Outdoors – Stars & Sunshine

Crystal Mountain Rocks

May 3, 2012 Julia Leave a comment

My grandfather Jim lives in Creede, a small used-to-be-mining town in Colorado (where Johnny Depp is filming part of a movie this summer!). He’s got an amazing amount of knowledge about everything around Creede: hiking/snowmobiling trails, animals, fossils, mushrooms, and where to find cool rocks. When we were up there last summer, one of the places he took us to a place he called Crystal Mountain – where you can find a bunch of quartz crystals. We brought home a couple boxes full.

Quartz Crystals from Creede, CO

We found several small hexagonal quartz crystals, but we also found several rocks with sections of quartz crystal clusters in them.

Clean Quartz Crystals from Creede Colorado

Jim also told us how we should clean off the cluster ones when we got home – which worked out excellently. We soaked them in water and scrubbed them with a rough brush first, since they’re rocks and were covered in dirt. Then we soaked them in a diluted hydrochloric acid solution. My dad had some hydrochloric acid (also called muriatic acid) which he uses to adjust the pH in his pool. BE VERY CAREFUL WITH ACID. We did this in a pool chemical bucket and used thick gloves intended for use with strong chemicals like this. Fill up the bucket with water then add some acid. As soon as we put them in the acid, many of the rocks started bubbling. We decided this was probably some of the rocks (i.e. limestone) interacting with the acid and dissolving. Once this had died down, we picked out the rocks and rinsed them off again. In some of them, a lot of the rock-looking-rock had dissolved away, leaving even more shiny crystals than we could see when we picked them up. In many, some of the orange rusty tint had faded leaving prettier rocks. Below are just a few of the ones we brought home.

Quartz Crystal Clusters from Creede, CO

We’ve now got a few clusters of these guys around the house, which look pretty cool and are a nice reminder of our trips to Creede.

You also need to be very careful when disposing of materials like this. We neutralized the leftover acid with a little baking soda at a time until it stopped reacting and a pH strip read neutral, then put it down a storm drain with lots of hose water. Seriously though, acid isn’t something you should play with if you don’t know what you’re doing. This is more of a show-and-tell than my typical “if I can do it you can too!”, but I wanted to share anyways. Look – shiny pretty rocks!

Tomato Planter and a Garden Update

April 4, 2012 Julia 13 Comments

I added tomatoes to my garden! My grandfather grows tomatoes up in Colorado, and they are always so much fun to pick off the vine and eat, and much tastier than store bought ones! (Side note – did you know that many of the tomatoes you buy in stores are dyed to help them look more ripe? When we wash our tomatoes and put them in a bowl on a paper towel, the paper towel is always left very slightly orange-yellowish.) When we went to the hardware store to get supplies for planting vegetables earlier, they were out of tomato plants which was quite disappointing. When we went back for some other supplies though, they had more! And they had my favorite kind from my grandfather’s house – super sweet 100s. I also needed something to plant them in, so I asked the lady working at the Lowe’s garden center what sized container I would need for two tomato plants. She said she had a container that would work fine if I wanted one for free – yes, please! I met her and picked it up a couple days later, and after a little spray paint and some drainage holes I think it turned out great!

Red plastic tomato planter

This is probably much deeper than I really need for tomatoes, but hey, it was free! I got some red spray paint for plastic (in sunset red by rust-oleum), and painted all the visible surfaces (outer sides and top of inner sides – not the bottom or most of the inside which won’t show in my garden). I then drilled several 1/2″ holes around the bottom and sides for some drainage. I filled the tub up most of the way with compost (super cheap available from my city compost facility). I got some lime from the hardware store and mixed it in to the top foot or so of my compost because my grandfather suggested it – it makes the soil a bit more basic. I also helped Eddie put up a trellis to tie the tomato vines upright as they grow out of some fencing wire and a couple of 8 foot posts. My grandfather always ties his tomato plants vertically towards the roof on his porch – and they grow more than 6 feet tall! I like the vertical growing more than the cages you see because it makes all the tiny tomatoes easy to find and pick as they ripen. I really hope these guys do well even with our hot summers here.

In similar news – the rest of my garden is doing quite well, for the most part! My peas are going gangbusters! They’re already over two and a half feet tall (they’ve grown almost an inch a day!), have several flowers, and even have a couple baby pods already!

growing peas - pea pod and flowers

Most of my potato plants are doing well, but something is eating away some of the leaves. A couple of my potato plants are just being devastated. After some internet searching I think it may be snails – apparently they come out at night, so I’ll be looking for them after it gets dark.

potatoes - healthy and being eaten

The garlic is still growing well. I think the onions, green onions, and basil are all growing slower because they were planted from seed rather than bigger parts of the plants – like whole peas, chunks of seeded potatoes, and heads of garlic. They’re still coming along though!

gardening: garlic and onion plants

And here’s how my whole garden area is doing, 40 days after planting (plus adding the tomatoes a few weeks later!

Mmm, I love the red planter and raised bed with those growing soon-to-be-tasty plants!

I have a garden!

March 6, 2012 Julia 1 Comment

Last fall, I got really excited about having a vegetable garden. I looked into how to build a raised bed, got a book about vegetable gardening, and decided what I wanted to plant and found out when to plant it (because our winters are so mild here, there are a good number of things you can grow in the fall and a few things that can be planted before the winter for the next spring). Eddie and I got some wood, paint and dirt, and built a beautiful red raised bed to put in our backyard. Then, our dog decided she loved what she thought was her new personal sand box/bed, and we found out how expensive cute fences are (womp, womp).

Well, a few weeks ago, my wonderful husband put a fence in for my garden, I got some seeds and some compost*, and a friend came over and helped me break up the soil, mix it with the compost, and plant my veggies (thanks, Alison!)

I ended up planting basil, garlic, green onions, onions, peas, and potatoes. I didn’t do as much researching this time, and ended up planting the peas right in the middle of the bed without realizing they grow to be 6′ tall – yikes! we put in a trellis, and we’ll see how the potatoes behind them do when they start blocking some sun. You may notice our raised bed is not quite full. We’d lost some dirt since filling it in the fall due to our puppy playing/digging in it, and even with the added compost didn’t have enough to fill the whole bed. Since its my first time gardening, I figured I’d wait to buy more dirt until next season if I find this works well for us.

It’s been 10 days since planting, and already everyone but the onions have started popping up!

The peas started coming up after only 5 days, and are still by far the largest plants (they are supposed to reach 6 feet in three months).

The basil started popping up after about seven days. They’re still pretty tiny, but more up popping up every day.

I planted four heads of garlic, and first saw the first one today – 10 days after planting everything.

The first potato plant popped up yesterday (after 9 days), and another two showed up today. The green onions have also started growing, but they are very skinny and very short. Looking forward to seeing the onions, and seeing all these guys keep growing. And, of course, having some delicious home grown vegetables 🙂

The first few days of watering I just used a normal hose, and it tossed up a lot of the dirt. Since a few of the smaller seeds (basil, green onions, and onions) were planted only about 1/4″ below the surface, I was worried I disturbed too many of the seeds for them to grow well. So far the basil has been doing great, but we’ll see if the green onions and onions end up doing well. I eventually got a fan spray attachment for our hose, which waters the plants much more gently.

*If you want some compost, see if your city offers any. I was surprised to find that mine has a composting facility where you can drive up and get as much or as little as you like. We have a truck, and they used a big machine to just scoop it into the back for us. We got 500 lbs. (not just for this garden) for $7 – which seemed like a pretty great deal. Way easier than making/maintaining a compost bin of our own.

Julia

A while back, Julia expressed interest in a hummingbird feeder, but I wasn’t excited about paying 15+ dollars for some molded plastic. I told her I would make one instead! Something that I thought could be pretty complicated turned out to be pretty easy.

The parts I needed for the hummingbird feeder:
-Powerade bottle
-red, shallow, square tupperware container
-thin rope
-cutting utensil (I used a knife)
-hummingbird food (can be bought or made yourself)

First, take the lid off of the powerade bottle (be sure to hold on to it!) and mark the center of the top of the tupperware container (mine is not very well centered). Now cut a whole in the center of the tupperware top the size of the opening to the powerade bottle. Once that’s done, check to make sure that the powerade bottle fits through the hole and the lid can be screwed back on. The hole needs to be small enough so that when the lid is screwed back onto the bottle, the tupperware lid is stuck between the two.

Next, cut four small holes near the corners of the top of the tupperware container for the hummingbirds to drink out of. Make sure to leave enough of a ledge for the hummingbirds to sit on.

One of the trickier holes to cut is in the top of the powerade bottle. The hole needs to be big enough so that the hummingbird food fills the tupperware container, but not so big that it overflows. In the end, the humingbird food should only come up to the level of the powerade lid and won’t actually fill the whole tupperware container.

Put the gatorade bottle through the hole in the tupperware lid (from the top) and fasten the gatorade bottle lid to the bottom of the tupperware lid.

Once all of the holes are cut, it’s time to get the feeder ready to hang. Powerade bottles are shaped nicely such that you can hang them easily with thin rope (I didn’t have a gatorade bottle, it might be the same with them). I tied two loops around the bottle, one loop for each indentation and then tied the hanging rope from these two sturdy loops. It is a pretty sturdy hanging method and has already survived a couple of thunderstorms.

Within 3 days I heard hummingbirds near the feeder and saw them on the fourth! While this is probably because of the large number of hummingbirds in our area, hopefully your homemade hummingbird feeder will attract them too!

-Eddie

SAFETY UPDATE: Some concerns have been raised about our feeder design and hummingbird food dye. While there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that red dye is actually dangerous to hummingbirds, the red color is the food is not necessary to attract hummingbirds as long as your feeder itself is red. We will be using homemade sugar + water with no dye when we put the feeder back out this summer. Also, there appear to be some feeder designs that allow hummingbirds to get stuck in the feeder. Ours actually has quite wide holes in the top (wider than they look in the picture above – maybe hole-punch sized) – so hummingbirds are not required to stick their beaks in straight down. You can see in the picture of one feeding above that it is actually at quite an angle. There is also no gap around the outside for the birds to get stuck in. We had great use of our feeder all last summer with no hummingbirds getting stuck.

Fossil Hunting!

June 20, 2011 Julia 1 Comment

Hi, it’s Eddie again. While on a quick trip to Santa Fe, Julia and I made a detour so that we could hunt for some fossils! I had read online that north of Santa Fe, before you get to the national forest, there were some good places for hunting brachiopods and crinoids. We didn’t have an enormous amount of time there, but we did find some pretty cool specimens.

One of the fossils we found was the above brachiopod. It’s essentially an ancient clam.

Here’s the opposite cast of a different brachiopod.

Crinoids were a type of sea creature, related to the starfish, that had a long stalk for a body topped by something resembling a flower. Finding parts of the stalk of the Crinoid is pretty common and two cross sections of the stalk are shown in the above picture. We were pleased we found two segments that were so well preserved!

I believe that I found something resembling fossilized sea weed (the black lines above). But looking at other pictures of fossilized sea plants online, mine is either really sad or not a fossil (but I still think it’s cool).

As you can see, we found quite a fossil rich area! Having only done fossil hunting in Mississippi (quite good fossil hunting there), I was pleasantly surprised by the number of fossils in New Mexico. Hopefully Julia and I will find a new batch of fossils soon!