Outdoors
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Echinacea purpurea | Texas Native Plant Week
The purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, has been a tricky plant to grow in my garden. The deer love it! I don’t know how many times it has been chowed down on by those feisty rascals, but it took all summer and just in the past few weeks have the bloom stalks survived being eaten long enough to actually produce a bloom. We started these plants from seeds that I received from my mom. Pass along seeds and plants are the best as they always have some sort of story or memory attached to them. It probably would have helped if we hadn’t planted the flowers front and center along the…
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Bidens laevis | Texas Native Plant Week
A couple of weeks ago I was on the Native Plant Society of Texas webpage and somehow came across Texas Native Plant Week. The Texas legislature signed the week into law in 2009 and this week for praising Texas native plants has been going on now for several years. I’m sure there are events associated with this week, however I thought it would be fun to cover native plants in my yard and garden currently growing over the next seven days. I’ve got a great list of them and this week we’re going to start with Bidens laevis. Last year was our first autumn in this house and that’s of…
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Cedar Brake Outer Loop | Dinosaur Valley State Park
Over the weekend I drove up to Fort Worth to see Patrice and Justin who are currently the Gear and Go Tour ambassadors for Backpacker magazine. You might remember them from our trip to Guadalupe National Park nearly two years ago at Thanksgiving or our first encounter with them in The Whites on the Appalachian Trail where they gave us trail magic and we met them after they had been following our journey from Georgia to Maine. Anyway those two have been traveling the country this summer giving presentations at various outdoor stores and they were stopping three times in Texas. Fort Worth was going to be the best opportunity…
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Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds | Fall Migration
We’ve been seeing the hummingbirds here and there all summer but September is their big month, the month they start heavily flying back through before they make their way back for central America to spend the winter. They stop here to feast before making the long flight over the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of bird interested folks like to ply them with sugar water to help them with energy before they are gone for the winter. I finally put two feeders up last week but my neighbor down the street had his 10+ feeders up for a week or two before that. At the height of the season there…
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Wildness | WG Jones State Forest
Heading east down the Middle Lake Trail (not to be confused with the Middle Lake Hiking Trail), I came to the Deep Gully Trail. To the north it was another wide dirt roadway, to the south I saw a fairly well worn but slightly overgrown singletrack. Feeling adventurous I decided to try the singletrack. Worst case, if it dead ended I’d just turn around. Planted pine stood in rows, sometimes not very obvious, and other times you noticed that this was a managed forest. I’m at a loss for identifying this pea. I was thinking Centrosema or Clitoria but I really just don’t know. I saw some down by our…
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Middle Lake Explorations | WG Jones State Forest
When I arrived at Middle Lake I saw several fishermen on the south end. I spotted a park bench on the east side of the lake and had to wade through calf deep grass to get there. A path was not worn well in this direction. Lake levels were down due to the summer and drought so I put my camera back down on the bench and edged closer to the water. I looked to the north and noticed more cypress trees, deciding that it was worth going off and exploring. A berm separated the lake and the smaller pond behind it to the north. The pond was down as…
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Late Summer Hike | WG Jones State Forest
Feeling the need to get out and stretch my legs, I drove to WG Jones State Forest, which is about 25 minutes from my house. It really isn’t that far away but all of the roads to get there are minor surface roads with a lot of traffic signals and speed limits are only as high as 55 in a few places. Nonetheless, it is a nice little bit of green space surrounded by suburbia. The town of The Woodlands abuts the forest to the west and south, though the park is technically in Conroe city limits. Chris and I went and explored the north portion of the park sometime…
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Paddling Galveston Island State Park
Last weekend Chris and I drove to Galveston for a short weekend stay over the Labor Day holiday. We headed for Galveston Island State Park to kayak their paddling trails on the bay side of the park. I hadn’t even used my kayak since getting it last Christmas and Chris hadn’t taken his out in awhile either. We launched from the Jenkins Bayou trailhead, driving the truck down a narrow two-track road to the launch to drop our kayaks off before parking back up the way in the parking lot. This made it a lot easier than wheeling our kayaks down the road like we’d thought we were going to…
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Backyard Birding
The waterbody we live on is named a lake but really it is more of a pond. There’s another pond adjacent to this one with a few other houses on it as well and it also has a lot of wildlife. Here you see a single roseate spoonbill and a plethora of black bellied whistling ducks. The ducks are very fun but noisy. Sometimes I can hear them inside my house at 11pm or later, just whistling away! I have no idea what they are up to at that hour, but so they are sometimes. (OK, according to multiple resources they are nocturnal feeders. There ya go!) I took a…
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Waiting for Fall
Just a few trees and plants are beginning to work themselves into fall foliage changes. Some are just calling summer ‘done’ and switching over to hibernation in favor of not putting up with the drought any longer. The ones that are truly beginning to turn colors are the mulberries like the one in our backyard. I remarked on Sprout Dispatch that I’m really enjoying this change, this tip of the switch between seasons. I am ready for Autumn. Puttering about the garden the other day I found the mimosa tree still putting out blooms. I’ve seen hummingbirds and swallowtail butterflies enjoying the nectar from the flowers. Walking near the edge…