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Monarch Babies
I took these photos on April 19th and since then I haven’t been able to find more caterpillars or any chrysalises despite seeing quite a few monarch butterflies flitting about and landing on the milkweed as well as additional eggs throughout the month. I’m not sure if they are being predated on or if our storms shortly after taking these photos influenced their outcome. Likely a combination of both which is a little depressing. It’s been a little hectic around here and while I’ve had plenty of things to write I’ve been trying to stay on top of multiple things. We went camping over the weekend and I’ve processed all…
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Friday Five | 7
Some thoughts and link sharing for your Friday: a little happy, a little sad mixed in this week. Lemonade. More specifically, a certain mixture created by Beyonce. Two Saturday’s ago as I was scrolling for Outlander tweets I kept seeing social media blowing up about Beyonce’s HBO special releasing her new album. By the next Sunday night someone posted a link to a Vimeo video, now currently taken down as it was pirated, streaming the entire 1 hour movie. I had already been debating what I was going to do after Forest went to bed and I opted to watch the entire movie. Holy cow! I liked and listened to…
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Touring Peckerwood Garden
It’s been a few years since I first heard about Peckerwood Garden. I think I may have stumbled across it when we moved to NW Houston when I was searching out plant nurseries and gardens, and then the garden was reinforced when I saw fliers at our local plant nursery advertising their Open Days that occur a few times in spring and fall. We finally managed to make it there last weekend but it was not the glorious botanical experience I was hoping for! I’d called about four or six weeks ago to find out if we needed to pay for a ticket for Forest since he was under 2…
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April 2016 Book Report
Read +Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors: I really loved this book! If you like to read stories about the outdoors, this book is for you. The premise is that the author is working as a journalist in NYC when one of his friends let’s him know that a fire lookout job is available in New Mexico. He’d previously spent some time in a tower with this friend and really enjoyed his time out there. Well, one thing lead to another and Connors ends up spending half the year looking for fires in the Gila Wilderness and the other half tending bar. What I liked…
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Friday Five | 6
It’s been a hectic week here (sickies, flooding!), so I thought it appropriate to have a Friday Five for some warm fuzzies! Patrice emailed me a week ago to say that she had spotted my little old blog on a compilation list of Best Backpacking and Hiking Websites of All time. Whaaa? Having spent nearly 14 years writing on the internet it is pretty nice to get a little bit of acknowledgement that someone out there enjoys my blog enough to put it on a ‘best of’ list! I’m down there at 119. I liked this list because it gives me a few more blogs to check out that I…
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Regal and Bee Creeks | Pedernales Falls State Park
Up the Wolf Mountain Trail at the state park, not but a mile or so in, you cross Regal and Bee Creeks which feed down to the Twin Falls Creek. We only stopped shortly at Regal Creek, shown here with Chris flipping rocks over to find salamanders and other creek life, but spent more time scoping out Bee Creek which was wider and flowing more than Regal Creek. Bee Creek begged to be explored more. Chris poked around the creek for bit while I entertained Forest with a late morning snack in his backpack. On his explorations he found chatterbox orchids just out of reach of good photography range. Doesn’t…
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Nun’s Orchid | Wordless Wednesday
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Early April Garden Wildlife & Blooms
We’ve never had a ton of monarchs in our garden, not compared to what we had in our Florida gardens, but they’ve always been a transient butterfly throughout the spring and summer migration months here in Texas. This year, however, it seems as if we’ve had a few more than usual and some have been laying eggs on the milkweed! I suspect we will be needing to purchase more milkweed soon. This particular milkweed is Asclepias curassavica, or tropical milkweed, though we have another species that we picked up at another nursery that was unmarked as to what species and hasn’t leafed out enough for us to try to identify.…
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Pedernales Wildlife
Wildlife at Pedernales Falls State Park was fairly abundant. There were a ton of doves, more than I’ve heard at a campground in awhile. It was a constant cacophony of doves cooing in the junipers. Some of the doves started sounding like barred owls, at least to me. Chris gave me the side-eye on that observation, but really, sometimes they had a little ‘who cooks for you’ going on! Western scrub jays were a fun addition to our birding list for the day. We hoped to see golden-cheeked warblers but alas, none were found. The scrub jays were just like their Floridian counterparts, rather tame and willing to pose for…
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Bees on the Borage
Ever since I planted borage a few years ago I’ve typically never needed to reseed it in the vegetable garden, it has always come up itself in late winter. Usually it comes up in a vegetable bed but sometimes it comes up in the middle of the pathway. This year we’ve left several plants in the vegetable garden and they’ve attracted our honeybees and other native bees and pollinators, which has been a very good thing after we’d pulled the flowering greens. The flowering greens had been the main attractant to the vegetable garden up until February. I think parts of the plant are considered to be edible but we…