Salty Sam’s Fun Blog for Children
Number 549
Superblooms
Hello Everyone
As a sailor travelling the world, l saw many strange and wondrous sights.
One of the strangest things you will see in the world is a place that is usually a dry and barren desert burst into life after a rain shower.
When you see miles of dry, empty, lifeless landscape stretching before your eyes it is easy to think that the earth has no nutrition in it, no plants – just nothing at all.
Sometimes you can see dried grasses or tumbleweed; but not much colour.
But add water and magic happens.
Plants appear, seemingly from nowhere!
And why is this – well because there were seeds hiding in the ground just waiting to be watered by the rain.
Of course, a downpour of rain is very rare in desert areas, but if it arrives, there can be many seeds waiting to germinate when the conditions are right.
The word we use to describe this burst of life is superbloom.
Superbloom is a word that refers to a mass appearance of wild flowers bursting into bloom all at once.
The conditions have to be exact; there must be enough water soak deep into the soil and trigger germination, but not so much that the seeds wash away in flash floods.
There must also be enough cloud cover to stop the ground from heating up too much in hot sun and drying out – or freezing in low, night temperatures.
ln addition, there must be an absence of strong winds that would damage the young shoots as they emerge.
The spectacle of a superbloom is very rare; one will emerge once every few years.
Superblooms also usually appear where there aren’t too many people around to see them happen either – which is a shame.
Sometimes tourists get to hear about them, and come in huge numbers then cause a lot of damage by picking the flowers or even pulling them up by the roots!
This is an even bigger shame!
One superbloom can be seen in the vast plains of the Atacama Desert in Chile when the rainfall has been unusually high.
Another can be seen in the Californian Desert.
Some flowers that you see there can be grown in our gardens like: Californian poppies which have hardy, long-lasting seeds and evening primroses which have long tap roots.
With recent climate change causing more droughts, superblooms are becoming even rarer than ever.
But of course you can create your own superblooms – as was demonstrated at the Tower of London for the first time in the summer of 2022 when 20 million flower seeds were planted to create an extravaganza of colour around the famous building.
And many school children worked hard to follow the example in their own school grounds!
lf you want to create a garden quickly, you can do it by planting annuals too.
These flowers make their food from the sun, so make sure you plant them in a sunny position.
Bye bye everyone – don’t forget to subscribe to my blog!
Love and kisses
Salty Sam
www.christina-sinclair.com
Bill and Bob’s Joke of the Week
Bill: Why did the cactus cross the road?
Bob: l don’t know. Why did the cactus cross the road?
Bill: Because it got stuck to the chicken!
Salty Sam © Christina Sinclair 2015
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of material from this blog without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited.
Links may be used to www.christina-sinclair.com
Picture Gallery
Tower of London
THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK
This week, Bill, Bob, Emily Henry and I went up to see Farmer Jenkins.
Henry had some very large plastic containers from the chip shop that Farmer Jenkins wanted to use to put out on his land as dinking stations for the animals there – not his cattle which had a trough to drink from, but the smaller animals like hares and deer that could find nowhere to drink if pools and puddles dried up over the summer and autumn.
When we got there, he was out in a field looking around intently.
We wondered what he was doing, so we went to ask.
Well, I mean, how else would we find out?
Anyway, he said that he was going to look after some horses for a few weeks while their owners took a long holiday.
Horses can’t just be left – like any other pet, they need looking after every day.
It would be a nice little earner for him – or what Bill and Bob’s dad calls another revenue stream (way to make money).
But there are plants that are dangerous to horses like: hemlock, ragwort, yew, horse chestnut, deadly nightshade foxglove and horse radish; and he was making sure there were none of those plants growing in the field before the horses arrived.
He had seen a small yew near the hedge.
It had planted itself – maybe a bird had dropped a seed.
He was going to dig it up.
Bill and Bob wanted the little tree for their collection and Farmer Jenkins said that they could have it to plant in town – maybe in the churchyard if the vicar did not mind or even in the park where animals did not graze.
So we left our presents and took one home.
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Quick Quiz
Can you identify these musical instruments?
lt’s the Weekend!
HOW TO MAKE A DOLLS’ HOUSE BEDSlDE MAT
This week, Emily made a little mat to go inside her dolls’ house.
It has a groovy design and matches the throw she made a few weeks ago.
If you would like to make a similar mat, you can copy this pattern or make up your own.
This item can be made with any off-cut of plastic canvas that is the right size to make a mat or rug or small or even large carpet for a dolls’ house.
The mat in the photograph is made with a piece of canvas 10 by 20 holes.
This meant that the item had 9 stitches across and 19 stitches along.
You can use any colours of knitting yarns or even tapestry yarns if you have a few strands spare.
Some light green squares were placed at random using cross stitch then they were bordered with lines of black cross stitch.
The rest of the space was filled with a mid-green colour and stitches were put around the outside of the mat to create an edging.
If you want to make up your own design, you can use random squares, rectangles or diamonds to make a modern, abstract design or regular patterns or stripes to make a more traditional one.
It would be a good idea to design the pattern before you start working to make sure you have a well-balanced design across the whole canvas.
Firstly, draw dots on a piece of paper to represent the holes in your canvas. Draw crosses between the dots to represent your stitches and use colour pencils if you like to represent the colours you want to use.
There will be a different number of stitches to the number of holes.
When you are happy with your design, you can start stitching.
The pattern you create will be unique; you are the designer.
There is a throw for a dolls’ house on the Salty Sam News Desk on Blog Post 539.
Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.
It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.
Use of the toys and projects is at your own risk.
©Christina Sinclair Designs 2015
Quick Quiz Answers
- harp
- violin
- French horn
- flute
- kettle drums (they are a similar shape to an old kettle that was put over a fire – we now call it a cauldron)
