This and that post

I'm making this post because I'm waiting on the phone to talk with someone about COBRA coverage. This is what I do all day lately, and it's not the most interesting blogging material. But perhaps it will allow me to sneak in a quick post.

The photo above is my roof deck planter. I hastily threw in a few annuals in late May and put a net over them to keep the jays and starlings out. At the time we were having problems with the building watering system and I left for Italy in June thinking all the plants would surely be dead by the time we returned.

But when I finally got home and made it back upstairs (late July), our planters looked better than they ever had! Everything had filled in, the plants were lush (the basil has yellowed a little since), the tomato plants had become the size of a small tree (I apparently mistook Beefsteak shoots for Sweet 100s), and best of all, my mom's heirloom salad tomatoes had volunteered in the thick of the other herbs. Beefsteaks don't do so well in planter boxes (mine currently have a sort of rot), but the salad tomatoes are doing fine. Is this the law of benign neglect?

We also returned to find that a pair of Redtailed Hawks had adopted our neighborhood as their hunting territory. They may quite possibly be descendants of Pale Male, the famous Redtail who lives on Mary Tyler Moore's building on Fifth Avenue. If so, they are decidedly slumming in Morningside Heights. But either way, they get the same rich diet of New York City rats and pigeons, and I often see them at work around 6 a.m. when I wake up. (See below, and note the extended talons.)

But the photo above is the one that was the initial impetus for my post: I was cleaning out the science experiment cabinet and happened upon a mason jar that looked like the remains of an old experiment. At first I thought we'd grown some salt crystals, but then I noticed that the bottle was labeled, "Bleach." Then I remembered that I'd used a bottle of bleach to clean up after a bacteria experiment. So I poked the almost 1" crystals adhering to the bottom of the jar, and sure enough there were still bits of liquid bleach underneath the hollowed out pyramids. So I guess this experiment was a two for one!

One last anecdote: CZ recently performed in a nursing home concert for the 103rd birthday of one of the residents. When she walked back into the apartment after the concert, she announced, "Well, now I've seen everything!"

"You mean the 103-year-old man?" I replied.

"No. I was walking up Broadway at 107th and I saw a Columbia student carrying a four-foot-long, clear plastic toothbrush!"

I'll miss this city.

Spring food

This week the spring farmers' market season started in earnest.  I was in my favorite local bookstore buying some Moleskine journals, and I told the checkout girl how much l liked the springy green covers. 

"And there's rhubarb and asparagus up at the farmers' market, too!" she added. 

That's just where I was headed! So I went farther up the street and bought both rhubarb and asparagus, and also bought some ramps (center of bottom left photo, above), a relative of the scallion. They taste somewhere between scallions and garlic scapes.  

But that wasn't even my main farmers' market run for the week.  I went to my usual market today. Oh, boy!  I went so overboard that I may have a hard time using everything I bought. You can see some of the items I bought in the photo at right above. (I always keep a list running on my kitchen board so that I won't forget things in the refrigerator. Vegetables are on the left, things I need to buy on the right.)  

At the Friday market I found yet another new (for me) vegetable: lamb's quarters (top left, above).  I'd heard of them, but had never tasted any. It turns out they have a nutty flavor, and are a sort of wild spinach, so they can be used like spinach or chard. I did a little research on them, because I wasn't sure whether they might be the same thing as lamb's lettuce, or mache. They're not. Some people call them quelites, or Good King Henry, but lamb's lettuce is something different.  Aren't you glad you know that now?  

There's one booth at the market that sells potted plants, so I stocked up for my two roof deck planters with parsley, sage, rosemary, and basil. My chives, tarragon, lavender, thyme, and some pansies survived the mild winter, so I don't have to replant them. And I have a zinnia that I sprouted from some seeds that I keep stored in my cabinet.

That leaves tomatoes. My planter boxes won't grow the large kind well, but they do just fine with cherry-size tomatoes. My mom had sent me some heirloom cherry tomato seeds from her own garden. She just picked them out of the tomatoes when she was making a salad and stuck them in an envelope. I was a little skeptical that they'd come up, so I dumped a bunch of them in one pot. I was even more skeptical when the zinnias came up and they didn't, so I bought some Sweet 100s tomatoes at the farmers' market a couple of weeks ago. (I'd never pass up the chance to buy Sweet 100s in April. Last year I couldn't find them until June.)  

This week, the heirloom tomatoes started coming up. Not just one of them, but four, five, and then on up to ten!  Oops, now I'm not even sure how to separate them!  But they were getting sort of leggy on my windowsill, so I put them in the box upstairs, too. I planted everything else today in the warm sun, gave it all a good watering, and covered the boxes with netting to keep out the Starlings.  I'm already harvesting thyme and chives, so it looks like we'll have a good roof deck season, and the sprinklers aren't even on yet.  I'm feeling very productive!   

Clockwise from top left: 1. pansies, parsley and basil 2. sage, rosemary, tarragon and chives (with Sweet 100s above) 3 & 4. Sprouted heirloom cherry tomatoes on different days 5. tarragon and chives 6. lavender, thyme, and the heirloom cherry tomatoes still in their pot.

Fall leaves nature journal

The leaves are finally starting to turn riot in Central Park. Watching them turn always reminds me of a tradition C.Z. and I had in our early days of homeschooling. Anyone could think of it, no doubt, but what I like about it is that though it is extremely simple, it isn't dumbed down or silly in the least. A child (or even an adult) can do as much or as little with it as he likes, and it's a good exercise in observation. I think Charlotte Mason would approve!

• The procedure is simple enough. You take a walk in the park and gather a few leaves. Of course, C.Z. preferred to gather a few hundred, but after a while I'd say, "Well, okay, but you'll have to carry them, and...hmm, do you suppose maybe we should leave a few for the other children?" (Young New Yorkers have to learn very early to share with a few million people.) So, we tried to come home with only our very favorites.

These was one of the last leaf pages we did, after C.Z. had already learned to mix colors pretty well.

• When you get home, have the pencils, watercolors, field guides and paper ready. Children soon learn that leaves shrivel overnight, and parents soon get busy with other things, like dinner.

• Place a leaf on a piece of paper. Sometimes we used sketch pad paper, but often enough, we used printer paper, because that's what we had. After a while, we learned to arrange several leaves on the paper to create a composition. Trace the leaf's outline with a pencil.

• Get out the colors and try to imitate what's going on in the leaf. Here, it might help to know basic color mixing. Not only do blue and yellow make green, but they look better mixed loosely on the paper than dutifully colored with a straight green pencil. Brown leaves usually have a lot of bright yellow shining through. And a touch of contrasting color, like red or blue, often makes the shadows look interesting, but too much muddies the color. But don't be afraid to mess up. Experimenting is half the fun, and the beauty of it is, you can always get more leaves and paper!

• Sometimes we used more pencils, sometimes more watercolor, and sometimes we used both. And sometimes we looked at D'Aulaire books for color-mixing ideas. I feel fairly confident suggesting that you can do this, because C.Z. doesn't consider herself to be a particularly good draftsman, but tracing the leaves gave her just the right amount of encouragement to do the rest.

• After you've done all that observation through tracing and coloring, identify the leaf. Many leaves are easy enough to identify with a field guide--the maples, the oaks, and gingkos, for instance. But we eventually came across a few that stumped us, like the ailanthus that hung over our old building's back patio. Eventually we learned to bring home a bit of the seed pod from the park if it was available, or to take a good look at the tree's bark. Since we were usually in a public park, and at any rate shared all our trees with others, we only took leaves that were on the ground, and we didn't shave off any bark. So we had to be very observant on the spot.

To be honest, we're still not 100% sure this is an ailanthus leaf, but we learned a lot about shapes and pods while trying to identify a branch that fell onto our building's patio!

• Then we wrote the name of the leaf below the drawing. C.Z. was not enthusiastic on the subject of penmanship or spelling as a young child, so sometimes this was the hardest part, but it did give her practice using something real, and to this day we know what some of these leaves are only because she took the trouble to label them the day we brought them home.

• When we finished, we simply slipped the pages into a small notebook with plastic sleeves. We added a few pages each year for three or four years. In the end, we had a nice little leaf nature journal, and lots of happy memories of crunching and sloshing (depending on the weather) through leaves on fall days in the park.

The opening page to C.Z.'s old leaf notebook

(You can tell she already had strong opinions about the colors of her letters.)

I'm sure New York City isn't the first place most people think of when they consider nature education. (For one thing, kids aren't even allowed to climb the trees, and even the prospect of jumping in a pile of leaves can be unsavory considering some of the trash one finds underneath.) And I've heard more than one New Yorker proudly claim to have no interest in nature whatsoever. But our family has always liked nature, and the challenge of finding nature in New York City rather invigorated us than defeated us. We've always been a little contrary, but really, it's not nearly so much the pleasure of being obstinate that drives us outdoors as the smell of wet leaves, and the jewel-like contrast of bright red maple leaves with their gray surroundings of fog, looming park rocks, and sodden sky.

Ideas for sketching

Do you like nature journaling? The image at left is by NYC artist Tommy Kane. (I hope he won't mind my reproducing it here as a bit of free publicity.) It's from a website called Urban Sketchers, which I only just discovered yesterday.

Another interesting artist on the site is John Wooley. Wooley just happens to be ten years old, but that's not the point. I am utterly impressed with his free sense of line, composition, and sheer inventiveness. I could draw realistically when I was ten, but I couldn't invent like he does. I wonder if I could even do it now, with an extensive art background and many years' worth of images in my head. Looking at these drawings makes me want to try.

Most of these sketchers seem to make their living in the advertising world. And Kane is unfortunately the same man who did those Steve Madden ads a few years ago that looked like Bratz dolls. Makes me wonder how we can open up better opportunities for artists to make a living.

Meanwhile, I think this website makes great inspiration for nature journaling! I know it's urban journaling, but I posted it even so for two reasons: 1) The drawing styles are more creative than on most nature journaling sites I've seen, and 2) urban journaling looks like fun, too! Enjoy!

Sketch by John Wooley, from Urban Sketchers

***

I haven't had a whole lot of time lately to sketch medieval manuscripts, but I have done a three or four. I hope to do more sketching as time permits, perhaps even post a few eventually. For that, though, I'll need a scanner.

Cherry blossoms

Inside a Manhattan apartment...

Notes on the day

Fall weather arrived in earnest today, with a constant coldish wind. Everything felt different!

The first thing I heard as I sat down next to the open window with my journal this morning was a man singing "O Holy Night" in an operatic voice.  I have no idea whether he was in another apartment or on the street, because I didn't hear him for long.  Shortly afterwards, a fire truck with an intermittent siren passed by (they don't blare continuously at seven a.m.), and I didn't hear him after that.  I actually needed the chenille blanket over my feet.

This is the corner where I sit and journal each morning.

More lights were on in the windows of the other buildings, even though it was getting light, because many people are now getting up while it's still dark.  Whenever I get up earlier than usual, say 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., I'm surprised to see lights on that I never see on at any other time.  I figure these people just have really unusual work schedules.  The apartment in the building behind us is one of these, and one of its windows has been broken for a month.  I wonder why the landlord added a penthouse apartment to this building last year, but won't fix the window. And what does this person do that requires them to get up so early and stay out all day and night so that the curtains are never open?  It bothers me.

Once Bob left for work, C.Z. and I ran in the park, and she kicked up her heels so much that she almost beat her own personal record.  The dogs in the park all looked extremely happy, too.  

Birds were making an unusual lot of noise while we ran.  Perhaps it was the hawk we heard overhead as we entered park, but I think it's more likely they were coming in with the fall wind.  At an overlook I heard a high call from a rush of small birds.  I hoped very much that they were kinglets (we usually get Golden-crowned Kinglets for a couple of days in October).  On another pass by the overlook, I saw a small bird that I didn't recognize (I actually stopped running for a few seconds and stared after it, which could partly explain why my running times are so slow lately).  I lost it before I got a good look, and decided to that we should definitely go out later in the day.  We had seen newly-arrived White-throated Sparrows on Tuesday.  Those are winter residents, those the birds that sing, "Oh, say, Canada, Canada!"

We did schoolwork and our other tasks for the day and went out again for birds as soon as we could. By now, low gray clouds were blowing across the sun, but they were moving so fast that they came and went.  The tops of the trees tossed in the wind.  We saw one genuinely fallish-looking branch with yellow and orange leaves, but everything else was still deep summer green. I figured this was going to be either a good day for birds, or a bust, but nothing like the past few weeks.  

And it was a good day!  Right away, at the Drip, we saw three Blue Jays chasing each other out of the pool, a Flicker come to drink, a Phoebe wagging its tail on the fence, and a Redstart (or a Yellowstart as we call them) fanning its tail in the bush.  Later on, up in the woods, we saw the White-throats again, a Wood Thrush, a Swainson's Thrush, Titmice, and when we looked back on the trail, a lovely Black-throated Blue Warbler.  We distinctly heard a Chickadee.  And on the way home, I spotted the bird I had so wanted to see ever since last October--a tiny kinglet!  This one was a Ruby-crowned, not a Golden-crowned, but we stopped to watch it gleaning insects with its tiny beak from the branches of a bush and then tree for a long time, all by itself.  I do think kinglets may be my very favorite birds.  And those thrushes somehow remind me of fall in the same way that winter squashes do.  They're sturdy and plain, but satisfying to see.  And they sing well, too.  (There the analogy falls apart.)

A Ruby-Crowned Kinglet (image from Wikipedia Commons)

When we got home, we were cold from being outside for the first time since last May.  I took a cue from Susan's blog and made myself a first cup of Raspberry tea for the season.  C.Z. made hot chocolate, and we poured them both in her tea cups from Boston.  We sat down to do our last bit of schoolwork, a Latin translation from Wheelock's.  "Hot chocolate and Latin," she mused. "I feel like French royalty!  Or maybe more like the Pauper in The Prince and the Pauper."  I never would have guessed, back when I was having to drag her through Latina Christiana last spring, that she would think translation was fun.  But when she finished her short paragraph, she looked up and asked, "Are there any more of these?"  I think Wheelock's is a much more grown up book, and I wish that I hadn't been too intimidated to try it last year.  But who knows?  Sometimes fit and timing in learning are a bit of a mystery.

C.Z. was so inspired by the weather that she picked up her fiddle and spontaneously produced a very warm, smoky rendition of "Beech Spring."  What's fallish about this?  I don't know, but it reminds me of log cabins and Pa's fiddle, so perhaps she thought so, too.  Now she's playing Vaughn Williams and whistling to it in harmony.  

And finally, we got another dramatic cloud and sun effect with our view again.  I like this one even better, and it accurately reflects the blue-gray, watercolor raggedness of the clouds today. 

Whether it's fall yet or not where you are, I hope you had a pleasant day of it. Time to go cook dinner!

Early fall birds at Jamaica Bay

Glossy Ibises are common at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge

With fall getting suddenly quite busy, C.Z. and I decided to sneak out to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge today before we looked up and it was January.  Yes, our priorities are in order--outdoor learning first!  (Well, maybe books first.  But sometimes it's close.)  The excuse may have been birds, but we mostly just wanted to get out in the open one more time before it got cold.  So off we went for a 2-hour commute on the A train to Broad Channel Island, near JFK airport.  

When we got to the refuge, we noticed right away that the place already looked quite different than it had in June and July when we'd been out there for several days to help researchers with nesting turtles. The vegetation was mostly thicker and overgrown, but already the honeysuckle had mostly disappeared and many of the plants sported berries.  I wish that I'd had my camera for one of the berry bushes, because its berries were in a lovely array of greens, blues and pale lavenders that reminded me of eggs raised on small farms.  The mature berries were deep red.  Some of the vines were starting to turn bright red, too, even though the leaves on the trees won't turn for another month. The weather had turned yesterday from muggy and summer hot to breezy and almost cool, and though I wore short sleeves, I occasionally felt a slight chill in the cloudy weather.  

The terrapin trail was now open, and I wondered what had happened to all the nesting turtles. We found a few protective nest cages, still marked.  Had many terrapins hatched safely and made it to overwintering spots on the island, or had raccoons eaten most of the eggs?  Were some turtles, for now, still crawling around in the underbrush?  (One thing that the Hofstra University researchers we worked have discovered through their work is that baby Diamondback Terrapins overwinter on land.  One usually thinks of baby saltwater turtles going back into the water.)  We felt nostalgic and even a bit proprietary walking down the trail, which we knew quite well from watching turtles and marking nests this summer.

 

A Snowy Egret, with those yellow feet

As for birds, we noticed right away that there were lots and lots of wading birds--Great Egrets, Snowy Egrets, Black-Crowned Night Herons, Yellow-Crowned Night Herons, Tricolor Herons, Glossy Ibises, and several other birds with stilty legs.  And not only was there a lot of variety, but for most species we saw lots and lots of each.  Greater Yellowlegs skirted around in great flocks, circling over the water and making their peeping sound.  Usually they're just wading when I see them. My favorite wading birds of the day, though, were the Snowy Egrets because they have black legs with yellow feet, which makes them look a little like Mickey Mouse!   

What we really didn't see that much of, surprisingly, were ducks.  Usually the West Pond is full of them, and happily some of them wear their breeding plumage in winter, so that gives one something fun to look for on fall and winter birding trips.  We did, however, see a Wood Duck (in breeding plumage) in the blind near the East Pond.  Since I've only seen one in the wild once before, that was a satisfying duck find.  

A Wood Duck in breeding plumage.  Almost looks fake, doesn't it?

We also enjoyed seeing a whole family of Mute Swans and a juvenile Laughing Gull begging for food from its mother.  There were even a couple of early-arriving Snow Geese.  No Black Skimmers this time, though.

We saw a good many songbirds, too, though we saw many for such a very short time that they were hard to identify.  Many of the warblers, in particular, go drab olive at this time of year.  Peterson's Field Guide has a page on "confusing fall warblers" which helps.  C.Z. and I have started calling them C.F.W.s for short.  (Not that saying "W" aloud is really that short.)  We had no trouble, however, identifying a Black-Throated Blue Warbler in the North Garden.  "Take a good look," I said of this favorite bird, "We may not see another one for a long time."  Some of the C.F.W.s or other non-breeding birds we saw today were a Common Yellowthroat, Redstarts (a misnomer, since they're yellow this time of year), and an American Goldfinch.  And I think a Pine Warbler.  

Now, I don't suppose that many of my readers are birders.  (I don't even suppose that there are many of you!)  So, maybe some of these species names are a little more detail than you ever wanted to know ;-).  But for me, the combination of being outside in a lovely marsh and getting to do a little sleuthing, all at once, is not a bad way to spend a day.  We had a very nice, quiet day, often quite alone and feeling safe enough (no small thing in NYC), and we saw about thirty species of birds, all told.  And since every time we've been to the park lately, mostly all the birds we've seen have been very raucous and aggressive robins, I thought it notable that we saw not one robin all afternoon!

May your outside days be enjoyable, however far you have to commute for them!

All images are from Wikipedia Commons or Creative Commons on Wikipedia.