martaruiz2's Journal

I am a really lucky person as I live in a house with a garden which is an excellent tool to improve the knowledge about plants and others living beings, as insects or birds. A lot of backyards are too much managed and all the floor is cover only by the same purchase grasses, so it is a challange trying to find other kind of plants apart from cultivated. Luckily my house doesnt belong to this sort of houses and even having the floor cover by grasses it is combine with mosses, thistles and other wild herbs.

One of the features that I like most about my garden is that roughly half of it is cover by mosses and grasses. Nevertheless not all my family is happy about this fact, and sadly they are thinking ways to get rid of the mosses, I tried to explain them that having mosses improve greatly the biodiversity of our garden, but they dont pay me any attention and only think about how ugly is it going to look during the summer when it will get dry turning to a yellow colour.

I have to point that we do mow the garden so combine with the fact that is winter it makes really difficult to find flowers. Most of the parts of the herbs that I have seen were leaves prostate on the floor. Anyway I managed to record Taraxacum officinale, Plantago lanceolata and Cardamine flexuosa (the only one with flowers, it was lucky to be on a place that the lawn machine cant reach). I also have a swing with a old wood seat which is cover by lichens as the known Xanthoria parietina , Physcia sp or Lecanora sp.

Hi everyone!

Today I succesfully completed my first day hunting for plants and I want to outline it a little.
This morning I've decided to take a walk around Zolina's salty man-made lake in Navarra, Spain, which is a ''lake'' designed to hold waste water from a salt quarry, not in use nowadays.

The landscape is constitute by crops with cereal growing in them and paths in which you can see people walkin, cyclist riding and time to time even a towing. It is a lovely place to get lost as you barely can hear any noise from the highroads. So even being a place really close to the city ( It takes me 25 minutes by walk to arrive there from my home) you can feel the silent sourrounding you and feel the nature.

The lake attract a lot of different wild birds, like coots or gulls. But today I've decided to take a look only to the plants growing alongside the paths, although I managed to see a blackbird and a bird of prey!

I was a little disappointed as there weren't many plants with flowers. The only ones that I found were a daisy, a common dandelion and a persian speedwell. Nevertheless I took home some vegetative plants and I managed to identify two galiums. I couldn't identify for sure both until species level because the lack of flowers, but one of them I dare to say that was Galium aparine while I have my doubts about the other one, Galium saxitale.