The Creek Journal

September 2017

And into September.

A favorite month because the sun’s arc across the canyon shrinks towards the south, bringing with it angled lights and yellowing cedar elm leaves (the first ones to indicate approaching autumn).

Here are some of the plants that flower around the first of this month (and for most, extending till the end):

Cowpen daisy

Silverleaf nightshade

Common wild petunia (purple and white)

straggler daisy

Tube-tongue

Velvet-leaf mallow

Baby’s breath bluets

Zexmenia

Snow-on-the-mountain

Stickleaf

Clammy weed

Palafoxia

Senna

Purple bindweed

Buttonbush

Wood-sorrel

Widow’s tears
Broomweed
Common Mullein
Lindheimer's Morning Glory
Rock Rose (Rose Mallow, Pavonia Mallow)

Central Texas is said to have an absence of seasons, which is, of course, quite an interesting thought considering the sorts of discomforts we subject ourselves to each August and each February. But maybe they mean the changing seasons. The colors. So here are a few of the changing colors of this September season.

A rare ringed kingfisher spending the month with us

2 Lambs Born the First of the Month

January 2017

A sunshiny day in the first week of 2017

Little red sweet potatoes warming up in a bit of olive oil

Kate dug red sweet potatoes the second of January, and we set them in the dark to cure for a few weeks. These little things were mostly only an inch thick and five or so long because I failed to plant them early enough. But tasty, damn!

On January six, I took the life of a free-living, innocent wild hog, fearfully and wonderfully made. One doesn't just casually squeeze the trigger of a .243 rifle while it's aimed at another life.

That same day I butchered it cleanly and ground up all the meat, half going to pan sausage and the other half to link sausage we smoked over oak and peach wood a couple days later. In a light drizzle, we kept the oak coals going all day, adding every now and then pieces of green peach wood just recently pruned from their trees. The result was the most delicious sausage we've ever enjoyed. Spicy, smokey, and raised free on wild grasses, acorns, roots, fruits, and tubers.

Wild hog link sausage smoking

Hind quarter of the pig

The pig

Six lambs were born the second week of the month, two sets of twins and two to two mothers. The first ewe to deliver did so shortly before sunrise, but by the time I found her an hour or two later, one of the lambs was dead. Still slightly warm, but limp and lifeless, his death left us without a known cause.

These two little ones below were only hours old and as healthy as one could hope for.

Birthday twins (January 9)

Our blackberries have left us disappointed with their flavor, so we're trying again, this time along the east fence of the sheep field. We've tilled the sandy soil and amended it with sulfur, peat moss, and compost from the highly organic soil beneath the Boulders.

Making the bed (for blackberries)

Looking north across a foggy pond--January 16, 8:30 a.m.

September

Moving into autumn, even while afternoon temperatures remain in the nineties. It's not the dramatic introduction to a new season that some experience, but the excitement is probably on about the same level. For us, anyhow.

All of the images except for the final one illustrate just a few of the plants in bloom within the Stonefield this September.

Sesbania pods

View of the Stonefield from the yard (slowly, plants take root among rocks)

View of the Stonefield from about the Beer Rock next to the Creek.

This plant above is one of about six Texas species of spurges (genus Tragia) going by the appropriate name, "noseburn." Every part of the plant grows stinging hairs, each tipped with a crystal of calcium oxalate.

We read this: "A 1976 study at Texas A&M University took a close look at the stinging mechanism. Viewed with an electron microscope, each hair is seen to be a four-celled structure. Three support cells surround a tall central cell that rises above the leaf’s surface, with a crystal at the tip and a cavity down below that holds a drop of irritating fluid. The crystal works like a spear point: touch the plant and it pierces your skin. The fluid irritant comes right behind it, released by pressure on the bending hair" (from Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine, March 2015).

And in keeping with the central Texas theme of late summer suffering, spears, and spikes, we've also been enjoying these: Eryngo (Eryngium leavenworthii), Cocklebur (Xanthium strumarium L.), and the one whose leaves sticketh closer than a brother.

Stickleaf (Mentzelia oligosperma)

...and the most common flowering plants now:

Straggler Daisy (Calyptocarpus vialis)

And not--quite-as-common pretty little things....

Silver dwarf morning-glory

Scarlet spiderling (Boerhaavia coccinea)

Senna

Clammy weed

Curly-top gumweed

Palafoxia

Snow-on-the-mountain

Morning light

February 2016: Lambs, Ice, Hillside Hot tubs, Microclimates, and Garden Colors

Nine lambs were born here over eleven days this month. Four sets of twins and an only child lamb.

Beginning constructing a hillside hot tub.

Clawfoot tub nestled in a small deck on a rocky hillside

Left the sprinklers on in the sheep field over a freezing night

Those silly images above were shot the morning after I left the sprinklers on in the sheep field during a freezing night. Two-foot long ice-cycles hung from bent cedar elm and live oak branches. Grass blades and cactus pads glistened under half an inch of ice, while all around them sun shone on green grass. The juxtaposition was almost absurd.

A stranger walking upon this field would stop and wonder at the existence of such a micro-climate.
And that's been the meditation all week. Small differences in temperature and humidity from one small place to the next.

When one is a child, he learns in about one summer day's time that sleeping on the bottom mattress of a bunk bed in a poorly air conditioned home could be more comfortable than sweating sleepless on the top bunk. That's microclimate. In the winter, he can appreciate the microclimate of that drafty space near the kitchen door on the north side of the house. And if it were his chore to water the potted plants on the porch, he might soon drag them to the shadiest area under the leakiest stretch of gutter. That's microclimate.

We see microclimates on the sides of highways where grass grows greener and thicker because of runoff and the heat retention properties of pavement. Below is a small example of this principle at work beside the stone wall up near the house, where winter buffalo grass prefers the warm re-radiation created by stacked pieces of limestone. The wall also changes wind current and temperature flow as cold air falls off the hillside behind us. This is, of course, similar to the way slower, shallower waters of the Creek warm up faster under mid-day sun and freeze faster in the winter (or, rather, the once-every-dozen-years winter for us).

The light, sandy soil of the old garden area is prone to overheating in the summer afternoon and overcooling on a winter night. A higher concentration of clay in the soil's composition would improve matters by moderating these temperature swings. But sand is what we got in the 2007 rain of nineteen inches that one night. Hamilton Creek rose fast and high, but where the old garden is, the flood waters were only high. Not fast. And that meant sediment deposition and lots of it. So the inside curve-deposition of a stream with bends will end up creating innumerable microclimates based on the presence of steep banks vs. sandbars; vegetation vs. no vegetation; etc.

And just as water flows downhill, so does heavier cold air. And nothing lies between that old sandy garden and the limestone cliff at the bottom of the hill behind the house. On a still winter night, cold air flows relatively unimpeded down onto this garden, while a hundred yards away near our new gardens, the same cold air bumps into too much vegetation. And because the new gardens are closer up against the wooded slope of the hillside, there's too much diversion of strong winds for that ever to be as much of a problem for the plants as it is in the old garden sitting more out in the open. Additionally, all that tree-growth above the new gardens has created with its yearly leaf-fall a completely different soil, one that is dark and rich with humus. (The higher organic composition also means more nitrogen and more acid, something the old garden is deplete of.) Variety.

We'll see an easy three to five degree temperature difference between the bottom of the hill and the top of the hill. If we were in San Francisco, we could take advantage of an app that lets its folks locate the city's various microclimates. http://www.sfclimates.com/