Friday, July 25, 2008

Mountain Wildflowers & Cool Acquisition

I took a break from transcribing right before lunch to take my little guy out and help me pick some wildflowers from our property, as our meadow is just bursting with color! The most prolific (well, the most noticeable anyway) is the wild bergamot (aka beebalm, horsemint):
We also have some large patches of purple coneflower:


And many, many other wildflowers, some of which are in this bouquet we picked, including harebells, common yarrow, threenerve fleabane and daisy fleabane, blackeyed susan, and lavender hyssop:


This fall when we finish our landscape structure I'll start transplanting some of these from other areas of our 10 acres. I'd never pick flowers in the National Forest except on our place, and sparingly at that. There are certain flowers that I will not pick on our place that are rare or ephemeral, like Gunnison's Mariposa lily, wood lily, and shooting stars.

While we were out, we got to eat wild raspberries that are just starting to come in. In another 2 weeks we'll have a bumper crop all over the Hills. I totally forgot to check the wild strawberry slope, but we should have a really good crop of those right now with all the rain we've had this year. They're super tiny and the wildlife will probably clean them up before I think to check again. Just a small taste is all we take.

One more picture before you go (thanks for staying so long!). I went haywire at Target's dollar spot yesterday, but look! Medium and small metal tubs (future stamp camp? gifts? not sure yet!) and tiny lunchboxes printed and filled with small samples of some old-school candies! They're not much bigger than a deck of cards!

Thanks for stopping by again today!

Michelle