Why I Oughta...

I was watching this garden tour on YouTube from Garden Gate Magazine and just about totally fell in love.  What a garden.   There is SO MUCH to appreciate in this one video in this one garden that I'll probably post a few things about it that struck me.  The first of which...is related to gabion-style walls.  Below is a screenshot of the garden tour - at the 9:53 mark ( here's a link to that 9:53 mark in the video ) that shows off a set of pillars that are done gabion-style.  See below: The garden-owner talks about framing and how they use these gabion-style pillars as a way to frame the entrance for visitor's experience.  The gardener saw these in a local garden and decided to replicate them and included putting pots on top.   I've posted about gabion walls back in 2019 when I saw them in an annual garden trend post .   I also posted a few other posts about various walls over the years including this stone wall at Disney's Aulani resort , a timber wall in our neig

Last Fall, I was moving around a few pieces of flagstone in our yard when I - for some reason - looked closer at one of the stones and I realized I was staring at a fossil.  Weird.  Or at least it seemed weird to me.  I examined the piece of flagstone and realized there were a few fossils imprinted in the stone, so I went looking on the Web to figure out what we had.  Turns out, we're the owner of some Trilobites that are hundreds of millions of years old (yes...read that again... hundreds of millions of years old ).  Kinda neat, right?  Finding it and researching the fossil was a fun little exercise to do with the kids.   Imagine my delight when I was out in the yard this past week and noticed that a few of our pieces of flagstone and split open due to the winter and freezing.  I picked the pieces up to see if any of the freshly-revealed surfaces showed off any new (to us) fossils.  And, sure enough....along the edge of one of them looks like this: Below is another, more zoom'

I was out in the backyard doing what I spend most of my free time doing these days:  dealing with the leaves.  We have a mix of native trees (Kentucky Coffee Trees, Hackberry) and a couple of large Oak trees.  The Oak leaves come down differently than the the rest of the trees.  Rather than dropping them mostly at once, our Oaks drop leaves a little bit at a time.  And the Oaks are HUGE, so there are TONS of leaves. That means, Oak leaf cleanup lasts for weeks.   How I start my cleanup is by blowing the leaves into the lawn where I collect them in big piles then I begin to mulch them in and bag some of them up.  As part of that blowing with the leaf blower (don't worry...I use an electric one from eGo and it isn't loud), I was cleaning up our firepit area.  And, for *some* reason, I looked closely at the stepping stones that take you from our lawn to the gravel bed.  One one of them - clear as day - was what sure looked like a fossil to my naked eye.  I got down on my knees and