Darkoshi

crispy ground

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:53:14 GMT

There hasn't been significant rain here in over a month. Two weeks ago I started watering the fig tree daily, carrying buckets of water to it. Today I noticed the gardenia bush had lost most of its leaves; only the tips of some branches still had green ones. So I gave it a lot of water too. I hope it survives; its flowers smell so good when they bloom.

I gave the azalea bush by the back door water too.

When I walk across the grass with the buckets of water, it feels crispy under my shoes. It is so dried out. I don't know how plants can survive so long without water, especially on hot days. But so far, most of the yard seems to be doing ok. Maybe I haven't looked closely enough. Today I decided to also water some of the lantana, and closer up, its leaves looked like they were shrivelling up.

I thought this might be the driest I ever recalled it being here. I was right:

Drought Status Update for the Southeast

Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina have experienced record dry conditions for September 2025-March 2026, with records dating back to 1895. September–March was the second driest for Alabama, third driest for Florida, ninth driest for Tennessee, and tenth driest for Virginia.
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Moderate to Exceptional Drought (D1-D4) conditions cover 96.83% of the Southeast, and Severe to Exceptional Drought (D2-D4) conditions cover 81.75% of the region. This is the largest area of drought (D1-D4) and of Severe Drought or worse (D2-D4) for the Southeast since the U.S. Drought Monitor started in 2000.

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Nandina

Mon, 23 May 2022 03:34:40 GMT

Both my yard and Qiao's has clumps of this bush: Nandina, also known as "Heavenly Bamboo".

Individual stalks of it aren't too hard to pull out when they are young. But when they get taller and start growing a bunch of stalks in a small area which is what they do, they are very hard to get rid of. I can cut them down, but they grow back (like everything else in the yard, so frustrating!). It has a curiously yellow wood. It gets small white flowers, and clusters of red berries, which I thought must at least be good for birds. But per the Wikipedia page, Nandina, the berries are toxic to birds and animals!

I haven't seen dead birds in our yards, so hopefully the birds know to avoid them.

Now that I know it's not even a good food source for birds, I'll be even more ruthless in cutting it down.

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autumn sunshine fluff

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 21:53:28 GMT

I'm sitting outside in the sunshine, working. Every once in a while I see a round white fluffy thing floating by on the breeze. ( Tiny seeds with a ball of white hairs spread out around them - they look like these thistle seeds but are more likely from some nearby tree. Cottonwood, maybe. )

I look up, and up there, many many of these fluffy things are drifting by, glowing even brighter in the sunlight as they pass near the sun.

My camera does not pick them up well against the sky.

I chase a few, and catch one, and take it inside to get some close-up photos of it. Then I release it back outside, and it floats away.

What to call them? "Parachute seed" doesn't seem to do them justice, these delicate light floaty spheres.

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summer time

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 08:29:22 GMT

lalalalalalalala nevermind, don't need to write about that.

Little frogs all over Qiao's back yard. Big ones too; there were two on the back steps last night. Had to shoo them away last night before the dogs saw them. I'm surprised but glad that the dogs haven't been going after the little ones. I worry I might accidentally step on them as they are hard to see when they're not moving. They jump away and then I see them from the motion.

I found a nice plant with grape tomatoes growing in the yard. We didn't plant it. How could it have gotten there? I don't like raw tomatoes; when Qiao sometimes brings me a take-out meal that includes them, I give the tomatoes to the dogs as they like them. The plant is growing in the area where I bury the dog p**p. So that must be where it came from.

Dandelion trees... Weeds that look like dandelions from their leaves, but grow tall with a thick steam. I was watching one such plant grow tall at my house. It finally got even taller than me, and only then did little flowers start blooming at the top. There was one in Qiao's yard too, similar but different; also taller than me.

There's a sassafras sapling growing out back too. I tasted a couple of its leaves; they didn't taste much like root beer, but they were very mucilaginous. From what I read it is actually dangerous to eat, and so they don't use real sassafras as a flavoring any more.

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photos from this year

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 08:20:27 GMT

( Cut for size. Click to see photos )

Hey, wait a minute. Why, when I right-click one of the photos in this post and select to view the image, does it bring up a Dreamwidth URL? Is DW automatically copying photos that we post, to the DW servers? It didn't used to do that.

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Fall Spring

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 14:01:01 GMT

Now that the weather's getting cooler, it's odd how some plants are acting like it's Spring. The pink magnolia got blossoms last month. Now the lantana, which *didn't* bloom for most of the summer as it usually does, is blooming again.

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fireflies, fireworks, miscellaneous

Thu, 05 Jul 2018 22:57:45 GMT

I finally took down the Christmas tree and decorations.

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The border grass (liriope) behind the house was tall and thick so I used the string trimmer on it. Swarms of mosquitos flew at me. Maybe that is where they hang out in the daytime, shading themselves from the sun between the thick blades of grass. Maybe that is why there are always so many mosquitos in the back yard. Now I'm tempted to uproot all the border grass back there and get rid of it. It's a pity as regular grass doesn't grow well back there, so it was always nice to at least have the greenness of the border grass along the house. Although it is very hardy, so it might grow back. Which is the bane of having a yard; even when you cut things down and cut out as much root as you can (and feel bad about how you're killing the poor things), they keep growing back.

Those darn hardy crepe myrtles. One of them which had the stump ground keeps getting a bunch of sprouts in the same place, apparently from old seeds. The other one which had the stump ground (or did it?) still has a big root underground which I was only able to partially hack away, and keeps getting a bunch of sprouts. The one which had the stump left, and in which I drilled holes to kill it, is no longer growing back in the middle, but keeps sprouting branches along the outer edge of the stump. This last time, I cracked off a lot of the stump's bark where the branches were growing from; hopefully that will kill it.

It's not even like I even had all the crepe myrtle trees cut down; I only had a few of them cut, to thin things out.

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Yesterday, fireflies and fireworks. Not many to see, only a few here and there. But a lot of thump boom pop sounds to hear. I did some taekwondo/stretch kicks down by the lake in the dark while looking for bright colors in the sky. I spied a mostly stationary light in the sky to my left, not too high up, partially behind some trees, which seemed to fade and come back every once in a while. I wondered if it was flares or a drone.

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Thinking about how gluten can be separated from wheat, to get low-carb wheat gluten, made me wonder if one could make gluten-free wheat flour (or rather, starch). The info at that link is what I found; ie. yes you can, or mostly gluten-free anyway.

Low (and high) FODMAP Foods for Vegans - for reference.

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I was surprised to read "While citric acid is usually made from corn, beet sugar or molasses, it can also be made from wheat." I had thought it was made from citrus fruit. Then, I was even more surprised to read that it is actually produced from a mold (aspergillus niger) (a black mold, but not the toxic one), which is grown on the sugary syrup produced from the corn/beets/wheat/etc. More details here: Overview of citric acid production from Aspergillus niger

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I was also surprised to read that several gums commonly added to foods are made, not from plants as I had thought, but from bacteria.

Carrageenan (aka irish moss) comes from a red seaweed. I had previously discounted claims that it could be unhealthy, but now I'm not so sure, as it seems to be linked to inflammation.
Xanthum Gum, gellan gum, and curdlan are made from bacteria.
Guar gum, locust bean (aka carob bean) gum, and tara gum are made from plants.
Gum arabic (aka acacia gum) is made from the sap of the acacia tree.

Sources/more info:
What is Carrageenan?
Carrageenan and Gellan Gum
Gums in Foods Causing Health Problems for Many - very informative about the different kinds of gums in use.

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This was interesting, as I had never heard about it before:
Alpha-gal allergy - can be caused by tick bites. Makes one allergic to mammalian meat products. Based on the comments on this page, it can also cause reactions to meat by-products like gelatin, dairy, and even animal-derived magnesium stearate.

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Winter seems to be over

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 07:11:40 GMT

The next 9 days are forecast to be in the 70s and 80s here. The last few days have been, as well.

Don't ask me what kind of plant these buds these are from... I vaguely recall having taken a photo of the plant at another time of the year, but it would take some searching to find it.

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they keep trying to grow back

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 04:29:34 GMT

I'll have to try this:

How to stop stumps from growing back, organically! - drill holes in the stump and apply epsom salts, and replenish the salt every week or so.

Another idea - after doing the above, cover the stumps with black plastic / garbage bag and weight it down with bricks, to both block sunlight, and to keep the salts from being washed away by rain.

How To Use Epsom Salt For Stump Removal - this page says to put a little bit of water in the holes with the epsom salt.

How to Mix Epsom Salts to Kill Stumps - this page says to use a one-inch extra long drill bit... Oh, that must be a spade bit.

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flight skills

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 04:44:01 GMT

Walking back from my lunch break, I passed a group of 7 crows cawing and flitting between trees.

Next, I came across a group of vultures standing together in a group on the grass. At first glance, they looked like black crows too. I tried not to look at them very directly, as doing so generally scares them away. But I got out my cell phone and took a furtive photo.

A few of the vultures flew upwards and bumped into the side of the building behind them before landing back on the ground. Huh? A couple more did the same thing, and I wondered what were they doing. Then I realized... they were all younglings, and were frightened of me and trying to fly up onto the top of the building. But their flying skills aren't good enough yet to fly straight up 20 feet like that. I walked away, not to scare them further, poor things.

It reminded me of a day last week when I walked right past a single young vulture that was sitting on a railing, not even noticing it until the last moment, as I had just walked out of the building into the sunshine.

A few days ago I was reading about vines... ah yes, to see if my mom was correct that letting them grow up the pine tree trunks can hurt the trees. While doing that, I found out the name of one of the vines that grows in my yard: Virginia Creeper. It has little suckers on its tendrils that helps it climb, and 5 leaflets in each compound leaf.

Earlier today while walking, I saw a similar looking plant with leaflets of 3... and remembered that rhyme, "leaves of three, let them be". I wondered if it was poison ivy. It looks so innocuous; I walk by it nearly every day. In lieu of touching the leaves to find out, I did a web search on my cell phone to find some images of poison ivy, and sure enough, that is what it was. Now I know what it looks like. For the moment, anyway.

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never see the same

Thu, 18 May 2017 13:52:52 GMT

Now when I see dandelions, I think to myself "Aha! That one has pointy leaves, not round, and they are sticking up, not close to the ground. That is a true dandelion." Or "That's not a true dandelion, it's cat's claw... err, no, cat's ear" (almost every time, "cat's claw" comes to mind first, even though I'm not familiar with it... per a search, it looks similar to yellow jessamine).

The yellow flowers themselves look identical to me on both kinds of dandelions, though this one below didn't have a ball of unopened petals in the middle. Its petals were all open.

It's like when as a kid, I learned the difference between white oak which has the round/curve-edged leaves versus black oak which has the pointy-edged leaves, not to mention, blackjack oak.

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gnawed trunk, catalpa, starfish fungus

Fri, 12 May 2017 04:49:44 GMT

I've decided which phone to buy. The Moto G4 Play has pretty good specs (it has 2GB RAM, not 1/2 GB as I originally thought), for a good price.

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This is the most chewed-on tree trunk by the pond.

These are Catalpa tree blossoms. The photo is from 2015, but the tree has blossoms this year too. The blossoms are about the size of big popcorn, and don't have much scent. But a clump of honeysuckle is also growing by the tree, the lovely sweet scent of which has fooled me a few times.

I found this growing in the ground in Qiao's yard. At first glance they look like fallen red blossoms, but what is that black tarry gunk on them? It's one of the strangest looking things. Per the internet, they are called starfish fungus. I saw one by the pond at work too, an odd coincidence, as I don't ever remember seeing these before. But then again, maybe I did and simply thought they were fallen blossoms.

While walking along, do you ever have a sudden amusing thought that makes you break out in a big grin?

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my dandelions are not sweet

Wed, 10 May 2017 05:46:02 GMT

I ate 3 dandelion/cat's ear flowers today. They were not sweet. They tasted pretty similar to the green leaves, slightly bitter. The leaves were hairy, but not as unpleasant as chewing on under-ripe peach peel. I could probably eat a plate of it if I had to.

[Edited to add, 2017/05/13: I ate 4 more of the flowers today, after even more carefully peeling off the green parts than last time. They still don't taste sweet, nor particularly good. They taste a little like raw celery but without the crunch. Ie., not bad, but not special either. I wonder if "true" dandelions have any different flavor to them.]

A reminder that there are a lot of mis-facts on the web...
Nutritional Information on Dandelion Root : The image at the top of the page is neither dandelion nor false dandelion. It looks like coltsfoot.

Cat’s Ear: Backyard ‘Weed’ With Super-Antioxidant Properties : This page says: One identifying characteristic of cat’s ear is its leaves; they are sharply toothed and more asymmetrical than the leaves of dandelion. But that is not true. Cat's ear leaves are more rounded than regular dandelion.

I'm sort of amazed at the details I got in some of these photos. When looking at the flowers in the yard, they all pretty much look like the 5th one below. In the sunshine, the clump of unopened petals in the center of some of them aren't very noticeable.

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my dandelions are false

Tue, 09 May 2017 02:58:42 GMT

False Dandelions For Lunch

Dandelions, True or False?

Wild edibles: How to eat and identify cat's ear / flatweed / false dandelion (video, posted by wildsuperfoods)

Foraging Notes: The False Dandelion (video, posted by Survivalkraft)

Both people in those videos have said the false dandelion flowers are sweet. Now I am very curious, and am going to taste them in the coming days.
The leaves on my dandelions are close to the ground, so they tend to be dirty as well as hairy. But maybe I'll try some of them too. I'll probably need to cook them, as I don't even like eating peach skins, due to the fuzz that scratches my throat.
I've already tasted some root, raw, from 2 of the largest ones I pulled up while weeding last weekend. (Even so, they're fairly small and narrow). The root's not particularly tasty, but not bad either. It's rather dry, so I'm soaking the remainder in water to make it crunchier.

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a disconcertation of figs

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 06:28:14 GMT

The little fig tree leafs are growing (bigger). There are a bunch of little figs growing too. The car is already getting lightly covered in pollen. This evening we had some wind and a small refreshing rainstorm. It was too warm inside, so I opened a few windows to get some of the breeze. Tomorrow it will be cooler, a high of 65. (Last week or somewhen, when the forecast was also for 65, I thought *eek* that will be cool, and then reminded myself that normally 65 in February would be nice and temperate.)

(click to enlarge)
(from https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KCAE/2017/2/1/MonthlyCalendar.html)

Now that it is March, maybe I will stop feeling so disconcerted about the weather. In my experience, we could have cold weather and sporadic snow and ice up through the very end of February here. But March has always sounded like Spring.

( Photos under cut... )

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Spring of February

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 22:49:27 GMT

It is such a gorgeous warm sunny day today. This whole so-called winter has been relatively warm. Other than a few cold nights and cool days, it hasn't even felt like winter.

The pink magnolia tree started blooming this week. The blooms don't usually last more than a week or two. Based on photos, in prior years it bloomed in early to late March. So this year is a full month earlier than usual, unless the years in which I didn't take photos had earlier blooms too.

The fragrant yellow jessamine on the fence is also already blooming.

There is a bush at Qiao's house, which I've been curious to know what kind of plant it is. It has thin stalks, some with reddish blossoms and some with white (unless the white ones are a different kind of bush). It started blooming right at the beginning of February, even before the pink magnolia. In the summer, it gets roundish green fruit that look like plum-sized small apples. They are surprising to see, because the thin stalks don't seem like they could support such relatively big fruit, yet they do. The fruit smells and tastes like bitter apples (too bitter to eat). So it's probably some apple variant. It doesn't look like what Google Images shows for crab-apples, though.

After doing some searches, my best guess is that it is a shrub quince, even though the fruit is green rather than yellow, and more apple-shaped than quince-shaped.

( More photos... )

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lil figleafs

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 03:52:57 GMT

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10k

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 04:24:05 GMT

On Tuesday, I surpassed 10,000 steps in a single day for the first time since I started tracking my walking. At 11:45pm, the pedometer showed 9900. Naturally, I decided I had to do at least another 100 before midnight arrived.

The sky was very beautiful while driving home this evening. Awesome layers of clouds and light that make you want to look up rather than down at the street. The sun was setting, orange.

The wisteria/kudzu smells lovely.

Azaleas in full bloom. I still have some azalea photos from a year ago that I never posted. Still haven't finished going through all of last year's photos.

I have some photos of the cute budding fig leaves from a week or 2 ago... Now the leaves are already full size. Last year, I took photos of the young fig leaves too. I'm sure I'll get to them eventually.

I ordered 7 small items from Amazon last night. Button batteries and a couple other items which I've had trouble finding in physical stores. Already got shipment notifications on 5, and USPS tracking emails on 2 of them. California and New Jersey. Interesting to think that around the country, stuff is moving just for me.

When ordering Amazon Marketplace items, the credit card charge may randomly show up from either "AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS" or "Amazon Payments". Because of that, it's no longer convenient to use Shop-Safe credit card numbers (which for security purposes allow purchases from only a single seller) for those purchases. Half the payments have been getting declined, and I've had to submit them again using a different credit card number. The weird thing is that when Amazon resubmits the ones that were originally charged to "Amazon Payments", the 2nd time they actually charge them to "AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS".

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spring time

Thu, 26 Mar 2015 03:09:09 GMT

Yellow: A few daffodils were out some weeks ago. Now there are flowering forsythia bushes (I looked up what they are called!), and sweet-smelling jessamine along the fence.

Pinkish-white: Elegant long-petaled magnolia blossoms, already completely replaced by young green leaves. A tree full of blossoms (possibly bradford pear; I'm not sure) by the side of the house. Puffs of a flowering almond bush (I looked up what it is called!) by the front windows.

Red: A single tulip.

Purple: The sweet-smelling wisteria is on the way.

Barking: woof woof woof

Falling blossoms: nature's confetti

Unusual: A Canadian goose taking a nap in the middle of the road. The other lane, and no traffic in that direction, but still.

Turtles: turtles, squirrels.

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odd dream

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 19:00:02 GMT

I was outside with someone else, apparently having trimmed / cut back overgrowth. The other person mentioned that this one plant that had been trimmed was an oracle.

There was a question/mystery we needed answered. So I addressed the plant, "Oh, Oracle Plant, ..."

Immediately, a vine on the plant grew outwards, and wrapped itself around my wrists. It may have also wrapped one around my neck. But it wasn't menacing; it was recognizing me as a supplicant.

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important distinction

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:31:55 GMT

Coltsfoot - a perennial herbaceous plant in the family Asteraceae that has traditionally had medicinal uses.

Neatsfoot oil - a yellow oil rendered and purified from the shin bones and feet (but not the hooves) of cattle. "Neat" in the oil's name comes from an old name for cattle.

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yellow beauties

Thu, 02 May 2013 03:12:05 GMT

I got the blister while uprooting dandelions in the yard of Forestfen's new house. Dandelions are so beautiful. I never feel pleased about mowing them down or disposing of them as weeds.

This is them, 4 days after having been pulled from the earth and tossed on a pile. You'd expect them to be limp and dying. But see how bright yellow they are, and how their stems have curved upwards to the sky?

There's an empty corner lot on one street, absolutely full of blooming dandelions. So gorgeous.

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did you know...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 03:34:32 GMT

...that Irish Moss is actually a seaweed, and that carrageenan is made from it? I diddin' know that.

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ouchies / sandspurs

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 03:37:57 GMT

There are these small spikey things in the grass around here sometimes. They hurt quite a bit, if you get them stuck in your skin... removing them is painful too, because if you try to pull one out with unprotected fingers, it usually embeds itself into your fingers.

Today, Serena got a couple of them stuck in her paw (I noticed her suddenly yelp in pain as she was running towards me), and I helped her get them out.

So, this evening, I was trying to find out what they are called. It seems they are called sandspurs or sandburs.

I also wanted to find out what these weeds look like while they are still young, so that I could uproot and dispose of them before they develop the painful burs. I sometimes see grass that looks like this around my yard, and wondered if that might be it. But even though someone labelled that photo "sandspurs", the burs on that grass are soft, and don't seem like they'll develop into the hard spikey painful ones I'm interested in. So I suspect that particular grass/weed is not really sandspur. I think this photo must be how it looks... but by the time it is at that stage, it is already dangerous.

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