Here in Highland Park, New Jersey

My block is full of beautiful summer flowers: these echinacea are in the front of my neighbor’s house (two doors down), and the yellow “splotches” you see in the photo are the many rudbeckia (black-eyed susans) blooming in front of my home. I had echinacea growing in my backyard, but they were chewed up, either by deer or by our resident ground hog. Yesterday morning I yelled “get out of here” at the ground hog. I just bought a solar mole chaser. We might buy a love trap. My neighbor down the block caught 11 last year. What can I say, the ground hogs love living in Highland Park.

For more Summer Stock Sunday posts, visit Robin at Around the Island.

Call me impulsive. Or a creative gardener. A risk-taking lawn owner?

I’m sick of grass. I don’t much care for weeds, either. So I pulled up some of my grass in early spring and planted some chamomile seeds on my front lawn. The seeds took a while to germinate, and now I have these pretty, leafy green plants (pictured on right side of photo, under the rudbeckia leaves), but no chamomile flowers yet. While playing with my daughter in the front I pulled up some more weeds. After a while, I had more space to plant in front. My intention was to plant flowers, ideally perennials that would grow back each year. I put in a few, such as creeping phlox, speedwell and Mexican primrose (at left in photo). But there was still room for more. If you recall from an earlier post, I had planted a lot of basil seeds. So I had a lot of basil plants. Since the groundhog or the deer had eaten my dill and chomped at my marigolds and nasturtium in the backyard, I thought my front lawn might be a safer place for my basil. I now have little basil plants in both my backyard and the front yard. And some parsley, too. A few oregano seedlings.

What’s going on naturally where you are? Visit Michelle’s Nature Notes:

Love this new blanket flower, Gaillardia, that I planted in my garden this spring. Such brilliant red and yellow colors in one flower.

Soon I will have many, many of these black-eyed susans or rudbeckia growing all over my garden. Luckily, the animals (ground hog? deer?) don’t seem to eat them. They have already eaten my cone flowers, dill and marigolds. Discouraging.

Lambs ears produce these ultra-pink flowers; you either love ‘em or you pick them away because they are a bit too brilliant. My snapdragons are beginning to show their colors, white alyssum are happily blooming in the front, and a few petunias reseeded themselves from last summer.

For more flowers, visit:

Each month I post a listing of birds sightings in Highland Park. I don’t do the bird sightings; I just set up the page way back in 2001 and post the data. This month I noticed a lot more X’s in the May column. Joanne Williams, who gathers the data from other local birdwatchers, explained to me:

Lots of birds come here to breed in the summer and some just fly through to points farther north. It is one of the reasons that the World Series of Birding (yes, there is such an event) is held in New Jersey in May.

I have been seeing a lot of gray birds in our backyard. It turns out these are called gray catbirds. Michelle sent me this link about catbirds. And if you look at Joanne’s list, you will see that catbirds don’t show up in Highland Park until late April. Here are some photos I took of the gray catbirds:

Do you see the little brown patch near the tail? The bird is not all gray.

Michelle at Rambling Woods writes:

I am going to challenge myself and hopefully you to take a look at nature. What is going on in your area? Is it spring in your part of the world or are you heading into cold weather. Take a little walk….. look at something you might never had paid attention to..a flower…a plant..an animal…What changes are taking place?..Is your garden starting to come to life again?..Step outside and close your eyes. What do you hear? …take a deep breath…What do you smell?

I’d really like to know how my blogger friends feel about what they observe in nature. Post a photo..a poem..artwork or a even few words about what you see and how it made you feel…

I am cheating a little this week, because these are not my own photographs, and I wasn’t even there! Klara, who lives outside Jerusalem, emailed me these lovely photos of a new moon sighting from Mount Radar. In days of old, every time there was a new month, people were required to sight the new moon and then report it to others. This was especially important in determining when the holidays occurred during the month. At some point Jews stopped relying on these sightings and switched to a calendar. It seems, however, that the calendar does not currently match with the sightings of the moon. Here’s a website of the Israeli New Moon Society that explains more.

Anyway, getting back to the pics, I thought they were just gorgeous. They were photographed and sent to Klara by Rabbi Daniel Jackson, who gave me kind permission to post them on my blog. He writes in his note (I didn’t include all the pics in this post, and I’m not sure which one is which):

Roy,

Attached are the four images presented at the Re-enactment yesterday of the new moon sighting yesterday. I have also included a cropping of the moon without the arty field (about 15cm by 10cm) as well as an image of my first siting (which turns out to have been taken at 1958 hrs–earlier than reported at the Beit Din).

Offficially, I reported the sun setting into the cloud bank at 1938 hrs and the first image of the new moon presented at 2007 hrs. I knew that I had seen the crescent before this–but forgot about this image.

Daniel

Enjoy.