The Judy Tour

Happy Saturday friends!

The hills are alive...🎵🎼🎶 and everything is popping! Each day I go outside and do the "Judy Tour"—walking around the yard to see what's going on, what's blooming, what's just pushing through the mulch. Mom comes with me :-) Back when she was on earth, this is what we did every time I came to see her, we had to go outside and wander the yard to see what changes had happened overnight. People often wonder how I remember so many plant names, it was thousands upon thousands of Judy Tours that taught me. And each exclamation of joy drilled happiness and awe at all the beautiful little things there are in the world, if we just take a moment to look.

Here's this week's Judy Tour of the ranch!

A Green Anole:

The video at the top of the page is also a Green Anole (Anolis carolinensis). The red throat fan is called a dewlap, and males flash it to attract females and defend territory. It's a display of dominance and courtship all in one.

A few fun facts:

• They're the only anole native to the US, found all over the Southeast
• Despite being bright green here, they can shift to brown depending on temperature, stress, or mood — so people sometimes call them "American chameleons," though they're not true chameleons
• They're totally harmless and beneficial — great insect hunters

Bluebird:

The red tips are just getting ready to bloom:

And even though the allergen numbers are still really high, I feel less like this:

And more like this:

The 40 year old Japanese maple's pretty pink seeds:

I love the bark on crepe myrtles:

The azaleas are starting!!! Mom's favorite color:

I don't think I've ever seen termites, you? Well here you go! They were swarming off of an old fence post, far away from the house. On a section of fence we were going to take down anyway. Here's how to tell the difference between flying ants and termites:

• Equal-length wings (all four the same size), ants have unequal wings
• Straight antennae, ants have elbowed antennae
• Thick waist, ants have a pinched waist; termites are more uniform in body shape

Iris:

I'm just starting to see the bees:

Remember last week when I posted the pic of the oak gall on an old white oak leaf? 

Well here is a fresh version on an white oak branch!

A wool sower gall. Caused by Callirhytis seminator, a tiny cynipid wasp specific to white oaks.

The fuzzy, felt-like texture with those little reddish dots is unmistakable — each red spot is actually a seed-like structure inside the fuzz containing an individual larva. 

A few fun details:

• Only females of this species are known — it reproduces entirely by parthenogenesis (no males needed)
• They appear in spring, only on white oaks
• Completely harmless to the tree

This is what happens when you follow a gardener...😁

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It's that time again where you need to go order this stuff:

This is the natural mosquito spray I use, it's made by my neighbors across the street from my old Longmont, Colorado ranch! Smells good, won't kill you, keeps mosquitos away!

THE STORIES:

I was doing my daily Judy Tour this week when I spotted this:

I have been finding naturalized daylilies all over the property this spring and have started digging them up to move them into my sunny garden beds. I planted a section of them and two days later came out to find a few had been pulled up...weird. Then I thought of Lucy barking her head off early that morning and that deer like young daylily shoots. She must have seen this happening and was yelling about it! All the naturalized daylilies's roots are sunk deep and strong in the ground, but my dug up ones are loose in the soil for now. Deer, like goats, only have bottom teeth in the front so it's harder to bite greenery. Imagine the deer's surprise to find the whole clump came out! 

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My friend Bonnie and I were hanging around the upper pasture talking while I fed one morning this week. Everyone in the herd gets a pan of food and I typically put the donkeys in two different areas and the ponies side by side since that's how they want to eat. Except for this day ;-) Blu decided he was going to get both pans of pony food! Tori tried to go to one side and then the other and each time, Blu would swing his butt toward her, blocking her from eating. She was getting very upset and then all of a sudden she lifted her head to look at me and then came running over, eyes wide and doing her impression of an angry and frustrated little girl pointing at Blu and all but yelling at me, "MOM! He's not sharing!" Bonnie and I burst out laughing. I told her, "It's okay, I will finish up the hay bags and then go get you your very own pan and I'll feed it to you outside the pasture so he can't steal it." She calmed down and waited. So darn cute.

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I've been planting daylilies, ajuga, and lambs ears, and Brad's been cutting back pampas grass and taking down all the invasives. This arbor was covered with trumpet vine, honeysuckle, and sweet autumn clematis:

We've let the sweet autumn clematis just run wild because it smells so good and I didn't know it was invasive, darn it. But now that I'm feeling better, we are on a mission to take back control of the farm! Brad fought the good fight, and it took several days, but he finally wrangled everything off the arbor, which promptly lost a bunch of pieces, whoops. He's going to build me a pretty new arbor for that area, I can't wait. This is what it looks like after cutting back all the vines, kinda sad:

Those are holly growing on each side of the arbor area. On the left is a scrubby tree and even more vines but we are waiting for that mama duck to hatch out her babies before ripping all that out too. Then comes a fresh new arbor built just so I can put climbing roses on it! I'm so excited! This is what I ordered from Heirloom Roses:

And this Agastache (giant hyssop) to put at the roses feet:

The thing about Heirloom Roses is that they only grow "own root" roses, not grafted. With grafted, nurseries will use a super hardy root stock that has meh roses and graft/grow a beautiful rose on top. A million years ago, my first husband bought me a lavender colored rose. It was grafted and I didn't know anything about that back then. Eventually the lavender rose died off leaving me with the hardy root stock that had pink roses that were a single layer of petals, called a prairie rose sometimes. That won't happen with these new roses.

I've always liked climbing roses but only ever had one. Back in the 90s when I lived here before, Mom and I went driving the back roads to harvest wild roses to dry and use in wreaths. I took a shovel because I really wanted a chunk of that root stock lol. I look back on this now and think...huh...that probably wasn't okay...but I brought the chunk back to my little house with my first husband and planted it. Eventually we bought a new house and I dug that rose up and took it with me. 

Then I left him and sadly the rose stayed at that house. One day, years later, he emailed me and said, "Can you come get this rose?" I went over and dug it out while he told me his tale of woe, "I've mowed over it. I've poisoned it. I've graveled over it. It won't die." 

😳

I knew exactly how that rose felt.

I rescued it and planted it at my Apex house with Brad. We left it behind when we moved to Colorado but I drove by and saw it recently, it's still thriving on the same fence. 💜

So, when I think of climbing roses, I always think of that story and I want to plant a million of them :-) 

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The grass is always greener:

HOW TO WORK WITH ME:

Equine Partnered Coaching! With horses, without horses, in-person, or online, your choice. 

Neurofeedback Train your brain to calm and ease. The most common response I hear about neurofeedback is, "I'm so much less reactive in my life!" It really does smooth out the sharp spikes. Super helpful if your world feels harsh and spiky right now. 

Reiki Another way to facilitate relaxation, calm, healing. If the weather is nice, you can choose inside, outside, or outside in the herd. 

And of course Women's Circles! The Wednesday circle has a waiting list, I will add you to it if you'd like.

Don't forget my monthly, online, freebie art watercolor classes! These are for all abilities, even if you think you have NO ability. There is a line drawing to trace and then we saturate our paper with water and play with dropping in colors we like and watching how they dance together. We finish it up with some splatter, a little black outline, and of course, EYELASHES!

Saturday, April 11, 10—11:30am ET, spring foal watercolor
You can sign up here!

This is an AI-free newsletter! While I love to use AI to help me figure out a piece of software I don't understand, my intention is to use it to help me with the drudgery, never with writing, art, creation. All em dashes are intentional and mine, I was using them way before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altman's eye :-) 

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Thank you for reading :-)

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