It's Not a weed, Mom, I promise! Letterboxes - seed

Clue is at this address

http://www.atlasquest.com/showinfo.html?gBoxId=115900

It's Not a weed, Mom, I promise! Letterboxes -Flower

Clue

http://www.atlasquest.com/showinfo.html?gBoxId=115899

"It's not a weed, Mom, I promise!" - Pollen

For Clue go to this address

http://www.atlasquest.com/showinfo.html?gBoxId=114913

It's not a Weed, Mom, I promise!" - Stem Letterbox

Many years ago I spent an afternoon playing with my eldest granddaughter (then 2 1/2) We did many things with dandelions. A few days later she became hysterical when her mother started mowing the lawn full of dandelions. "Don't hurt the dandelion!" she cried, "It's not weed, Mom, I promise!" Thus ---the name for this group of very Kid friendly boxes. ENJOY!

I had already planted several in this series before I started doing this blog.

To find the clues to The Stem Box go to this address.

http://www.atlasquest.com/boxes/clue/index.html?gBoxId=113872

It's not a Weed, Mom, I promise!" - Clock Letterbox

It's not a Weed, Mom, I promise!" - Clock clue can be found at this address:

http://www.atlasquest.com/showinfo.html?gBoxId=121047

It's Not a weed, Mom, I promise! Letterboxes - Root

Go to this address for clue.

http://www.atlasquest.com/showinfo.html?gBoxId=114899

"It's not a weed, Mom, I Promise!" Letter Box - Make a wish

Letterbox:Traditional

Placed: November 5, 2009
Carve: purchased

Placers: PhotoGram

Location: Midway,Utah

I planted this box here because ----in the spring it looks like the photo ab

ove. so many Dandelions. I had intended to go back and get a picture when they are all white, but didn't make it. Maybe next year. From the hill one is surrounded by joyous fields of

dandelion. SO NICE!

Directions: Head to Midway. Drive west from Heber on hwy 113/100s (Main st. in Midway). Turn right on River Rd/400 s, and look for the entrance to the big hill on your right. There is a gate with a large banner that says Memorial Hill. Park here. You may be able to drive up, but the gate has been closed every time I have been there. Proceed clockwise up the hill, completing almost three rotations and reaching the top.

Clue

1. Go the the flags on the east of the parking lot. You will find a path between the

2nd & 3 flags. Take the path. Be careful, the path is steep with loose rocks.

2. You will see a scrubby branch growing right next to the path just before it gets even steeper.

3. Turn to the South and look for a group of rock about 6 feet off the path. There will be two rocks that are larger than the rest. The box is concealed under smaller rocks on the east of the farther large one.

Hope all your wishes come true.

Enjoy!

K.O.A. Letter Box

Placed November 2, 2009

Letterbox:Traditional
Carver PhotoGram
Placers: PhotoGram
Location:Provo, Utah

Status: Active

K.O.A.

When I saw the K.O.A. Campground near where I had planted other boxes, I was immediately reminded of the word Koa which is the name of type of acacia tree that grows in Hawaii. Our eldest son loves the wood from that tree and bought a guitar made of it. He also named one of his pets Koa.

To discover what kind of pet just find this box.

CLUE

You can park in the parking lot at Utah Fort and walk to the K.O.A.Drive.

There is a path (Provo River Parkway) that heads east.

Follow that path until you come to a chain link fence on the right.

You should be able to see an old chair in back of the fence.

See Photo.

Starting at the beginning

of the fence, turn facing the west and count off 20 steps in that direction.

You should see a log fallen log on the right side of the path to the north.

On the right of the log, obscured in the photo by greenery, is a big rock.

The box is under the right edge of the log.

Cheers! Enjoy!

NOTE:

I cannot seem to make this publish witho

ut having some of the words broken up. Just so you know I tried and tried. Now, I give-up.

30 Oaks Ranch Box #1 The Ranch

From the time I was 11, the 30 Oaks Ranch at the mouth of HobbleCreek Canyon has been in my life. My uncle had leased it back in the 1940s and I could write a book on all the adventures I had there as a child. Then my uncle moved to Idaho and the two men who bought the ranch turned out to be my husband's brothers. So I have another book I could write about the fun & adventures I've had there as an adult.

I intend to include to a few of those stories in this series of boxes.

Box # 1 30 Oaks Ranch - The Ranch

Clues

Begin at 2750 East Canyon Road In Springville, Utah. Take a leisurely walk up the Hobble Creek Trail/Bike-path going east up the hill. Almost everything around you in all 4 directions was once part of 30 Oaks Ranch. Down the drive way to the right is the garage in the photo at the top of this page. You may also be able to see the old barn through the trees. As you near the top of the hill you may be able to hear the water flowing from the Burt Spring that feeds the pond below.

Continue up the hill to the end of the fence. Now you will find the box under a small pile of rocks at the base of the 3rd Fence post from the end. It will be on the south side of the fence. Enjoy!

Under the Lilac - Letter box

PlacedNovember 3,2009

Letterbox:Traditional

Carver PhotoGram
Placers: PhotoGram
Location:Springville, Utah
Status: Active

Wigging out!

In August 1989 I wrote the following letter about an experience my Grandson and I had. He is grown now. I ran across the letter this summer and decided to make a stamp about it. What better place for an earwig, but under the Lilacs? (Well, Almost. You'll have to find it.)

You have no doubt heard of the infamous salamander letter. Well, this may go down in history as the infamous earwig letter. Somehow I just keep running into them, surprised to find them congregating in places I don't expect.

Bracken and I were busy pulling sprouted birdseed out of the planter in front of the porch. (The big drawback to bird-feeding is the mess they make and the fact that the scattered seed grows.) I noticed the fallen plastic squirrel, picked it up and tossed it on to the porch. Six or eight earwigs were jolted out of their siestas by the impact and quickly scattered in every direction.

Wow!!! Bracken's attention and my curiosity had both been aroused. I picked up the squirrel and brought it down firmly on the cement and again approximately the same number of insects were dispersed. I repeated the procedure possibly ten times more similar but progressively dwindling results until no more came out. So quickly did those bugs head for cover that there were none visible within seconds after that last slam. We were left with only our amazement so we spent the next few minutes re-telling the tale and sharing it with one another.

Yesterday morning I was watering the lawn with the extension hose Dan bought this Spring. It consists of a sprinkler, about 10 feet of hose and another sprinkler. You attach it to the hose and it is much like a s

prinkler system. After placing it where I wanted it in the parkway, I turned the water on and watched the hose bulge and contort. It struggled, writhing like a snake in pain. I had inadvertently put the sprinkler heads face down. After much twisting and hissing, the hose up-righted them on its own releasing the pent-up water from the first sprinkler, but not the end one. I made two or three feeble attempts to get it working with no luck at all. Finally I took it off and hit it hard against the sidewalk releasing three dead earwigs, one severed in two. Looking inside I could see a clump of bodies jammed against and into the sprayer opening. The force of the water had pushed them as far as they could go and then crushed them. (If such a story were on the news, we'd cringe at the tragedy of it. fortunately, for my conscience sake, it was an accident.) I did spend the next 45 minutes extracting the corpses with a tweezer,piece by partial piece, and did manage to save the sprinkler head.

Since then, I seem to find them everywhere, inside and outside. The other night when Dan jumped out of bed saying something was in bed with us and tried to bite him, I immediately thought of an earwig. We never did find out what it was.

All this trauma within a week, not to mention all the many more casual encounters, has left me with several questions about the make-up and habits of these tiny versions of out-of-this world monster-movie-creatures. So I looked them up.

Did you know that there are only 1100 species of ear

wigs (dermaptera) world wide? And only 20 of those species are found in North America. Now that ought to be a relief to folks like my sister, Lela, who genuinely loathes the little Creepies. She thinks they are sneaky and, you know, she may be right. They hide during the day under debris or in dark spaces (Imagine that?) emerging at night to feed on plants, organic wastes and smaller insects.

Dermoptera means "skinwings", referring to the leather-like fore wings that some earwigs have. Yet many species are wingless and few earwigs fly. I think I'm glad they don't fly.

The name Earwig comes from an old and totally unfounded superstition that they crawl into people’s ears at night and bite them (Now we already know they would be more likely to do that during the day when they are looking for a place to hide don't we?) According to the book earwigs are completely harmless. The worst thing they do is occasionally damage flower blossoms. Knowing this, however, is no great comfort to me. I prefer they stay out of my ears.

Reading on ... I find that earwigs inhabit gardens, fields and also sometimes indoors. I'm not exactly sure of how many times is a sometimes but I'll bet it is pretty darned often judging from my own experience. They feed on aphids and other small insects, plants and ground litter, and perhaps on foodstuffs found in homes and grain warehouses. Perhaps?

The book doesn't have a picture of the "Common earwig" so I'm not sure if that is what they were or if they were Ring legged earwigs whose picture does look like what I saw. I think. The descriptions confuse me. Here they are.

Ring-legged Earwig; 3/8 to 1 inch long. Brown to black.

brown spots at tip of pronotum and

brown rings on yellow femora anci tibiae

Antennae have 15 to 1~ segments and

are black with white ring near tip

of each segment. Adults are

wingless

Common Earwig; Brownish and shiny. 3/8 to 5/8 inch

long, antenae 12 to 15 segments

long. adults have wings but

seldom fly. The Cerce or

pincers at the end of the abdomen

are curved strongly on the male,

while the female's are straight and

almost parallel.

What an absolute wreck I am! How can I know what I saw when I didn't notice how long they were plus I forgot to count the segments on the antanae. Fact is I don't even know if there were wings and I was digging them out with a tweezer. I sure couldn't be counted on to make a positive identification if I had to could I? Hope I never witness a crime.

Well, to continue with what I know about these little Wigglies I can't even identify; they defend themselves in two ways. They use their pincers and they also emit a liquid that smells like creosote when they are disturbed. I didn't know that! Now if I only knew what creosote smells like.

Earwigs do have two redeeming- qualities I discovered.

1. Their metamorphosis is simple and discreet ... discernible changes being increased number of and size of wings. Isn't that nice to know.?
2. The females are especially maternal. They protect eggs laid in burrows on the ground, rush to collect them if they are dispersed, and feed the nymphs until they are strong enough to fend for themselves. They remain with their eggs till their hatched. Now isn't that even nicer to know?

Yesterday I removed a rock from one of my houseplants and discovered a bunch of eggs of some kind. There was no earwig mother there so I guess I can count them out as earwig eggs. Wonder what they were.?

I now have my glasses cleaned and the magnifying glass is handy. You can be sure that from now on I will look closer when I see an earwig so I will know exactly what is. I'm much more interested in them than I was.

Clues

Go to the Church at 970 North 400 East, Springville, Utah. Park on the North side of the North Parking lot. There is a long row of Lilac bushes growing along a retaining wall where an evergreen shrubs overlaps the top of the wall . Start at the first bush on the west.

1. After 10 there is a runt. Don't you always feel a bit sorry for the runt? I do.

2. From there - step on 6 yellow lines going in the direction of the setting sun. Stop on the 6th and look toward Salt Lake.

4. The box is in back of a __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __, on top of the __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ - __ __ __ __ and underneath an __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ - __ __ __ __ __ . All of the blanks are thing I things have been previously mentioned above.

Good Luck & ENJOY! (You may want to cover your ears.)

Picking Mulberries --- Bonus Box

One of the fondest memories I have of my Grandmother, was when I was about 6-years-old. She and my Grandfather lived on a large sprawling farm at the southeast edge of Springville just before you go up the hill to Mapleton and the Evergreen Cemetery.

One early morning she added a straw hat to her usual attire of housedress & apron, took my hand and the two of us walked along the road fronting the farm following a weedy, overgrown path. We talked as we walked along together. I don't recall the conversation, but I still feel the closeness of the connection we had.

As we started up the sloping hill, she stopped near the end of the pasture under a big tree with many low-hanging branches, low-hanging because they were heavy with ripe, juicy mulberries. There we spent a half hour or so picking berries and sharing one another's company. We ate berries too! They were so juicy and delicious! I'm sure that my mouth was stained as well as our hands. When our pails were full, Grandma took my hand and led me back through the scratchy weeds to the house.

Funny! I have no idea what she did with the berries and I have only vague recollections of the other days we spent there at my grandparent's house at that time, but Grandma, mulberries and honey pails are forever fused and suspended in my memory.

Munching Moose Letter Box

Date Placed November 3, 2009

Letterbox:Traditional
Carver PhotoGram
Placers: PhotoGram
Location:Spanish Fork
Status: Active

While spending a few days with Grandchildren at Snowbird, we saw this moose munching near the path leading from Iron Blossam Lodge to the Snowbird Center. I thought it would be fun to make a letterbox about it and plant it at Snowbird. However, It is a place that is often covered with snow and a bit hard to get to, so I decided to simply plant the pox in an easier place. Yes, I am lazy.

Enjoy anyway.

Clues

In Spanish Fork, go west on 100 south until you get to Spanish Fields Drive (1000 West). Follow Spanish Fields Drive until it ends and you can’t go any further. Turn right and park on the side of the street before you drive over the bridge. Cross over the the walking/bike path on the east side of the road and begin there. The first clues are a series of photos of things you will pass. You shoulf find them in order by staying on the main path going toward the mountains. Good Luck!

All these will be on the right side near the edge of the path or on the path.

The "Frog" on the log could have fallen offbut watch for them anyway.

The mark on the tree will below your waist.

When you reach the V in the path you should be able to see a grassy area and Maple Mountain clearly in the distance. At this point turn to your west and count back to the 11th yellow line on the path. Turn to the right. There are To boulders about "Moosehead" sized in the right side of the path. Beyond the western-most one and down the slope there is a fallen log. The moose is resting there. Enjoy!

Silk Saga - The Mulberry Tree

Since it is absolutely essential to have access to Mulberry trees in order to raise silkworms, well, you can guess. Yes, the first thing we did was plant a couple of Mulberry trees.

The mulberry tree originated in east Asia. Some trees bear fruit, others trees are fruitless. The fruit can be red, dark purple or white. The white fruit is green when immature and the red & dark purple fruits are white when immature. These fruit-bearing trees are not popular in landscaping for several reasons, the fruit is messy, and stains, it attracts many birds, also messy and that problem is compounded by the fact that birds eat mulberries & leave droppings that stain.

It is the fruitless Mulberry tree that is most often cultivated for the food for silkworms since they eat only Mulberry leaves (Morus alba being the most popular food). These trees grow rapidly at first, but eventually slow down and do not get higher that about 50 feet. They make wonderful shade but, like most big-leafed deciduous trees, they mean lots of raking in the fall. The leaves of the fruitless mulberry can be quite varied, some sort of heart-shaped and others three lobed.

There is also a weeping mulberry like the one pictured above. We have both.

Note: I believe that I did read somewhere of a Eucalyptus that some silkworms will eat, but I cannot find that info now. A concentrated Mulberry food can also be purchased.

Clue:

Start at the Bywater Park sign.

Note the Number on the sign.

cross the street to the west and walk north on the side walk. You will pass a short fence walkway that leads to another street. Staying on the original sidewalk, go to the (Number on Sign) Park bench. Sit and rest or just enjoy the view of the nice park and mountains. To you left you should see (Number on the sign) trees.

Stad by the northernmost tree and face North. On you left you will see a metal fence post. Count 2 times the (Number on sign) and find the box under the fence on the west side at the base of the post. ENJOY!

Buckley Mountain Letter Boxes -Disappearing Act

Be sure to refer to August entry about Buckley Mountain Letter boxes for further details.

Placed November 3, 2009

Letterbox:Traditional
Carver PhotoGram
Placers: PhotoGram
Location:Spanish Fork

Status: Active

We have a sneaky little friend up on the mountain. Depending on the weather, the season, the lighting and our ability to see clearly, he seems to come and go, although he is made up of a very stationary rock formation. Some times he stands out all by himself and other times he can only be seen by the shadow he makes.

We are sentimental about him because this creature is the first thing our youngest son learned to draw and did he ever get carried away with it. You could find little scrawls on almost everything he could find to draw on and it sort of became his childhood trademark.

This creature's home is in the co

rner of a big triangle. To discover what he is and to get a good look at it, just find this box.

(Of course, it just what you see depend entirely upon you imagination.

You may not see like that at all. Also,

we see it from our front window so your perspective will definitely be different. Good luck!)

Clue

Go the the church at 970 North 40

0 east in Springville Utah. Park in Parking lot.

1. Find the place in the photo.

2. Walk the wall counting off 113 steps.

The box is next to the wall as it changes level. (I tried to dig a hole, but it was too hard. )

From here you should be able to see our little friend