Fossils and cactus babes...

OK folks... in the previous post, before I went off on a tangent about that stinking armpit of the metroplex known as Grapevine TX, I had told you about my visit to White Settlement and collecting a few fossils... here they are, mostly because I told you I would put the pics in more than anything else. They're not that impressive...

This first is a complete clamshell... although, it's probably more an impression of the inside of a shell rather than the shell itself. Or maybe not.. I'm not entirely sure. I like fossils, but I've never been totally inclined to do all the research neccesary... I'm more inclined to set them in the rock garden or a flower pot and not worry about it too much...

The next are ammonite sections. The round one being either a complete small ammonite or the center of one of the ammonite coils... the other just being a loose piece that broke off. See, I pic things up off the ground as I find them after the creeks have washed them free. I'm not inclined to go digging into a hillside. 1) I'm there for about 30 minutes max usually and 2) I don't think anybody would be too happy about someone with a pick-axe in the city park... if you read my previous post you know that just being male in the park with a camera is enough to get you accused of being a child molestor. Being a male in the park with a pick-axe would probably elevate my status to serial killer. Not only that... digging in the park would be destruction of public property, or interfering with a natural waterway or something or other. Plus, pickaxes are just cumbersome things to carry around in general.

Let's just say I'm not inclined and leave it at that... here's the ammonite.

This is an oyster shell. Fairly common as fossils go... and this one is remarkable only in that it still has it's bottom shell, but it was really hard to photograph the other side...

So, anyway, there's some of the local fossils.

I'm not a big fossil hound, I think I fell into fossils as a side note to the gardening... as I mentioned I tend to set them in the rock gardens, and I found the first ones when I was looking for interesting rocks for the rock garden. This part of Texas isn't known for dramatic fossils... although parts of the state do have dinosaur fossils. Tyranosaurus and all that...

and that's it. I said I'd show them, so there they are.

do with them what you will...

This might be slightly more interesting...

I'm kind of an experimental gardener. I do things just to see what will happen... so I'd read about a technique on another blog - forget which one - where somebody was growing bonsai in pure spagnum moss. You wet the moss, pack it really really tight, and things will grow in it.

Well, I had some here... so I packed it really really tight, put it in an old selfwatering african violet pot, put 3 acorns in it and waited to see if any oak seedlings sprouted. They haven't yet... it's been about 2 months... just sitting on the kitchen counter not doing anything... or so I thought...

Also in the kitchen window were some Escobaria vivipara seeds drying. I have most of them in an envelope now, but at one point, some of them got tipped into that little pot of spagnum moss, and if you look closely in the next pic, you will see little pinhead green spots... they're cactus seedlings.

altogether... there are about a dozen of the little things... now Spagnum is highly acid, and it keeps things from developing the fungus that kills most seedlings... I'm kinda wondering how long this will last... or if this is going to become my prefered method of planting cactus seedlings over the next few years... interesting, huh?