Darkoshi

I'm sitting outside in the sunshine, working. Every once in a while I see a round white fluffy thing floating by on the breeze. ( Tiny seeds with a ball of white hairs spread out around them - they look like these thistle seeds but are more likely from some nearby tree. Cottonwood, maybe. )

I look up, and up there, many many of these fluffy things are drifting by, glowing even brighter in the sunlight as they pass near the sun.

My camera does not pick them up well against the sky.

I chase a few, and catch one, and take it inside to get some close-up photos of it. Then I release it back outside, and it floats away.

What to call them? "Parachute seed" doesn't seem to do them justice, these delicate light floaty spheres.

( Cut for size. Click to see photos )

Hey, wait a minute. Why, when I right-click one of the photos in this post and select to view the image, does it bring up a Dreamwidth URL? Is DW automatically copying photos that we post, to the DW servers? It didn't used to do that.

I finally took down the Christmas tree and decorations.

.


The border grass (liriope) behind the house was tall and thick so I used the string trimmer on it. Swarms of mosquitos flew at me. Maybe that is where they hang out in the daytime, shading themselves from the sun between the thick blades of grass. Maybe that is why there are always so many mosquitos in the back yard. Now I'm tempted to uproot all the border grass back there and get rid of it. It's a pity as regular grass doesn't grow well back there, so it was always nice to at least have the greenness of the border grass along the house. Although it is very hardy, so it might grow back. Which is the bane of having a yard; even when you cut things down and cut out as much root as you can (and feel bad about how you're killing the poor things), they keep growing back.

Those darn hardy crepe myrtles. One of them which had the stump ground keeps getting a bunch of sprouts in the same place, apparently from old seeds. The other one which had the stump ground (or did it?) still has a big root underground which I was only able to partially hack away, and keeps getting a bunch of sprouts. The one which had the stump left, and in which I drilled holes to kill it, is no longer growing back in the middle, but keeps sprouting branches along the outer edge of the stump. This last time, I cracked off a lot of the stump's bark where the branches were growing from; hopefully that will kill it.

It's not even like I even had all the crepe myrtle trees cut down; I only had a few of them cut, to thin things out.

.

Yesterday, fireflies and fireworks. Not many to see, only a few here and there. But a lot of thump boom pop sounds to hear. I did some taekwondo/stretch kicks down by the lake in the dark while looking for bright colors in the sky. I spied a mostly stationary light in the sky to my left, not too high up, partially behind some trees, which seemed to fade and come back every once in a while. I wondered if it was flares or a drone.

.

Thinking about how gluten can be separated from wheat, to get low-carb wheat gluten, made me wonder if one could make gluten-free wheat flour (or rather, starch). The info at that link is what I found; ie. yes you can, or mostly gluten-free anyway.

Low (and high) FODMAP Foods for Vegans - for reference.

.

I was surprised to read "While citric acid is usually made from corn, beet sugar or molasses, it can also be made from wheat." I had thought it was made from citrus fruit. Then, I was even more surprised to read that it is actually produced from a mold (aspergillus niger) (a black mold, but not the toxic one), which is grown on the sugary syrup produced from the corn/beets/wheat/etc. More details here: Overview of citric acid production from Aspergillus niger

.

I was also surprised to read that several gums commonly added to foods are made, not from plants as I had thought, but from bacteria.

Carrageenan (aka irish moss) comes from a red seaweed. I had previously discounted claims that it could be unhealthy, but now I'm not so sure, as it seems to be linked to inflammation.
Xanthum Gum, gellan gum, and curdlan are made from bacteria.
Guar gum, locust bean (aka carob bean) gum, and tara gum are made from plants.
Gum arabic (aka acacia gum) is made from the sap of the acacia tree.

Sources/more info:
What is Carrageenan?
Carrageenan and Gellan Gum
Gums in Foods Causing Health Problems for Many - very informative about the different kinds of gums in use.

.

This was interesting, as I had never heard about it before:
Alpha-gal allergy - can be caused by tick bites. Makes one allergic to mammalian meat products. Based on the comments on this page, it can also cause reactions to meat by-products like gelatin, dairy, and even animal-derived magnesium stearate.

I'll have to try this:

How to stop stumps from growing back, organically! - drill holes in the stump and apply epsom salts, and replenish the salt every week or so.

Another idea - after doing the above, cover the stumps with black plastic / garbage bag and weight it down with bricks, to both block sunlight, and to keep the salts from being washed away by rain.

How To Use Epsom Salt For Stump Removal - this page says to put a little bit of water in the holes with the epsom salt.

How to Mix Epsom Salts to Kill Stumps - this page says to use a one-inch extra long drill bit... Oh, that must be a spade bit.

Now when I see dandelions, I think to myself "Aha! That one has pointy leaves, not round, and they are sticking up, not close to the ground. That is a true dandelion." Or "That's not a true dandelion, it's cat's claw... err, no, cat's ear" (almost every time, "cat's claw" comes to mind first, even though I'm not familiar with it... per a search, it looks similar to yellow jessamine).

The yellow flowers themselves look identical to me on both kinds of dandelions, though this one below didn't have a ball of unopened petals in the middle. Its petals were all open.

It's like when as a kid, I learned the difference between white oak which has the round/curve-edged leaves versus black oak which has the pointy-edged leaves, not to mention, blackjack oak.

I ate 3 dandelion/cat's ear flowers today. They were not sweet. They tasted pretty similar to the green leaves, slightly bitter. The leaves were hairy, but not as unpleasant as chewing on under-ripe peach peel. I could probably eat a plate of it if I had to.

[Edited to add, 2017/05/13: I ate 4 more of the flowers today, after even more carefully peeling off the green parts than last time. They still don't taste sweet, nor particularly good. They taste a little like raw celery but without the crunch. Ie., not bad, but not special either. I wonder if "true" dandelions have any different flavor to them.]

A reminder that there are a lot of mis-facts on the web...
Nutritional Information on Dandelion Root : The image at the top of the page is neither dandelion nor false dandelion. It looks like coltsfoot.

Cat’s Ear: Backyard ‘Weed’ With Super-Antioxidant Properties : This page says: One identifying characteristic of cat’s ear is its leaves; they are sharply toothed and more asymmetrical than the leaves of dandelion. But that is not true. Cat's ear leaves are more rounded than regular dandelion.

I'm sort of amazed at the details I got in some of these photos. When looking at the flowers in the yard, they all pretty much look like the 5th one below. In the sunshine, the clump of unopened petals in the center of some of them aren't very noticeable.

The little fig tree leafs are growing (bigger). There are a bunch of little figs growing too. The car is already getting lightly covered in pollen. This evening we had some wind and a small refreshing rainstorm. It was too warm inside, so I opened a few windows to get some of the breeze. Tomorrow it will be cooler, a high of 65. (Last week or somewhen, when the forecast was also for 65, I thought *eek* that will be cool, and then reminded myself that normally 65 in February would be nice and temperate.)


(click to enlarge)
(from https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KCAE/2017/2/1/MonthlyCalendar.html)

Now that it is March, maybe I will stop feeling so disconcerted about the weather. In my experience, we could have cold weather and sporadic snow and ice up through the very end of February here. But March has always sounded like Spring.

( Photos under cut... )

Yellow: A few daffodils were out some weeks ago. Now there are flowering forsythia bushes (I looked up what they are called!), and sweet-smelling jessamine along the fence.

Pinkish-white: Elegant long-petaled magnolia blossoms, already completely replaced by young green leaves. A tree full of blossoms (possibly bradford pear; I'm not sure) by the side of the house. Puffs of a flowering almond bush (I looked up what it is called!) by the front windows.

Red: A single tulip.

Purple: The sweet-smelling wisteria is on the way.

Barking: woof woof woof

Falling blossoms: nature's confetti

Unusual: A Canadian goose taking a nap in the middle of the road. The other lane, and no traffic in that direction, but still.

Turtles: turtles, squirrels.

Coltsfoot - a perennial herbaceous plant in the family Asteraceae that has traditionally had medicinal uses.

Neatsfoot oil - a yellow oil rendered and purified from the shin bones and feet (but not the hooves) of cattle. "Neat" in the oil's name comes from an old name for cattle.