Rainbows are breathtakingly beautiful, especially in places where there’s such a big horizon that you can see most of the rainbow, instead of a small sliver of it.
I wish we had rainbows more often–we usually only have a few of them a year–but I guess if they were a common occurrence, they wouldn’t seem as special.
I can identify a poison ivy plant from yards away, even on the fly. For example, when I’m mowing with the tractor, I often have to mow under low hanging branches and even while going 10 mph or so, I can pick out and avoid poison ivy-covered limbs from afar.
This wasn’t always the case, and even now, after about 12 summers of dodging the nasty vine daily, my poison-ivy radar is certainly farm from infallible. But I’m definitely better at avoiding it than I used to be.
The biggest lesson that I have learned about poison ivy is that it can look like a tree–it’s not always just a shiny, three-leafed ground cover–sometimes it’s a massive and less shiny “tree”. This is because poison ivy is a vine that climbs trees and can nearly take them over, creating the appearance of a poison ivy tree.
No matter how watchful I am, I end up stumbling into some poison ivy at least once a year, and the resulting rash and itching is always even worse than I remembered it to be.
The best remedy that I’ve discovered for poison ivy is putting jewelweed juice on it. Every summer, when the jewelweed is flowering (I can only identify it while it’s blooming), I harvest some, boil it down, and use the resulting juice as a homemade poison ivy cure. I always try to keep some frozen jewelweed juice ice cubes on hand, just in case the poison ivy wins my daily battle against it!
A patch of clover in bloom always brings a smile to my face. Clover flowers attract pollinating insects, which, besides being a delight to watch, are important to the health of the garden as well as the ecosystem as a whole. The blooms also mean that the clover is thriving and, given a chance, will go to seed, thus producing more clover plants.
Happy clover plants contribute lots of nitrogen to the soil. In fact, estimates for how much nitrogen a stand of red clover creates every year hover around 50-75 pounds of nitrogen per acre. On our farm, this equals a very real dollar savings in terms of fertilizer, especially in our pastures, where our grass is amazingly green, even though we apply nitrogen fertilizer at less than the recommended rate. We have our clover to thank for the free N!
