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Hohenberger Farmstead on the Old San Antonio Road
If you’ve ever driven around Texas for any length of time you’ll likely find yourself passing a brown sign pointing to a historical marker off to the side of the road. Many times it just faces a field, but sometimes they are in front of actual buildings. Chris and I were driving from Fredericksburg to Old Tunnel State Park on the Old San Antonio Road when we saw a long stone wall that went on for perhaps a mile. Then we came upon this house and since we had a bit of time to kill before getting to the state park I had Chris turn around so we could check…
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Mexican Free-Tailed Bats at Old Tunnel State Park
Over the weekend Chris and I went to the Texas Hill Country near Boerne to do some hiking and exploring of the area. We happened upon a rainy weekend, complete with some flooding in the San Antonio area. Because of this some of the areas we wanted to go to were closed. As I was planning our trip I found a small park on Google Earth called Old Tunnel State Park. So on Sunday night as we drove back from Fredericksburg to our motel in Comfort we took the Old San Antonio Road to the state park. I really wasn’t expecting a lot of people but boy, was I wrong!…
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Pulsating Mass of Daddy Long Legs!
Chris and I were in the Texas Hill Country this weekend and we had a rainy day on Sunday. Instead of hiking we chose to go to a cave, Cave Without A Name and then scoped out some of their short trails afterward. We came up to a sinkhole and what I thought was a spiderweb, but I quickly realized it was a pulsating and moving mass of daddy long legs! Chris got a close up of them so I could tell if they were actually harvestmen or actually spiders and this particular group was harvestmen. So, they are arachnids but not spiders. But still creepy nonetheless…creepy in a fascinating…
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Gladiolus dalenii | Parrot Beaked Gladiolus
I first came across this species of gladioli at our local nursery only I wasn’t sure what type or variety they were. Initially I thought they were a hybrid but later on I found out otherwise. In fact it is a species plant instead of a hybrid, originally from tropical Africa. It was at the Mercer Arboretum March Mart Plant Sale where I bought the plant that ended up in our flower bed. It was modestly priced, right up my alley. Hopefully the plant will send out extra corms that I can spread around in the bed for next spring. Gladioli are one of my favorite bulbs so having a…
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Collard Green Pesto
The collards were starting to bolt and I decided that I wasn’t in mood for boiling up lots of collards for dinner one night and instead wanted to do something different. In passing on a blog somewhere I’d remembered reading about collard green pesto. Sure enough there were a lot of recipes and I decided on this one to experiment with. I modified it using walnuts instead of pecans and eliminating the olives, but for the most part I followed the directions. Pesto is forgiving and very pliable, I think you could use any kind of green for a different result. All of the collard leaves were not picked, but…
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Peaches
Our 5-in-1 peach/nectarine tree flowered earlier this spring and now has a few fruits on it. I think there is one nectarine but the peach limb has produced the most fruit so far. Technically I think you are supposed to pick the fruit off the first year in the ground in an effort to get the tree to have better growth but with only three or four fruits we decided to leave them on. I guess in another month or so I’ll get to taste the peaches and savor our teeny harvest.
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Dill | Wordless Wednesday
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More Scenes At The Potting Bench
I shared the View From The Potting Bench last week, but here’s what is actually going on *on* the potting bench. This potting bench was actually here when we arrived. It really needs to be rebuilt and fixed. The legs of the table are bent in a few areas and it isn’t quite stable. I miss the potting bench we had in Florida. I found it via Freecycle and picked it up from someone else when we lived in Pembroke Pines. They had two at the time, a small and large one, but I was only able to take the larger one as it would only fit on our little…
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A Favorite Native
Gaillardia pulchella, aka: Indian Blanket or Firewheel, is one of my favorite natives. It blooms for much of the year in warmer parts of Texas and other areas of the south. They’ve been blooming very well for the last few weeks and another patch of them we put in our main garden is about to start blooming as well. We just bought a hybrid variety that is mostly yellow at a nursery. I could probably get into Indian Blanket hybrid varieties and become a collector of these flowers like we have with Salvia. I’m over at Sprout Dispatch today showing off what is growing in the vegetable garden. Come over…
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View From The Potting Bench
Last night I spent an hour or so working around the potting bench, cleaning up seed trays and 4″ pots that hadn’t sprouted or that had already been transplanted. I started a round of more seeds from our stash, trying to germinate some old seeds in an effort to get some new plants for the garden but also an effort to get a fresh batch seeds from that too. Some of that effort is probably futile as some of the seeds are many years old and are likely not going to germinate at all. Oh well. I find myself outside until 8pm these days, working until almost dark and then…