Glacier lilies

Windy today so the photo of the Glacier Lily is blurry---the flower is quite large---thus the latin name Erythronium " grandiflorum". The erythronium is from the greek erythro meaning red . I guess in some species the flowers are red but it's yellow around here. Another explanation for the Erythronium in the name is that the tips of the stamens are red in one of my field guides--I don't know as they were covered with yellow pollen and they may be red underneath. I'll check again in a few days and see if the wind has dispersed the pollen and find out the answer. The field guides tell me this flower was eaten raw and cooked---it has an edible corm down deep in the earth that is hard to get to. I have never tried any part of the plant--too beautiful to eat. I noticed that the sring beauties were up too( Claytonia lanceolata)--My kids and I have eaten them raw--the corm is not very deep and the taste reminds me of a ricy potato--the corms are quite small and again it's too beautiful to eat unless in a survival situation. I'll try to dig up a picture of one( no- not a bad pun). My camera died after just a few pictures up at the land this weekend so I wasn't able to get pictures of the skunk cabbage( Lysichitum americanus) coming up( one of the only plants I know of that can generate it's own heat inside). I was in deep need of my annual stinging nettle fix and this winter has been a long one so they are just starting to push thier purple sprouts through the warming ground. I collected a handfull near a spring and made a nice meal of nettles and a rainbow trout my boys caught. I also used some to treat my elbow injury by whipping the joint with the nettles so stimulate a histamine response and help the damaged tendon to get better circulation. It works quite well as my elbow numbed up quite nice and I was able to work on pruning my fruit trees without much pain. I never wear gloves when I pick nettles and the tips of my fingers go numb and stay that way for hours--it works. As I mentioned we had a long winter--we found 5 deer skeletons--all well chewed up--Go grizzlies, wolves, lions and coyotes!!!!. Still several feet of snow in the darker woods. One more flower on the rollcall----Waterleaf(Hydrophyllum capitatum) on the side of the road across from the house.

Frogs are Croaking!!

Tonight I went out to feed the horse and close up the chicken coop and I heard the frogs in the wetlands for the first time this year. It was in the mid 50's today but will be in the 20's tonight. We had 13 inches of snow last Saturday and I still have snowbanks around the house as high as my waist. The pasqueflowers are up ---A somewhat blurry picture of my favorite flower. Can you see the fairy in all that fuzz?

Western Mound Buiding Ants

Something that has interested me for some time are the mound building ants on my land. This year we had alot of snow but as soon as the snow melts away on top of these mounds all it takes is a sunny day or two and the Western Thatching ants begin to slowly move about. This year it was early March when I saw the first mounds cleared of snow. I believe the heat from the composting twigs, needles and vegetation acts like a compost pile of sorts(my theory) and the heat produced helps to melt the snow faster than it would otherwise--(when I stuck my nose next to the mound it reminded me of fermenting silage in the silos of my dads farm) There are over 12,000 species of ants in the world and Formica Obscuripes builds these mounds as high as several feet. The raised mound also serves to catch the suns rays and further heat it up. These ants eat the seeds of the surrounding vegetation and carry bits of vegetation back to build the raised mounds.

Outhouse door

Today it was raining so the kids and I decided to continue working on the outhouse we are building for our land. We found some Western Red Cedar to work with for the door and finished it off with both a star and moon at the top. From the "The Vanishing American Outhouse" by Ronald S. Barlow: ...."Vents often doubled as symbols for gender identification. Luna, the ancient crescent shaped figure, was a universal symbol for womankind. A moon, sawed into a privy door, served as the "Ladies Room" sign of early innkeeping days. Sol, a sunburst pattern, was cut into the men's room side of the outhouse. These symbols were necessary because in Colonial times only a fraction of our population could read or write. ...As time passed by and frontiers were pushed further westward, the gentleman's restrooms fell into disrepair and eventually were abandoned altogether. Accommodations for ladies were better maintained and this is why the moon symbol remains on many outhouse doors today. Its original meaning, however, was lost to the general population sometime in the mid 1800's." I love the grain of the Cedar wood in this door with all the knots . I have also used Western red cedar foilage to make a really nice aromatic soap in the past. This outhouse will be a composting type based on the principles in The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins.
(http://weblife.org/humanure/default.html) I can get plenty of free coffee grounds and sawdust for the compost buckets.This humanure will provide compost for our fruit trees and save us the time of pulling our travel trailer up to the rv dump station so often.

Buttercups are up

Today I decided that I would start my blog about the natural world. While returning from my daughters horse riding lesson I was doing my usual botanizing while driving and I noticed the first Buttercups along a south facing cut on the side of the road. In the interior of the Pacific Northwest of the United States the buttercup is called ‘Coyote’s eyes’ — iceyéeyenm sílu in Nez Perce and spilyaynmí áčaš in Sahaptin. In the legend Coyote was tossing his eyes up in the air and catching them again when Eagle snatched them. Unable to see, Coyote made eyes from the buttercup.There are several hundred species of the buttercup family in the world. The family name Ranunculaceae is from the latin word for frog which is "rana". This is in reference to the preference of wet habitat by many of the species. The common name buttercup is thought to be from the yellow,waxy surface of the petals reminding one of a cup of butter. Most references refer to the buttercups as being poisonous when eaten as the leaves contain an acrid juice only to be used externally as a poultice. I was able to find numerous uses of this plant in my ethnobotany books but I have no direct experience using buttercups. We had snow again yesterday, just a couple inches of wet March snow--already melted for the most part.