Category: Garden

Winter Birds: Woodpeckers, Foggy Cranes and Cardinals

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Now that the leaves have dropped, I can see all the pretty winter birds that don’t migrate south for winter. I’m still learning how to use my telephoto lens and caught these woodpeckers and cardinals on a foggy day. Fog wasn’t my friend when taking these photos of the birds. Low light, fast-moving birds and low contrast makes it hard to get a good crisp shot of them. A more skilled photographer could use the fog to increase dramatic effect (plus they would probably have more sophisticated equipment with a faster shutter speed.)

 

There is a mating pair of cardinals that live somewhere in our alley. I try to keep my feeders full for them.

Cardinal pair. female on the left.

 

Cardinal male is on patrol. His mate is in the same tree but so very well hidden.

Cardinal: On guard.

 

 

I saw the red bellied woodpecker again but today’s bonus sighting is this downy woodpecker.

Downy woodpecker enjoying a feast on the insects in my slow-dying tree.

 

Downy woodpeckers look just like hairy woodpeckers, except for their shorter bill.

It’s possibly a hairy woodpecker but the guidebook lists the size of the bill as the only difference between these two species. In this shot it looks like a short bill.

 

And then there was this death-defying squirrel. he navigated all throughout the cable and rural electric infrastructure.

 

Then there were honking cranes circling for a landing. I could hear them long before I could see them (it was really foggy).

 

When the sun came out in the afternoon I tried to photograph the woodpecker again, but he’s just so darn fast. When I looked closer, I think it’s a third species—a golden fronted woodpecker. This means that the tree in our yard, that is dying a slow death, is also full of insects, which is feeding all these woodpeckers.

Golden fronted woodpecker.

 

Significant Gifts are Transactions of the Heart

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Every year my husband and I set a budget for spending on Christmas gifts and we try to stick to it. Throughout the year we’re thinking about what we can give each other and our family members that is both thoughtful and budget friendly. We keep notes on our phones and wish lists on Amazon for inspiration.

We have one child. He’s on the spoiled side, but he is loved, if anything. Our discussions about budgets and gifts sound like this:

“Let’s not overdo it this year with the kid gifts, ok? He has so much stuff already.”

“Yeah, last year was overboard. We need to focus more on the time with family, visit your grandma, go see my Pawpaw… not go crazy with Christmas gifts. You know, you don’t have to get me anything for Christmas.”

“I know, and stop saying that. I’m going to give you something for Christmas.”

“Seriously, you don’t have to, whatever you were going to spend on a gift to me, save it and spend it on our son.”

“Didn’t we just start this conversation about how we weren’t going to overdo it with the kid?”

Then somehow every year it looks like Toys R Us threw up in our living room. Everything is a piled-up mess with wrapping paper remnants, shredded bows and packaging shrapnel that could double as a prison shank.

I yearn for a less commercialized holiday, when the frenzy of Christmas decorating didn’t start before Halloween. Maybe it’s wistful to think that a genuine gift is a smoked ham from the fatted hog or a special bottle of wine that everyone gets to taste.

The art to truly giving a significant gift is not about how much it cost, but how well it captures the essence of the recipient. Sometimes this requires a lot of thought or not much at all. Some people in your life are hard to fin

d gifts for no matter the amount of meditation or money.

It’s about giving gifts with the most meaning, not the most expensive.

My young son is a better gift giver than I am and that’s embarrassing on Christmas morning. But he provid

es an example of what great gift giving is.

I am an avid gardener and plan continuously for each growing season.

My birthday is in February and on the cusp of spring planting. This year my son knew exactly what he wanted to give me and stated it clearly to his daddy that he wanted to give me “magic beans.”

At first my husband didn’t understand, thinking it was an absurd idea inspired from a Jack and the Beanstalk movie. But our son persisted, telling him it was easy to find at Walmart. So off they went … and there they were on the seed rack, a package of “magic beans” in an envelope containing 14 grams of hybrid green beans.

The perfect gift cost $1.28. When my son gave me the “magic beans” my soul smiled with the deepest appreciation because his gift was full of meaning.

His honest gift is one of my most treasured because it was a transaction of the heart, not the bank account.

PawPaw’s Barn

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Handy husband’s grandfather is a gardener and a retired owner of a vacuum and sewing machine repair shop. He’s practical and industrious and a bit sentimental about barns and tractors. On our recent Thanksgiving visit we walked the fallow fields, prepped and waiting for its next crop. Right next to PawPaw’s new, double-decker barn is his very old, rickety barn. The day I took these photos it was windy and I wasn’t entirely sure the barn wasn’t going to topple over (on top of me.)

One day this barn will collapse and I hope we can salvage some of the wood for frames and other decorative items. But for now, it’s a great photography subject.

 

All About Roses

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I’m studying up on roses. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my Canadian friend gave me a bunch of her books about roses. She instructed me on how to propagate roses from soft wood stems, which I’m attempting to do with the flowers from my grandmother’s funeral.

When I was 16 years old I planted a Peace Rose in my mother’s front flower bed for a project in my home economics class. It was my first attempt at flower gardening. That rose grew for nearly 20 years before a drought and grasshoppers got it. One fall it had such big, beautiful blossoms it could be seen from 100 yards away.

It’s amazing how many varieties, cultivars and classifications of roses there are. I’m just now reacquainting myself with the vast varieties of roses available.

But I’m excited to start learning more about roses and experimenting with them in my garden. More to come…
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Backyard Birds: Red-Bellied Woodpecker

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This morning when I went out to feed and tend to my backyard flock, I heard the telltale sound of a woodpecker tapping the tree in our backyard.

Red-bellied woodpecker.

 

Now that the trees mostly have dropped their leaves, you can clearly see the birds in them. The name of this woodpecker is curious to me, considering his head is red and not his belly.

Woodpecker looking for insects in the trees.

 

Thanks to my trusty telephoto lense, I was able to capture this guy. A few days ago the wide angle was the winner, today it’s the telephoto.

Red-bellied woodpeckers do not migrate south for the winter.

 

This little guy kept eyeing me. He was very chirpy to the other birds in the area that were singing their own songs. It was almost like there was an inter-species conversation going on.

Images of Arcadia

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Occasionally, I get to stand in for my dad and play cowgirl on the family ranch. I love being outside, tending to the critters. When you are doing something, you usually can show something for it. Here are a few highlights from the last seven days. It demonstrates how extreme the weather cycle can be here in North Texas. 79 degrees down to 18 then back to 68, a dusting of snow, a light rain and one blustery day with winds gusting upwards to 40mph.

A week ago it was a very cold night on top of a light dusting of snow. The bitter cold nipped back even the hardiest of the winter vegetables.

 

A few days later it was sunny and 60 degrees. This is a funny picture of the cows at chow time.

A new baby in the pasture. It’s always so sweet to see a new calf, especially a pretty and healthy one like this. My boy named her Marney (like Barney but with an “M,” he says.)

 

Yesterday we got a little over an inch of desperately-needed rain. As soon as the rain stopped, the chickies went looking for waterlogged worms.

Big-Girl Camera: The Sky and the Lens

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Today the sky was beautiful. The high, wispy clouds and bright sun and blue, blue sky, made everything seem to drip in light. I’m a hobby photographer, with a very good friend who loaned me her lovely [and expensive] lenses.

Occasionally I can make my images represent what my eyeball actually sees. And sometimes, I can frame an image that I couldn’t have seen without the camera.

Today I experimented with wide angel and telephoto lenses.

I’m standing in basically the same spot; I did adjust and position my body to frame the photo. I started by trying to capture agriculture in action with the beef cattle in the foreground and the tractor planting wheat in the background.

But I ended up going to school in the difference between the two lenses, which is remarkable. Can you see it, too?

These next four photographs are not cropped or edited other than adding text labels for a visual point of reference. (they are also saved down into smaller files for web publishing).

Telephoto: I can’t get all the cattle in the shot. And look at how “flat” the sky appears.

Wide angle: amazingly all the cattle fit in the shot– all I did was change the lens. And you can see both tractors. Notice how “curved” the image looks. Much closer to the way our eyeballs see the world.

Telephoto: I repositioned to catch the tractor as he made another pass, and to frame out the parked tractor and hay bale.

 

Wide angle: The tractor is farther away (he was moving the whole time I was shooting). Notice the difference in the color saturation the wide angel captures v. the telephoto– how blue, blue the sky is.

And the sun flare – I would have been marked down at least 10 points in Ashton’s photo journalism class at Texas Tech. I personally love the sun flare in photos like this one.

 

My favorite sky images from the day: the wide angle wins for today and does the best job at capturing the glorious sky.

 

 

 

A Good Egg

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“And a big white hen standing on one leg. And under the hen was a quiet egg,” a line from one of our most treasured board books, The Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown.

Today was a momentous day for our little backyard flock of four hens. It was a day we’ve been waiting for… for 21 weeks since they hatched.

Someone laid the first egg, ever!

It was a small, perfectly shaped, light brown egg. I’m fairly certain it came from Dexter since she is the only one squatting and singing a clucking, egg-laying song. But there were both red and black feathers in the nesting box, so it could be Tollie, our one red chicken.

The first egg ever!

 

Experiment: Propagating Roses

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I am experimenting with rose propagation. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I have read about it and gotten advice from my rose-expert friend, who has successfully propagated roses clipped from bar ditches and yards with a caved-in houses.

According to the internet and my friend, a stem that is about the diameter of a #2 pencil with multiple nodes is ideal. It’s recommended to use a seed starter mix, perlite or vermiculite as the medium and rooting hormone.

These roses came from the flowers at my grandmother’s funeral. They were beautiful and smelled amazing, so I figured I’d give it a go and see what happens. I can’t identify these roses (although they are technically not roses, but rather floribundas,) and I don’t know if they are GMO freaks or their growing history. I’m sure they were bombed with all kinds of chemicals and preservatives.

1. Since it’s off season, I got what they had at the hardware store, putting the starter mix into a tub and watering thoroughly. Water, stir, water, wait, water, stir.

2. Once the starter mix is sufficiently moist, I packed it into a couple pots.

3. Made planting holes several inches deep with my handy chopstick.

4. Clipped the roses down to use just the stems with multiple nodes.

5. Dipped the stems into water, then into the rooting hormone so it would stick, and placed each stem into the holes.


6. Covered with plastic sacks to create a mini greenhouse. I left the pots on the ground in the greenhouse in a partially sunny spot.

Now we wait and hope.

The last time I tried this it didn’t work, but it was July, in Texas, during a drought, and we left for vacation, etc. A north Texas November and a commercially grown floribunda may not work either, but I figure it’s worth a try.

November Gardening: Playing with Frost

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November is here and with it comes the first frost for my garden. I live in north central Texas in USDA zone 7b with an average first frost around November 10.

But I always flirt with danger, hoping to extend my garden season for a few warm season plants. With the impending doom lurking with the first freeze, I will be spending my weekend preserving what I can for the winter.

What’s thriving in my garden at the moment:

 

Fall okra. No kidding. I planted okra at least a year ago, but it’s just now coming up. [soon to be killed by frost]

Cucumbers … another one waiting to be bitten by the frost… Maybe I can make a makeshift vertical row cover… I had bad luck with my summer cucumbers because the aphids and mites sucked them dry.

Of course my favorite volunteer Porter tomatoes, god love them, they are tenacious, if anything.

 

Tomatillos. My first endeavor with this plant. I had no idea it would go all over the place. It’s growing habit is more like pumpkins with how it spreads and takes over.

And the ever-resilient Swiss chard. This stuff is hardy and fairest of all. It grows in the winter, spring, summer and fall. It tastes the best in early spring and late fall. It’s frost tolerant to about 25 degrees, which makes it a perfect choice for my winter garden! It’s also delicious, bright and beautiful.