Most trees that produce nuts or fruit go through cycles of production. One year may produce lots of fruit, other years not so much. Each species is a little bit different but there always seems to be a cycle. We have pecan trees that went for years and years and didn't produce enough nuts for a single pecan pie. I should say that pecans are actually considered drupes - a category that includes stone fruits like plums and peaches, but also apples, strawberries, cherries, avocados and some true nuts like walnuts and pecans. It's an interesting gathering of very different foods. Over the last several years we have had pretty good pecan production. Our trees have produced enough to warrant...
We have a huge crop of sand burrs which I would love to attack with a torch but we had the fire department out here to put out a grass fire last fall so setting my pastures and fences on fire doesn't seem like a great move.
I wish I could train the goats to eat them.
There are poisons that will kill them but I'm not ready to saturate the ground where my animals live with toxins. We have enough of those in the environment as it is.
That cycles me back to fire. Not ready to do that quite yet either. Hmmmmmmmm.
I planted two garden bins with cotton seeds back at the end of April. This past Friday I picked my first cotton! It's always a joy to see something you planted grow to the point of picking it. For me, it doesn't seem to matter if it's something to eat, like tomatoes or yellow squash, or something that looks pretty like sunflowers or marigolds, or something to process, dry and sell like the cotton and also the marigolds. It is all so satisfying. As it turned out, my first garden bin full of flax and cotton was a complete failure. About the only thing growing in that bin was grass. I uprooted all the grass and planted marigolds. The second...
Yikes. It's already August. It seems like we have been in lockdown for years or maybe only for moments. Time has become an interesting phenomenon that sometimes streaks ahead, sometimes loops back on itself and sometimes plays dead. Despite our unusual happenings, the seasons proceed as they ought. The gardenias are blooming again. The crepe myrtle has grown glorious and is now calming down. The azalea bushes that we moved last winter are mostly still doing great. Except for the two that struggled from the beginning. Our front garden is getting extra watering in all this heat and only looks the better for it. The rudbeckia is blooming! Recently, I got a call from a wonderful customer...
I'm in the middle of warping up my Schacht Standard floor loom with hemp yarn for face cloths. I just finished a run of linen face cloths and this will be a second choice for a face cloth made of natural materials. I'm excited to try out the hemp. So far it has been slightly more awkward to deal with than the linen. The hemp likes to tangle a bit more so I am adjusting my winding technique to take that into account. I am also trying out a new technique that Peggy put me on to. I am winding my back beam in sections that are each 2" wide like I always do. But this time I'm adding some...
