Have you ever heard the phrase, “The world is my oyster?” Well in a way, that applied to me in my childhood, as I grew up in a small town in
Virginia that was heavily involved in the harvesting
and processing of oysters. The shells of the processed
oysters were often so plentiful that they were used to form roadbeds on private roads. This, of course, was back in the 1940s and 50s, when the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries were blessed with an abundance of the tasty bivalves.
September 2023 Chachalaca newsletter.
There are many rewarding experiences when gardening with plants native to Deep South Texas but one of the most spectacular for me was this third of August bloom of over 40 heartleaf hibiscus flowers in our front yard in Rancho Viejo.
For those of you not familiar with iNaturalist (iNat), I offer, here, an abbreviated overview of what it is and what it is all about. Briefly, iNaturalist is a nonprofit social network that enables individuals to record and share observations of living things—across the globe—either from iNat’s website on their laptop / desktop or via iNat’s mobile application on their cellphone or other electronic device—iPad, for example.
Aah, nothing compares to the soothing, pulsing choirs of frogs, crickets and geckos of an evening! Geckos? Yes, some of those chirps, squeaks and clicks may come from Mediterranean house geckos that hunt along our fences and bricks as they entice mates and defend turf.
I accumulated a few one-gallon pots of upstart plants from the yard in late spring and stashed them under the arbor in a make-shift nursery. There were no more plant sales slated; several of the plants were naturalized, rather than native, but a mantra goes through my head sometimes, “no plant left behind,” and I end up babysitting stray plants.