Lichens and Moss

It's definitely midwinter here.  We have a fair bit of snow, although not as much as I might expect for this time of year.  Still, it's more than enough!  Sometimes winter gets me down, but I'm trying to avoid that.  Today I went for a walk in the sunshine in the woods around my house.  I took some pictures of lichen and moss - things that are still growing despite the cold.  I don't know much about lichen really, but there are many different types.  The interesting thing about lichen is that it isn't a single organism, like a plant or a mushroom.  It's a combination of both algae (or cyanobacteria) and fungi, in a symbiotic relationship.  So, here are my lichens from today, along with a cameo appearance by a moss.

Since I don't know much about lichen, I can't give you a species on these.  I've posted them to iNaturalist in the hope that I might get some answers, but for now, I'm just enjoying their different forms and colours.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think the small brown circles might be another lichen species growing on top of the greyish-green one.

I think this one might be called varied rag lichen, Platismatia glauca, but I'm not sure.

I'm pretty sure the following two pictures are of old man's beard, or Usnia longissima, but there are some other Usnia species that are similar..

Whoops, who let that chicken in here?  Hello Smidgen! 

I thought this was really beautiful - it's a small moss cushion that has lichen weaving through it.  An interesting specimen.

This seems to be the most common type of lichen in my woods, and I believe it is in the shield lichen class, but again, I'm no expert!

I just think they're beautiful, often overlooked life forms that are perhaps more visible in winter due to the lack of foliage and the abundance of snow.  One must look harder for signs of life!

 Often there are multiple lichens on a single tree.

It was a lovely day (for a short time) to be outside and wandering amongst the trees, but it soon clouded over and became grey and cold again.  I'm glad I went out for a short walk.

Hurricane Dorian

Just about a week ago, the Maritime Provinces were hit by Hurricane Dorian, which actually sped up as it powered up the East Coast.  That was unusual, because most often, hurricanes slow down as they approach our area, and tend to reach the Maritimes with just some gusty winds and rain.  That wasn't the case this time.  Hurricane Dorian made landfall in Nova Scotia on Saturday, September 7 with wind speeds reaching 150 km/h (93 mph), essentially a category 2 hurricane.

I had left our home to go for a week's vacation with my parents in Prince Edward Island, starting on Friday, September 6, but Marc had stayed home for a couple more days because he wanted to come to the Island on his motorcycle.  The night of September 6, I slept off and on (more off than on) in our rented cottage on the Island, where I listened to sounds that made me think the roof might come off, and watched the back wall of the cottage flexing in the wind, about 1.5 inches each way, from what I could see.  It was a very scary night.  Marc was woken in the early morning hours by a tree falling on the roof of our house. 

By morning, the Maritime provinces had more than 500,000 residents without power, thousands of trees and power poles were lost, and even a construction crane collapsed in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  Many cell phone towers were damaged, leaving people without service.  In addition, more than 100 mm (4 inches) of rain fell in 24 hours.  Our situation was nowhere near as dire or catastrophic as the situation in the Bahamas, but it was very challenging none the less.

Our vacation was hampered, to an extent, by the loss of power, given that we were in a cottage where the water is pumped from a well, and when the power is out, there's no water.  We did a lot of reading and walking on the beach and enjoyed some lovely times despite the inconvenience of no power.

Upon arriving home yesterday, I was able to survey the damage around our home.  It wasn't pretty.  One of my favourite shade trees in our yard lost its largest limb, which I think is a fatal loss.  I will have an arbourist come and look at it, but I don't think it can survive this kind of damage.

From a distance in a picture, it doesn't look as bad as it does when you get closer, and when you see the size of my lens cap for scale.

The trunk has more-or-less been ripped in half.  Marc started some clean up of it yesterday.

There are some sizeable logs that will be useful for the next time we lose power in the winter - they will be burned in our wood stove.

The falling limb also took out my clothesline.  I will have to have a new post installed.  The old one is laying next to the chicken coop.  Thank goodness it didn't fall ON the coop!

The clean-up of the maple will take some time.  I'm really sad to have lost such a beautiful shade tree.  It narrowly missed my new arbour, for which I am grateful. 

It also missed my raised beds. My beautiful squash vines are pretty much toast, but the root crops are all OK.  The tomatoes have suffered somewhat but I am confident I will still get some more ripe fruits from them.

The tree that fell on the house and woke Marc in the middle of the night is on the back of the house.  It is a very large big-tooth aspen tree (Populus grandidentata).

Unlike the maple, the aspen was uprooted rather than snapped.  You can see it also took a couple of smaller spruce with it.

We are fortunate to have a steel roof, so there was no roof damage.

We do, however, have a badly cracked window that will need replacing.

I feel lucky that my bird feeder poles weren't taken out.  Amazingly, the hummingbirds are still around so you can see I still have the feeders on the window of my home office.

 Removing this tree will take some care and planning to ensure that no other windows are damaged.

I am very grateful for the limited amount of damage we have in comparison to so many others who were affected by Dorian, and am also very glad that none of our animals were hurt.  At the same time, we definitely have a lot of clean up to do, and I suspect I will have to have the rest of the maple taken down by an arbourist.  It is close to our power line and we need to be very careful about that.  I sure hope that's the only hurricane for this year.

Vacation Day One

Last week, I went on vacation.  This was, in and of itself, a sort of milestone.  The last time I went on a proper vacation was in 2008.  What do I mean by a "proper vacation?"  Well, I had gone on a couple of trips in the past 10 years to the US to visit friends, but I also took my computer with me and worked, regularly, on those trips.  I also took a few long weekends for spinning or knitting events.  I don't count that as a "vacation" because (a) it's just a long weekend and (b) I sometimes took work on those events and (c) I was often there to do workshops and learn things, which can be a lot of fun, but it isn't the same as a do-what-you-want-when-you-want vacation.  Last week was one of those weeks, and it was marvellous!

I went to Prince Edward Island, which is the province next to mine, to spend the week in a lovely seaside cottage which I shared with my parents.  Marc also came for the first day and a half of the vacation, which was good because he doesn't usually go on vacation either, but he also wanted to use some of his time off for his own projects in the garage, so he only stayed for a short time.

I have all sorts of things I want to blog about, but I'll just blog today about the first day of our vacation.  On Monday morning of last week, we headed off under sunny skies to the Confederation Bridge.  That's a bridge that goes from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island.  I was driving the car and Marc was on his motorcycle, so I couldn't take pictures of the bridge, but here's one from Wikipedia for you.


The bridge is 12.9 kilometres long (that's 8 miles!) and is a multi-span balanced cantilever bridge that ranges from 40 to 60 metres (131 to 197 feet) above the water.  It's the longest bridge in the world that crosses ice-covered water (obviously not at this time of year).  It takes over 10 minutes to drive across it.

We didn't have to be at the cottage until 4 pm, so we decided to visit a historical site called Roma at Three Rivers.  It's the site of a French trading post that was established in 1732 and which was unfortunately burned down by the British in 1745.  Not my ancestors I hope!  We enjoyed lunch there and toured around the buildings and the heritage garden site.  The building where we had lunch is built in the style of the original main building which would have been the original sleeping quarters for about 70 settlers.

There is a replica of an Acadian "chaloupe" - a type of fishing boat used in the original settlement.

I enjoyed looking at all the plants in the garden, and I liked the sturdy fence. The restaurant had a lovely herbal iced tea made with bergamot (bee balm), lemon balm and something else from the garden...I think it was rosemary but I'm not sure.

Marc enjoyed investigating the huge clay oven that is in daily operation at the site.

Since we had almost 2 hours to spare, we decided to go on one of the walking trails at the site.  We chose a 3 km trail that we thought would be easy to complete with time to spare to get us to the cottage.  Unfortunately, vandals had broken and obliterated many of the interpretive signs along the trail. However, the trail itself was a beautiful, peaceful walk through a forested headland.

There was a remarkable array of mushrooms through the woods, including some that were obviously boletes (which are edible).  I was captivated by their massive size.  Here's a picture of some of them with my lens cap for scale.

 I loved the massive tree trunks and couldn't help but embrace my tree hugger personality on the trail.


After a while though, we ran into a lot of trail obstacles - downed trees from various storms, areas of difficult walking, and a few other issues, so we decided to take a shortcut.  On the map below, we were on the white line trail "B" on the right hand side, expecting to do the full loop.  Instead, we crossed at the orange marked trail that cuts the northern portion of white trail "B" out, and leads back to the start.

Well, we crossed that orange trail expecting to see the white tree markers that indicated the other side of trail "B" but unfortunately, they were nowhere to be found.  We wandered around in circles desperately seeking the trail to no avail.  There wasn't any signage to be found.  I tried to use my cell phone to find the trails on the map, but no dice.  Growing increasingly concerned, we had no choice but to double back, taking the orange trail back across the middle and returning to the start via the same part of trail B that we started on.  It was quite a long delay and involved me losing a shoe several times in the boggy area at the bottom of the orange trail, and both of us getting quite flustered.

This resulted in us being more than an hour later than expected for our arrival at the cottage, which no doubt caused some concern to my parents who were expecting us at 4 pm, but at least we didn't get entirely lost and spend the night in a bog.  And I got a lot of really great pictures of interesting fungi.

More about the rest of the holiday soon!

Friday's Hunt v 3.04

It's time for Friday's Hunt again.  This has been a very busy week again.  I am into my second week with my new work contract and it seems to be going well, but it is certainly keeping me occupied. The prompts for today's hunt from Eden Hills are:  Starts with D, Week's Favourite, and Close Up.

Starts with D
We had a major ice storm earlier this week.  For the provincial power utility, it was the worst ever storm on record for power outages.  There are still people without power.  We lost power for one night, but fortunately it was back on the next day.  Anyway, the letter D applies to lots of things related to the storm.

Dropped (or Downed) tree branches.  We had a lot of them, and there were also downed power lines all over the province.  It's taking a long time to clean up.  This branch is over part of our driveway - it's a big one!

Here you can see the damage at the top of a tree.

Here is the piece that dropped to the ground from that damaged tree - it nearly fell into the sheep and goat pen, but was stopped by other trees in the way!

Drooping trees.  The ice was so heavy on these birch trees, they were drooping down to the ground!

Dripping water, due to the temperature going above freezing for a short time after the storm.  Here you can see the drips on the top part of my bird feeder pole.


The driveway was a rather dangerous - rather like a skating rink!

Week's Favourite
It's not a great picture really, but this week I was very excited to see a male evening grosbeak at my feeder for the first time here in Sackville.  I hope he will come back!

Close Up
I took a lot of close-up shots of the ice after the worst of the storm was over.  Here are a few of those that I thought turned out well.  This old, dried birch leaf was encased in ice.

The cheerful red of this crab-apple still shows through its icy cage.

The yew shrub's branches were also encased in ice.

I think it's fascinating how this branch looks as if it has thorns, but those are just formed by the ice encasing the branch.  They must have formed when the precipitation was between rain and freezing rain, so as it dripped from the branch, it froze.


Finally, another tiny leaf - see how its serrated edges are so clearly defined inside the ice, and you can even see the patterns within the ice caused by the freezing water.

Goats! Trees! And an Impending Project!

The goats have been very happy for the past couple of days because they were given a special treat!  Or should I say treet?

The road on which I live had a large machine go by a few weeks ago that did some pretty major trimming along the side of the road.   Unfortunately, this trimming involved a lot of trees with pretty wide trunks, including a lovely old apple tree.  I don't know why the county felt a need to get quite so vigourous with their brush cutting, but the outcome was a massive mess of branches and lots of young spruce trees that were cut off at the base.

I gathered quite a few of these felled trees and dragged them up to the barn, because the goats love spruce, so it was a free food source that was pre-cut for me to haul up to the hungry herd!  As you can see, they are very pleased.

Oh wait, no, I guess you can't see.  Word to the wise.  When you're trying to take pictures in a cold barn, you can't breathe out at the time time you snap the picture, otherwise all you take a picture of is a plume of breath that is making a little cloud in front of the lens!

Here we go - wee Westley to the left and Fezzik to the right, along with the sheep in the background, all having a good gnawing on a spruce!

Wee Fezzik has been doing well with his winter turtleneck-coat on and seems to be at least maintaining his weight despite the cold, which was what I had hoped for.  He still gets his special molasses oats treat every day to keep the weight on him as much as I can without giving him a case of the runs!

Moving on, you may recall, if you are a regular reader, that a while ago we bought cabinets to re-do the kitchen here.  We're not quite ready to do that project yet, but when we bought those cabinets, we bought a few extra units so that we could install some in my upstairs "studio" area, giving me places to store yarn, spinning fibre, dye materials, and other goodies.  It is with much excitement that I can tell you that the project to install these cabinets is set for Sunday!  Woohoo!!

Here are the cabinets that we have moved upstairs in preparation for the project!  There are two like the cabinet facing the camera on the left.  Nice big drawer and cupboard.  Then there is a smaller one (narrower) that is the same height.

 This is the sink cabinet unit.  Eventually we will get a nicer sink but one thing at a time!

Here is where they'll be installed (the chaos zone). We'll get rid of this grungy old half-baked plywood counter and put in the cabinets and a nice piece of second hand countertop (which already had a sink hole!) that we were able to get.  It is a nice dark greenish looking laminate.  Easy to clean.

All those bottles under the sink are my fibre dyes and detergents, etc.  The microwave is for dyeing also.  All our bathroom stuff is also there because our bathroom doesn't have a sink yet, so we have to use this one for that too.  Anyway, I can't wait to do the project and get things put away in their proper, organized places.  I'll be sure to show some pictures after our work!