Sunday picture posting

[which_chick]

I need to get outside more in the winter (exercise and daylight help my mood), so we're trying for Sunday Picture Posting. I have to Go Outside and Take Pictures to do Sunday Picture Posting, so...

Also there has been (some) expressed interest in Moar Picture Posts (this was not directed at me personally) and I don't expect me doing pictures on Sundays is going to offend anyone. They're all tucked behind the cut so if you're only here for my scintillating (lol) prose, skip over this entry and try again later.



It was a wet, wet, wet day. How wet was it?

Here's the pond:


Take it as read that it was wet out. I wore a raincoat.

Seeing as how it's December out, mostly, things were brown on my walk. Here's a typical picture of the leaf litter, also wet:



But some things were green. You got yer lichens, they're kinda green-grey. Greenish, maybe. Here are some rock-based lichens:


Here are some wood-based lichens, are they not delightfully shaped? They're like legit Dr. Seuss. Still green-grey, tho.



Here's some lichen on a tree, this style also grows on rocks. Tell me this is not texturally interesting:


I found a dead locust tree with interesting holes in it. Not green, but interesting:


We've got some stunningly green mosses in winter. Here's one:


The ground pines (several species of 'em) are reliably evergreen, too. We have a nice selection of these, also called "clubmosses". Here are the ones within easy walking distance from my house...

Fan clubmoss:


Some other clubmoss:


Staghorn clubmoss:


We've got a native terrestrial orchid that's evergreen, Downy Rattlesnake Plantain. Here is one:


They're kind of small and inconspicuous even in flower, but they are orchids. The ones in this picture have intact seed heads.

Here's a Where Is The Orchid picture so that you can practice finding one in the landscape when it's not, y'know, super easy to find:


Our property used to be a not very successful farm, quite a while ago. It hasn't been farm for quite a while and the farm history is not terribly obvious a lot of the time, but when you're marching through the woods and you find (a) a long row of stones piled up for no particular reason and (b) stumps that were clearly sawn off about four feet tall that are adjacent to the weird linear stonepiles, you have a good shot at finding evidence of pasture. Since the leaf litter covers the stone rows, I didn't take a picture of that. They're more obvious at the end of winter, but with heavy leaf litter, they're not easy to see. I did take some pictures of a few of the unusually tall stumps and then got some closer shots so that you could see WHY the stumps were sawn off so high.

Tall stump:


Why it's a tall stump and why this is ex-pastureland:


That's barbed wire. You use barbed wire to keep livestock inside pasture fences.

So, that was my wet, wet, wet day walk. I did other stuff today (wired up an outlet in chicken coop for water tank heater, installed bathroom sink faucets for Lala, worked on my book/plant/craft room project) but none of that was fun for pictures.

The flooring store says that the last box of plank flooring I need for The Floor will be at the warehouse on Monday. I'm kind of excited since they were all "It will be Mid-January" or some shit. We just might make it by xmas after all.