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What To Do When You Have To Be Out Of The House For An Hour On Short Notice
It's not how I like to live, having to vacate the house on short notice so that someone else can look at it and decide if they'd like it to be home.
But it's what we're in right now, and, last week it was bright (but cold) out, so we grabbed our nature journals, lenses, pencils, and string, and walked to the park to pass that hour.
We were following Barb's Square Foot Challenge from her Handbook of Nature Study blog, which you can read in detail if you'd like.
We start by marking off 12" x 12" areas with string, and then make ourselves comfortable, sitting on jackets discarded in the sunshine.
It's still very early spring, here in our diamond between the lakes, so there isn't a lot to see, but here's what I find in my square foot:
Lots of dry leaves, twigs, and grass.
Small shoots of grass beginning to peek from the centre of existing leaves.
Stubby grass, barely tinting the ground green above the damp, packed earth.
Dry keys of life, abandoned on the ground. No future for this once-twirling blade.
New growth of unknown plants, oblong leaved, coloured in green to deep red.
Tightly wound, yet to uncurl, more new growth buried in the blackness.
More remains from last year's plenteous greens, now brown.
And clover. Soon this park-land will be covered in clover. This is one of the first of many that will crowd out the grass.
