Pokeweed

A while after I took this picture of the largest specimen in my yard, the berries started to turn black (mature).


I'd never noticed this plant before moving to Lansing, but it seems fairly common around here. I first asked the neighbor lady, a longtime gardener, and she said she thought it was pokeweed, but wasn't sure. Then a couple days later there was a post on gardenrant specifically about this plant. What a coincidence. I can only hope that identifying everything else in the yard will be so easy.
But knowing the name of this plant isn't enough --not for my goal with this "blog", anyway, in which I hope to actually learn a thing or two about each plant, in order to decide what to leave, what to treat as beneficial, and what to tear out with a vengeance-- so I looked it up on wikipedia. Cool stuff, turns out pokeweed is poisonous. Now, I would have assumed from the song that you could just eat it like lettuce, but that was before I ever saw it. Doesn't look too appetizing. The chickens just ignore it (although they might eat the berries eventually). And apparently it's a food source for the Giant Leopard Moth. Now that's cool!

My hens

Here are two of my girls. They don't have names, but the white one is my favorite. She's a leghorn. I also have two black jersey giants, five barred rocks, and five isa browns. I get around ten eggs a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. In the spring and early summer I was getting one a day from each of them, 13 eggs a day. My girlfriend and I give most of the eggs to our neighbors, as a friendly gesture. It is understood that when our daughter gets a little older, if she wants to start selling the extra eggs she can, but as far as I'm concerned we don't have enough extra to make it worth the trouble. Better to just give them to people we like.

Goldfinch

So, to start with, here's a lousy picture of a bird. If you had asked me an hour ago what kind of bird it was, I might have said it was a "little yellow bird", but now, thanks to our friend Google, and whatbird.com , I can now identify it as an American Goldfinch. They're quite common around here. I'll try to get some better pictures.

What the hell this is

I've been feeling like a goon lately for not knowing what any of the plants are in my yard, so I'm going to use this blog to keep track of what's what, and try to identify them. Not just plants, I'd like to know the animals, fungi, insects, too. So, like the title says, this blog is about the things that live in my back yard.