Take a hike

Sally and I hiked part of the Young Gulch Trail today. It was really nice out, not too hot, and Sally loved it because the trail crosses a stream about a dozen times. She looks hot, but she's just wet and quite happy. I'm trying to get her to be a better leash walker on trails, and this was a good practice hike for us. I'm using the very simple method of she pulls/I stop. I found out, at the last 25% of the way back down (maybe she was just tired!) that if I gave her about 6' of leash instead of 4', she did a lot better.

I took some pictures with my spiffy awesome camera, and here are some of them. I taught the lab part of the Plant ID course when I was in grad school, and so I've become content with knowing the family or genus many plants are in, but seldom feel compelled to actually key it out all the way. The above is in the Scrophulareacea, the Snapdragon family, and you can see the shape of the flower is kind of familiar.

Now, you might look at this and think, 'what a boring plant'. But this is in the genus Lesquerella which is closely related to the plant I worked on in school, Physaria bellii So it's kind of like taking a picture of family.
Here's a showy one. This is some kind of Delphinium (Larkspur), and it was even bluer than this. I love showy flowers.


And (drum roll, please).... Here is my first meal from the garden. It's sort of cheating because I didn't plant these greens from seed, but there's a red leaf lettuce and some spinach and they were wonderful together. I had bought and thrown away countless bottles of salad dressing before I discovered Penzey's dry mixes. Love that Penzey's. A little oil, a little balsamic vinegar, some dry salad dressing mix, and there it is. Much less waste.