Outdoor Hour Challenge #18 - Looking for pollen

We have been venturing outside for our walks early in the morning the last few weeks. We are usually out and about by 9:00 a.m. to take advantage of the cool temperatures. By afternoon we are hidden away in our house trying to stay cool. This morning I told the kids we had a quest. Our assignment was to go out and look for pollen. I asked them where we should look for pollen. They quickly replied "in flowers".
We started our walk by checking on our few little garden plants.
The Tomatoes look like they are coming along nicely. Our little cherry tomato plant has bunchs of these little clusters.
Sophie was happy to point out that there were still lots of yellow flowers on the plant too so there will still be more.
I was happy to see this little bloom. I didn't know if my cucumber plants were going to make it. But there are a few little cucumbers growing already and one or two blossoms on the two plants so hopefully we will have a few cucumbers to go with our tomatoes.

Sophie said our quest was over. There was pollen in those flowers on our plants. I said yes there was but we needed to find more so the kids then grabbed their scooters and we were out to look at other flowers to find more pollen.

We stopped and watched this big "bee" bumble around a bush for awhile. It didn't quite look like a bee Sophie thought we should call it a beetle but I don't think it was that either.
Sophie went looking for pollen in these large fluted flowers.


Sometimes I think I have never paid that much attention to the plants and trees around me. This week I suddenly noticed that a tree on our block has all these pick flowers all over it.When driving around I noticed a lot of these trees all in flower right now. Here is a close of up of the flowers. They are more like pom poms or puff balls.
After looking it up online I believe the tree is called a Silk tree or often called a Mimosa. It's scientific name is Albizia julibrissin.
I love that I am learning to really look at what is around me. I live in an area where there is so much variety. I just never really looked at it. Before they were all just trees. Now I am actually noticing the different types of leaves, fruits and seeds that each produces.

Back to our quest for pollen.

The agapanthus are almost all out in full glory around the neighborhood. We have seen a lot of purple and get excited when we see some of the white variety. We peeked inside a few to see if we could see the pollen inside.
We also stopped to really look at the parts of this white iris as well.When you gently lift those purple petals in the center it reveals some little stamen I think. We figured that the yellow lines down the petals must lead the bees to the nectar.

It started to warm up quickly so we headed back home to get out of the sun. But we had a great walk and took a good look at some more plants around us.