Today we took a quick trip to the lower part of Hobble Creek, near where the creek empties out into Utah Lake. (The plants were pretty overgrown so we didn’t go all the way to the lake side, but we got what we needed. You should already have results from your water testing in your nature journal. Below are the results from the soil testing. Pretty interesting! But first, enjoy this awesome drone video of the area. (It makes you want to go back and bushwack all the way to the lake!)
We learned a short poem to help us remember how to tell the difference between grasses, sedges, and rushes:
“Sedges have edges, Rushes are round, Grasses have joints when the cops aren’t around.”
The stems of these plants are described in the poem. The sedges have edged stems – the one we saw had three distinct sides and corners. The rushes have round stalks, and there were some great examples nearby. And the grasses grow in segments, with joints and nodes. It was interesting to learn that the leaves actually start growing at these nodes and grow up as a sheath around the stem until they sort of pull away and fall off to the side and look like the grass “leaf” we are used to seeing.
Most of my photos were pretty bad – and I forgot to take photos of EVERYTHING – so I’m going to pull from a few stock photos here, too. Here are the plants we looked at.
Barnyard Grass
Cockle Burrs
Fox Tail Barley
Common Reed
Russian Olive Tree
Saltbush
Purple Fleabane
We also heard Song Sparrows, Marsh Wrens, and Franklin Gulls. Thank you Merlin! https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
Here are the soil sample results. Add these to your nature journal page.
Here are some more photos just for fun!
