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  • Pea’s Blossom

    I pray you,

    commend me to Mistress Squash, your mother,

    and to Master Peascod, your father.

    Good Master Peaseblossom,

    I shall desire you of more acquaintance too.

    -William Shakespeare
    A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  • Maverick Elton, Backyard Naturalist

    This week I found one bug one bird and one plant in my backyard to identify.

    This is not a bug, actually. It’s a Venusta Orchard Spider. Bugs have six legs and spiders have eight.

    It makes a web between flowers in our garden. The web is 11 inches across. It sticks to the underside of the web and waits for the bugs to get near and get stuck in the web. This means that my mom laid down under the web to take this picture!

    If you touch the web by accident it runs to the ropes that the web is built on. (Maverick is referring to the anchoring threads that the spider first puts down, called the frame threads.)

    We have lots of orchard spiders. I found thirteen in one walk around the yard.

    The body is about 1/4 of an inch and if you count the legs it is about an inch. This means it is a female because the male is smaller than that. 1/8 of an inch.

    This bird is an American Robin. We have lots of them too.

    They are black brown on top and orange red on the tummy.

    They are medium size. They are bigger than a hummingbird and smaller than a crow.

    They eat worms in our yard. They do not come to the feeder.
    Robin’s eggs are blue. We’ve seen them on the ground after they fell out of the nest.

    Robins can be found pretty much anywhere in the whole United States. When you see a robin that is supposed to mean spring is here, but we have them sometimes in winter too.

    This is called a wood strawberry. They are like wild strawberries except on wild strawberries the seeds are in pits and on a wood strawberry they are on the skin’s surface.

    Also on a wild strawberry the flowers are white but on a wood strawberry they are yellow.

    And wild strawberries are good to eat but wood strawberries are not! They are disgusting. But they are not poisonous.

    Wood strawberries are very small and grow in the grass.


    This is a flower that will turn into a wood strawberry.

    Websites I used:

    Spidersrule.com
    wildmanstevebrill.com

    (In the interest of full disclosure: Mav dictated this and I typed it because he hates typing. But he did all his own research.)

  • Summer Boredom Busters on the Cheap: Days Three and Four

    Day #3: Hold a Dance Party.

    This is one that you can make as simple or as ornate as you like. We played it simple yesterday and just turned the lights off, put Elvis’ 30 #1 Hits in the CD player, and danced our little hearts out. ( This had the additional bonus of being a good workout! We took advantage of the ballads for water breaks.)

    I can see us doing this again but taking the time to slick our hair back (boys) or putting on flouncy skirts (girls). Maybe making ourselves up a tasty diner dinner and some milkshakes and fries! Or, we could have a disco night or an 80s dance party…Really, the possibilities for fun here are endless.

    Day #4: Record a Day in the Life.

    We’re taking part in the official Day in the Life project today, but there’s no reason not to do this on a regular basis. Simply take a bunch of shots of the miniscule details of day-to-day life, pick the five that you like best or best capture the mood of a day, and put it in an album to help your children better remember what childhood summers “felt” like.