Photos: House Yard and South Lot
These pictures are from Sunday, February 2 but I didn't get them posted until after midnight. I took some of the house yard and south lot, mostly focused on planting projects.
Looking east across the house yard, the grass still shows a bit of green.
Looking southeast across the house yard, you can see the picnic table and garden shed. This is in the early afternoon before I set up the seed pots on the picnic table.
Around the base of the maple tree, some flowers are sprouting.
These are probably daffodils.
The purple-and-white garden also has flowers sprouting.
This iris is putting up lots of leaves. Most of them never really went dormant this winter.
Looking west along the south lot, you can see the picnic table and septic garden.
Here's a closer view of the picnic table with the septic garden beyond it.
These are the plant labels that I made at the beginning of January, so they've been outdoors for about a month.
For comparison, here is a picture from that January set.
Today, the old Sharpie is still legible, but notably faded. Where the pen stopped, dots of thicker ink take longer to fade.
The Sharpie oil paint is just as dark and crisp as ever. This is the clear winner. If you need to make plant labels for outdoor, use, this is what I recommend.
The Craft Smart label doesn't seem to be fading quickly, but was the only one that smeared in the smear test.
This is a wide view of the septic garden looking south.
This is some sort of sedum, but I'm not sure why it's growing in that spot.
This is a big patch of yarrow.
This is the sedum patch in the middle of the septic garden. I'm not sure why it looks like it's glowing. Though for all I know, it could have been glowing; weird things happen a lot.
Later in the day, I set up two flats of seed pots and planted them with wildflowers, so there are several pictures of this project.
Here's one of my upcycling projects. The coffee cup has a big chip above the handle (not visible from this angle) so I used it to corral a bunch of blank labels that I cut down from water jugs. Waste not, want not.
The two flats of seed pots are sitting on the end of the picnic table.
Here's a closeup of the seed pots. In front, the flat of 12 has 6 each of orange butterfly weed and 'Hello Yellow' butterfly weed. The back flat of 10 has common milkweed. Note that two of these are species plants and one is a named cultivar developed from wild butterfly weed. Insects tend to prefer wild-type plants over cultivars, sometimes by a very large margin. Really I'm just doing what I usually do: some for myself, some for mitakuye oyasin (all my relatives). So far, I've only found monarch caterpillars on the common milkweed in the prairie garden.
Looking east across the house yard, the grass still shows a bit of green.
Looking southeast across the house yard, you can see the picnic table and garden shed. This is in the early afternoon before I set up the seed pots on the picnic table.
Around the base of the maple tree, some flowers are sprouting.
These are probably daffodils.
The purple-and-white garden also has flowers sprouting.
This iris is putting up lots of leaves. Most of them never really went dormant this winter.
Looking west along the south lot, you can see the picnic table and septic garden.
Here's a closer view of the picnic table with the septic garden beyond it.
These are the plant labels that I made at the beginning of January, so they've been outdoors for about a month.
For comparison, here is a picture from that January set.
Today, the old Sharpie is still legible, but notably faded. Where the pen stopped, dots of thicker ink take longer to fade.
The Sharpie oil paint is just as dark and crisp as ever. This is the clear winner. If you need to make plant labels for outdoor, use, this is what I recommend.
The Craft Smart label doesn't seem to be fading quickly, but was the only one that smeared in the smear test.
This is a wide view of the septic garden looking south.
This is some sort of sedum, but I'm not sure why it's growing in that spot.
This is a big patch of yarrow.
This is the sedum patch in the middle of the septic garden. I'm not sure why it looks like it's glowing. Though for all I know, it could have been glowing; weird things happen a lot.
Later in the day, I set up two flats of seed pots and planted them with wildflowers, so there are several pictures of this project.
Here's one of my upcycling projects. The coffee cup has a big chip above the handle (not visible from this angle) so I used it to corral a bunch of blank labels that I cut down from water jugs. Waste not, want not.
The two flats of seed pots are sitting on the end of the picnic table.
Here's a closeup of the seed pots. In front, the flat of 12 has 6 each of orange butterfly weed and 'Hello Yellow' butterfly weed. The back flat of 10 has common milkweed. Note that two of these are species plants and one is a named cultivar developed from wild butterfly weed. Insects tend to prefer wild-type plants over cultivars, sometimes by a very large margin. Really I'm just doing what I usually do: some for myself, some for mitakuye oyasin (all my relatives). So far, I've only found monarch caterpillars on the common milkweed in the prairie garden.
