Tag: soil

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04/06/2023 Black Mesa Nature Preserve afternoon walk

Briar posed for us as we began our slow walk up the trail.
Here we go! Briar was on her leash and thought we were slow. Especially when I kept stopping to take photos of grama grass.
Mom also does botany photography along the trail!
I’ll look up this grasshopper when we get home.
I like how this photo has a cholla in front of a juniper with grama grass framing it. These were among the dominant plants along the trail.
Framed by the cholla cacti and distant junipers is a stretch of green tinted soil exposed by erosion! you can also see some of the abundant yuccas.
This young yucca by the trail already has a few strings peeling off the leaves.
One of the volcanic rocks that gives Black Mesa its name was down at our level. The trail climbs the Mesa for a round trip of 8.2 miles, but between botany and my arthritis we did a round trip of 1.6 miles in 1 hr and 50 min.
This dried leaf was very firm and had lovely reticulated veins.
Close up of cholla cactus branches and spines, with Black Mesa in the background.
Briar is the picture of patience once again. The packed earth trail is really broad and smooth!
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03/05/2023 more compost business

After moving the new soil to the garden yesterday, Paula wanted to move and layer the newer pile today.
She put layers of leaves between layers of kitchen waste. Now we’re ready for more on the empty side!
We put this compostable takeout fork in at some point and it didn’t compost. Apparently some compostable items require higher heat compost than our “cold” method.
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02/05/2023 peppers growing

Before, a tall pepper seedling in a big yogurt container.
After, with new potting soil up to near the leaves. We did this to all the peppers and ground cherries. This is my experiment to reduce transplanting stress by just letting them grow more roots in place since these can root from stems.
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01/28/2023 purple cliffbrake fern spores

Mom gave me some native Great Plains fern spores recently and on Saturday, Paula and I sort of followed these online directions to start our attempt at germination.

The containers have all been run through the dishwasher at some point. Then I stirred up potting soil (“seed starting mix” chosen because someone gave me a bag of it and I wanted to use it up) with water to create the sloppy mud the above webpage describes.
Microwaving the sloppy soil to sterilize it, sort of.
We did reach temperatures higher than the instructions suggested for sterilization,but didn’t microwave for a long time. So I’m going to say “we’ll see” and move on.
While the soil cooled (Paula set it outside to help it along), I started trying to coax spores from the undersides of the fern leaves using the dissecting scope at 1x and very fine forceps. Turns out there’s a lot of stuff in the big brown spots. I didn’t do the 10% bleach wash suggested in the directions.
I suspect these round spots (circled in red) are the spores and the other little bits are debris from the brown sporangia.
I had to go but Paula kindly finished the process by dusting all the spore containing dust onto the very wet soil surface and sealing it up. It’s now sitting in the guest room with the baby peppers and patient basil. The light there is on and off 12 hrs a day.
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01/16/2023 creating a special caliche/barrens habitat in containers

Visited home last weekend and Mom and Dad kindly let us take home some calcareous soil from an already disturbed area – the “lake”.
I had planned to shovel the soil but they kindly offered the much easier method of front-end loader. 🙂 We did scrape in a few small little bluestems and other plants that I have kept!
Since the soil was heavy, I carefully moved it into a bucket I could lift, and also searched for those little plants I mentioned got scraped in.
Paula and I put careful layers of soil and water to get it compact in the planters by the front door.
Paula smoothed them nicely and added water.
You can see the plants I found in the background, sitting on the porch. This is the final picture with a dusting of cactus/succulent/citrus potting soil on top.
Shackleton helped me sort the calcareous soil/barrens specialist seeds that Mom gave me.
Here are all the seeds in place with little markers! I also put one each little bluestem in the pot, a possible Oldplainsman in each, and a mystery round-leafed green plant. We’ll see what they become!
I did the two planters symmetrical but mirror images since they are on either side of the porch. Fingers crossed we get some sprouts in the spring!