Today was the holiday party for the Rainbow Garden Club – Dallas’s gay gardening group. I had to take something fabulous for the potluck. I started with a pound of deli ham, a pack of sliced Swiss cheese, a pack with capicola, calabrese, and peppered salami, two bricks of cream cheese, some cherry tomatoes, and […]
We got these chickens piece-meal, a few at a time. We’d never had them before, and started out with five Ameraucanas, tiny week-old balls of fluff… three of which turned out to be roosters. I got Jeanette off an ad in Craigslist; she was supposed to be a Maran, but isn’t. We took the three […]
I’m trying this out to see if animated GIFS are supported by my WordPress install: If it works, it should be moving. It’s from this video:
My first thought was, “Hmm, the hyacinth bean vine has started growing onto the ailanthus bush. But something didn’t seem quite right… And, not a great surprise in this yard… it’s a beautiful little snake. Such a sweet little face! I think it’s a Rough Green Tree Snake, Opheodrys aestivus. He crawled onto the fence […]
Today was the first day I saw any blooms on the Lady Margaret passionflower. They’re lovely! They’re not as large as some of the varieties, but the color makes up for the size. The different types ramble along one another… it can be difficult with some of them to tell where one vine ends and […]
For Chris’s birthday, I took him down to central Texas for a skydiving class. Chris, looking dashing in his jump suit. We tried really hard to get him into the neon-green-and-pink one, but he swore it wouldn’t fit. Me, looking portly in my jumpsuit, and explaining something with lots of gestures. For some reason, Chris […]
I felt really bad. For the first time since the bees arrived in April, I walked toward the hive with treason in my heart. I was going to find, and kill, and replace the Queen. The decision had actually been made in June – the queen’s brood pattern was spotty, and the hive wasn’t happy […]
One of the reasons that I get really annoyed when people refer to outdoor sericulture as “wildcrafting,” is that I know from wildcrafting… we usually called it “picking blackberries” or “picking wild grapes” in my family, but we have a long history on both sides of going into the wild and coming back with jams […]
This time of year, it’s not just the moths that are getting busy in the garden. This lovely mantis is starting to show her egg belly – she’ll be laying hundreds of eggs in a tough, resiny casing soon. I have very much enjoyed all the mantises this year! Charlottte is yolking up, too. She […]
The day before yesterday, a lovely female polyphemus moth hatched out, from this June’s rearing. They had been taking so long that I was beginning to worry they would not hatch until spring, but I think they were just waiting for cooler temperatures. I put her in the little suet feeder cage and put her […]