Fall Foliage in Carrollton

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The peak fall color in my parents Carrollton yard was in December this year….and seemed more vibrant than usual. The crape myrtle leaves turned red and stayed attached long enough to be noticed.

The pecan turned stayed green for a longer…then turned yellow. It sheds small branches of leaves rather than single leaves. I caught one small branch in the process of turning…the sun bringing out more colors than I had noticed previously.

The mulberry leaves turn yellow. They dominate in the collection of leaves that must be mowed/mulched into the yard.

The red oak in the front yard is indeed very red when the sun shines through the leaves.

Even the neighbor’s wisteria that is coming over the fence contributed fall color.

After last summer’s drought and high temperatures in this area, the trees have apparently recovered sufficiently to provide a magnificent fall display…before settling into winter.

Carrollton Yard – November 2023

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At the beginning of the month – the yard in Carrollton, Texas was still needing to be mowed almost weekly and the leaves were mostly green on the trees. The metal iris I bought last spring was still surrounded my growing vegetation – not the only focal point of the garden as it will be in the winter.

There are still some things blooming.

The pecan tree is shedding groups of leaves that are still green onto the pavers.

I cut the three millet seed heads that grew under the bird feeder. I’ll put them in the sunniest corner of my yard in Missouri. Maybe the seeds will come up next spring, grow as ornamentals, round the corners of the yard that I mow, and feed birds by the fall.

Carrollton is renovating the infrastructure in my parents’ neighborhood. The alley already has flags to mark where the gas line is located. The alley will be removed/replaced and plantings about 8 inches from the existing concrete will be destroyed.

That 8 inches includes some tiger lily and iris bulbs, sunflowers that have come back year after year from my niece’s kindergarten sunflower-in-a-cup planted there over 20 years ago, native hibiscus, and lots of chives. My sister cut the sunflowers and put the stalks further back in the bed (hoping the seeds will continue to mature there), dug up the lily and iris bulbs to plant elsewhere, and dug up/moved the native hibiscus plants.

In the front yard, there were mums planted in open spaces in ground cover…the red oak in that area is beginning to shed a few leaves.

Across the sidewalk, the red yucca has mature seed pods full of black seeds…but is still blooming as well.

Overall – a yard beginning a slow slide to fall.

Carrollton Yard – June 2023

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June is the ‘getting hot’ month in Carrollton, Texas…leading into more frequent 100-degree-plus days in the following months. It is already obvious which yards in the neighborhood are getting watered. My parents have a sprinkler system that my sister keeps tuned to maximize the watering where it is needed most. In the backyard the Queen Anne’s Lace, cosmos, hibiscus, and day lilies are lush – flowers and lots of green. In the front yard there are dusty miller plants in bloom, the last of the daisies, and the red yuccas with blooms and lots of green seed pods. The red oak planted there is finally getting a lot of light and growing well since the ancient mulberry has been cut down.

There is still grass to mow and weed eating/edging – a continuing chore – even though the years of gardening have reduced the area maintained in that way. Pulling ‘trash trees’ that emerge in the flowerbeds requires more finesse by the person doing the work (distinguishing what needs to be pulled from the plants that should be in the flower beds) and is always on the ‘to do’ list for the yard!

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Wishing everyone an enjoyable 4th of July…Independence Day in the US…a day for fireworks, parades, and watermelon!

Tree Trunk Macros – Part 2

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A few days ago, I posted some macro images of our sycamore and cherry tree trunks. Today the macro images are of our Thundercloud Plum and Red Oak tree trunks.

The plum tree bark has fissures and a reddish tinge – maybe from the same pigment that makes its leaves red purple in summer. There are small growths of lichen. The tree is not as well colonized as the cherry but seems to have some the same type of lichen.

The red oak is a mini-ecosystem complete with the lichen (some with a dendritic type of growth) and moss. I appreciate the moss in the winter because it is the greenest thing in our front yard!

The oak also supports some Virginia Creeper vines…with moss and lichen growing under them. The suction cup like attachment to the tree are covered over by the moss.

Overall, this photographic project in our yard has encouraged me to try it someplace else. Maybe I’ll do some tree trunk photography down by the neighborhood pond or into the forest behind our house. Stay tuned.

Zooming – September 2020

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Less that 1000 photos this month…but still enough zoomed images for this post: 16 images. 4 of the images were inside (the stained glass butterfly and the super zoomed flowers). There are 4 butterflies (Common Buckeye, Red Admiral, Palamedes Swallowtail, and Spread-winged Skipper) and a Monarch caterpillar. All 3 birds are somewhat unusual: the Northern Cardinal is a juvenile still begging to be fed by its parents but learning quickly to find seed on our deck, the Blue Jay is contorting itself to get seed from the feeder (the roosts are too close together for him), and the Caroline Wren is tailless. Other animals in our yard or deck are also included: a chipmunk with very fat cheeks and a deer. And lastly are our trees: the sycamore leaves beginning to change against a blue sky after the smoke from the west coast that past over Maryland at 30,000 feet cleared out and an oak leaf that might be an indication that our oak tree has the infection common in our state (and not something we can treat…may eventually kill the tree).

All the pictures were taken at our house or the CSA.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Green tomatoes. I got 2 green tomatoes in the CSA share last week; they have been near the kitchen window since then. One began to turn red almost immediately and the other has stayed green. I’ll make green salsa with the one that is still green (or something else that cooks the green tomato so that it is edible) and let the other one finish turned red to eat like a regular tomato.

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CSA Bounty – September 2020

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Fabulous fall veggies. Our shares have been full of them all month.

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This week we got

  • The last of the tomatoes (green) which I have ripening near the kitchen window,

  • The first butternut squash and sweet potatoes (both on the large side),

  • Maybe the last of the shishito peppers (I picked a few snacking peppers in the cutting garden),

  • And the fall staples of potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, garlic, hot peppers, and kale.

I love the orange veggies (squash and sweet potatoes) and will probably use them for custards or hearty soups…although I like sweet potatoes grated and used in salads and stir fries (as I would carrots). I might have to cook them and then freeze portion sizes since their size is overwhelming to eat in one week!

I cut stevia in the cutting garden and have it drying on the counter. I’ll use it to sweeten pots of hot tea – maybe I’ll have enough to use for the remainder of 2020.

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There were still a few flowers – more on those in another post.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Sweeping acorns and oak leaves. The driveway was covered again. I noticed a squirrel sniffing the acorns and maybe taking a few….there are way too many acorns to rely on the squirrels to do the clean up! I swept the driveway and then the gutter in the street which filled the wheelbarrow. The load made a nice addition to my compost pile (lots of browns to overwhelm the few ‘green’ kitchen scraps I have.

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I am discovering joy in everyday activities….that might be considered chores. The clear driveway plus the knowledge that I’ve kept the acorns and twigs from clogging the storm drain are two positives for the day!

September sunrise. I always do the grocery shopping early and this time I was on my way to the store before sunrise. I stopped at the CSA turn out to take a picture. It was a great way to start the day.

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Mini-clover. The clover is filling in the bare spots in the yard and is still short enough that the mower doesn’t touch it. So far – it had worked better than our attempts to overseed with grass seed. We’ll see what happens over the winter. I hope we’ll still have enough warm days that it will grow a bit more and be firmly established before the first frost.

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Filling a Day of Social Distancing - 5/3/2020 - Dogwoods

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Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

Here are the unique activities for yesterday:

Browsing Life magazine (on Internet Archive) from around the time I was born (mid-1950s). There were articles about Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and exploration of the artic. I was surprised at the number of ads for cigarettes and alcohol. The two images I picked to show as samples were both ads: IBM Electric Typewriters (not yet the Selectric models that had the golf ball-like type element which the company made up until shortly after I joined the company in the 1980s) and a passenger train through the Southwest.

Photographing tiny leaves on our red oak with the digiscope (smartphone attached to spotting scope). The branches of the tree are too high to get close enough to do macro photography (I’m not confident enough to use a ladder that high). We put the spotting scope on the front porch, and it was able to focus on the top branches of the tree. We waited until the sun was in the west to provide good light on the leaves…make it possible to ‘freeze’ the motion caused by the breeze.

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A picture of a cat visitor in Missouri. There is a cat that comes to visit at my daughter’s house periodically (started about the same time the pandemic did). It meows loudly at the door to be let in, visits, then goes home. I was talking to her when it appeared on Saturday evening about dusk. She sent us a picture of the cat that appears to be very much ‘at home’ in their house. It probably belongs to a neighbor although she isn’t sure which one.

Experimenting with Procreate App features. When I make Zentangle tiles on the iPad with the Apple Pencil, I use the Procreate App in its simplest form…changing colors occasionally or changing the intensity of the lines. I experimented with the ‘liquify’ feature on some old tiles. The original is on the left and the right is the one I augmented with a few swipes.

And then I did another with a partial ‘recolor’…quite a change from the original! It was fun to experiment although I think I enjoy the creation of Zentangle tiles in digital form that relies on my own drawing rather that the razzle-dazzle features.

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Receiving a new computer for my husband. Fed Ex delivered it on a Sunday! We were not expecting it until Monday and my husband was still doing backups of his old machine when it arrived.

Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts  here.

And now for the neighborhood dogwoods…

I photographed white and pink dogwoods in our neighborhood during last week’s walk. They were all in front yards and I was able to photograph them standing in the street. The white ones seemed to be a little bruised…might have been out longer than the pink ones. But both were still beautiful. I like the dogwood flowers because they are a springtime feature of our area, the way the trees move in the breeze with their delicate  leafy branches in the summer and then the red of the leaves/seed clusters in the fall. I probably like the white ones that are native to North America the best.

Battered Moth

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Earlier this week when I was heading out to a volunteer shift at Brookside Gardens’ Wings of Fancy exhibit, I noticed something moving at the base of the red oak tree near our mailbox. I got out of my car to see what it was. There was a large moth flapping around on the ground among the remnants of day lily plants. I took several pictures with my phone and continued to Brookside.

When I got there, the staff helped me identify what I’d seen: a Polyphemus moth (read about the species at Maryland Biodiversity Project and Wikipedia). It’s a female because it doesn’t have the feather-looking antennae. It looked very battered and it died sometime after I left. I collected it when I got home and have it in my freezer…trying to decide what to do with it.

The caterpillars require about 60 days to grow enough to make a cocoon to go through the winter…so this is going to be cutting it close for the eggs this female probably laid in our oak tree. Some of the leaves on our oak (a food plant of the caterpillars) are already beginning to turn reddish brown. None of the branches are low enough for me to see any of the caterpillars in action unfortunately. I’ll still be watching the tree hoping to see one as they grow larger.