80AcresOnline

It’s not fully open yet, but we count “first bluebonnet” from the first “bonnets” being open, so this counts.  You can see one not as far along in the background.

Read the rest of this entry »

The thicketing plums in full bloom–this thicket began with a few stems of plum stuck in the ground.

Read the rest of this entry »

The earliest native plum is a thicketing bush plum that’s spread in what we laughingly call  the orchard.   First bloom opened yesterday;  this morning I found these, with many more to come.

Read the rest of this entry »

Elbowbush, either Forestiera pubescens or F. angustifolia (we have both species), is the first of our woody plants to flower in spring, and yesterday the first of the elbowbushes on the north fenceline west of the dry woods was opening.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The upstream part of the dry woods swale, with water seeping through the grass on both sides.   This area produces the best water quality, as most of the water has seeped through both rock and soil. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end an hour slogging around a very wet, running-water-wet field as the sun gets low, you might wonder why you didn’t go back before now.  Then you look down and there it is…the first one this spring.  The sheer audacity of it–that determined stem, those leaves reaching for sunlight, and then that fragile, pale pink flower.

Read the rest of this entry »

A little rain, after the hard freeze…a week of warmer weather and some sun…and more plants have burst into bloom or begun to pop buds.   Here a rusty blackhaw viburnum’s buds have lengthened and changed color and texture, reaching out for another year’s growth:

Read the rest of this entry »

We’d had some sprinkles, but the first real rain came Thursday & Friday, about two inches, and set the secondary drainage flowing across the near meadow again.  Creek was up and a little turbid, but the flow in the grass was crystal clear.   Today, I finally photographed a common (supposedly) species of butterfly around here, which I’d never been able to catch in the lens.

Read the rest of this entry »

The cold front that hit central Texas between midnight and dawn Thursday certainly did change things…yeah, we’d had that 15 degree down-spike back in December, and some other overnights in the 20s (good for knocking the ticks back) but this was a serious Arctic blast like we used to get every winter 30 years ago and haven’t had for the past decade.  Of course we wrapped pipes in advance, put on the hose bib foam-thingies, blocked the air vents under the house, all the usual things you do.

Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t….yup, that’s a pipe that burst–not where it’s sawed off, but at an elbow just underground. Read the rest of this entry »