This year

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More from Waterford Gardens.  

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Scenes from a nursery specializing in aquatic plants.  This is Waterford Gardens in Saddle River, NJ

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Ornamental millet.  Been more and more busy with doing work-related internet things.  I'm doing most of the social media for the garden where I work and this takes up a lot of the photos I take and a chunk of my evenings.  

The millet is in the greenhouse which is steadily filling with plants.  We have gotten four shipments and will be getting the last one for the season tomorrow.  Initially almost everything went into 32s due to our not having our soil and plant pot shipment in yet.  Now that that has arrived we're furiously potting up thousands of marigolds into 4 inch pots.  We'll continue that with other plants after this final shipment comes in.

Meanwhile outside the snow has finally melted (there are occasional drifts left) and we can finally return to clearing trees and other winter tasks.  Unfortunately the time needed for the greenhouse cuts into the time needed for the outside stuff.  

In brief: spring is coming and there's lots to do.

[oakapples]

This afternoon I went to a talk about structural colour in Hibiscus, during which I remembered about these Lamproderma slime moulds that also display this phenomenon (although with a different physical basis). Many species are restricted to the snow-line in montane Europe. Beautiful things.

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I'm going to read this review article to learn something about structural color.  I remember learning that bluejays use structural color to make their feathers appear blue, by reflecting light in the blue range.  If you hold one up to the light, you'll only see gray.  

I've never seen slime mold like that though.  This must be thin film interference?  And the hibiscus is a diffraction grating.  

Haven't done much science reading in the past few years so this will be fun.  

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Time to sweep the greenhouse floor.

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We haven't been able to continue to work on clearing out Norway maples in a while due to the snow coverage.  The poor lonely woodpile off by itself in the snow.  

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Snowmelt patterns: infinitely amusing.  

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The benches that the plants are on are on rollers so you get more bench and less aisle space which is efficient, but there's a lot of sidling around when two people need to be in the same area.  

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Most of the plants are in 32s right now.  We had a problem with getting soil in on time so we had a limited amount when we went to pot up the annuals which came to us as plugs or rooted cuttings.  Only a few plants went into 4 inch square pots; this means that we'll have to pot on many of the plants in 32s at some point before they get planted outside.

[katabaticwind]

I will be spending time in here almost every day of the week from now until we plant these guys.  We still have another two shipments coming in over the next three weeks, but these are smaller shipments than the last one which was 9,000 plants.  It took four of us a day and a half to get those all potted up.  I think I'm looking forward to the smaller shipments!

[untermyergardens]

In the background, a gardener checks the plants.  When all shipments of annuals have arrived there will be around 14,000 plants in the greenhouse.  These are all the plants for the season for all the parks of Yonkers including Untermyer.  

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Behind the scenes at the city greenhouse.  

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The line of clouds above the Hudson River changes how you look at the Palisades by hiding part - it focuses the gaze. 

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Looking south down the Hudson River on a grey day in February.

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Fog lowering on the Hudson River in Yonkers at Greystone Train Station.

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Foggy day on the Hudson River at Greystone Train Station in Yonkers, NY.

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This was one of those days when I was walking home and looked across the street toward the river and the Palisades.  The way the fog was lowering over the river made me walk down the stairs to the train station.  

This pair of geese were initially on the water and eventually came up on land walking around.  

It was impossibly beautiful.  I've got more pictures which I'll queue up in another couple of posts.

[katabaticwind]

I guess I'm supposed to know what this is but I'm not sure.  Might have to wait until spring to find out.  It has graceful arcs.