Spring is blooming!

[rdback]

Things are a-blooming! Spring is around the corner. It's a great time of year!

Blue Bells along the river.

Peach tree blooming.

Redbud budding. Should flower soon.

[chrysanthemum]

Beautiful, @rdback. Thanks for the photos.

[rdback]

Thank you chrysanthemum! I was thinking of you when I took the picture of the Blue Bells. As you know, they're pretty common here in VA, but I don't remember them being in TX. Glad you enjoyed the pics.

[chrysanthemum]

I have not seen bluebells in Texas, @rdback, bluebonnets, but not bluebells.

I took my kids to a nature center for a little “field trip” today.  I also took some pictures around our house as it was such a beautiful day.  I thought I could add them here.

These were some bluebonnets and other wildflowers along the side of the path were were walking on.

Eventually the path led down to the part of the creek where there was still water.  There were some huge bald cypresses growing there, and I was just impressed by the roots.  The next shot is after we had climbed back up to the looping path, and the kids sat on a bench and looked at that view of the creek.


The next photos are from our home this evening.  We have a lot of prairie verbena blooming on various parts of our property right now, and the butterflies were out in force this evening.  We have a few peaches this year that set after our early February ice storm.  The last picture is the first pomegranate bloom that we have from the little hedge we planted as seedlings four years ago.

[chrysanthemum]

Every day my mother and her three sisters send e-mail messages to their group to talk about how they’ve spent their days.  My mother often includes photos from her place.  She’s been doing lots of spring shots of blooming flowers and trees recently, and I thought you’d appreciate this one, @rdback.  She’s a couple counties southeast of you, I believe.

[rdback]

....blueberries be bloomin'.

[chrysanthemum]

Beautiful!

I think blueberries are really quite pretty plants. Perhaps I’m influenced since I love the fruit so much (though I hated when my mother made me pick the berries when I was little. She didn’t mulch around the plants at that time, and weeds and grass grew high under her bird netting. I remember the plants making me itch, and I always seemed to end up with chigger bites, too. She now mulches.)

I took a photo of some berries on my Powderblue blueberry bush tonight. I’m hoping these will mature nicely.

[heavyhitterokra]

Chrysanthemum,

Maybe the secret to enjoying a good blueberry harvest is better found in the picking of forbidden fruit.

We used to have a neighbor, Jack Denton, who lived about a mile and a half Southwest of here, down our mutual dirt road. Sometimes, we'd walk to his farm to pick blueberries. He was a retired Professor from NSU. Their farm was the oldest and the largest blueberry patch in the State of Oklahoma. Each June, they'd hire blueberry pickers paying them $4.00 per gallon of berries picked. The name of their outfit was, "Blueberry Acres".

Since I was a school teacher, I had summers off. Just for kicks, I'd show up there at 6:00 am from time to time and would pick berries for them until 10:00 am when Jack would declare the patch closed for the day because of the heat that would be packed into the berries. The berries needed to be kept cool for shipping, so he didn't allow any picking after 10:00 am.

He also didn't allow children under the age of 12 to enter his fields. He had workers who patrolled the fields, looking for minors to kick them out, so my kids could never pick berries with me. When my daughter was about 10 years old, she wanted to pick berries so badly that she was willing for me to let her off about a quarter mile from the front gate of the berry farm, so she could climb through the barbed wire fence and sneak into the berry patch from the back side to meet me in the middle of the field.

At quitting time, she'd hide her berry buckets in the bushes and she'd sneak out the back fence, while I'd drive around to pick her up. once back inside the gate, I'd leave her in the truck and go fetch our berries to be weighed in.

Rather than getting paid for our work, we'd opt to take our picking fee from the wholesale price of our berries and purchase them at a discount for $11.00 per gallon. Then, we'd drive to Starbuck's where we'd sell our freshly harvested berries to the coffee shop for $3.00 per pint, getting a price equal to $24 per gallon for them. I'd give my daughter the money she made and take her to Welch's Trading Post to buy anything she wanted that day. We'd pick berries a couple of times per week until the season was spent.

A couple of years later, when her younger brother got old enough to want to pick berries too, she showed him where the hole in the fence was and he'd sneak in to help her pick. They had a great time sneaking around picking berries like that. Sometimes, we'd take the money we made that day and go buy snacks to take to the river and just go swimming the rest of the day.

The funny thing is, once they were both old enough to pick legitimately, neither one of them wanted to get up that early to go with me picking berries anymore. Years later, Jack said he always knew what they were up to but he let them pick anyway.

Forbidden fruit always tastes the sweetest.

[rdback]

I know Spring is all but over and Summer is upon us, but I saw this Columbine the other day and thought it worthy of sharing. So long Spring 2023!