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.
Mom and Dad visited us this Fall. We did some fun western stuff in Fort Worth plus the Benbrook Cowboy Roundup. We also spent some time by Benbrook Lake and ate good vegan food.
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!
According to the latest Zillow Real Estate Market Reports, home values in Benbrook increased 20.0% in the first quarter of 2009, compared to the first quarter of 2008. Nationally, home values decreased 14.2% during this same period.
Downright amazing for a recession! I clicked through to their market report and saw this (warm is up, cool is down). It’s very interesting to me that every city on the Fort Worth side saw appreciation while every city on the Dallas side saw a loss. And guess which city of all saw the biggest gain? Yep, Benbrook!
I have high hopes for Benbrook. If all goes well during the next five years we’ll have a redesigned main boulevard with landscaping and utilities underground (standard in California but rare here) and some “big box” stores. I also just read in the paper that they are building 10 – 35 acre ranch estates on the south shore of Benbrook Lake. That’s not technically in Benbrook (it’s nowhere) but I think having bazillionaires nearby helps with all things.
There’s also Benbrook Town Center (to my San Diego people, think Otay Ranch Town Center with Dutch architecture) but I don’t think this is possible until the economy is doing really well again. It sure would be cool though.
Here’s the evening lightning storm footage I mentioned earlier. The second half is in slow motion. I’ll post another video tomorrow showing a rainbow, hail and part of the neighbor’s roof flying away. It was a day of sweet footage!
Here are thunderstorm pictures from late May. The dark sky shots were from a storm that barely clipped us. Amazingly it hardly sprinkled. The later pictures are from the 96 degree day with golf ball size hail and lightning striking a rainbow that I wrote about here. I was so lucky to get that lightning shot. Thank you Sudi-Pie for finding the rainbow or I would have missed both.
Later on in the evening we saw near-continuous horizontal lightning very far away. I took a gig of video. This weekend I’ll edit that to show the lightning branching out in slow motion. I think there will be 3 or 4 really cool sequences.
