Journal February 22, 2005

The weather seems to have gotten into a pattern of snowstorms every time we go to the farm. When we get there the hills are brown, or at least some ground is showing. Then there’s a snowstorm, and by the time we leave it’s winter again.
This week it was a big storm – it snowed one night and the next day. It was heavy wet snow, eight or ten inches of it. Sometimes the falling snow got so thick that we couldn’t see the hill across the road and it stuck to the branches of all the trees.

We worked hard on the floor project, and finally finished just before we left for home. Next time we’ll put up the molding and clean up and get the room back in order. Mike is thinking he’ll have his office up there – it will be a wonderful space with great views into the trees and up the valley.

I did one long walk up through the woods to Sumac Prairie and down through the wet end of East Center Valley. It was beautiful, and fun to see the prairie with snow on it. It’s our steepest prairie and faces directly south so the snow melts very quickly. I like the way the prairie plants, especially Monarda, look against the snow.

It was so warm and wet that the lichens were very bright on the tree trunks. I haven’t been working on lichens lately, so I’m going to have to learn the terminology all over again, and see if I can identify this one.

There were also some bright red fungi on some of the branches – I’m pretty sure they are Peniophora rufa – Red Tree Brain Fungus

We also walked up to Hidden Oaks Point and admired all the clearing we did last fall. We’ve been scattering seeds from the main part of the prairie, and some savanna seeds that I’ve collected, so it will be interesting to see which plants come up.

I only planted a few seeds this weekend. I threw out some of my “aggressive mix” (Yellow Coneflower, Black-eyed Susan, Monarda, Big Bluestem and Indian Grass) on top of the septic mound. That area still has lots of non-native warm season grasses so I’ll see if this helps. I still have lots of odds and ends of seeds to get planted – I’ll try to get them done in the next few weeks.