What Nature Interactions have you had lately?

I know everyone is busy with springtime activities, now with summer getting closer. But I still want to hear about your nature interactions lately 😀

Here at Wild Ozark, nature tries to reclaim EVERYTHING at this time of year.

Taming a bit of Nature

Our land isn’t level and it’s lots of rocks, so I can’t ‘mow’. I weedeat whatever needs to be kept under control. Usually I start at the mailbox area and work up the driveway to get around the house. When I was younger, this was a couple of day’s worth of work.

Nowadays it’s going to take a couple of weeks. If I’m lucky, I won’t have to repeat for a few weeks, maybe a month if a drought sets in.

But this year, rain keeps interrupting, and rain makes everything grow crazy again, so I’m likely going to have to start over by the time I finally reach the finish line with it.

Aside from reclaiming some space, I get a lot of nature in my gardening.

Nature Interactions while Working

And today I went to work on a fence line in one of the areas of our property that I don’t get to see often. There are huge boulders on a steep hill here, and it’s a pretty interesting place. A little farther down there’s a gully where a spring feeds the creek at the bottom.

Today I didn’t get there, but a little hike farther in a bit of a difficult slope, there’s a very nice waterfall that’s probably flowing with a thin sheet of water over a large and tall flat boulder face. I’ll try to get to it tomorrow and will remember to stop and take some pictures or video for you.

Other than that, just the sights and sounds are exposure to nature around here. Even in cities there’s nature to see, though! What have you seen, heard, or experienced so far this year?

Here’s some pretty little red disc fungi my husband spotted today on the fence-walk:

Wildlife Nature Interactions

Sometimes interactions aren’t direct, but indirect. When I went out to check on my garden this morning, I found that an armadillo had uprooted my garlic, tomato, and green onion beds. And then I saw that the squirrel had turned over all of the pots with turmeric tubers in them, and ate the tumeric:

And sometimes nature interactions involving wildlife is a fun encounter. I saw this box turtle (tortoise) running at top speed through the wet grasses yesterday morning:

A New Plant!

I suppose my most frequent nature interactions involve plants. First of all, they’re too slow-moving to get away before I can take a photo and observe them. And second, well, I’m just attracted to plants and especially varieties I’ve never seen in our neck of the woods before.

This is a type of beebalm, Monarda bradburiana. It’s the first time I’ve seen it here, so of course I had to stop and get a closer look:

I’m going to gather some seeds from it later on this year and hope to establish some in my garden. I have two other varieties there, M. fistulosa (which I use for my winter crud herbal syrup) and I’m hoping the other one that hasn’t bloomed yet is M. didyma. It makes a scarlet red flower. Fingers crossed on that one.

So there’s some of my nature interactions. Share yours!