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Gardenias….
You can almost scratch and sniff through the computer screen. The aroma is pretty heady, even more so in the evenings. Our gardenia bush is at back of the house near our porch. Chris cut it back after we moved in and it has put on a lot of growth, looking much healthier. I took a couple of pieces from the trimmings he had sometime in late winter and attempted to root them. I’d had success doing this from a plant I found at a park in Florida so I wanted to try again. So far one has succeeded and put on a leaf and the other hasn’t done anything…
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Then & Now | Changes At The House
May 14, 2012 May 31, 2013 I was going back through the photos we took on one of the visits we had to our house when we were contemplating making an offer on it to look at a tree Chris thought was leaning a lot more than when we moved in (it’s not, it was leaning just about the same then) and found the photo of the driveway and front of the house and knew I had to take a photo of how it looks now to compare. It is hard to see all of the changes but the most evident is that the grass is so much greener this…
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Natives of Texas Nursery | Kerrville, Texas
Last weekend while in the Hill Country we wanted to stop at a couple of nurseries to scope out what might be for sale in a different region than where we are in southeast Texas. We found a very tiny place near Bandera with a couple of cacti that were of interest, but didn’t buy anything. Google search and maps revealed not too many places and most of the ones that popped up were closed on Sunday, which is when we wanted to go. I found Natives of Texas and it said they were open on Sunday but I called just to verify before we left Boerne (apparently that is…
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Hohenberger Farmstead on the Old San Antonio Road
If you’ve ever driven around Texas for any length of time you’ll likely find yourself passing a brown sign pointing to a historical marker off to the side of the road. Many times it just faces a field, but sometimes they are in front of actual buildings. Chris and I were driving from Fredericksburg to Old Tunnel State Park on the Old San Antonio Road when we saw a long stone wall that went on for perhaps a mile. Then we came upon this house and since we had a bit of time to kill before getting to the state park I had Chris turn around so we could check…
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Mexican Free-Tailed Bats at Old Tunnel State Park
Over the weekend Chris and I went to the Texas Hill Country near Boerne to do some hiking and exploring of the area. We happened upon a rainy weekend, complete with some flooding in the San Antonio area. Because of this some of the areas we wanted to go to were closed. As I was planning our trip I found a small park on Google Earth called Old Tunnel State Park. So on Sunday night as we drove back from Fredericksburg to our motel in Comfort we took the Old San Antonio Road to the state park. I really wasn’t expecting a lot of people but boy, was I wrong!…
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Pulsating Mass of Daddy Long Legs!
Chris and I were in the Texas Hill Country this weekend and we had a rainy day on Sunday. Instead of hiking we chose to go to a cave, Cave Without A Name and then scoped out some of their short trails afterward. We came up to a sinkhole and what I thought was a spiderweb, but I quickly realized it was a pulsating and moving mass of daddy long legs! Chris got a close up of them so I could tell if they were actually harvestmen or actually spiders and this particular group was harvestmen. So, they are arachnids but not spiders. But still creepy nonetheless…creepy in a fascinating…
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Gladiolus dalenii | Parrot Beaked Gladiolus
I first came across this species of gladioli at our local nursery only I wasn’t sure what type or variety they were. Initially I thought they were a hybrid but later on I found out otherwise. In fact it is a species plant instead of a hybrid, originally from tropical Africa. It was at the Mercer Arboretum March Mart Plant Sale where I bought the plant that ended up in our flower bed. It was modestly priced, right up my alley. Hopefully the plant will send out extra corms that I can spread around in the bed for next spring. Gladioli are one of my favorite bulbs so having a…
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Collard Green Pesto
The collards were starting to bolt and I decided that I wasn’t in mood for boiling up lots of collards for dinner one night and instead wanted to do something different. In passing on a blog somewhere I’d remembered reading about collard green pesto. Sure enough there were a lot of recipes and I decided on this one to experiment with. I modified it using walnuts instead of pecans and eliminating the olives, but for the most part I followed the directions. Pesto is forgiving and very pliable, I think you could use any kind of green for a different result. All of the collard leaves were not picked, but…
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Peaches
Our 5-in-1 peach/nectarine tree flowered earlier this spring and now has a few fruits on it. I think there is one nectarine but the peach limb has produced the most fruit so far. Technically I think you are supposed to pick the fruit off the first year in the ground in an effort to get the tree to have better growth but with only three or four fruits we decided to leave them on. I guess in another month or so I’ll get to taste the peaches and savor our teeny harvest.
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Dill | Wordless Wednesday