*** Sorry, but this event has ended *** Join me in a “Review Round Robin” I’ll send you 10 Common Plants in paperback format, and none of this costs anything for you, not even postage (but you don’t get to keep the book, unfortunately – you’ll send it on to the next reviewer). 1. I’ll send you …
We have singing dogs. Every morning at sunrise when the rooster crows and the hens wake, and during the day when the chickens get all a-cluck over an egg laying, the dogs break into song with them. Does anyone else have singing dogs, especially in choir with chickens?
They’re not aggressive. Really. This one just wanted to be left alone. It’s the second one I’d encountered that week, and both were relatively calm. Badger even stepped on the first one and didn’t notice until after doing it. The snake didn’t bite, just coiled up and started rattling. This one took a long time before …
I’ve been observing and recording our slowly descending Ozark landslide. Leaning trees and driveway encroachment, photographed day by day. Since the flood last Monday I haven’t done a whole lot of cleanup. The main reason for that is the landslide. It’s blocking my path from the house to the camper and to the gate. …
I have two black marans setting eggs. Each hen was in a separate box, sitting on her own clutch of eggs. There are other boxes for the other hens to lay eggs in, too. I haven’t been finding eggs in the other nests lately, and I suspect there’s a snake in the henhouse somewhere (again). …
We’ve had a lot of rain in the last days here in the Ozark Highlands. 7 inches in a few hours Monday night. That’s too much rain for our little creeks and hollers. Lots of folks have lost homes, cattle, hay harvests and rigs they need to work. My parents spent a terrifying night among …
Gnats have made it nearly impossible for me to stand being outside at my potting bench for very long. Yesterday I did the little bit of work I needed to do at it while trying not to breathe so the pesky little buggers wouldn’t go up my nose. I pretty much needed to close my …
I have a hard time believing I have no pictures – at all – of ripe elderberry fruit. After digging through file after unfruitful file, I thought it might be faster to just go get a new photo. Not quite. The berries aren’t ripe yet here at Wild Ozark. But maybe they are on top …
Something didn’t work right and the previous post went out with the wrong link. Here’s the right one: https://www.wildozark.com/10-common-plants/
When you can hear the roar of the wet-weather waterfall from the house, you know the water’s up. If you can see the waterfall from the front porch, it’s a fair bet the creek is way over the bridge. When the creek is this much into the driveway… Yep. Looks like I’ll be staying home …
Dragons Hatching! Last fall I collected seeds from a large Green Dragon. I put the berries directly into pots and kept them overwinter in the ginseng nursery. The other morning I noticed they were hatching – er, sprouting! The link in the first sentence will take you to a page about the plant. It’s also …
Dragons Hatching, Clematis Blooming, and Feeding Horses in the Rain Read More »
Here’s one of my monthly newsletters that goes out to my subscribers. This one is from May 2015 and is all about challenges, new discoveries, and a brand new product from Wild Ozark. “Greatest” Challenge Are you often faced with challenging situations to figure yourself out of? It seems I get to encounter “greatest” challenges …
Apparently there’s a snake in the hen-house. Looks like the hens had some stealthy company yesterday. The unwelcome guest left a bit of evidence behind for me to find this morning. I searched under all of the nexts and behind the boxes and up in the rafters but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Sooner or later …
“What’s that plant good for?” A curious thing I’m noticing by selling plants at the market is that people almost always have the same question, phrased in various ways. It’s often the first thing they ask, in general about any of the plants, when they first walk into the booth. It seems to be a …
Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum biflorum) There’s a nice patch of Solomon Seal at the front of the driveway that was so choked out last summer that I don’t think any of them got a chance to bloom. I was afraid they might not come back after that. And I wasn’t sure exactly which spot it was where …
Arnold is a Fall chicken. He hatched from an egg, along with his three nestlings way back in October (I think). The clutch of eggs that had hatched shortly before his fell prey to a large black rat snake. You might remember my FB post about that. It takes about six months from hatch to …
Today we were gifted with more snow. Yesterday when I got out of bed, the sun shown brightly with promises of warmth at least from direct sunlight. So I let the horses out to scrounge around for what little grass might be popping up from beneath melted snow from last week. We decided to go …
It’s our first snowy day for the season. First it sleeted about an inch or so, then it snowed. It’s still snowing today. Not too much but enough to make everything look pretty. It’s about 20*F, so no danger of melting away just yet.
Is herbalism exclusively for animals and people? Why not herbalism for plants? I’ve never heard of anyone else using herbs to treat plants. There’s lots of information about how to use plants to treat people (and animals), but not for using plants to treat plants. And why not? Certain plants have affinity for certain other …
We have an Arkansas Black apple tree overgrown by brush and saplings. Is it possible to recover an apple tree after it’s gotten overgrown? Pruning it has been on my list of things to do for a few years now. Today I finally got around to it. Here’s how it looked before: The first thing …
Yesterday I took a break from figuring taxes (yes, I’m still working on taxes) and went outside to enjoy the warm-ish winter’s day and plant seeds. On the seed list today: American ginseng Echinacea purpurea Echinacea tennesseensis Comfrey (officinale) Poppies These plants all need to be seeded while it’s still cool outside so the seeds can …
I enjoy seeing signs of life in the dead of winter. This week hasn’t been the typical dead of winter. Today was a beautiful day, sunny and nearly 70*F, and I became tired of figuring taxes. Time to go outside and move rocks around in the garden. I brought the camera to get some pics …
We’re holding our breath here this morning at Wild Ozark, waiting to see what happens when the lines on the mountain thaw. See, we’d insulated all the lines under the house and figured, hey, it shouldn’t freeze now under there tonight – let’s see what happens. Well, we forgot about the nature of still water …
Abundance in Nature The other day as we were out scouting for new springs on the mountain, (springs new to us, not springs new in existence and another form of the abundance in nature out here), I looked at the shrubs around me. The airy, twisty trees looked familiar and my excitement grew as the …
Today I’ve been undergoing the torture of taxes, podcasts and frozen water . I’m doing taxes for the business, repairing broken podcast audio files, compiling good nature blog links, and making the chickens happy today. Compiling the good nature blog links has actually been a pleasant task, though. And at least the water job ended with …
