ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

The season is a' changin'. A sugar maple across the street from us is already ablaze in color, as are a few of our red maples (you'll see in a photo below). Most of the trees are still clinging onto their greenery for as long as they can, but the trees that are more stressed are already getting ready to shed for the winter. This year in particular we've got a lot of early color, as we had the driest August on record for this area, and September is promising the same. (Other than that one day with a little rain that I talked about last week, we've had nary a drop in 2 months -- in fact, our well recently dried up, a fact that makes day-to-day life around here a bit of a challenge. We're wearing out of feet practicing our rain dance.)

These are just some snapshots I grabbed while out on our morning bike ride. These pretty purple asters were growing amongst the ferns along our street. The weather has been clear and comfortable in the mornings, but it's been getting beastly hot and humid again in the afternoons. Just when you think summer is gone, it blows back in again like a blast furnace. If only it would rain....

A few "wild sunflowers". In quotes because I'm honestly not sure what species this is -- looks like a tall sunflower with a small head, so that's what I'm going with. In any case, they're growing all up and down our street and look nice with the stone walls and browning ferns.




This is what our pasture is looking like these days. Brown. With color from some of our red maples eeking in. The yellow is the grape leaves in the trees along the edge of the pasture. The grapes are just about gone now, the birds having eaten their fill, the sheep having eaten whatever dropped. Never did get around to collecting any to make jelly (which I was resistant to) or wine (a good suggestion by a friend!) this year.

And now I'll tell the quick saga of our milkweeds. We had a few milkweed plants sprout in the sand that we brought in for the playscape. Thrilled, we kept a diligent eye out for Monarch eggs and caterpillars. We thought we finally found some, only to discover (thanks to a reader) that they were really Milkweed Moth Caterpillars. Being unsure whether Milkweed Moths are migratory or if they hibernate and metamorphize in the spring, we decided to release those that we had set up camp for in our aquarium. Well, we went out to check on them today, and found our milkweed plants absolutely covered in aphids (that yellow fuzzy stuff on the stem of that milkweed is hundreds of aphids). We did see a couple of caterpillars still, munching away steadily at the leaves, but no sign of any cocoons. So the jury's still out on whether or not our caterpillars will turn into moths this fall, or wait until spring. Does anyone out there know?

Happy Harvest Moon to you all!