If you'll remember this post from several months ago, I told you about the "wild area". It's a large area at the far corner of our property that we leave unmowed. We leave it that way because it is good for the butterflies, bees, and other wildlife that roam our property; mainly, deer, squirrels, a bobcat, and coyotes. (While we don't try to attract the coyotes to our place, we do try to live in harmony with them as much as such a thing is possible.)
For several years now, I've been trying to plant wildflowers in this area. To be clear, there are plenty of wildflowers growing on their own. (Most people would call them weeds. I'm trying to be generous.) What I'm trying to do is to increase the variety of wildflowers that grow, and so I've gone to no small expense tossing out wildflower seed mixes for about three years in a row. The first year, nothing much came up. The seeds were old, and I'd just never gotten around to sowing them.
Last year, I started with new seeds, and I had a pretty good start on them. But then Erik, who was helping out with the yard work at the time, mowed them before they bloomed. To be fair to Erik, he didn't know we left it unmowed. It was my fault for neglecting to tell him. That meant that they didn't flower, and so they didn't seed themselves for the next year.
So this year, I declared it would be my final time. (I'm very much a three strikes and your out kind of person.) So Mike tilled it once again, and it began like you see above.
After spying quite a bit of color over the past few days, we walked down there today and were delighted to find this:
It's a little hard to see the color in this image, but I wanted you to see what grows there ordinarily. A lot of those little white flowers (whatever they are) and a lot of dandelions. But get close up, and this is what you'll see now:
They're just getting started, and there are lots more getting ready to bloom. But these should seed themselves when they are bloomed out, and the hope is that we'll have more and more each year.
And what else do you think we saw?
Tigers!
7 comments:
Beautiful! I love wild flowers (not weeds!)
I didn't know tigers were attracted to flowers. Those are beautiful. I've always loved wildflowers. Hopefully they're on their way to more each year.
ah George... the best of all flowers!
Beautiful wild flowers.
3 times a charm and your luck finally held The flowers look great. The poppies should come back.
Tiger tiger burning bright... he looks regal.
Wildflowers are fun, we’ve spread a few bags of seed over our yard and one year we took a shoebox full of home grown sunflower seeds to Sonora Pass and broadcast them over a large area in memory of my friend Deb who had recently died.
Huzzah! A home run on that 3rd pitch, instead of a strike!! :D The flowers are lovely.
Be careful of those tigers...that one looks quite fierce!
Post a Comment