It must be spring

 Even though 85 or more doesn't seem very spring-like. I prefer 70s for spring.

St. Andrew's cross. A member of the St. John's Wort family.

The yellow flower is sow thistle. Quite spiny so you don't pull it without protection! 

Would seem to be Buttercup.

Clover, of course. :)

Wild blackberries.

A few of this year's "crop."

Thistle. Very spiny. Yes, I am behind on mowing. :) I've read some people eat them and they apparently taste a bit like celery. I hope to never need to know. 

I pray you are all doing well. Be safe and God bless. 

This is what you get when you can't mow

 besides long grass..

I did some reading and apparently bees love thistles. And it takes 2 years for them to flower.

You all be safe and God bless.

Palm Sunday was a very windy day

 Looking at the possibility of severe weather again on Wednesday.

Still looking for a new tractor and mower.

These are supposed to be edible when younger but I haven't had the courage to try them yet. :)

You all be safe and God bless. 

Things around the farm

One of my most despised weeds.

The pecan crop is coming along.

With the heat and lack of rain, we've started watering some of the trees. Will cost us in electricity, but the next month or so will be critical for the growing nuts.

I love when the little egrets come around while we are mowing. They're fun to watch as they go after the bugs that fly away from the mowers.

They don't like being photographed...

Stay cool, be safe, God bless. ♥

We found another patio type area

While trying to level the area by the steps he put in at the utility room. (It's always been strange having a door to a drop-off.)





Sorry about the pictures, the sun was over the roof.
Hubby said there used to be big brick patios and paths of the red bricks, that's why we find them everywhere. It must have been really pretty then. Wish I had seen it like that.


We went fishing this morning, but only caught a few, so we tossed them back. It was nice this morning. Even with the Cotton mouth that tried to climb the bank. I scared it off by hitting the ground in front of it with my walking stick. No pictures because the camera was in the truck.

On the way to fishing, we saw Pileated Woodpeckers eating on the ground. Very strange.
We got a new camera. While I was fumbling with it, one of them flew off, but we got a picture of the other one.




There is supposed to be a big hatch of cicadas this year and BIL thinks they may have been feasting on an early hatch.

Thought I'd show you our corn, too. Ignore the grass. This garden is running away with grass. I'm going to try and weed a row a day, but this grass is very stubborn. Every little piece of root hubby left when he tilled it up, has sprouted into two or more plants.
Annoying.






The shiny stuff is aluminum foil on fish line. Had to come up with something to keep the blackbirds from pulling up the young plants so they could eat the corn!

The bags are an idea I was trying. I've read about other people 'bag gardening' to help keep weeds down. Yeah, I know, it didn't exactly work, haha.
Anyway, the bags are compost and they each hold a small melon plant.

Oh, since K asked, I have not started canning anything yet. I don't have a canner. (Well, I have a water bath canner, but I don't have a pressure canner.) I need to get one and learn how to use it.
I've not used the water bath canner since the disastrous pickle affair a couple (few?) years ago.
What we don't eat, we either freeze or blanch and freeze right now.
I need to research canners.

I'm ready for summer to be over. Don't like summer temps so early. Oh well.

Hope you all have a wonderful week! ♥

Now we know the rest of the story.

Hubby told me this morning, as we were waking up, that BIL remembered that the... whatever the pipe is called that goes to the leech field -- well, BIL remembered that the pipe from septic number 2 runs out back alongside the out building.
So I said, "Oh. You mean it was put in when your family still owned that property."
Hubby said yes.
So that explains how it could get muddy and get a tractor stuck, I guess.
I told him we'll just have to keep an eye on it then; and if it starts getting muddy when there's been no rain, I suppose that tank will have to be pumped.
We also need to fill in the hole, and then mark it somehow so we remember where it is.

I don't really know how big that property is back there. But the FIL lost it many years ago due to drinking and gambling. That's how 'the farm' came to be the 6 or so acres it is today.

Hope you're all having a good day. I suppose I should go out and weed. Ugh.

See you later!

Can Spring be far behind?

Wonder what it is, Wednesday

Running out of stuff. haha.
Remember this... vine?

I know I posted about it a year or so ago, but I can't find the post. Oh well. At any rate, I think I have identified it.

It is of the family Smilacaceae. (Shortened to Smilax.) Other names are Greenbrier, Cat brier, and Bristly Greenbrier and Hog Brier, among others. I think this one in particular is Smilax tamnoides, based on the picture here.

I found a lot of good information here: at Dave's Garden website; and from random Google searches as well.

The berries are blueblack, as shown at the previous web page, and here.

And, it may be related to the plant in the back yard, though I have never seen berries in the front yard.

In the summer, the berry clusters are green, very similar to this here:

That's a picture I took from the pasture, in May of last year. I had forgotten about it.
You can definitely see the resemblance to the purplish berries I showed you in earlier posts.
The Smilax has about a half dozen varieties of leaves, too, depending on which variety you have.

I don't believe I have seen spines on the one in the back yard, like the one in the first picture though.

Apparently parts of some plants are edible and some taste like asparagus, and is where sarsaparilla came from.

Sorry for all the rambling. I hope this post makes sense. Anyway, I am again interested in getting a professional opinion to see if my research will be proven accurate.

---

On another matter, my throat was terrible last night.
Got me some cantaloupe and yogurt today and I'm feeling better so far.
Hope you all have a wonderful day!

What to talk about today?

Hard to believe it's the end of August!
Been hard to post lately. Can't seem to concentrate on blogger and it seems blogger doesn't want to work right anyway.
As you know, our trip to the farm didn't go at all like we might have expected.
We didn't get there until about 1030 at night. I do not like night arrivals.
Even with the dark though, it wasn't hard to see that everything had grown like crazy. July and August are usually the hottest months anyway, and as those of you who live in the South know, this year has been exceptionally so.
I did take a few pictures in the dark.

Notice we have no driveway visible upon arrival.




This is a shot towards the trailer. The light is the security light that the electric company maintains. I think it costs around $8 a month. A fair enough price to not be totally in the dark.



The Johnson grass had gone crazy.



This is our Chevy 2500 pickup, almost engulfed by Johnson grass.



Yes, it was taller than our truck. Annoying and a bit depressing. Hubby said to not let it get to me, but ugh.

I'm guessing there is a backyard here somewhere. It's just crazy that this is barely 3 months' growth.



Here you can see the actual grass is not as tall as the Johnson grass.



That's the burn pile. We didn't actually burn last time because it was so dry. The Johnson grass seems to love it. :/
Hope you can see the pictures okay. I shrunk them all down because I don't have the option to shrink in the blog any more. I decided to just use Webshots for now, since that is where I keep all my online photos right now anyway.
If you can't see the pictures very well, just click on the album link for August 2011, and it will take you to my album where you can see the pictures.

That's all for now. Back to reading up on you all. :-)

When it rains it pours

Not.
Not the good kind of rain, anyway.
Johnson Grass has practically taken over the main yard. Was not happy.
We arrived about 1030 PM. To no water. The pump was out. Went into town and got water and went to bed about midnight.
Hubby has done some troubleshooting. Some resister or something burned out. I am guessing we lost power at some point and the pump lost prime and that was the result.
We filled a couple buckets with water today so we have enough to flush the toilet at least.
Today, the A/C keeps cutting off. Don't know what's going on there, so probably will have to cut this trip short to bring the trailer back to NC to have that looked at.
Just hope we can get the pump working before we have to leave.

Oh, the trees we planted last trip? Well, they're sort of okay. They still have some green leaves anyway. And they have some brown. I'm hoping it's just all the hot weather has been hard on them, and they aren't sick or something.

Final oh before I go, haha. The old cub cadet we were using for a mule? It blew a fuse, too. Between all the hot temps here and him using it for a mower today (it is still a mower, just the transmission slips a lot when it gets hot. we had it fixed but it still does it); the hood (bonnet to some of you) warped from the heat.
Yup. You read right. It warped.
When the mower quit, he opened the cover to look at the engine and it just kind of bent in on itself.

What the heck.

At least the trip here was relatively painless.

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Have a blessed week!

Memorial Day Weekend

God bless and comfort us all.
Have a wonderful weekend, everyone. ♥

What a trip

Lots of pictures. Mostly of before. All we did was mow, and we didn't get all that done. Lots of poison ivy, too.
Oh well. We did have really nice weather. Dry though. Which is good and bad. Made for lots of laundry.

This picture was taken at eye-level in the back yard after hubby had mowed a couple pathways. It's Johnson grass.

No back yard this trip. All my hard work to clear the back of the house. I guess I should be glad I can still see the back of the house.

I was excited when I saw what looked like peas. :)

There were hundreds, if not thousands of these all over the farm and pasture. But, as near as we can tell they are wild peas, which are poisonous and not field peas, which would be useful.

I was happy to see the bit of fence line that I cleared had remained clear. :)
Something to show for the poison ivy rash I had, haha!

You can see there, behind the pump house, no green on that little bit of fence there.

There were lots of HUGE thistles with spines that I wondered how they didn't puncture the mower tires.

There were a lot more than what I took pictures of. That's just to show you the size of the thistles.

I think I'll stop here for now.

Crazy weather around the country. Thoughts and prayers to all affected by the latest tornado in Missouri. ♥