• Photography

    Summer in Photos: Week 1 | June

    June 1: Black swallowtail caterpillar munching on some parsley June 4: Leo hanging out with me while I write some blogs. June 5: A cropped photo of what I’m 97% sure to be Venus exiting the sun during its transit last week. I took a bunch of photos but thought I didn’t get anything at all until I opened them a week later. I used a red filter to force the camera to be able to shoot into the sun, turned my F-stop to 32 and ISO to 100 and hoped for the best. No, I didn’t look at the sun when I did this—you should see all the outtakes…

  • Gardening

    Cucurbits In The Garden

    Right now we have multiple beds with a variety of cucurbits growing. So far the melon varieties, such as this Charentais cantaloupe have been taking the heat well. I’m looking forward to eating some fresh fruit later this summer! A smaller staged version of the same cantaloupe. We had two plants of zucchini which have both bit the dust, as well as a smaller replacement zucchini we left in our grow-out pots too long. The first zucchini, this one pictured, bit the dust when someone in our community garden chopped the growing tip off. I was not pleased. Another zucchini, a golden variety, bit the dust one day due to…

  • Gardening

    Good Gourd

    Back in late February/early March when I decided to plant all the flowers in the garden I also decided to plant some vines along the back fence. I found luffa seeds at a local garden center and immediately had to have those because they reminded me of Florida. We grew some along one of our fences there. I picked up those seeds and then planted some birdhouse gourds that were in the garden shed—they didn’t come up, mostly likely because they’d been in the shed through the heat of summer and were no longer viable. Instead I picked up more bottle gourds at the store to re-seed in their place.…

  • Thoughts

    Summer—I’m ready for you!

    Summer is officially here in Texas. I know, we have a few more weeks until the solstice but the heat is dialed up, the rain is getting sparse and my tomatoes, I believe, had their peak harvest last week. Summer has arrived! This summer is incredibly full already. We are closing on our first house at the end of the month! It is exciting because we’ve really waited 10 years for this—-oh, and our 10th wedding anniversary is next week! It might have been possible to buy a house if we’d stayed in the Melbourne/Space Coast area of Florida in 2004 and not moved to south Florida when the housing…

  • Food,  Gardening

    Tomato City

    Last week I wrote about cucumbers and the insane amount we harvested throughout May. Oh, they still sent May off with a bang, giving us a reusable grocery bag full in the last two days of May. But, let’s talk tomatoes…. I’m beginning to run out of counter space. This isn’t a new thing, I’ve dealt with this before in Florida and our harvest there, but we had more counter space then. I’ve been picking them when they just turn pink on the bottom (unless I miss one and get one that is ripe), to keep the bugs and birds at bay. I’ve seen many birds flying into the tomatoes…

  • Gardening

    May—The Month Of….

    Early May to say, within the last week, could easily be designated the cucumber weeks of May. I’m almost willing to call the whole month the Cucumber Month but the last week the Sumter cucumbers have waned, letting the County Fairs take over as producing the abundance of fruit. I might be able to get another round of fruit out of the Sumters but I think they are done. The County Fairs have another few weeks. The amount of cucumbers we’ve been harvesting has been bordering on the ridiculous. I took some to Chris’ field site for the biologists and archaeologists to eat on, then he was home last week…

  • Creative

    A Handmade Blanket

    Sewing is not one of my fortes but I do like to make quilts/easy blankets. Right now however I do not have a sewing machine so I took up this endeavor by hand—something very dumb of me to do in the middle of a big harvest season. My coworker is pregnant and due in a few weeks and I wanted to make something for the baby. Normally I would have used a machine to sew up a quick blanket or even crocheted but no, I did it the hard way. It turned out mostly good with a few blemishes but I think that adds to the charm. I miscalculated my…

  • Hiking,  Outdoors

    Eagle Rock Loop Day 2 | Ouachita National Forest

    Read Day 1 if you haven’t already…. We woke up the next morning around 6 a.m. Dawn had already broke and the sky was getting light. Some of the other hikers had begun to rouse before 6, knowing it would take them longer to get ready and drink their coffee that morning. We were hoping to make maybe 12 miles that day in order to ease our mileage for the third and final day so we wouldn’t be leaving the forest so late for our four to five hour drive back to DFW. The ups and downs of the previous day were mostly over; the topo map showed mostly level…