Walden wrote:Yep, yep... brown and yaller leaves... grass to match... wet... rainy.... getting to be about that time of year. Time for nuts and persimmons and acorns and pumpkins and apples. Hmmm... more I think about it... kind of a nice time.... the fall of the year.
We don't exactly get fall around here (or winter, or spring, or summer). The plants seem to be confused by the lack of well-defined seasons. Our orange tree is now in bloom--at the same time that the lemons and limes are beginning to ripen. The artichoke was beginning to bloom for the second time this year when my son decided to chop it down. There are lots of flowers. Our lone corn stalk is showing silk. (And it's about 8-9 feet tall.)
I went out yesterday afternoon to pick tomato and cilantro for my salsa. The cilantro will go to seed soon, but the tomato plants will keep producing right up through the end of the year if we don't get tired of looking at the raggedy plants growing out across the sidewalks next to the flower beds.
We live just a few blocks from some large vegetable fields, and last week we could smell that they've begun fertilizing--with manure, apparently. They get two to three crops a year here, depending on the vegetable.
This area doesn't seem to have much in the way of trees that turn red in fall. What does turn goes to yellow. Lots of deciduous trees seem hesitant to drop their leaves until the new ones actually start to sprout in the spring.
The weather is a bit boring here. Lots of grey skies, chilly winds, but very little rain. I don't think I've seen lightning more than a dozen times in the past twenty years.
If we do move--which is looking increasingly likely, I expect the Dallas area (Lewisville, actually) to be very different. I'm hoping for lots of interesting insects, too. This has been a very bad year for bugs in Salinas. If this is due to something done by the agriculturists last year, then they sure have hit on something that works. It's just as well, as I've been too busy to do much photography this year, but that should change by next summer.
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