It’s that time of year again. Goldenrod is everywhere along the roads, in the fields, popping up in gardens. It is a great pollinator plant. Butterflies and bees use goldenrod as a source of late summer pollen so they can spend the winter with full stomachs. When I...
I have some blue cranesbill geraniums which spread aggressively in my garden and even in with the weeds. These are not the red double geraniums sold in all the flower stores. These are cranesbill geraniums (Geranium maculatum “Rosanne”). The native wild geraniums...
As we walk along we see little blobs of bubbly foam on a stem here and there. Often referred to as frog spit or snake spit, whose spit is this? It doesn’t come from either a frog or a snake. It is the house of a little bug nymph. And, yes, there really is a group of...
Two days ago I was walking with my golden doodle along a woodland trail we use every day, and much to my delight a little white fringed orchid (Platanthera lacera) had popped up. I was amazed that I had not seen it the day before. It was suddenly there next to my...
Now that we have had several days of hot summer weather, we are seeing the numbers and variety of butterflies increase. There are many little ones like this little Least Skipper (Ancyloxypha numitor). Which likes to lay its eggs on grasses. In the north it favors...
This week we have been planning to put up a new sign placed next to the slough in Herbster to tell people about this beautiful and unusual place. This slough is really also a bog. Leading into Lake Superior, it is a kind of backwater where small streams feed into...
