Butterfly Life Cycle

I looked down to find this scene and asked M. to explain.  Well, she said, the butterflies had landed on a leaf (chartreuse diaper wipe) and laid their eggs (ping pong balls).  This was followed by the hatching of caterpillars (ladybug and praying mantis standing in for these), and an elaborate swaddling in more diaper wipes to create chrysalises for each.  Then butterflies emerged, and the cycle repeated itself anew.  So much for fancy props!  This girl found her own way to illustrate what she had learned.

Mountain Meadows

Enough with writing about the promise of things to come –  wildflower season has launched at last in our neck of the woods.  We drove out past Round Mountain this morning to access the eastern shoreline of Mountain Meadows Reservoir.  As we drove through Goodrich Meadows, we paused to see a few pairs of sandhill cranes, Canada geese, a great blue heron with a snake in its bill, an American kestrel, and dozens of red-winged blackbirds.  We stopped in at Lone Pine, a place of particular significance to me because it is where my husband and I were wed.  The usual spring suspects hugged the ground.  Fritillaria pudica (yellow bells), Viola beckwithii (Beckwith’s violet), Potentilla millefolia (cut-leaved potentilla), a Lomatium species, the fleshy red leaves of western peonies (Paeonia brownii) not yet in bloom, and of course the ubiquitous dandelion, at home in nearly every habitat.  M. went off in search of frog life, but alas they were heard and not seen.

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Promise

This post-snowmelt, pre-mosquito time of year is always a special interlude.  I was quarantined for most of the week with a sick babe, but managed occasional sips of outdoor time here and there.   Spring has really and truly arrived in the mountains.  Last week’s solid foot of snow seems but a distant memory.   A landscape full of promise, as birds scope out nesting sites and radishes explode from their seeds.

Listing Toward the Sun

Basil and parsley seedlings are up in our windowsill garden, and starting to put out their first true leaves.  We find them leaning toward the sun in the afternoons, straining to maximize their photosynthetic gain.  This is positive phototropism in action, a growth response toward the light.  A plant growth hormone called auxin mediates this response by migrating to the shaded side of the plant.  The presence of auxin causes plant cells on the shaded side of the plant to elongate and grow, while the cells on the sunny side no longer have auxin present to stimulate growth.   This lop-sided growth of cells on the shady side pushes the plant to curve toward the light.

Different parts of a plant may have different responses to the same stimulus.  Plant roots, for example, demonstrate postive gravitropism (growing downward in the same direction as gravity), while plant shoots show negative gravitropism as they grow against the force of gravity.  Turn a potted plant on its side or upside down, and the shoots  will make a u-turn and grow upward.

Our family is certainly responding in kind to external stimulus.  We too are listing toward the sun as the snow melts under a bright blue sky and we can remain in the dark, cold shade not a minute more.

Evening Grosbeaks

This morning we awoke to a thick blanket of snow and raucous bird chatter outside. The evening grosbeaks are back. I saw this species for the first time almost exactly two years ago to the day, a timeline I remember well because little A. had just been born and I spent many hours those first precious weeks at the sunroom bench, nursing and holding and watching spring come to life outside the window. This was a bird I had never noticed prior to that because, perhaps, I had rarely paused long enough to consider them.  But newborns do have a way of slowing life down in the best possible way, and forcing someone like me to adapt to a slower, more humane pace.  And notice grosbeaks.

The grosbeaks were just outside our door, which was enough motivation for the girls to get bundled up and trundle outside.  A. lasted only a few minutes (after declaring her hand-knit woolen mittens “nasty” and refusing to wear them, her fingers soon became cold).  But M. bird-watched for quite awhile, trying to master the art of binoculars.  We watched the grosbeaks flock into a giant white fir tree a few hundred feet away, then into the skeleton of an aspen across the street.  When M. tired of this, she became the bird, building a nest in the snow, sitting on snowball eggs until they hatched, and then seeking out ‘insects’ (pine needles) for her babies.  She had me play birdwatcher through this entire charade, sighting her in the binoculars as she flew around the yard.

An Intrepid Pollinator

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M. and I were patrolling the yard for early bloomers when she stooped to peer into this yellow crocus.  “A bee!” she cried, and so it was.  Its small body was scarcely a centimeter in length, and so encrusted with pollen that it appeared golden.  We watched it root around in the nectaries at the base of the flower, then traipse back and forth along the edges of the petals.  The girls kept checking in on the bee between other important yard duties (grass twirls, ball kicks, snow eating, etc.).  As shadows lengthened, the crocus narrowed its corolla, and still the bee remained.  The last we saw before we went inside, our bee was hunkered down in a bivouac of constricted petals.

Peas . . . Beets . . . Carrots

With a few balmy days melting off most of the snow, the garden was impossible to resist.  In went the peas, in went the beets, and why stop there, how about some carrots and greens.  Too soon?  Maybe.  But, “Plant early, and plant often,” I was told when I arrived here.  And so we will, should the cold nights of early spring prove too much for our little seeds.

 

 

 

Beet-Dyed Easter Eggs

We dyed our Easter eggs this weekend, using an easy how-to from Mother Earth News. For our dyestuffs, we chose chopped beets and turmeric powder. They boiled up into vivid magenta and bright saffron yellow.  We then mixed the two to make a midway orange as well.  Our eggs would have colored to deeper tones if we had boiled the eggs in the dye as suggested, but there’s something about the dipping and checking process that’s just so much fun!  Plus, pink is pink in my four-year-old’s book.

Botanically speaking, beet pigments are rather notable.   Most other flowering plant species contain anthocyanins, variously colored pigments that fill a host of different roles.  Anthocyanins may protect plant tissues against ultraviolet radiation, attract pollinators by coloring petals and sepals, or mediate plant interactions with bacteria and pathogens. When deciduous plants stop producing chlorophyll in the fall, green drains from the leaves and anthocyanin pigments are unmasked to give us our brilliant crimson and gold “fall color” displays.

Beets and other related plants (amaranth, chard), however, contain betalain pigments instead, which possess an entirely different chemical structure.  Some are reddish-violet (betacyanins), as we see in beets, and others yellowish-orange (betaxanthins)  In rainbow chard, different leaf mid-ribs may express these different pigment types.  The role of betalain pigments is still poorly understood.  Sure, pigmented petals may help to attract pollinators, but what function do these pigments serve in the blood-red, below-ground root of a beet?  For our immediate purposes, however, what matters about both betalain pigments and anthocyanin pigments is that they are water-soluble, which means they make for pretty darned great Easter egg dyes!

April Sunrise

My visiting father took this photo this morning  — a clear, crisp dawn tailing a day of spring storms. Normally I am awake well before sunrise, but this morning? Blissfully asleep for a few more hours, thanks to an accommodating husband.

“Pine Noodles”

Today  thick, wet snow falls, but just two days ago our local woods were nearly clear of snow, and its paths open to exploration.  It is not often that I get one-on-one time with my girls, particularly this one.  But with M. at the store with Papa, we had a few hours together, just the two of us.  Such a different dynamic than when I am out with the two of them together.  Usually A. becomes frustrated trying to keep up with her long-limbed sister, but on this day, she was able to proceed at her very own pace. We started off in our own yard, but she soon led me across the street and into the forest.  She likes to point and identify these days. Tree. Stick. Rock. “Pine noodles.” Off to a very good start, I think. Next up, botanical Latin!