A few weeks ago, I gave my first update of the year for my flowers at the mailbox. Last year, I planted flowers and diligently watered them, and we had something nice in our mailbox planter for the first time since we moved here seven years ago. This year, I was late getting started, so my flowers aren't looking as good or impressive, but they're there. There's something.
I'm making this update, because I finally have something other than just greenery.
My first flowers of the year appeared recently. Huzzah!
The petals look a little wilty. I think they need to be watered more diligently, like I did last year. Especially now that it's gotten really hot. I'm hoping that the plants will get more impressive. My wife grows these flowers in the backyard, and the same seeds make big bushes of flowers for her, but for me they're always just single shoot plants. I don't know what it is about the two spots that makes them so different. I thought that maybe it was too many plants in one little spot last year, but this year I have way fewer plants, and they're still doing the same thing. I guess we'll see if that changes as the summer progresses.
Last year, I planted a bunch of flowers in the planter box beside my mailbox. I updated updated y'all again and again over the next several weeks to show the progress of the flowers' growth. This year, I was slacking, and didn't get my seeds planted as early enough, but I did finally get them planted.
My wife, however, didn't slack. She planted her zinnias a while ago, and already has a bunch of mature flowers.
She's also getting flowers with her irises.
And flowers from these...things. I don't know what these flowers are. They're some kind of perennial, though, so she didn't have to plant them. I think the irises might be too...but I don't really have a green thumb so I don't know that kind of stuff.
I did plant my flowers though. I did a lazy job of it, and they aren't really filling the planter box like they did last year, but they'll probably look better when they get a lot bigger.
I gotta get less lazy about watering them, though. I have an alarm set on my phone to remind me, but I keep ignoring it because I'm busy with something else. I say to myself I'll get to it later, but I always forget too. If I want flowers, I'm going to have to stop slacking. Hopefully, I'll have a nice beautiful bunch of zinnias coming soon. I'll keep you posted.
I've done a few posts over the years about the wildflowers here in Texas.
Between February and May or June, they're everywhere, and they are often very impressive. They sprout up in any patch of open ground available to them, and line the freeways everywhere, even in dingy urban areas. They're a ray of sunshine in the deep darkness like that sometimes.
However, in all this time, I've never seen much of the state flower, the blue bonnet. I guess it must be Houston's climate. It must not be quite right for the spread of blue bonnets. Sometimes, you'll see a few of them here and there, but mostly its other flowers...yellow ones, pink ones, white ones, etc.
There's a trend here in Texas where people take their kids to a field festooned in blue bonnets and take pictures of them. I've seen the results, and the pictures are pretty great. I've even seen some blog posts about where the best place in Houston is to find enough blue bonnets to get a good picture.
It seemed weird to me that it was so hard to find them if they were such a big deal that the state of Texas decided to name them the state flower. Usually, that is reserved for something so prolific that it is a integral thread in the fabric of the society. You can't go anywhere without finding those flowers.
Well, this weekend, when we headed to the hill country to witness the eclipse, I discovered, at last, why blue bonnets are the state flower. As we drove away from Houston, the freeway was lined with yellow flowers, and orange flowers, and pink flowers, but here and there, we started to see some blue flowers. I even saw a large patch of them on the side of the road near Huntsville, and someone had pulled over on the freeway and set their kid in the middle of them for a picture.
Then we started getting more and more blue bonnets. Eventually, the blue bonnets completely took over. You might see some other flowers here and there, but the fields, the meadows, and the sides of the roads were covered with thick, shoulder to shoulder blue bonnets.
I wasn't about to stop on the side of the freeway for a picture like the lady did in Huntsville, but I smiled as I looked at the scenery through the whole drive. I hoped that our destination would have blue bonnets to see, and my hope was rewarded. They were everywhere, choking the fields and growing right up to the very edge of each campsite. Have you ever seen blue bonnets? Well, let me disgorge on you a bunch of my favorite shots that I took while there.
We planted a bunch of sunflowers this year, and I made sure to get both the regular yellow blossoms as well as the more exotic red ones. So far, the only things that bloomed are the yellow ones...until now. Here is our first (and probably only) red sunflower of the year!
This past weekend, my wife and I went to a place called Fredricksburg for our anniversary. In general, it wasn't for me. It was one of those places your wine aunt will visit to go shopping at those quaint little shops packed full of useless decorations and dumb shirts and to, of course, drink a bunch of wine.
Also, it's a German town, or settled by Germans back in the 1800s, so it has that aesthetic too. Not only are there a bunch of wineries, but also a bunch of breweries. All the restaurants are German-themed too, so it was schnitzel and sauerkraut with bratwursts or nothing, which I didn't hate, but I was trying to stick to my beef, butter, bacon, and eggs diet, and I could not.
It was so freaking hot too. We're having a heat wave...a tropical heat wave, and the temperatures are above 100°, with heat indexes above 110°. It's brutal out there. The heat sapped our will to go out and do stuff pretty quick. In fact, it sapped our will to live.
The AC at the hotel was really good, however. So, at least there was that. We even forgot our swimsuits at home, so we couldn't even go out and use the pool at the hotel, the one activity where we probably wouldn't be dying of heat.
One thing I did enjoy, probably because we got out and went to it the first thing in the morning, was Wildseed Farms. It's a farm (oh, and also a winery, because it's Fredricksburg and everything is a winery here. Even the McDonalds probably has a vineyard out back), that grows wildflowers, and harvests the seeds for sale. They had a trail in the back of the place that you could walk through and get a look at their wildflowers. It was pretty nice.
And you know me, I love me some wildflowers.
If they're grown at a farm and planted by people, are they really wildflowers? Not very wild, is it?
The wildflower farm also had a butterfly garden, where they planted a bunch of milkweed, and the monarchs were swarming all over that crap.
These two videos are interesting, just look at all of those butterflies moving from one flower to another.
Here's a couple more videos in the more manicured part of the butterfly garden. There's plenty of butterflies here too, but now we can get even closer to them with our phones.
We left the farm with a bunch of seeds that we're planning on growing next spring, and clothes that we were starting to sweat through. I was kind of glad when we left for home, which meant we could stay in the car with the air conditioning for several hours before getting out again.
Ever seen when some big deal YouTuber posts a new video and doophuses get on there and post, "First!" in the comment section? They don't have anything to say, nothing worthwhile to add, they just want to congratulate themselves for being the first person to respond to the alert that told them there was a new video. Being first isn't always a good thing, therefore. Nobody gives out a medal to the guy who was first to shit his pants or something.
I don't think that's quite the case with this post though...but kind of. Today, the first of all the sunflowers we planted bloomed!
It's pretty excited to see we finally got one. So far, here in Houston, the only sunflowers we've ever grown came from the birds knocking sunflower seeds in the birdfeeder on the ground and causing some to sprout. Every time we plant them ourselves, the die off before they ever reach adulthood, so this is pretty monumental.
This first flower isn't anything special, however. Like the dumb commenters, there's not much to this flower. It's really little. I'm excited, like the dumb commenters are, that it's the first one, but really I am excited for the even better things to come...like with the comments. I probably should never have bothered to type up so much about that dumb metaphor. Forget all the crap I said about dumb first commenters.
Anyway, I'm a freak for sunflowers. I love them. I think it's the massive size that they grow to that excites me. One time we had a flower that was waaay bigger than my head. I don't suspect that we'll get anything like that this year, expecially considering how late in the year our flowers are blooming versus the other sunflowers I've seen in our neighborhood. One thing I am excited about is harvesting the seeds to plant a new crop of the flowers next year. My wife may have to fight for space for any stupid vegetables she wants to grow.
How could I let this happen? It's been, like, a whole week since I last posted an update on my zinnias by the mailbox! Let's do a little timelapse or before and after or whatever we want to call it.
Here's May 19, the flowers starting to show up, but only 9 blossoms so far.
Now May 22, more blossoms. 13 now, but several buds are opening as well.
And this one was yesterday...I think I count 23, but it's still not the end, there's several buds opening still.
I sure am happy with how this turned out. Definitely worth the minimal effort of setting an alarm on my phone and actually going out to water the plants whenever it rang.
I am so excited and proud of these flowers that I planted in the mailbox planter. They are turning out so cool. Over the weekend, tons of blossoms have opened up, so I've got another set of update pictures.
If you look close, you'll see that there are a bunch more buds about to open. The flowers are just going to keep getting better...at least for a while. It's amazing what you can manage with a simple alarm on your phone for a reminder. It's pretty great, and I'm sure I'll annoy you with many more updates.
