What an utter disgrace… we haven’t blogged in 115 days! We’re still here.
Steven and I celebrated my Birthday yesterday in our California-like-spot… Rockwall Texas. The drive was amazing, we listened to all our old favorite songs. The weather was perfect! While we were eating, the near by fountain sprayed us with mist every once in a while, so we pretended it was an ocean breeze. The food was perfectly vegan and delicious. We walked for a long time taking beautiful pictures. I took a spectacular shot of Steven, it belongs on the cover of a Ralph Lauren Catalog- very regal- very handsome! We took a “silly” picture and it was my idea- very surprising. It got pretty hot at around 4pm and so we laid down under a shady tree and talked for another long while. It was a magical day (Thank you, my darling)!
I got a beautiful bouquet of tulips (my favorite), a pirate speed-boat and a super sweet card. It says:
Take joy in the music of life.
They’s playing your Song.
Happy Birthday!
Today is Christmas. It’s a White Christmas! We had snowed all day on Christmas Eve. It was 75 degrees and beautiful on the 23rd then it dropped to 30 degrees (that’s an insane drop) on the 24th, with 30 – 45 MPH wind! This “near blizzard” as they called it was unexpected and the amount of snow is very unusual for North Texas (three inches in Benbrook with some one foot drifts). How wonderful it was that it happened on Christmas Eve though, because here we are on Christmas day with snow all over the place… a real White Christmas. I even built a snowman.
I’ll put together a video later… including some home storm chaser action of me jumping directly into the “blizzard” for some sweet footage.
P.S. Our street is frozen solid with 1 cm of ice (!) but it’s blue skies and sunshine again today so everything is starting to melt.
I’m happy to see that we can grow veggies through November here. Our peppers are doing better now than they did in Spring. The tomatoes are producing well but now the plants are looking tired. I learned it’s better to cut the Spring tomato plants back in July than to replant for Fall. We make some killer salsa out of the harvest. Our experimental Mexican Piquin Pepper plants that we grew from seed are finally producing their itsy bitsy peppers too.
One of these slides shows prepared ground for Apache and Navaho blackberry plants (to be planted next Spring). We live on “Hills of Whitestone” so I dug out tons of rocks. One of them must have weighed 200 pounds or more because I could hardly even roll it. We then added a few hundred pounds of various composts (and a little cow manure) to help improve the clay soil. Next week we’ll dump a bunch of mulch on top to encourage the worms to keep working for us over the winter.
Here are some pics from our garden at this point. We’ve have 300+ tomatoes and we’re starting to get some good cucumbers now. The peppers are few but tasty. Our sunflowers expired. The tallest one was about 9 feet tall. Fun to grow!
Here are some pictures we took about a week ago. Just try to imagine everything a little bigger. The sunflowers are about half way up the fence as of now. A couple are starting to grow flowers (I think) and the biggest one will probably be near the top of the fence in a week or two. Our radishes are ready, we have about 30 tomatoes, the cucumbers are flowering and some of the peppers are starting to show up. The green onions don’t grow as fast as I thought they would but they are thickening up. Homegrown radishes are spicer than the store bought ones.
I surveyed the wind and hail damage from yesterday. We only lost two tomatoes out of about 30 and possibly one sunflower out of about 20, but I’m seeing if its half-severed trunk will fuse back together. The others had their leaves pierced and a few were ripped off, but I’m sure they’ll be standing straight and tall again after a week of sunshine like last time. A periodic hail storm might even be a good thing. It sort of showed me which leaves to thin out and also provided some good soft organic matter for our compost bin.
I found our heavy-duty back doormat flipped over 10 feet away along with a sandwich bag and a tin foil dispenser. We didn’t lose any shingles and the pansies (they’re supposed to be dead by this time anyway) have again proven absolutely indestructible. Not too shabby!
Today was 96 degrees. We were driving home when we saw this very small storm on the horizon in the afternoon. We weren’t sure it would get to us but it sure did! It got very windy (we saw some shingles flying across the sky) then it started dropping hail. We had a few pieces of quarter sized hail then ONE golf ball sized piece of hail dropped all by itself. I ran out and grabbed it because it’s the biggest we’ve seen yet and who knows if we’ll see anything like that again.
After the hail, Sudi saw a rainbow pop up, so I went out side to video it. I was lucky enough to also capture a cloud to ground lightning strike that crossed the rainbow! WOOHOO! What a day… I love weather, man.
Spring is really exciting in North Texas. Wildflowers pop up, nights become warm enough to sleep with windows open, and cold dry air from the Rockies collide with warm humid air from the Gulf. That creates severe thunderstorms just about every week here in the southern tip of Tornado Alley. I’m talking loud thunder, big hail, wind that eats signs and, in isolated areas, more rain in one day than San Diego gets in one year! You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a dark green sky (that means get the horses inside now).
We have a variety of wildflowers at this time of year. Here are a few that I picked in a field at the end of our street for Sudi during a bike ride (well, technically not while I was riding). Pretty, huh? There’s a bluebonnet, two buttercups and I don’t know what the others are called. The background is our garage wall. We painted it a sort of cappuccino color. It makes a great patio with all of our folding lawn chairs from the 70’s.
