Sweet Saturday

Saturday we escaped the city.

For this.

And this.

Phlox drummondii - Annual Phlox

And this.

We made the failed attempt to get poles for the shelter, and then arrived at Tree Ring to this.

But it just didn't matter.  It was such a great day!  Nothing could bother us.

We sat in the middle of Tree Ring and ate our standard fare.

It only rained a short time, so we went for a walk.  The blackberries aren't quite ripe.  Maybe two more weeks.

On our walk we found some interesting plants.

Asarum arifolium - Heartleaf Wild Ginger

Pterocaulon virgatum - Wand Blackroot

Dyschoriste oblongifolia - Oblongleaf Twinflower

Please share if you know what they are.  

It was getting late, but  we decided to go a longer way home, and found more beautiful plants.

Opuntia Humifusa - Prickly Pear Cactus

Turning a corner, we came upon the coolest homemade bridge.

Followed by our first Florida bunny sighting.

And a turkey and a deer hanging together.  

How strange.

All in all a beautiful Memorial Weekend day.

Blackberries in two weeks!  Yessssssssss!

Another Small Step To A Shelter

After surveying the location of the four corners of the shelter, our next step was to get the poles to our property.  This really sounds so easy, but has turned out to be hard.  

Or I should say hard for us.

The Shelter will have four poles in front (13 1/2', 3' in the ground) and four poles in back (12', 3' in the ground).  We decided we would get eight 14 foot poles and cut them to fit.  

Please don't ask me why we don't get four 14' poles and four 12' poles.  Apparently this isn't the way it is done.  The only problem is that no one carries 14 ft poles.  We finally found them in stock at Sparr Farm and Building Supply - more than 40 miles away from Tree Ring. 

I was pretty skeptical that our little truck with a 6 foot bed and a 2 foot tailgate would be able to handle one 14 foot pole, much less eight of them.

No Problem, Retro Man said.  Piece of cake, he said.  These trucks are lot stronger than you think.

They look so benign, don't they?  Almost like big toothpicks.  How heavy could they be?

The Yard man quickly pulled out 8 good looking, straight enough poles.

He put straps around them to hold them together.

Using this cool thingy.

Then he and another Yard man pushed them in.

Just before the Yard man was about to lower the poles fully onto the bed of the truck, he asked, one last time.  Are you sure you want to do this?

Retro Man looked at the logs and then at the tailgate chain.

And he decided to have them delivered.  

There was no suspension and the tailgate looked like it had a big headache.  The Yard man said he's seen 8 tailgates break off trucks this year.

Hopefully next week we will be able to figure out how to get the logs delivered to Tree Ring, which has no known street address.  I wonder if delivery trucks have a GPS?

More About Pine Cone Seeds

After some research, I wrote about pine cone seeds a few posts back, but now that we were surrounded by pine cones, I wanted to have a closer look for myself.

Here is the pine cone I started with.

I pulled away some of the scales at the bottom.  You can see how the seeds sit between the scales.

They sit neatly between the rows.

The seeds were about an inch long and 1/4 inch wide.

I didn't see a nut looking thing on the end, but perhaps these seeds were immature.  If I ever find a mature seed, I'll post again and let you know how it tastes.

Whitey Spidey

As with all of you, it sure has been busy around here.  We haven't been to Tree Ring in about two months. 

But yesterday was the day!  I don't have time to post much except this really cool blackberry flower photo.

You can just make out a white spider waiting for some lunch.  

I want to call it a ghost spider, but I googled 'ghost spider' and this isn't it.  If you know what kind of spider this is, please share.

The cold winter has delayed the growing season a little bit.  A year ago this week the blackberries looked like this:

TTFN.   More later.