nothing much happening...

Nothing much happening over the past week... Today I did figure out how to get to a historic graveyard that you can see from the road, but there is no clear access too... turned out that the only road leading to it goes ambles between a natural gas rig, the electric company and the access road to the main water supply of a town... essentially, they don't want people visiting the area. The graveyard is locked up behind a gate, but I stuck the camera through and got a pic of one corner...

also, while I was there, I took a pic of the first of the winecups I've seen blooming this year...

and some of the wild verbena...

Then I came home and made another tire planter. This is what they look like if you have the rims still attached... I'll be painting it Terra Cotta tomorrow.

This one is for my sister, who insisted that she wanted one. My neighbor down the street was walking through the alley when I was making this one, and asked me to make her one. Really, I've made these things since I was a kid... as I explained in a previous post... (click the tag, and you'll find it!) It never occured to me that it was a special talent. Now I'm wondering if I should make a few for the Flea Market... the price of pots is so high, I bet I could get 15 or 20 each out of these...


And that's about all the excitement I've had.

Passiflora incarnata

Today, the Passionflower decided to open it's first bud... I left the vines up on the fence last fall rather than trimming them up. Consequently, I've got flowers much earlier than usual... of course, I'll probably have this thing rampaging all over this summer, completely out of control, but some plants I'll put up with that...

Wild Bluebonnets...

First, I was on a run, so I didn't have enough time to find the best shot... these are quick snaps... but I finally found some wild bluebonnets to photograph for you...
and they were so perfectly set against a rundown farm house too...

I think this last shot may be the best...

Mom came to spend the night yesterday, and left today about 2 PM, so I spent the rest of the afternoon doing yard work... specifically the front yard. The alley still isn't finished, but it's an alley, the front yard is what everybody sees and it desperately needed some attention. After about 3 or 4 hours, I'd achieved quite a bit, and then, since the sun had softened down, I decided I would take some pics... Not much new here, and they're in no particular order, but I was more having fun than anything else...

Here's the Sweet Williams, in full bloom now...

And here's the M. sonorensis ssp. craigii, even though the blooms were bigining to shut down for the night...

And here's Phennig, keeping watch for any mockingbirds in the curly willow tree ...

And this is a shelf that I rigged against the fence in the back yard... it gets the perfect amount of sun for the cactus & succulents, and as rough as it looks, it still looks better than the bare fence... It'll do until I can get something better there... you can see some Agave americana pups that I've potted up on the left. I'm waiting for them to root good, then I'll take em to the flea market to sell for a couple bucks each.

And here's another tray of succulents that I'm doing the same thing with. The Echeverias keep producing baby's and my friends run when they see me with one... so, off to the flea market they go... Not turning any profit on them, but at least they have some chance of finding a good home.

And I don't know if you remember me telling you about the abandoned crown of thorn plant that I found on my front step in a previous post... well, he's been repotted, and he's growing and blooming. Kinda cute... and that's the pachypodium beside it...

And here's on of my Sempervivum's going haywire in the pot tower...

And that's it.

Hope everybody out there had a wonderful weekend!

Later...

golden cat tail blooming...

My cleistocactus winteri, aka 'golden cat tail' or 'golden rat tail' (I prefer cat because 1. it's more accurately descriptive and 2. it just sounds better) has decided to bloom this spring... This is unusual.

Usually it blooms several times from late spring to summer, about 3 flushes... and last year it didn't bloom at all. Maybe these are some buds that started to develop last year and didn't until now...

You've probably seen this plant before, kind of... it's crestate or monstrose variety is quite common on those little grafted cactus you get at wal-mart. A South American native, it likes a little more water in the summer than most cacti. It will survive the winter outside here, but it has to be kept absolutely bone-dry, which is a little bit more than I can manage, so I bring it in...

Rambing around...

Well, I did manage to see some buffalo today...

But then the weather turned on me. Nasty, rainy, and cold...

And then the speaker went out on my GPS... grrrrr....

Texas Bluebonnet Season has started!

Our state flower started blooming a couple of weeks ago, but they're just now starting to really put on a show... Unfortunately, I haven't been able to stop and take pics during my deliveries. If I've got a few minutes, there doesn't seem to be one in sight, and when I'm surrounded by them, I'm on a run!

so this single solitary specimen that has managed to survive in my yard will have to do...

They'll continue to bloom until the summer heat really hits, although after Mothers Day they'll be much less impressive. There's a rather annoying tradition of people wanting to take pictures of their children running through the bluebonnets on Mothers Day... consequently, most of the displays beside the highways, which the state seeds at some expense, end up looking pummelled. A few years ago, the state troopers started ticketing people for it, but it still seems to happen. There are a few places along the highway where on M. D. They have a mowed path down to a circular mowed patch, where you can sit the kids on a bench with a fine display of the flowers spread out behind them... and this usually has a trooper standing there making sure nobody grabs a handfull of them... that's illegal too...

nithing too special...

Nothing too exciting... just posting a few more pics of the back alley...

In the front, is the tire planter. Behind it, is the O. engelmanni that we use every year to make jelly... behind that, you can barely see the spanish bayonet...

This year, I'm mulching with straw. It doesn't look as pretty, but this area would take at least 20 bags of mulch, and it's too darned expensive. The yellow straw will weather down to a gray soon... I know it looks like hell, but it's enviormentally friendly, and anything looks better than johnson grass. NOTHING kills johnson grass except suffocation...


This is the other end of the bed... haven't even started on this end yet... I'm doing all this in the half hour or so of light I have when I get home from work, so it's going rather slowly.


The tree that your seeing at the top of the pic is a peach tree.. it grew up between the shed and the fence from a pit... I know that you're not supposed to grow peach trees from the pit because they won't be any known variety... well this tree produces some of the sweetest cling peaches I've ever ate.

Finally, the sun came out today... the rain was pretty much over yesteday, but no sun, and 45 degrees... Today, it got up to 80, and I loved every minute of it... really, when it comes right down to it, I'm a lizard. I kind of like the heat. Of course, come July and August, don't even try to remind me of that statement, because I'll come back, delete this post and swear you're insane.

But the sun and heat did finally prompt the Mammillaria sonorensis v. craigii to start opening it's buds... still not in it's full glory, but starting to put on a good show...

And a few Sweet Williams started to open up also... I planted this ones ancestors about 6 years ago, and there always seems to be a few around now...

And of course, since Julie showed off her tire planters, I just had to show off mine... You might remember this planter from when I illustrated how to make them in a post last year... click the tag under the posts and you'll find it. I'll take a better pic after I get the mulching and stuff done that I want. In there is an agave, one of the variagated A. americanas, but I don't know which one as I got it from one of those sellers on the side of the road. There's also an O. microdasys and a little sempervivum... I thought the Optunia, with it's little yellow dots would look good against the Agave with it's yellow stripes... both of these plants will get quite big. The sempervivum will spread out to make a ground cover almost, especially if I keep pulling chicks off the others in the yard and planting them in here...

Hope everyone is having a great spring!

GRRRR

Well, I got to Waco at 7 am on Friday morning, and by the time I got home, I had spent 13 hours on the road.

I looked, and i can assure you that there's nothing in Waco to take a pic of at 7 am, in the dark, in the rain. Maybe next time I get there I'll actually be able to see something...

Then I got home and collapsed, and I woke up at 3 am on Saturday. No chance of going back to sleep, so I'm going to spend the weekend trying to get my internal clock back on track... It's still raining, so I'll see if I can find some inside pics to take.