Planting Problems

[Note:  I wrote this piece last week, after a particularly frustrating day.  Since then, I've planted some of these plants, purchased others, and been given even more. Thank goodness it's been a slow spring so far!]

Okay.  It's confession time.  I find that planting - actually putting plants in a specific place in the ground - is getting harder and harder to accomplish.  In fact, it's getting downright painful.

It's not that I'm getting older and stiffer and fatter - although all 3 of those are, unfortunately, true.  No, it's different from physical difficulty.

I'm experiencing a mental disability about planting....

Let me backtrack just a little so that I can try to fully explain what I'm fighting against.

I am a plant collector and I have a plant collector's garden.  To those of you who don't know what that means, just imagine "One here...one there...3 over here...one way back there..." on a garden-wide scale.

My plant passion is basically "native" plants - here in south central Kansas, that means prairie plants.  While the idea of gardening with native plants has caught on fairly well in many other areas of the country, it's still in its infancy here in the heartland.  For that reason, there aren't many places to find native plants around here, especially native plants that have any local provenance, which is ideally what I'd like to have in my gardens.

Oh, the garden centers carry a few - mainly just the perennials with horticultural varieties that create a splash.  Even the box stores have a few plants that are native to the prairies, but they are even more likely to be horticultural varieties.  My two best sources are 1) a man who lives a county or two to the east of us, who drives in each Saturday morning during the spring and early summer to sell the plants he's grown at the Farmers' Market, and 2) a biannual weekend sale held at Dyck Arboretum, about an hour north of us.

With such transitory sources for my plant material, I tend to buy... 1) what I intended to buy - if they have it with them or in stock, 2) anything that looks particularly healthy or good that I think I can use, 3) anything that might work in place of what I wanted to buy that's out of stock, and 4) anything that's particularly interesting or unusual that they may never have again.

Thus, I always end up with more than I intended.  And all of it is COOL, COOL stuff.  Stuff I can't just waltz down the street and buy at 123 Nursery.

Now, here comes the hard part.  I'm home.  I've got a couple boxes crammed full of plant material, most of it unplanned purchases.  Much of it is actually something I've only seen in books or, if I'm lucky, out in the field.  Sometimes the only reason I come home with it is because Kevan says, "Oh, you'll love this!  You've got to try it!"

Now I actually have to find places for all my new plants.  Places that give each of my new little sprouts a chance to grow and mature and strut their stuff.  Places where they can be seen, where they won't get lost or hidden by their neighbors.  Places where they look "right", where they look like part of the garden and, better yet, like part of a plant community.

Most of the time, the plants I planned on purchasing were sought to fill specific holes in my flower beds.  Okay, those go in quickly.  That 20% was easy.

Now to find spots for the rest of them....  "This one will be perfect here, at the back of the bed.  And this one will slip right in there, near the front.  But I've got 12 Liatris of 3 different species!  Damn!  What were their differing requirements?  I know that mucronata is basically like punctata...but I don't really have any open spots that are dry and sunny.  I used some of those for the common milkweed...and there's that area of the corner bed, but there's still some crown vetch lurking there and I don't want to accidentally Round-up the wrong plant.  Hmmm.  I'll have plenty of room when I get the Bermuda weeded out of that new bed I've outlined, but can I get that done before the plants die on me?  I've been wanting to put a couple perennials out in the tallgrass under the fence!  Would these work there?"  And on it goes...and goes...and goes.

With luck - and good weather - I might get them all in this spring.

Each planting day, though, is filled with decisions and counter-decisions, with research and tentative placements, followed by more research and rearrangements.  Then, to make matters worse, as I start the tentative placements, I start finding the tombstones.  You know what I mean - the little tags left over from the last plant you tried there, the one that didn't make it.  "Oh, blast.  If Jack-in-the-Pulpit didn't make it here, will rue anemone fare any better?  And will THIS spring's Jack-in-the-Pulpit's - which look better than any I've seen for sale look before - do okay over there?  Or will that site be too dry for them?"

I remove the tombstones and put them in a pile.  Some day I'm going to go through and figure out which plants I've tried - and killed - and tried - and killed - and tried again - and killed again.  Maybe I'll remember not to buy them again, then.  Meanwhile, as the pile mounts, I start feeling depressed.  "Why am I even bothering?!  It is so hot and dry and cold and windy and awful around here!  Why do I even TRY to garden?  Why don't I just give up, plant grass, and let Greg mow it while I sit inside and read?"

"No. No. No. No.  What would I read about?  I read about plants!  Besides which, I'd go stir crazy!  Okay, I can do this.  Next time I won't buy so many plants, though.  Let's see...."

And the agony goes on.  Am I the only one who experiences this planting pain?  Please, tell me that others share my neuroses in this regard!  Misery truly would love company.  And maybe, then, Misery would feel less depressed and could even get all her plants in the ground in a particularly timely manner this spring!

Red-Tails at Home

A couple weeks ago, Greg and I went on our first big outing in the new dogmobile, complete with The Boys in the back.  We decided to head down to Elk City Reservoir to check out the hiking trails there.

The wonderful hike we had that day is fodder for another blog post, but we lucked out on the way there, too.  We were just getting on to the Turnpike when I noticed a big nest in a cottonwood near the road and asked Greg to pull off so I could catch a photo or two.  As we stopped, I thought I saw a head in the nest.  Zooming in confirmed my sighting.

While I was taking a photo or two, the hawk on the nest stood up and started looking around....

At that point, I thought to take a shot with a wider view to document some of the surrounding landscape....

Suddenly, through the lens, I realized that a second hawk had swooped in to the nest.  Hawk 1 flew off, as Hawk 2 flew in.

It didn't take much time at all for Hawk 2 to settle in; obviously this was a well rehearsed changing of the guard.

Hawk 1 flew off to a nearby tree and settled in for a break from nursery duties.

The excitement seemed to be over for the moment, so I got back in the car and we resumed our trip.  Not bad, though, for a brief roadside stop!

Visitors from Other Kingdoms: Red-Eared Slider

As a "natural" gardener, one of the experiences I look forward to most is a serendipitous meeting with one of the many creatures that share the yard with us.  Last weekend, we had one such encounter.

It was Greg that saw her first.  He motioned for me to come quickly.  I asked if I should get the camera and, since he nodded yes, I grabbed it and came running.  There in the grass was a good-sized turtle, almost a foot long and at least 100 feet from the nearest water.  Since we've had rain several times this spring and most ponds and creeks have at least some water in them, I assumed this was a female, presumably away from water to lay eggs.

From her shape and size and color, I knew she was either a red-eared slider or a painted turtle, but since her head was mostly pulled back into her shell, I couldn't tell which.  Greg picked her up and let me take a quick peek at her lower shell (or plastron):  she was a red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta).

He only held her aloft for a few seconds, but she was NOT happy about the experience.  When he placed her back down, she pulled deeply back into her shell and did not reappear for about 30 minutes...

...all of which time I spent watching her.  From past experience, I knew that once she emerged and determined that she was safe, she would be gone in an amazingly short time.  At first I simply stood about 20 feet away, watching.  Then I decided that my standing silhouette might be concerning her, so I sat down on the ground.  After about half an hour, I decided to try to become even less conspicuous, so I lay down on my belly and watched and waited for her to make a move.

It wasn't long after I shifted to fully prone that she finally decided to stick her nose out again. 

Slowly it came out.  Then it came a little further.  A little further.  About 20 minutes after she first started to see if I was still out there, she had relaxed enough to have her head almost fully extended.  Almost immediately, she turned and looked directly at me.

I could swear that, at one point, she was looking down her nose at me, sniffing haughtily!  

She stared at me for several minutes, then looked around a bit.  Unfortunately, I made a small motion that startled her and caused her to retreat partway back inside her shell again.

It took just over an hour for my wandering red-eared slider to gain the courage to put her legs out and start moving.  Her first move was to turn away from me, and away from the direction she was originally traveling, to move obliquely away from me.

As she went, she passed a couple bright dandelions, which seemed to be worth a careful look-see, but she didn't stop to investigate further or to sample. 

She straightened back onto her original trajectory and determinedly headed towards the tall grass area.  Beyond it was the creek.

As she went through the bright patch of henbit that was just on the edge of the tallgrass, she stuck her head up high to look around one last time, then she disappeared into the taller standing grass stems.

I got up to take a final parting shot as she headed on her way.  From the time she started moving again until I quit photographing her was 4 minutes.  Perhaps not a speed record, but startlingly fast compared to the 60+ minutes she stayed essentially motionless until she felt safe enough to travel.

For those of you old enough to be a child before the big turtle/salmonella crisis of the early 1970's, this is one of the species whose young used to be sold by the millions to children as cheap, easy pets.  Many a turtle died while providing kids a first hand experience with nature.  My brothers and I had a couple of baby turtles over the years as we grew up:  a cheap, clear plastic dish with the fake island and palm tree in the middle of it, and the doomed little turtle, paddling around, trying to find some way out to its rightful place in the wild.

My heart clenches quite a bit over the fate of all those little turtles over the years, but in a way they were also serving as ambassadors, helping children connect firsthand with nature.  How do our children do that these days?  Or do they ever get a chance to truly connect with the natural world, in a firsthand way, at all?  Touching, holding, watching, feeding, even getting stung or bitten - these are all important ways for children to connect with animals, to connect with nature.  Watching TV isn't a good substitute at all - for all the fancy closeups in a good nature film, there is no sense of reality, no hands-on touching, no seat of the pants adventure or excitement.

I don't want baby turtles to sacrifice their lives to help our human children connect with nature any more...but I sure would like to see more families care for their gardens and their landscapes naturally, so that kids could, once again, have real world adventures in the real world of nature.  

Rock-A-Bye...Raccoon?

One advantage to owning two large German shepherds when you live out in the country is that they HAVE to have their morning walkabout.  In the last several weeks, we've had several "cold" snaps, accompanied by snow or freezing rain or ice pellets.  These are definitely NOT considered sufficient reason to stay inside by The Boys.  It doesn't matter how ugly the weather is, they need a bit of romp time...and so I "suit up" to suit the weather and out we go.

Although it's hard to convince myself of the positive side of these walks when I'm donning waterproof shoes and wind-and-rain-resistant coat, facing cold winds that will cut through everything I have on, I do get to see some things that I'd probably miss otherwise. 

Sometimes I even have my camera along to capture the experience.  Here, for example, is one such time....

Look closely at this photo.  See anything much besides a bunch of snags and last year's dead plant stems, waiting to decompose?  I took this photo a week ago, on the day we woke up to snow.  This was taken about mid morning, after most of the snow had melted but while the temperatures were still quite chilly.

Look more closely at the center of the photo, right at the top of the broken black willow, where the top part of the trunk heads downwards at 90%.  (Yes, it's ugly.  No, I shouldn't have had someone out to "take care of it."  And this is why!)

See that bundle of gray fur?  I think it's a raccoon, perhaps the one that I photographed a couple weeks ago, climbing up a nearby black willow that was similarly "past its prime."  It could, however, be an opossum.  Anyone who is better than I at identifying fur is welcome to chime in with a positive identification!

Whichever it is, this is evidently a favorite hangout, especially (weirdly) in cold, wet, spring weather.  I saw it again this morning, similarly curled up, with enough rain falling that I'd taken neither my camera nor my binoculars along on our walkabout.  There it lay, seemingly snug as a bug in a rug.

Raccoons denning in hollow trees.  Raccoons napping in snags.  Woodpeckers nesting in holes, drilled into standing dead trees.  Insects overwintering in standing dead plant stems or snuggled deep in leaf litter.  We humans may see dead plants as ugly trash, messing up our landscape, but wild amimals view dead plants as shelter - safe, comfortable places to weather storms and cold and rain.  Secure places to raise the next generation. 

So, before you automatically cut down that dead tree at the back of your property, stop a minute and really analyze the situation.  Is it likely to fall on a building or a person passing by?  By all means, cut it down, and the sooner, the better!  But if that dead tree is not likely to cause any harm, then consider leaving it as a sort of wildlife hotel.  You never know what may decide to take up residence there!

Crazy-Making Weather

As I sit at the kitchen table on a beautiful, sunny, April 29th afternoon, the thermometer nearby reads 87 degrees.  The record high for this date is 96; the normal high 72.  So we're a little over halfway between normal and record heat, on the high side.

This wouldn't be anything to think twice about except for the fact that 4 days ago we were at the end of a record-setting cold streak, having set record cold temperatures for April 23, 24, and 25th at 32, 25, and 33 respectively.

And in 3 1/2 more days, we are supposed to be right around freezing again, probably another record cold temperature. 

Our poor plants don't know whether to go ahead and leaf out and bloom, or continue to hunker down.  Gardeners are having troubles too:  do we go ahead and put the tomatoes out yet, or wait another week?  Surely NEXT week will bring stabilized temperatures! 

Last Monday night through Wednesday morning were particularly challenging:  Monday had been a pretty spring day with warm temperatures.  Thunderstorms moved through on Monday night, bringing lots of wind, lots of rain, and a fair amount of hail.

By Tuesday morning, the temperatures had dropped precipitously and the plants were showing the effects of the previous night's storms.  Despite the fact that it had been several hours since the last hail fell, there were drifts of small hail storms that ended up lasting most of the day.  Here is one such drift beside the front walkway....

Another drift of hail was near some heirloom red tulips.  Can you tell which way the wind was blowing?

In case those tulips didn't let you know, maybe these Willem de Oranje tulips will give a clue....

Or these pretty pink heirlooms....

All things considered, the garden weathered the hail, winds and large amounts of driving rain amazingly well.  When we woke up on Wednesday morning, though, the weather had another surprise waiting for us:  temperatures in the mid-20s and about 1/2" of snow.  Many plants, like the summer phlox and asters shown here, still showed the wind direction of the storms on Monday night, now overlaid with a coat of frozen white stuff.

Others hadn't kept a coat of snow on, but were definitely looking a little worse the wear because of the freezing temperatures.  The foliage of the red buckeye (Aesculus pavia), just beginning to fill out after emerging, looked particularly vulnerable.

My two little mayapple shoots (Podophyllum peltatum) didn't look too glamorous either.

I wondered about the heirloom pink tulips, now frozen over in their windblown position, but hoped for the best.

Other plants, like the clove currant (Ribes odoratum), didn't seem affected much at all, despite the fact that it had already leafed out and was in full bloom.

The pasqueflower (Pulsatilla sp.)

and the Tharp's spiderwort (Tradescantia tharpii) actually seemed to be wearing their coats of snow with panache and style!

A week later, I can happily report that none of these plants suffered much damage at all.  A few leaves on the buckeye were frozen solid and now are hanging down blackly, but most recovered with no sign of injury.  The ever-fragile Bradford pears lost a lot of leaves and may not bear much fruit this year.  Otherwise things look good.

Prairie plants have to be tough.  Most true natives are still underground and only beginning to think of sending their fragile new growth skyward.  A late spring, like this one has proven to be, illustrates the encoded wisdom of the prairie's late green-up timing, even though the human spirit is aching for earlier signs of spring.

As I swelter in today's heat, I can't help thinking ahead to Friday morning's cold - hopefully it will not get as low as they are predicting.  Even prairie plants and tough non-natives will get hurt by late freezes eventually.  Not to mention that this prairie inhabitant is ready for tomatoes!

Learn From My Mistakes: Crown Vetch

I probably ought to make this a series - heaven only knows that I've made plenty of mistakes over my time gardening.  Others might as well learn from my hard-headedness!

So, moving on to this particular example....  Last year I was cleaning out an area where a large Austrian pine had succumbed to pine wilt.  We had had the pine removed earlier last spring, leaving a large area that was bare of almost all vegetation and coated with pine needles.  This area was right next to the northeast corner of the house, so it seemed like a logical expansion for the front flower bed.

Of course, as is typical under a large evergreen, there were a few seedlings that had grown up from seeds dropped by birds, thoughtfully provided with a little bolus of fertilizer to help them establish.  We didn't want any large trees growing that close to the house, so removing the tree seedlings seemed straightforward.  However, as I started clearing out the stray clumps of grass and other plants that had managed to claim a spot, I found a small start of a beautiful, almost ferny, low growing plant that seemed to be acting as a groundcover.

Greg loves groundcovers and is constantly on the lookout for a particularly special one.  You know the type of plant he wants, the "perfect plant":  it will grow luxuriously enough that it outcompetes any weeds, never needs to be weeded, and forms a thick, lush cover, but it won't outgrow its space or choke out any wanted plants growing in or near it.  (Yeah, I know, an impossibility, oxymoronic in fact, but a gardener can dream, can't he?!)  I showed the plant to Greg and, indeed, he did like it, so I let it grow.

I hadn't identified the plant yet, but it had come in naturally and it was quite pretty - providing a ferny effect - but obviously very hardy and definitely providing good cover.  Neither of us were too concerned about leaving it for a while.  Eventually our mystery plant started blooming, and the blooms were attractive too.

In fact, the blooms allowed me to identify the plant as crown vetch (Coronilla varia).  I knew that this species was planted along highways and other roads for erosion control, and something was tickling my mind about it maybe being a problem in some way, but the Kansas Wildflower and Grasses page didn't raise any red flags for me.  The blooms only made it more attractive.  The plant seemed to be staying closely confined, so I let it be.  After all, the prairie environment is harsh enough that many "overly aggressive" plants elsewhere behave more reasonably for us.

Boy, was letting it alone a mistake.  By last fall, I'd decided that I really didn't want such a rapidly spreading groundcover in that spot, so I tried to dig it out.  Shortly after I thought I'd got it all out, I found new sprouts coming up all over the place.  By now, the plant was definitely spreading out widely and it was beginning to impinge on several small wildflowers I'd planted during the summer.  I dug out it all out again just before frost...and kept my fingers crossed over the winter.

I guess that finger-crossing isn't a particularly effective eradication technique. Wishing and hoping evidently don't work either.

I spent today doing my spring-time clean-up on that bed.  The crown vetch has now spread to an area about 6-8' in diameter.  Greg and I have decided it's time to pull out the Roundup, much as I dislike resorting to that option.  I trust that, by carefully using it, we'll be able to eradicate this infestation, but I sure wish I'd gotten rid of the crown vetch when I first realized it was developing as a "groundcover".  Live and learn.

My "live and let live" attitude towards unknown plants has served me well many times, but sometimes it reaches up and bites me.   This was one of those times.  I'd suggest getting rid of crown vetch immediately, if you ever find even a sprig of it in your garden.  A classic example of "Do as I say, not as I did!"

Facing Into the Sun

This morning's exercise in photography - trying to capture the beauty of a world encased in ice - provided a philosophical lesson as well as an artistic one:  sometimes the only way to see the real truth of a situation is to look directly into the light.

Looking directly at the light can be painful.  In fact, it can be blinding. Done correctly, though, it can show us exactly what's going on.

Looking away from the light can be misleading, making us miss the reality of a situation.  The above two photos were taken less than a minute apart, simply by changing the direction that I was aiming the camera.  The first picture shows the reality of the ice coating everything.  The second photo looks basically normal - you have to look hard to see any evidence that anything is different from a regular spring day.

Moving from ice storms to a broader view of life, this metaphor works well for a "controversial" issue facing our society today:  climate change.  Truly, there is no scientific controversy concerning this issue.  The scientific community is shining the light of their research and knowledge, showing us the reality of climate change.  However, too many people are turning away from the information the scientists are providing because it hurts - and, truthfully, it's pretty scary too.

Looking away from the sun this morning, I could hardly tell this wasn't a perfect spring morning but, looking towards the light of the day, I could see that there was a hard layer that was affecting everything.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has been addressing the issue of climate change for some time.  Here is an article they shared on Facebook this morning, giving a specific example of how the truth about climate change is being hidden for political reasons:  What South Carolinians Deserve to Know About Climate Change.

The National Center for Science Education is another group that has picked up the job of getting scientific information about climate change into the public arena.  They, too, had a good article that they shared this morning addressing the issue of climate change, A Denver TV Meteorologist...in His Own Words.  This article was actually originally posted by The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.

There are many other groups and individuals trying to share scientific facts, as well as the predictions based upon those facts and upon the best scientific knowledge we currently have about how our Earth's atmosphere works. 

There are also those groups and individuals who are afraid they will lose a great deal of economic and political power if climate change is acknowledged and if, as a country, we start to work to keep the worst of those scientific predictions from occurring.  Because these latter folks currently DO have a great deal of economic and political power - and money - their views are getting much more attention than they should.

Too many people are looking away from the light of knowledge, into the "pretty picture" that distorts the reality of the situation.

On this issue, as on so many other issues, be very careful where you get your "knowledge".  All information is not created equal.  Even if it hurts and is frightening, we all need to look at the world through the best light we have available to us, instead of turning our backs to the truth.

Mason Bee Bonanza

Three days ago I got to witness something I hadn't seen before:  the mason bees awoke from their winter's inactivity and emerged to enjoy the spring weather.  The air around the house we had put up was filled with gentle little bees, checking out the fresh air and freedom.

If you look closely, you'll see a black dot to the right of the wire the house is hanging from - that's a mason bee flying.  There's a second one down in the center, near the bottom, checking out one of the tubes....

A few seconds after I took this shot, I took another.  The bee by the wire had landed and I got a photo of it, albeit a rather blurry one!

Our mason bee house is from Gardener's Supply.  A dear friend gave it to us and we've had it up for 2 years now.  In fact, this house attracted mason bees the very first year we put it up.  I've rarely seen the bees, though - just the mud they use to seal their nest cells when the tube is full.


When we first put up the house, Greg thought we should order mason bees to be sure there were some to start up a population.  I was hoping that our landscape had enough healthy, natural habitat for us to attract mason bees that were already here.  With bugguide.net saying that there were 150 species "in our area" (presumably the continental U.S.), I was hoping we could attract native species, rather than introduce a species that might not belong here.

In this case, it turns out that I was right.  While we've never been even close to 100% occupancy, our bee house has definitely become a home.

Not wanting to bother the bees too much, I didn't push to try to get a great shot.  I stayed back quite a ways and let my lens take me in closer.  Now, as I'm attempting to share this on my blog, I'm wishing I'd tried harder to get at least one good closeup.

The reading I've done on mason bees says that the outer sections of the tubes have males that develop in them, while the females develop in the deeper cells - the female mason bee can apparently determine the sex of the offspring that will emerge from her eggs.  This makes sense in several ways, biologically.  First, any predation by woodpeckers will take out males, rather than females.  Since the mason bees aren't monogamous, the males that remain can fertilize more than one female, ensuring another generation. 

Secondly, this causes the males to hatch/break out first.  They stay around the nest, waiting for newly emerging females and mating with them as soon as they emerge.  Another biological strategy for ensuring the continuation of the species.

If you look closely at the photo below, there are 2 mason bees, one in the lower left-hand corner, exploring the openings to several tubes, and one in the upper right-hand corner, coming out of a tube.

Once the males have mated, they apparently die.  Each female lays her own eggs and provisions them so they can develop properly.  First, the female makes a mud plug in the back of a tube and begins collecting pollen and nectar, depositing it inside the tube she's plugged.  When there is enough food to fully support a developing larva, the female lays an egg on the pollen mass, then seals that cell with a thin wall of mud.  There are generally 5 to 10 cells in each tube, depending on the length of the tube.  The final, outermost cell gets a thick layer of mud capping it, for protection from predators.  A female is able to lay, and appropriately provision, only 1 to 2 eggs each day.  She lives about 4 weeks.

Away from human-provided bee houses, mason bees use tunnels made by wood-eating beetles or they use hollow plant stems.

As with all solitary bees and wasps, the females will not sting unless actually handled roughly or trapped, for example between clothing and skin.  Once the female stings, she dies and is unable to lay more eggs, so there is no biological incentive for her to be aggressive.

Mason bees and other solitary bees are excellent pollinators.  If you haven't added a bee house to your yard, why don't you give it a try?

Springtime Ice Storm

Yup.  It's spring on the prairie.

We woke up, this 10th day of April, to a covering of ice on everything above ground level.  Oh, I've seen worse, but this is enough to make the branches clatter in the slightest breeze and to make the foolhardy plants with new leaves look miserable.

The evergreens aren't looking too happy either.  Yet another reason why there's really only one evergreen native to the prairie, the eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana).

At this time of year, it's especially obvious which plants aren't prairie natives:  the Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana), with its heavy load of full blooms....

the lilac (Syringa vulgaris), with its newly opened and expanding leaves...

the red buckeye (Aesculus pavia), also with newly open and expanding leaves.

Unlike the lilac or the Callery pear, the red buckeye is actually native to North America, but to parts east and south of here, rather than to here specifically.  Sometimes that can really make a difference.

I'm not too worried about most of the natives we have, and the ice doesn't seem heavy enough to cause much branch damage, even to the non-natives, but I doubt we'll have much of a Callery pear crop this fall.  The cedar waxwings will miss the berries.

On the plus side, as I hurriedly walked about, trying to keep my camera dry, one item I saw made me extremely happy.  Do you notice anything special in the photo below?

If you look a little closer, you'll see what I mean!

The draw has water in it!  Enough water that I couldn't walk across it without getting wet up to my shins!  Too much water to jump across!

I haven't seen that much water in the draw for probably 2 years.  This is certainly a major silver lining to this cloud of an ice storm.