A quick look at some siblings of the wild variety in my garden right now.
After a few days of heavy rain in the St. Louis area, heavy flooding is widespread. With perhaps 4" (10cm) of additional rainfall expected today and tomorrow, things are expected to get worse before they get better.
If you've been following along regularly you'll know that I updated the pond this spring: emptied it, made it a bit smaller, refilled. I've been waiting to add new goldfish, and the wait is finally over!
It's been quite hot here in St. Louis for the last week or so, and dry. Well, "dry" is maybe not descriptive enough, so I'll clarify by saying that although it's been very humid there has been no rain for a while.
One thing that I've learned in the few years that I've had a pond in my garden is that Spring means toads, who spend most of their lives on dry ground but return to water in order to mate. In Missouri although we have a few species of toads that are only found along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the most common species are the eastern American toad (Anaxyrus americanus americanus, formerly Bufo americanus americanus) and Fowler's toad (Anaxyrus fowleri, formerly Bufo fowleri).
Yesterday I posted butterfly photos from summer 2007 to give myself a reminder of what's coming in the next few months -- this cold can't last forever. Today I continue with that look back to highlight one of the things that I miss most about not being out in the garden: discovery!
More grasses to cut, this time in front of the house, closest to the porch. Mexican feather grass so lovely even when quite possibly completely dead -- they don't reliably overwinter for me even in normal winters.
Continuing my recent inadvertent theme of exclamatory post titles, I found something interesting yesterday. I spent several hours cleaning up some of my beds yesterday, and as a "one last thing before I head inside" task I decided to trim a few remaining ornamental grasses.
A couple of months ago when I saw the first batch of tadpoles in the pond, I was very excited. Then when they grew legs and started leaving the water, I became nervous.
The other day and night we finally got a decent, soaking rain here. Things had been getting pretty dry and tired, but the much-needed rain really helped wake things up. Especially the toads, who I haven't heard for quite a while but started calling that evening and continued the next morning.
Another tiny things post; I've already shown you the very young raccoon, the baby mantises. Today it's time to look at the tiny toads!
I remember seeing two different sets of toad eggs in the pond this year. The first eggs were tangled in the rushes. The second were just in the shallow water of the pebbled "beach".
I want to jump ahead a couple of months into summer because the pond is progressing slowly right now. Still, I guess things are happening.
I've been doing a little bit of work in and around the pond -- so have the toads apparently.
The other morning while digging bamboo rhizomes in Ted's garden, when we'd stop for a quiet breather we'd sometimes hear a rustling of the leaves that didn't seem like it was caused by the wind or our own movements. We both heard this a few times and it seemed like there was some creature moving around in the leaves -- we just couldn't be sure though.
Does your garden have toads living in it? Mine does. Oh, it's not that they're all over the place and I see them every day. I do see them occasionally though, and I like to think that the reason I don't see them more often is they're carefully camouflaged, hungrily hopping around beneath the cover of green I've provided for them. Sometimes though, conditions are right and I get much more exposure to toads than usual. May 2009 was one of those times -- in fact, it was the time when I learned more about toads than ever before.
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