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The hills are olive green now. In March they'll be practically florescent.
But I have to wait. Now they are just soft and kind of khaki. New
ferns are sprouting on the road cut near Devil's slide on the coast
and toyon berries are REALLY RED, making it feel all Christmasy out.
Last week out in the valley, someone had made a "snowman" out of
tumbleweeds. There were three tumbleweeds stacked up in order of decreasing size, and the top one had some cloth stuck in it for eyes and a
mouth and a broomstick was sticking out to the side of the bottom
tumbleweed. It was charming. I wish I could bring a camera out there...
We have a lot of tumbleweed in the valley, rolling around the roads, piling
up at fencelines. Fall is the season where they all let go and start
cavorting. Some of them are HUGE - the bottom of the snowman was probably
over a meter in diameter.
Sprout checking at the site is going smoothly - a few seedlings have died.
They all seem to die after they get true leaves - I've never seen one die
at the cotyledon stage. We were out there yesterday and it was beautiful
weather. It felt like fall, only there was no wind. We waited until the
afternoon to go out - it takes a while for the sun to reach the canyon.
Saw a lot of deer and a red tailed hawk sitting on a rock by the side of
the road.
While we were out, we also checked another experiment we have set up. This
one is on a tarplant. They occur in areas where there are fires, so
we set up an experiment where we exposed one set of seeds to fire and
another set of seeds did not get exposed to fire. The seeds are planted in
pots outdoors. Because tarplant is in the sunflower family,
it has two types of seeds. Sunflowers are really a bunch of little flowers
all squished together. There are two types of flowers that make up a
sunflower: disks (the fuzzy part in the middle) and rays (the ones on the
edge that have the longer petals). It turns out that in this tarplant, the
disk seeds germinate easily, but it's really hard to get the rays to
germinate. We thought exposure to fire might be the answer, but no ray
seeds are germinating at all. I love a good mystery.
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