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Overly Excited About The Wrong Plant
We were driving down a two lane, very rural road in central Arkansas having just left Petit Jean State Park and Chris was intent on finding either Lilium superbum/Turks cap lily or Lilium mixhauxii/Carolina lily. I had a vague idea of what they looked like, lily-like you know, but having not recently seen a photo I had no idea for sure. So, here we are driving along and looking at farm after farm with very tiny towns interspersed in between looking in roadside ditches as we got 60mph down the road. We slowed a couple of times for trumpet creeper and orange daylilies to get a better look only to…
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Relaxing
Last week Chris and I drove up to Hot Springs, Arkansas to spend a few days at a house on Lake Hamilton with my parents, brother, sister-in-law, and their kids. It was a relaxing trip, not filled with going hither and tither but for the most part spent lounging inside in the ‘cabiny’ living room or in the slightly more formal and spacious adjacent living area that had near floor-to-ceiling windows, or on the deck outside. More of those photos later. I sat a lot in the reclining chair looking out at the porch as you see here, flipping through magazines, watching whatever was on tv (Food Network or kid…
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4th of July at Lake Livingston
On the 4th of July I met up with Keely and her boyfriend over at Lake Livingston State Park. Chris was still out of town working so I decided to spend time with some friends instead of wading through chores at home—which I could have easily done mind you. Luckily I got there before the crowds got really thick and parking became impossible, but it was already filling up when I arrived at 11am. Keely was meeting a geocaching friend there for a cookout so for the first while we sat around a picnic area talking, eating and watching folks circle around and around looking for parking. The drive out…
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The Height of Summer In The Garden
The placement of our vegetable garden was such because it had the widest area of open space but also because it let the most sunlight in below the canopy of the trees. This area just so happened to be at the very front of our yard near the street, not exactly the most ideal spot but it works out. While it has a lot of sun it also gets some shade which I think has benefited the garden during the heat of the summer. Full sun for plants during the height of Texas heat isn’t very good, so a dose of shade through some of the rougher parts of the…
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Honey Harvest | A Video
We harvested two bars of honey this morning! The bees are in crazy comb making mode right now and Chris thought we might be able to nab some honey from them while they are still building comb and storing up for the winter. Around 6:58 the volume goes off, so no it isn’t your computer. I forgot to turn the volume back up for that segment and didn’t realize it until the video was uploaded. Sorry! I’m a newbie at this video editing stuff. Around 8:30 we switch to indoors and show you the crushing up of the comb. This was our first time noticing small hive beetle in our…
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Fig Season!
It’s fig season around here, or just starting up really. I tried one out about a week ago and it wasn’t quite ready yet…but now, now we’re talking. Last night I walked back and forth under the fig tree as I passed by doing garden and yard chores and would snag one off as I passed. A deliciously fresh desert! I also noticed some other garden animal had enjoyed one too as it was half eaten on the stem! Last year we harvested from the community garden. I’d forgotten we’d done that around the same time we’d closed on our house. We’ve been here a year—time flies!
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Austin In A Day
Last Sunday I made a very quick trip over to Austin to spend the day with my friend Rosemarie. We were college friends, having met aboard the Texas Clipper II when we sailed the summer before our freshman year in college. She’s from a town just outside of Austin but now lives in California and had come to visit her family for two weeks. We met at the Treaty Oak, a tree I’d heard about but had not visited. I found it tucked between parking lots and a shopping center, so it was hard to imagine the many other oaks that used to surround this now lone oak. After spending…
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Lunch Tomato
My kitchen does not have good food photography lighting so I apologise for the dark tomato shots there. I finally carved into the German Johnson tomato, the only tomato off of that plant so far, that had been sitting in my fridge for several days. It was high time, too. I only ate the two slices but I think I’ll polish the rest off at dinner, only after I save some seeds. It is definitely one of the larger tomatoes I’ve grown so I think I’d like to try again with this variety next year, though if it is a poor producer once again it is being struck off my…
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Life of a Black Swallowtail
I’ve been sitting on these images since April and have just now got around to working on them to get them posted here. I had several dill plants growing out on the side of my house. Dill is one of the a host plants to the black swallowtail butterfly in its larval stage. We had multiple caterpillars chowing down on the dill throughout their lifecycle and I even managed to catch one not long after it had emerged from its chrysalis when I came home from work at lunchtime. It was really fun to check on them daily to see which instar they had grown into, sometimes it seemed like…
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Leo Says…
…don’t forget to change your blog feed reader service if you’ve been using Google Reader. It’s gone starting July 1st. I’ve switched to Feedly and based upon Elizabeth’s review to Bloglovin’ as a backup. They both have platforms to import your current feeds, but you can also type in Oceanicwilderness.com into either and add me in or use this link for Bloglovin’. You can also copy in http://feeds.feedburner.com/oceanicwilderness to either of those services, or click the link, but it seems Feedburner has narrowed down their list of potential subscription services significantly. Email subscriptions still work currently with Feedburner so that is also an option until Google does away with Feedburner…