Random Weekend Observances

It was 80 degrees today.  It doesn't feel like Fall, but a lot of the leaves have fallen off of the trees.  Below is a photo of a Chinaberry tree right behind the barn.  The only thing left on the branches are the chinaberries themselves.  This is an invasive plant whose seeds are carried by birds.  I remember my dad or grandfather telling me that they used to take a piece of bamboo and make a pressurized chinaberry shooter using the berries as the ammo.  The berries and leaves of this tree are poisonous to humans.  Funny how the birds can eat these things and it doesn't seem to bother them.


Chinaberries

Speaking of trees, the Bradford Pear shown below is changing colors, with leaves ranging from green to yellow to orange to red.  It is really pretty.  I got this tree when it was the size of a pencil.  It was one of those Arbor Day promotions.  I planted it in the ground intending to move it.  Unfortunately, I waited too long and by the time I got around to trying to dig it up and move it, the tap root was so deep I couldn't dig it up.  So here it will stay.

Bradford Pear changing colors



Have you ever heard stories about 'cow tipping?'  People who say that cows sleep standing up and that you can sneak up on them and push them over?  I'm no expert by any means, but at least for our cows, I've never seen them sleeping standing up.  They always sleep sitting down, not to mention the fact that they are kind of hard to sneak up on without waking them up.  So I'm not sure 'cow tipping' is real or if it is an urban legend.  At any rate, I'd never push our girls over. 


Daisy trying to sleep

While walking out to the barn to milk Daisy and Rosie, I snapped this shot of Daisy trying to sleep.  She looks real enthused about being asked to get up and go get milked, doesn't she? 

Hey, Buddy.  Please let me sleep.

It's neat the things you see if you take time to look around.  Below is a honeybee in the sugar snap pea blooms.  I watched it travel from flower to flower.  It was doing it's best to pollinate the plants in the garden.

Sweet Pea Honey Bee

You can see numerous blooms on the peas and I spotted the first pea pod of the season.  You can see it if you follow the T post down about 2/3's of the way down and to the left.


First pea pods on the sugar snap peas

 This next photo shows that some seed must have gotten mixed up.  In the midst of the white, sugar snap pea blooms is a pea with a burgundy-reddish color bloom.  The picture also shows good detail of the pea's tendrils which reach out and grab anything near to wrap around to provide stability to the plant. 


Sweet pea blooms and tendrils

I heard geese honking and looked up in time to see a flock of geese flying south.  There is a front moving through tonight that should bring the temperature down over the next few days to near freezing along with rain.  These geese fly down from Canada each year and stop off in fields on their way to where they over-winter in places like Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge down south of us.
 

Geese flying south

I guess we'll kiss goodbye to the balmy weather we've had and get the fireplace roaring again...