Nature
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@RockChalkinTexas-0 Our kids and grandkids live on Maui. I watched my son making plumeria leis from flowers he picked last Christmas for the nurses who work at the health facility where my DIL is CEO. She and my son always do a major bake as well for the office Christmas party. The streets where they live are just flooded with plumeria trees and it is spectacular!
Never realized how much work it would be to grow one in the contiguous states. Congrats!
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I had great videos of all the hummingbirds last night getting their last drinks in but it says my files are too large (at 10 seconds of video each) so I wanted to share a photo of another part of my landscape, wild iris. At one time they lined the whole of the garden (which is basically the whole back yard) and they would bloom like crazy. Only have a few left after the 2021 freeze and have some left that I repotted to get them out of the ground. The only problem with them being outside was the deer always took the blooms before I could get a whole wall shot, so this one will have to do.
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Today's entry is just a depiction of the land I have and a story about Hattie, the vixen, who has been around us the past 4 years. She showed up with 3 kits last year and she must have dug a den underneath the firewood shed that Mike built because as she takes scraps back behind the shed and disappears for awhile and then comes back for leftovers. Her partner is always near and waits for her to do her thing before he comes to check out what's left (LOL). Each night I take down and put away the bird feeder and the 3 hummingbird feeders and Hattie was just laying there watching me watch the hummers. They were all there to get their last drinks in before I put them away. The dirty racoons will drink the syrup and empty a feeder and have broken so many in the past that I learned my lesson. So anyways, I put 2 of the feeders away and when I came back she had stretched out on my bench. She sits there alot waiting on me to come inside. She patiently waits right there by the bench until I go outside my solarium in back and she's there by the gate. Seeing the kits play and jump around the stack of firewood that is on the ground is something to behold.
So here's my property:
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The infamous she shed!!!!
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Typical terrain of the lots:
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Today's post is of a giant moth I found in my bed of loriopes one morning when I was watering. Just amazing what you can see in his defense mechanismsl
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Nice sheshed!
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Today's post is rather alarming. Late afternoon yesterday this mangy coyote showed up near the deer water bucket just outside our kitchen garden window. There's been only one other time I saw a coyote (mind you I can hear them off in the distance at times) was when I was on a walk with friends 12 years ago and one ran across the road in front of us down in a little valley and disappeared into the thicket. He came from the 2 lots I own away from all my contiguous lots. We saw another group of walkers on the other side of the little valley and they took off running. I often wondered if they saw it again.
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Did you ever ponder how one miniscule aspect of life has such a great impact on our planet? I have and still do.Thought of what Jaybate would have added to the conversation. I love, love, love Sir David Attenborough and what he has done for our planet...making us aware that all life is connected and we have to care for it. I used to watch a PBS show with Marty Stouffer called Wild America back in the early 80's as well as Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler on Wild Kingdom. Mike situated the string lines for our house 3 different ways in order to sit the house between the trees so that we only had to take one out when we built the house. He had a wide knowledge for outdoor living and so we camped out a lot here and made our plans. We bought our first 2 lots on a contract for deed basis and paid $75 a month for each lot beginning in 1981 and saved our money while living in a dump $150 duplex in Central Austin. We started the house in Sept. of 84 and moved in 4 months and 2 days later, on our wedding anniversary. He put up the 40' x 60' metal building all by himself (with the help of a crane) in 2009. All the other outbuildings he would draw out, we'd go over it, and then one day I would come home from work and it would be done!
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Have had over 2 inches of rain overnight. Slow, steady kinda rain. Rain all day. The best of what nature has to offer. Making Hershey's kisses peanut butter cookies to warm up the kitchen. Today's picture is of a small collection of arrow points, knives, scrapers, and flint pieces used in various ways that we unearthed when Mike and the girls and I dug trenches everywhere around the perimeter of our house to put in irrigation. We dug, dumped the dirt in buckets and hauled them to the sifter to run it through and inspect what was left for artifacts. Was gruling work for us girls but we found so many fossils, pottery pieces and rocks that I would take to work with me. There was an attorney I worked with that had a secondary degree in archeology and could look at one of my pieces and tell me what period it was from and how old and what it was used for. He always looked forward to seeing me after a weekend of work. The developer of our subdivision owned 20,000 acres back in the 50s and ran it as a ranch for cattle. We still have one of the loading banks they used and there are still insulators in the trees where they first ran electricty. He told me a lot of history and that they had pretty much excavated all the indian mounds around here and I saw some of his best arrow points. I have a perfect one that Mike and I found while digging at the University of Texas site right before they were going to lose it to sewer pipe trenching for a new subdivision. It's over 6,000 years old and Mike found a sea pod that is over 11 million years old per the attorney. I walk down by the lake when it's low and can find all kinds of fossils. I am a sucker for hauling home more rocks that you can imagine. I put them in the pots when replanting and even have an old aquariam that I filled with all my rocks. I would love to get a metal detector as there is a place where I found an old foundation of a cabin off in my property across the street from our house.
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Hey, those aren't cookies!
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Now those look like cookies!
mmm. -
@rockchalkjayhawk looks like u took a bite out of the 2nd one on the bottom rt. Hmm
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@crimsonblu22 said in Nature:
@rockchalkjayhawk looks like u took a bite out of the 2nd one on the bottom rt. Hmm
I wish!
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They were super crumbly when the girls took them off the pan after baking. Melt in your mouth crumbly. Yummmm.
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HAPPY EARTH DAY!!!!! I was a sophomore in high school in Leavenworth in 1970 when the first Earth Day was celebrated. I remember Robert Redford being a big part of this endeavor to wake people up about the connection we all have to making sure our planet is happy, healthy and keeping the environment rather than paving everything with asphalt and concrete. Robert used to vacation in Austin as a young boy and was in awe of the Barton Springs pool, which is fed by a natural spring. He narrated a documentary on it and the activists that were demanding construction be limited at the Spring's beginning started a years long fight by the Citizens of Austin to protest the development upstream by a "less than caring individual", Jim Bob Moffat, who with all his money thought he could rape the land to gain a profit. At a City Hall hearing that went on for over 24 hours, the City of Austin denied his development permit and the Springs were saved. From time to time they have to close it due to runoff from the other developments that were allowed upstream and it is a never ending fight to keep the Springs healthy. It's a constant 68 degrees and people swim in it year round, even in winter, and it is a shock to your system when you jump in on a 100 degree day! There is a salamander that is on the threatened species list and a cave cricket that was also found and were able to declare it a federally protected habitat. One of our clients owned a 2,700 acre ranch where the headwaters for Barton Springs began and I got to help the ranch owners protect their land with conservation easements with the City of Austin and The Nature Conservancy, whereby their land will never be sold for commercial development and is monitored yearly for control burns, hunting, grazing and wildflower restoration. Each year this family had an open house and Mike and I went to several, which included hiking to the beginning of the Springs and seeing the flora and fauna. Just breathtaking. We all can do our part to keep what we have before it is too late. That's why I plant so many polinator flowers. My wild sunflowers are a haven for the migrating Monarchs and this year I didn't even pull up the dandelions because before all the spring flowers have bloomed, the dandelion is one of the few plants out there when the bees need it the most.
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I lived in Austin in 1978 and visited Barton Springs regularly. It had absolutely nothing to do with the girls that would frequently sunbathe topless.
My reputation as an a-hole wasn't helped by the fact that I would tell out of town visitors that Barton Springs was Texas' only natural hot springs.
