New Creatures and Rototilling

The weekend before last, we had what I guess was the last storm of the rainy season and the clouds were amazing. Also, as you can see, over the prior week, I'd gotten a bit more ground cleared of grass and planted 3 basket fulls of Annie's Annuals.


Here are two Ladybird poppies, some native carex grass and the rest of my five spots.


A native Penstemon heterophyllus "Foothill Penstemon"


The first edible I've ever planted, Fragaria vesca "Alpine Strawberry".


And a bunch of others mixed with some of my much neglected earlier purchases, such as this bronze grass.

But once the plants were planted (the ones I could figure out where to plant, there are still a couple without homes), I worked on removing grass around what will be the dry creekbed. It was a slow slow chore but not too difficult using my handheld garden spike to lever the clumps out by their roots. But as that's not very interesting I haven't documented much of the process. However, this Sunday my husband finally came out into the yard and we went to work rototilling the area close to the house.


This is our before picture. Everything was very weedy and bumpy. We had a pile of dirt infused with lumps of concrete that the contractor's men left behind last year. You can see it next to the green bin in the picture. So there was quite a hill away from the house, growing flatter as you got closer. What we wanted though was the opposite. We want a nice flat area to eventually put outdoor furniture. That would involve a quick steep hill near the house (to maintain proper grading at the foundation), then a flat expanse, and another slope to what was the original level of the area. Like this, kind of:



It certainly an amazing improvement, its still not quite level, quite close though and a huge change from what it was. It's hard to see in the first picture but we created a nice hill near the house and now we need to compact the built up area and do a little more rototilling in the area we've been removing the dirt from to really make it level.

But isn't just beautiful, flat... ish and clear. I can really imagine that patio area being their eventually.

Another bit of fun this weekend - I sat down next to the batch of native wildflowers just above the "patio" area and watched the creatures moving about. And I actually took some good pictures! These are all my pictures, not stolen from around the web like before.


A native sweat bee, Agapostemon (angelicus?)


His back legs are covered, rather disgustingly... or at least weirdly... in pollen, both yellow and blue from the tricolor gillia that he's diving in here.


Here's one of the many pasted down metamorphosing ladybug pupas. This one has attached itself to a leaf on my Salvia leucantha.


Continuing with the same Salvia, here is a big black bee... maybe a carpenter bee, but the other pictures I see don't look like carpenter bees are fuzzy and this is fuzzy, right? Maybe it's just my picture.

Now, I'm not crazy about bugs or creepy crawlies but when it comes to my backyard and the creatures living directly around me, I'm extremely interested. I'm amazed by all the new different creatures I've found living on our property. I grew up just twenty miles from here and in my entire life I had never seen a sweat bee, to my knowledge, until two weeks ago. But now I've seen dozens of them! It's shocking that there have been all these creatures around me and I've never known it.


Here's a pretty common butterfly, a Fiery Skipper (Hylephila phyleus), on my five spots.


Wings closed.


Lastly, an awesome action picture, an Anna's hummingbird. After a few clicks of the camera, the hummingbird got interested in the clicking of my camera and freaked me out a bit by suddenly flying a very quick three feet closer to me, right at the camera and seeing it through the camera lens, she was like crazy divebomber. But no picture because I flinched at the teeny little bird.