A UVM blog NR009 Blog

Wonderblog entry #3

By mpvanmie

Saturday, July 15th. The weather is rainy, and the air is very wet. It is a bit cooler today at 74 degrees F.

  • today everything is very wet
  • more than any other colors, I notice greens. It’s as if the other colors which are usually present are being drowned out by the overwhelming greens.
  • a few of the flowers have been weighted down by the weight of the water droplets on their leaves.
  • over at the herb garden, the spinach plants seem to have reached the end of their production season. I wonder when and under what conditions spinach grows best for producing its leaves. 
  • the kale on the other hand is doing very well it seems. Its leaves have great color and there are many. One thing that is worrying is the small holes in some of the leaves. I wonder if they are from bugs or something else.
  • I spent some time looking around for small mushrooms which sometimes come up after rain. I could not find any, even around the edges of the yard, in the shady spots. 
  • there is a large fungus growing out of the rotting stump of an old tree. It’s cool that the fungus is colored nearly identically to the tree stump

I am curious about the small holes in the leaves of the kale. From a brief Google search, the information I found points to caterpillars as the culprit of the holes. Interestingly, when a plant senses that its leaves are being eaten by pests, it sends more antioxidants and nutrients to those leaves to help fight off the pest. This makes those leaves that are effected more nutrient dense.

Photos

Drooping Peonies. I took this picture to highlight the fallen peonies flowers which are being weighed down by the water droplets.
Spinach Plant with browning leaves. I took this photo to show a spinach plant that is not looking to healthy. I wondered what conditions might have caused it to look this way.
Hole-y Kale leaves. This photo shows the holes in the leaves of an otherwise perfectly healthy kale plant. The leaves are likely caused by worms and caterpillars I discovered.
Brown tree stump with brown fungi. I thought that it was really cool that the fungus growing on this stump is nearly the same color as the rotting wood. It can’t be a coincidence.
Unknown grass growing. I liked how this grass looked, it spreads almost like moss, carpeting the area which it covers. It has distinctive brown stems which stand out against the small green needles.

I noticed that similarly to sketching, searching for a subject for my photos allowed me to spend more time looking around my site. On the contrary, shaping a photo is much quicker than sketching, so you end up spending less time observing the subject.

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