Jill, Kari and I took the shorties to Wildcat Bluff Thursday morning. It was cloudy and cool, almost misty, and we needed jackets. One nearly needed a machete to navigate the paved trails around the nature center. The weeds were encroaching to the point where the two sides almost touched. About every other weed had a spider web spun to its neighbor on the other side. I wore shorts and came home with lots of spider web flotsam and jetsam wrapped around my legs because I was made to go first. We discovered a nest of walking sticks. The girls counted maybe a dozen, although I’m not sure of the final count.
We got rain this week, just when the place was getting pretty dry and the poor weeds were parched and feeling low. Round one was Monday night, 1.3 inches, and round two was Wednesday night, 1.5 inches. That perked everyone and everything up and I’ll be back to mowing like a mad man next week after a two week hiatus. I took advantage of the rain and generally satisfactory level of the grass to concentrate on spraying. After a rain is the best time to spray weeds.
Abigail spent the week at a camp at Abilene Christian University. I haven’t had a chance to talk to her much so I don’t know what sort of new information she came home with. She did say the new friends she made made her laugh harder than she had ever laughed in her life. I can remember being around people I didn’t know and finding them hilarious. Maybe they weren’t any more entertaining than the people I knew but had a new perspective I found humorous.
Friday I spent the morning trying to make a dent in the weeds along the paths at the Bluff. Saturday Chris was gracious enough to go back out there with me and run the trimmer while I raked and hauled off the trimmings. That allowed us to go much faster than I had been able to go doing both jobs. Even still, we left at least half the place untrimmed. The encroaching grass makes the place less inviting and, in fact, does it make more hazardous. A rattler, which are not in short supply, can be hidden way too close to where someone would be walking. Maybe we need a few goats or something. I’ve been turning over in my mind how we could rig up an electric fence to keep them enclosed. You may recall I’ve mentioned a herd of goats I’ve seen at the brush site, which is maybe a half a mile from the Bluff. Maybe whoever owns them would rent them out.
Vivian spotted a butterfly larvae on the fennel. Closer examination revealed eight about an inch long. To that point the fennel had gone begging but it looks like we’re in business now. Yesterday morning I came around the house and found Vivian pulling the larvae off and putting them on one of the flat rocks close my. She said they liked to walk around but I made her put them back.