Supermarket garden

It’s almost summertime, which means… it’s time for suburbanites to buy garden plants from supermarkets!

All across New Jersey (and possibly the entire United States), plants in front of grocery stores are a common sight. I’m not sure whether most people buy these plants on impulse (“Let’s see, milk, bread, eggs… oh! They have petunias! I’ll get some petunias,”) or whether supermarkets are just known convenient sources (“We could really use some geraniums out here. Hey sweetie, next time you go to the A&P, could you pick up some geraniums?”).

Have you ever bought plants from a supermarket? Why or why not?

 

(FYI: I was standing in an obvious place [blocking the store entrance, in fact] and using that plant to frame my shot. I was NOT hiding behind a bush and taking sneaky paparazzi photos. Just to clarify.)

Crepuscular crucifers!

My best guess is that this is a wild radish; however, from the photos I’ve seen, wild radishes have widely-spaced petals that splay all over the place. These petals look too neat.

While it might not be a radish, it’s almost certainly something in the Brassicaceae family. Brassicaceae are also known as Cruciferae, which means “cross-shaped,” which refers to the four-petaled flowers.

What do you think?

Asphalt crossing

While walking through the woods, I followed a dirt path off a main trail, and found myself staring at this railroad crossing sign with no railroad in sight.

Thinking of the old New Jersey West Line, I started snapping photos. Maybe this was a leftover relic of a railway of yore!

As I clicked away, an older gentleman (who’d been sweeping a nearby back porch) called out and asked me what I was doing.

I explained— blah blah, local photoblog, blah blah blah.

Since I had his ear, I asked if he knew the origins of this crossing sign.

“Yeah,” he said, “one of the guys found it somewhere and put it here a few years ago. We’re hoping to rewire it, get the lights working, and actually get a gate going one of these days.”

As he spoke, I read his shirt:
THE MODEL RAILROAD CLUB

I’d stumbled into the backyard of the local Model Railroad Club! Of COURSE they’d have a railroad crossing sign in their parking lot!

I didn’t really have time to go inside and get a full tour at that moment, but I really have been meaning to check out their offerings for a while (because, as we all know, I am a giant nerd). One of these days…!

Bike bridge

If you’re standing in the middle of a bike path to take a photo of a bridge, remember to stay alert for oncoming bicycles.

In memoriam

If you happen to pass through Lenape Park in Union, you might notice a tree wearing a white hat.

If you look a little closer, your amusement might turn to sadness.

Although the hat alone tells you pretty much all you need to know, Segundo Padilla was smoothing the path here when his roller toppled off the edge of a shallow embankment (presumably the one near this memorial).

The ink on the hat is fresh, and it’s my guess that the hat was just recently nailed here in memory of the one-year anniversary of his death.

It’s a tragedy, any way you slice it.

Egret!

I was surprised to find this snowy egret in Shallcross Pond in Kenilworth. Just, y’know, hangin’ out, four feet from the bike path.

When I got a liiiiiiittle too close, it flew across the pond.

Don’t worry, it came back later! I didn’t scare it off too badly.

Old blue eyes

I am visiting my parents this weekend, so for Mother’s Day, I had my mother choose from a few flower photos I’d taken. She liked this shot of a tiny blue flower. (Happy Mother’s Day!)

And then we couldn’t identify it. Her first idea was a forget-me-not, but forget-me-nots have five petals, and this has six.

A Google Image search pulled up a few other photos of this wildflower, usually with a caption like “I found a little purple flower, isn’t it pretty” or something equally useless.

Some searches later, I’m pretty sure it’s a blue-eyed grass! Blue-eyed grass is actually a rhizome related to irises, not a real grass. But it’s still a nifty little wildflower!

That seems like a funny name for a flower, though. Maybe the little stripey things on the petals look like the striations on an eyeball-iris, so they themselves look like blue eyes? And/or the resemblance to an eye-iris was a subtle pun on the flower’s relation to a flower-iris? Who knows?

It’s art!

At first I thought this teepee-looking thing in the South Mountain Reservation might be an educational Native American exhibit, something like the the Lenape hut in the Great Swamp. But after seeing a few more of these trees with sticks propped around them, and hearing chatter about local artists who come out here to play in the woods… I think it’s art.

It’s about 5 feet tall, and it’s got an entrance, so you can even go sit inside, if you like!

Family portrait

Last week, after I had decided I was finished mucking about a trail near a pond, I made for the trailhead, which is what one does when one wishes to stop mucking about on a trail. To my surprise, I found the trailhead blocked by a family of Canada geese.

I wasn’t really sure what to do, and neither were they. They were standing in a narrow bottleneck between the parking lot and a larger concrete landing at the beginning the trail, and neither of us could pass the other right there.

I decided to press on, in hopes that they would back up into the parking lot, giving me clearance to exit the trail and return to my car. But they stood their ground, and as I drew near, I heard a funny noise— hissing. Hissing geese!

It suddenly hit me that these were protective parent geese, and I was a threat to their goslings.

Visions of savage goose attacks flew into my head.

I backed away slowly, and quietly stood as far to the side of the trail as I could.

Mama Goose, keeping her head down and pulsing it forward like a sleepy snake, hissed and led her family past me. And without a word, they ungracefully slipped into the pond and swam away in a single file.

But not before I got a family photo.

Half blown

It’s time for those unconquerable dandelions to spread their seeds into your yard!

I am totally ripping off a better shot that I saw last week, but it was still fun to try my own version.