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Bee Day!
We got up this morning, stopped for breakfast tacos at the gas station, and drove through rural Montgomery and Grimes Counties to get to R. Weaver Apiaries just outside of Navasota. If you are looking for bluebonnets, you Texans out there, FM 2 in Grimes County has a ton of bluebonnets in the ranch pastures, sweeping vistas of them. Very beautiful! The bees were very quiet on our way home, not a buzz, and then, as you see in the video above we put them into the hive. They are doing well, bees flitting about the garden right now. We’re doing a bunch of yard work today so we’ll be…
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Goofing Around
I’ve got the goofiest, laziest, and silliest feral cats!
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Leprechaun Lake | Enchantment Lakes
On our hike through the Enchantment Lakes we hiked as far as Leprechaun Lake before deciding we didn’t want to descend further down into the Snow Lakes zone. We figured that going down meant having to come back up and well, we liked up already. Looking back I think we should have sucked it up and gone down into those zones, but at the same time what we ended up doing worked out too, leaving us time to explore other areas of Washington instead of staying only in the Enchantments. There was some rock hopping and precarious log walking involved to get across the streams leading to the lake. I…
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The Veggie Garden Is In! (Almost)
It was crunch time this last weekend and we made it a sprint by getting our vegetable garden in, well at least most of it. We brought in some dirt to even out the surface of where we chose to put the garden. The front yard is much larger than our back yard, and the only flat surface in the backyard would have been over our septic drainfield which is a total no-go for planting. So, up front the garden went. This is also a great sunny space with a bit of dappled shade for the hot summer afternoons. I became ‘one’ with the posthole digger over the course of…
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The Hungry Caterpillars
Last weekend I noticed a black swallowtail caterpillar on my dill. I had planted some dill in the space that is to be Phase II of our flower garden, but for now that space was serving as a makeshift vegetable garden. The dill had sprouted up from one of the large pots we had grown garlic in last year so I transplanted it to the ground instead. With the longer day lengths and increased heat it has already jumped into flowering. When I finally got around to taking photos I noticed smaller instars of the caterpillars! They are soooo cute, right? There’s a small mound of parsley right next to…
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Dusk Is Falling…
Right now it is raining, a light drizzle, enough for the water to pour off the roof and for me to hear the *ting* of drops on our metal roof. The sky brightened for a minute, perhaps a thinning of clouds for the late evening sun to glow through just a bit, but now the sky is darkening once again. The light there for a moment was a yellow-green, the colors of the newly opened leaves of the trees and overgrown grass reflecting back up into the atmosphere. Last night it rained heavily after dark, lightning dancing across the sky and the cymbals of thunder booming after. The forecasters had…
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Alpine Wildflowers In Macro | Enchantment Lakes
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Daffodils
I had begun to wonder if the daffodils would bloom. We planted some in late Fall but it was early Winter by the time we managed to get a few other bags of bulbs in the ground. I kept the label that came with the bags but it seems these are only the ‘Trumpet Mix’ and nothing more specific than that. Let’s hope that they rebloom next year.
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Spring in My Brother’s Garden
I hadn’t been up to DFW to see my family since Christmas, (keeping your head down and working in the garden every weekend for three months straight will do that to you), so a couple of weekends ago I drove up to see my grandmother whose mental condition (and physical) had deteriorated more recently. I also hadn’t been to my brother’s house recently to see the changes in his garden so I decided to stop by and check it out. The weather was beautiful, sunshine and late springtime temperatures instead of late winter temperatures. Of course my nephew Grayson came along for the garden tour. My brother lives in a…
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Sunny Sunday….errr Make that Wednesday
+I bleached our luffa sponges a few weeks ago. They turned out really lovely and I’m going to have to get Chris to cut them for me. Maybe one day when we have beeswax I’ll make soap and the luffa will pair nicely with the soap as gifts! +I’ve been listening to a lot of food/sustainability podcasts lately and one of them discussed organic bananas and the banana industry. It was a bit of a revelation because I don’t usually pay that much attention to buying organic bananas. Bananas are generally very cheap to begin with and the podcast was discussing that even organic bananas are relatively cheap in comparison…