80AcresOnline

Altogether, we’ve had 10 inches of rain since the big rain started.  Though it’s too late for some things, others have recovered well.

The yellow flowers are two-leaf senna, and the pink is the rose-oxalis that usually blooms in the early spring.

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The water that didn’t run off soaked in; it’s amazing that in one week it’s turned so green.    The darker streak in the middle distance is the grass waterway when it rains and right now is just dry enough to walk on in regular shoes.

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The near meadow, July 4th…another day of record high temperatures and clear skies with a good strong SW wind.

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Since it looks like the rain has left us for the summer (hope not, but the long-range predictions aren’t good), I’m posting flower pictures while we have some–and we have some.

An increaser in the west grass, mentioned before, is the Illinois Basketflower, Centaurea americana.  this tallish forb’s buds look a lot like thistles:

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If land managers had ten thousand years to play with the land, prairie restoration would be a lot easier, even if they had to start with an overgrazed, eroded, compacted, heavily-invaded, polluted mess.  But we don’t.   So some basic principles have been laid down–initially during research on northern prairies–that now govern most prairie restoration projects: physical removal of invasive woody plants by fire (cheap) or various mechanical clearing methods (more expensive) ,  grazing management to interrupt succession, physical disturbance of the soil (discing, for instance) to induce germination of dormant seeds.

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The half-inch of rain last weekend brought out a few more flowers, and today the theme was purple and yellow.  The most intense yellow belonged to the claspleaf coneflowers, damp-ground lovers, here in the swale below the #3 gabion.  The lacy white in the foreground bears the unlovely name of beggars’ ticks, for its adherent seeds.

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We’ve all had the experience of visitors arriving just before, or just after, the best show of flowers/vegetables…the garden just isn’t looking its best the day they come, but it was right before (or after.)  We once spent a small fortune watering a patch of bluebonnets, trying to keep it in flower in a drought year for my husband’s aunt, who–when shown them–said “Is that all?  Why do people make a fuss over those?”

Well, we had houseguests this past week–late for one set of flowers and early for another–but the land graciously showed them something anyway:

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This is the season when all my plans for writing sensible, helpful, organized entries about this or that aspect of our project go blooey…because since we finally got some rain, the flowers (and their insect “friends”) are burgeoning and all I want to do is take pictures and say “Look!  Look at this one!”    For instance, stiff-stem prairie flax,  Linum berlandieri, gold from a distance, but up close decorated with delicate, precise lines of dark orange.

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Plains Nipple Cactus, Coryphanta missouriensis, is a small, inconspicuous ground-hugging cactus that almost disappears (shrinks a lot) after between flowerings.   Unless you know where you have a patch, you do not see it then.  But when it flowers, it opens elegant little flowers with long, pointed petals.  The lacy pattern of the spines on the plant, and the starry shape of the flowers, makes this one of the spring joys around here.

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Despite the way their roots attack the pumps, we plant water iris in the larger permanent water features: they offer desirable habitat for odonates  above water, and shelter for tadpoles, red-lined ribbon snakes, and other aquatic critters below the water surface.  And though the “land” iris isn’t native here, I enjoy the older varieties that still mark out house-sites and yards in fields where a homesteader’s house has long vanished.

This robust yellow water iris multiples quickly and once more we need to yank about half of it out of the big pond–but it’s attracted hummingbirds and butterflies as well as the odes that perch on it and (some of them) use the stems to lay their eggs in.

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