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In Which the Gardener Actually Does Some Gardening
It’s dry, y’all. We had a smidge of rain last Thursday evening when a small storm blew through but it was mostly a talkative storm without a lot of precipitation action. I still try to skip watering every now and then, not always with intention, but it isn’t something the plants in the edible garden care too much for, as you can see. I’ve been watering deeply but it isn’t enough. In the main gardens closer to the house, I’m slowly working my way through weeding paths and eventually weeding those beds. Several need some attention but others aren’t too bad. A summer of neglect isn’t a big deal when…
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Variations on a Species
I’m struggling with what to write here these days. Summer has breezed by, school has started (third grade for Forest!), and we’re limping along with summer until we can get to fall. I suppose the best way to write here is to actually just sit down and write. I almost put this off for yet another day/week because I haven’t actually edited my camera photos of these and so you’ll have to suffice with mediocre phone photos. At the end of July, Chris and I spent a weekend at Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve scanning in some documents there for preservation reasons. We took a break late in the afternoon…
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Life Lately | July 2023
Hello. Three posts in July. Four in June. I had already been slowing down posting here this spring but I didn’t mean for things to drop to a trickle. I have been absorbed in writing elsewhere and then even those other places have dropped off the cliff. I’ve been inside my head, drafting posts, drafting emails, drafting other essays, but not showing up here. It isn’t for lack of content but lack of time and then, in attention. I’ve written here several times about the plight of Fairfield Lake State Park but I’ve slowly morphed into taking a more active role in advocating for the preservation of the park, with…
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Pineland Hibiscus Blooms in the Garden
Last year I bought pineland hibiscus (Hibiscus aculeatus) seeds from Chill Hill Farms in the Florida Panhandle. Well, my plants are finally big enough to start blooming and I am so delighted! Pineland hibiscus are relatively rare in Texas, primarily seen only around the Big Thicket in Tyler and Hardin counties. They are a little more common in western Louisiana and then much more common in Florida. Once these go to seed, I’m planning to start quite a bit more and I’m tempted to put one plant out in the main garden to see what the deer do. The deer generally eat any other hibiscus plant I’ve put out there…
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Good Things on a Sunday Morning *Monday Edition* | 3
Hello! My head hasn’t been in the right space to be spending much time here so here’s a post to get me back into the groove again! I have been very engrossed in working to save Fairfield Lake State Park, something I wrote about here a few months ago. Things have really hit the fan in the last month after TPWD voted to use eminent domain to save the state park. The developer, who took ownership of the park, lake and adjacent properties on June 1st, has since gone on a whirlwind PR tour in Freestone county to sway local opinion. There was a last minute PR dog and pony…
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Chance meeting with Lindheimer’s beebalm (Monarda lindheimeri)
In early June I drove up to Fort Parker State Park hang out with a couple of friends for the weekend. Typically we get an Airbnb or a cabin at Fort Boggy State Park, but Stephanie and her husband recently bought a travel trailer and we have upgraded our options for meetups! I’ll write more on that trip later, but before I left I scouted directions on how to get there. I chose a slightly slower route in favor of looking for wildflowers and the chance to iNat in some lesser known locations. That decision paid off really well! I wasn’t more than 30 minutes from home when I spied,…
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Respite on Drakes Creek
It was oppressively hot this weekend, as it has been for the last two weeks. Spring, our wonderfully mild spring, went *poof* once the calendar hit June. I’m glad we had such mild temperatures for so long, it made being outside much more enjoyable. Now? I’m re-thinking my twice daily laps around the yard at work. Opening the office door this last week has been met with the feeling of the inside of a furnace. So much for the pleasant tour about the yard looking for wildlife–I’m now hurrying to get my steps in and stretch my legs and back inside to the cool AC. Even outside time after dinner…
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Lazy Summer Days
Well, it isn’t quite as lazy of a summer as Rusty is having lounging in the office window to sunbathe for hours every day, but I did go into this summer with the intentions to move a lot more slowly and enjoy life’s simple pleasures a bit more. We met my parents in Corsicana last Friday to drop Forest off with them for a week and this weekend he will transition over to Chris’ mom’s house for another week, so we’ve been kid free the almost the last week. We took some of that time and went over to Gus Engeling WMA to do some botanizing and exploration and I…
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Mothing at Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve
A couple of years ago Chris bought lights and gear to set up so we could go mothing when we were camping, or even in our own backyard. What is mothing? Well, it’s looking for moths, of course! You can do it in a very basic manner, using a flashlight or porch light and try to attract moths that way, which does work to a limited extent. Or you can buy special lights, get a white cloth like a sheet or something similar, hang it up between some trees, and you can really get going with attracting moths! We’ve mothed in our own backyard and at many places we’ve camped…
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Return of the Orange Dogs
Over the last year or two we’ve planted out several new understory trees on the side yard, including several Hercules’ club, Zanthoxylum clava-herculis. Hercules’ club are one of the native host plants for giant swallowtail butterflies and I’d wanted get some established for years before we finally buckled down and bought some trees. Previously, and really still, they can be found on our citrus plants (same Family – Rutaceae), but now we have an alternative to move the caterpillars to if we see too many leave are being noshed by these little friends of ours. I dug out my macro lens for these photos and after editing the photos I…
