years, our elm grew to mature old age in the corner of a parking lot, watching cars come and go to the mall. Finally, in 2010, the library and the Urban League moved into the new building seen here, and the elm gave it excellent shade. The tree still had plenty of leaves this year, but was beginning to rot from inside out, as hardwoods do. And so the time came for the south Madison elm to come down, silently, without resisting.

August 2 Curtis Prairie

Today I led a tour on Curtis Prairie at the UW Arboretum where twenty-mile-per-hour gusts kept us dry in the humid heat and provided a sense of adventure. We identified and distinguished a slew of sunflowers, including yellow coneflower and rosinweed, ox eyes and cup plants, prairie blazing stars and black-eyed susans. We saw an amazing field of rattlesnake masters and a sorrowing field of invasive reed canary grass. Dedicated in 1934, the prairie then was no more than a collection of fallow farm fields and horse meadows. The first tasks for the 200 CCC men who arrived in Madison in 1935 was to rip up acres of open turf. Plantings came quickly then, with 42 trial species over the next few years. A photo of Aldo Leopold and three friends standing over a small burned over plot shows that experiments with fire started shortly thereafter. Curtis Prairie is the oldest restored tall-grass prairie ecosystem in the world, and gives a stunning, yet limited, feel for what the original 2 million acres of Wisconsin prairie offered. Curtis has over 300 native plant species, including joe-pye weed, which support a vast collection of insects (see swallowtail butterfly), invertebrates, mammals, fungus, and birds. And yet it is besieged on all sides - by major highways, stormwater retention ponds, fast moving woody plants, and 230,000 invasive humans. Curtis Prairie is an island in an ecological ocean, and a history book revealing our connection to the land.

August 1 Lady Whitetail Skimmer

I've become more fascinated by dragonflies lately as I see more and more buzz over the lakes and learn just how species there are in the world. According to the EEK! Wisconsin page, there are 110 species of dragonflies that breed in Wisconsin in six different families. There are 450 in North America and at least 5,100 on earth. That is almost the same number of mammal species! This one is a common whitetail (Libellula plathemis), but its tail is not white because it is the female. Same family as the blue dasher, yet this dragonfly has a stout abdomen and three dark spots on each wing. Skimmers received their name via the females' habit of dropping eggs into water during a low pass over the pond. Usually the dragonfly life cycle is 1.egg 2. underwater nymph 3. flying adult. However the male adult of this species will start out with a dark abdomen which somehow turns white. Does it shed its skin again, or does the color simply change with age? Either way the adults will only live for a few months, after spending up to four years as nymphs at the bottom of a pond.

July 31 Turtle Pile

You know we've reached the dog days when you see a scene like this. Most days now, when we take summer campers down to the Nature Center pond, there are three and four turtles sleeping on top of each other in the sun, like little solar panels absorbing energy. This boardwalk somehow made its way out to the middle and is the perfect raft for these sunbathers. It seems to me like the bookend turtles here are likely the children of the large middle turtle - look at the size of that foot!

July 30 Fuzzy Owl Feather

There's no way for me to know for sure, but I think this is a feather from a barred owl, judging by it fluff content, the white and brown stripes, and the length of 5 inches. If it's a downy feather, meaning the short warmer feathers close to a bird's body, then I suppose it could be from a hawk. But, I have heard young barred owls screeching to each on several nights recently (which sounds terrifying, like a screaming cat, if cat's could scream, or a demon maybe) and I heard an adult hooting this morning very close to this spot close to Lake Mendota in the Lakeshore Preserve. Other birds I heard this morning were an indigo bunting, serenading in the open to a female nearby; a wood thrush, still stinging the last few phrases of its morning song, and a few raucous goldfinches. Without a cloud in the sky, the lake was shimmering with sun, and the shimmer reflected up on sugar maple leaves as I ran back out to the lakeshore path.  

July 29 Rosinweed Moon

We were out harvesting vegetables from our garden tonight when the moon suddenly appeared, 99% full. With a little sunlight left, I thought a view of the moon through flowers might be nice. The tallest ones around were these rosinweeds (Silphium integrifolium) which are another close cousin of cup plants and compass plants. They grow on tall stalks with opposite leaves that are smaller than cup plant leaves but still 4 or 5 inches long. A favorite wildlife plant, rosinweed flowers are good for bees, flies, butterflies, sparrows, redpolls, and the two goldfinches I saw balancing on these breezy stalks a few minutes before. This moon wasn't quite full and rose about an hour before sunset, so over the next few days, watch for a big moon rising at or just after dark.

July 28 Darting Dashers

At the end of the afternoon, I found myself at Vilas Park and went down to the edge of Lake Wingra to watch summer. The sun was blinding, but I tried to look out with bare eyes at dragonflies making their rounds over the lily pads, and watch for birds calling from the cattails. A dragonfly landed on this piece of sedge for just a second before darting off. I waited. After some (many) minutes of research, I can confidently say this is a male blue dasher dragonfly. AKA Pachydiplax longipennis, this skimmer family dragonfly has touching green eyes, is only 2 inches long, and has a powder blue tail with black tip at the very end. While the more common darner family almost never seem to stop and rest, it is common for skimmer dragonflies to perch frequently. However, the blue dasher does mate in midair.

July 27 Osprey and Nest on Mysterious Tower

Today I was again exploring South Madison and heard a far away chirping noise that I figured for a bird. I looked around for a minute and to my surprise saw a large raptor near the top of a tower I have never seen before. When I zoomed in with the camera, I found the second bird, and then realized they are nesting on the platform. These are excellent fisherbirds, the osprey (Pandion haliaetus). At 22 inches long and a 5-6 foot wingspan, osprey are almost the size of bald eagles. They fly with their wings slightly bent at the middle, which gives them the distinct shape of the letter "m" when airborne. As I mentioned, they are great at fishing and will dive underwater to catch live fish. Then they fly with the fish pointed straight ahead to reduce wind drag. Smart! This mysterious tower is somewhere a quarter mile northwest of the St. Vinny's on Park Street, so if it's not actually in the Arboretum, it's very close. I'll have to go and see if there are young with these parents later. So many cool birds on tall human-made structures.

July 26 Michigan Lilies

The prairie continues to shine at the Nature Center, but today I took a look at these michigan lilies (Lilium michiganense). Not to be confused with the turk's cap lily (Lilium superbum), which is a different species, these tall orange flowers with 6 maroon-spotted tepals and 6 long curling stamens with dark oblong anthers will grow in small patches in wet prairie and moist hardwood openings. You can easily tell it apart from the wood lily, which has upright flowers. More difficult is knowing it from turk's cap lily, which has stamens that drop more straight down from the center of the flower and dark anthers at the ends which are longer than a half inch. Finally, superbum is very rare in Wisconsin, only growing in places where it has been introduced.

July 25 Slender Spreadwing Soiree

After a very successful work party this morning clearing invasive shrubs at the Arboretum, about a dozen of us team leaders went in search of dragonflies at Teal Pond. We saw plenty of twelve-spotted skimmers, both perching and buzzing the lake, and male and female white-faced meadowhawks soaking up the sun close to shore. We were just about to head to the marsh when we noticed this pair of damselflies hanging off the cattails. While they look an awful lot like dragonflies, one key difference is that the wings are only spread to a 45 degree angle, not straight across like a dragonfly at rest. Most damselflies hold their wings over their back at rest, except for the spreadwing family. These are slender spreadwings (Lestes rectangularis) with long abdomen, big bright blue eyes, and a disconnected yellow stripe across the back. So what's going on here? The male has four appendages at the end of his tail that he will grasp the female with at her mesothoracic plates. This is a courting stage, and she is deciding whether he is worth copulating with, by the feel and size of those four appendages. If she says yes, she will signal with a bend and then curve here abdomen up to his second abdominal to receive sperm. That move is called the wheel position. The male will then accompany her to lay the eggs either into a plant stem or directly into the water. An exciting dance for sure, head to your nearest small body of water to see damsels and dragons finding summer romance.

July 24 Prairie Fireworks

The prairie danced in the breeze today at the Nature Center under mostly blue skies. I found a small patch of four purple coneflowers, with those perfect orange domes atop their whorl of purple florets. I wanted a view with a lot of sky and so looked from the ground up. I saw queen anne's lace swaying gently at several heights, yellow coneflowers twirling above, and black-eyed susans and daisy flebanes rounding out the understory. All of these are small explosions of color in the sky, curving and bending with the light, singing and breathing with the wind.

July 23 A House Wren Scolding

Today at the Nature Center, I walked close to a nesting box and looked and listened for young birds inside. Then I heard a loud rattling call the was a clear warning sign from this most tiny bird. It's the mother house wren (Troglodytes aedon). At the Eagle Heights gardens, there are many very small basket birdhouses that are meant to fit these four and a half inch birds. I never saw them in my hometown in Illinois growing up but this year in Madison I see or hear them most days in front yards as I bike through town in the mornings. These 11 gram birds are impressively widespread, living from Buenos Aires to Calgary. Their songs are also incredible, with several notes and dozens of individual pulses in a rattling, chattering, ramble that they will sometimes sing on repeat. I have certainly learned how aggressive they can be in defending their nest cavities. Even in the forested areas of the Lakeshore Preserve, I have seen a female wren come out of her cavity fifty feet above me and yell for me to keep walking. This mother continued scolding me until I was around the corner and out of sight. 

July 22 Prairie Bursting

It was a clear blue sky without clouds for the first time in as long as I can remember today at the Nature Center. The cup plants have all put out flowers which are the tallest colors on the horizon. Yellow coneflowers are everywhere, twirling in the wind like ladies dancing with long skirts. There is bee balm in the photo, and the first grass seeds have set out, getting ready to let go onto the wind. The prairie has definitely come a long way since it was burned off in the middle of March. Three months, ample rain, and mostly average temperatures have worked to grow this incredible landscape, with just as much underground biomass in its root systems and groundhogs as you can see here above ground. Excellent.

July 21 Stinkhorn Sprouts

After a good dose of rain and a weekend free of trampling feet, the lawn at Aldo Leopold Nature Center has burst with mushrooms of all sorts. Perhaps the most eye-catching are these stinkhorns, with their orange stalks and caps covered with brown slime. Though I’m no mushroom expert, I think these stinkhorns are devil’s stinkhorns (Phallus rubicundus) because they have a distinguishable cap, unlike the similar-looking elegant stinkhorns (Mutinus elegansi). Both have a slimy brown spore mass on the top, which is dispersed by feasting flies. The range of devil’s stinkhorn in the United States used to be limited to the south, but it has made its way to the northeast and midwest in transported mulch. Indeed, these individuals were sprouting near a pile of wood chips. Apparently many gardeners lament the arrival of such sprouting specimens, but I think they’ll provide a good look into the world of fascinating fungi for visitors to the nature center.

July 20 Rainbow in the Rain

Tonight I again traveled to south Madison for a meeting and just after arriving at my destination, the sky opened up for fifteen minutes of heavy downpour. The sun peered out from behind the storm but the rain kept falling and shimmered in the light as a low rainbow appeared over the eastern horizon. This was magical and ephemeral, the crystals of water and bow of colors fading away in what felt like minutes to me, but was probably forty-five seconds. For those of us living in humid continental climates, moments like these are our reward for bearing the heat.

July 19 Bee on Bee Balm

At Aldo Leopold Nature Center, we call these pizza flowers. Squeeze one, then smell your hand, and you will get a great whiff of oregano. If you're a tea drinker, maybe you'll smell Earl Grey. Either way, this plant is called Bee Balm and Wild Bergamot. Always covered in bumblebees, patches of these showy lavender flowers brighten up the prairie with a buzz of activity. Monarda fistulosa has opposite leaves and square, hollow stems, which are common features of mint family plants. After going to seed in the fall, the heads darken and remain vertical through the winter, helping keep texture for the prairie landscape in the dormant season. These spread vigorously through slender rhizome roots, so if you plant them in your yard, expect them to multiply.

July 18 Sunny Wingra Creek

This is a view of Wingra Creek from the bridge on Park Street. The creek looked beautiful today with the greens of lilypads and cottonwood leaves set against the deep blue of sky and water. Before the 1920s, Wingra Creek didn't really exist. Lake Wingra slowly drained through a wide series of wetlands, including Gardner Marsh in the Arboretum, on its way to Monona Lake. Then in the 1920s the Lake Forest Land Company built the levee - now Arboretum Drive - and dredged the creek channel, effectively directing most of Lake Wingra's flow into the newly dug creek. Before 1800, there were 1500 acres of wetland in the Lake's watershed and now there are 210 left. As south Madison became more developed, the need for the dam at the head of the creek arose to control flooding of the artificial channel. This year, the City of Madison completed a three part project to naturalize Wingra Creek's channel and restore native vegetation to its banks. It looks pretty good, and next the City and the Friends of Lake Wingra are working to begin reducing the major contaminants that have killed the waters of the lake and creek. These are road salt, phosphorous from plants, and sediment, all of which get to the lake from stormwater sewer outflow.  

July 17 Sidewalk Cicada

This is a dogday cicada, aka Tibicen canicularis. I found this one on the sidewalk, not moving, and not singing the high-pitched droning note that males have begun singing now that the July heat has settled on Madison and the afternoon light is waning every so slightly. These cicadas, when adult, emerge every year and in late summer will insert eggs directly into tree twigs. The nymphs though will hatch and then burrow into the ground where they live for four to eight years before returning to the light as an adult cicada. They produce the high electrical hum sound by vibrating tymbals on the sides of their abdomen which resonate into a cavity and amplify sound outward. The sound is impressive and tells that the dogdays of summer are here.

July 16 Imptatiens Flowers

On our way up the garden today we saw that orange jewelweed plants have started flowering in the Lakeshore Preserve. Impatiens capensis seedlings carpeted the forest floor during the weeks right after spring ephemerals returned to dormancy, and since then many jewelweeds have grown to four and five feet tall. Now there are just a few yellow flowers scattered between many plants, but soon each plant is likely to have an array of flowers, and forest areas with wet soils and lakeshores and marshes will have dense yellow and green where impatiens abounds. Later in September when the seeds are formed, go and touch a few of them to learn why these plants are in the touch-me-not family! It's safe, don't worry.

July 15 Quick Pickling Swiss Chard

With our swiss chard plants ever-growing, we decided to start testing the pickling tradition, first with the refrigerator variety. We packed stems into the jars and added garlic and black pepper, then filled the jars with equal parts water and white vinegar. This is a very loose recipe and we did not so much as cook the stems for a few minutes, which would probably improve the pickle texture and flavor. But those serious pickling skills, with hot water baths and sterile lids and such, will come later. I got to wondering is swiss chard is even from Switzerland and it turns out that it's not. Beta vulgaris was given that scientific name by Swiss botanist and it has taken the name of swiss chard even though it originated in Sicily. It was revered by the ancient Greeks for its health effects, and prized by Mediterranean cooks for the flavor it can bring to soups. Over the years, English speakers have referred to it as white beet, strawberry spinach, sea kale beet, spinach beet, Sicilian beet, Chilian beet, Roman kale, and silverbeet. Hopefully these chard pickles turn out tasty, which would be good news since they'll likely be the worst pickles of the season.  

July 14 Life Abounds in Milkweed Patch

I was riding home from South Madison this evening when I stopped to admire these beauties out in front of the Catholic Multicultural Center. There are three different insects enjoying these milkweed flowers all at once. Monarch butterfly, red milkweed beetles (Tetraopes tetrophthalmus), and a small dark fly at bottom right that I can't identify from the picture. In the surrounding half mile from this plant, there are many native plantings, but all are very tiny compared to prairie and savanna habitat that existed here before European conquest. Nevertheless, this small group of a dozen milkweeds and other plants is playing its role as pollinator habitat and ecosystem connection for these important insects, which play the role of important food source for larger animals. Native plantings on private property is one of the foundation stones of Leopold's land ethic, and this is an example of its potential success.

July 13 Lake Wingra Under Clouds

I was out bicycling tonight and thought I may get caught in a big storm as huge clouds moved across the northern sky. I bought some groceries and on my way home past Lake Wingra, the storm clouds unfurled in my direction and began consuming the horizon. This is the view at just 6:05 PM, so the clouds were heavy and dark. It has been an interesting few weeks to watch clouds and seems like almost every day brings the threat of a thunderstorm. I rode home and a little rain fell for a while, but no thunder or lightning followed. Drat! Just missed a good storm tonight.

July 12 Labor Fruits (& Vegetables)

What an exciting day at the Eagle Heights garden. We lifted out carrots and radishes and one potato plant worth of potatoes. Our three swiss chard plants are completely unphased by the sun and heat, and a few onions and beets were big enough to eat this week. We also found our squash plants had grown by 50% and are trying to take over space from some pepper plants and the garden plants. Had to slice off a few stems and flowers to keep them under control. Digging root vegetables out of the ground is like finding gold. It's exciting to pull a quarter pound carrot out not having any idea of its size. We are first time vegetable growers this year and are quickly realizing how much food we can grown in 400 square feet. With many green beans and beets and more radishes and chard to come, it seems as though we better learn to preserve food soon or much of it will go uneaten.