Easter Sunday weekend and what to do with a guest. The women were all in Tyler Texas visiting with my granddaughter Celeste leaving Christian and myself to fend for ourselves Easter weekend. Saturday, as promised, we loaded the Kayaks in the truck and I took Christian to Lake Austin below the Lake Travis dam. We kayaked down lake in the teeth of a strong wind past all the houses. A lot of the time we hugged the shore to see if we could spot a snake swimming along the shore. Although we didn't see a snake, Christian spotted turtles in the water. The return paddle up the lake went easier with the wind at our back. Overall, we paddled almost two and a half hours.
Small purple flower, cluster about a quarter coin in diameter
Easter Sunday we went to Hutto Bible Church with a good friend +Scott Butler and his wife +Linda Butler where we enjoyed a very good service and sermon. After the service we drove out to Die Manchmal Gruene Weide to feed and water Herbie. It rained shortly after we arrived so we sat in the shed and waited for the light storm to pass. Afterwards we walked around the property, through fields and woods looking for different wildflowers to photograph. I am not a botanist so I don't know the identity of these flowers but they were certainly pretty.
I photographed all flower pictures with a Canon EOS XTi with the EF-S 60mm Macro Lens.
For flowers I take up to a dozen pictures per flower in the hope that
at least one photo is in focus. The rainy day lead to low light conditions
that were good for flower photography but the XTi/60mm macro lens combo
tends to hunt for focus in low light macro photography. This page contains thirteen different blooms I captured, but sadly I didn't successfully focus on another two very tiny and lovely flowers. In addition to the flowers, I captured intriguingly colorful and textured lichen and a skinny wasp crawling in the leaf litter.
Frilly Edge yellow flower. Bloom about 1/2 inch in diameter.
Blossom from prolific berry vines (bosenberry?) Tart delicious fruit coming soon!
Plant cluster of small blue flowers
Closeup of flower cluster
Bluebonnet Closeup - Darker blue shade version
Christian standing in bluebonnet patch
Bluebonnets surround fence post
Small star pinkish flower each bloom 0.3 inch in diameter
Larger Cup Shaped purple-pink bloom
Larger (quarter coin) yellow bloom
The next few are not technically flowers but were quite beautiful anyway!
Die Mahmal Greune Weide is indeed green this spring, even with less rain than usual. I realized today that I had taken photos of a prominent Bluebonnet patch on the land three weeks running. So I thought I'd post the photos of the Bluebonnet Bloom progression. Above, on March 10th there are only a couple of blooms present.
Sporadic Bluebonnet Blooms March 17th 2013
One week later (March 17th), the plot thickens but we still don't have a clue how thick it will get.
Bluebonnets Mostly in Bloom March 25th 2013
March 25tt the blooms presented themselves in the blue carpet typical of Texas spring.
New! Bluebonnet Patch Easter Sunday, March 31st 2013
March 31st, a rainy day! And the bluebonnets continue to thicken in the patch. I have never seen this patch so thick with blooms and the rain we had this day I hope even more blooms appear. (Hopefully the forecast of more rain comes true too.) I suspect though that this is nearly the peak bloom for this patch.
Bluebonnet Patch April 7th 2013
Posing in Field of Blue
And I couldn't resist posing with the flowers (March 21st photo). And now we have an Inge and Penny photo too!
Inge and Penny in Field of Bluebonnets - April 2013
For the first time in a few weeks, my brother became available to continue our well drilling operation. We made a weekend camping trip of it and as you can see from the above sundown photo, I served pork ribs and beans cooked over an open pit. Quite the manly fare for a Saturday evening. Yum! Yum! Naturally we washed down dinner with a couple of beers. I closed out the evening using my 10x binoculars to spot two of Jupiter's moons in the clear night sky.
By the way - if you cross read my health and fitness blog you'd know this food doesn't fit well within this year's eating light guidelines. But special occasions such as a campout on Gruene Weide naturally excuses a deviation from the norm.
I set up my HTC DNA with Lapse It Pro time lapse app and used it to time lapse a photo every 30 seconds while drilling Sunday Morning. The phone's battery died before it got too many photos so the resulting video runs a short and sweet 60 seconds, including the title and trailer.
Now for a well drilling recap. We started drilling the well around two years ago. During research about well drilling I found How to drill a well link which had a reasonable, achievable method to drill for ground water using a compressor drill attached to PVC and compressor hoses powered by renting heavy-duty compressor. I learned from neighbors that their well's water table stood at 19 ft., so I set my drilling goal to achieve a 40 ft. well depth.
I ordered the drill from the above link and after a few months got started. The work always requires two people and I planned to drill on weekends when I could get help from my brother, Kenny, or my wife, Inge. It has taken about two years to drill to today's 24 ft. depth due to two out of three team members not being available. Here's a run-down of what drilling in Blackland Prairie of Milam County, Texas encountered and rough time frames including rough estimate of how many weekends involved.
Initial post-hole digging to 30 inch depth and other set-up like return water hole digging and PVC assembly.
Started drilling - descended to 5'-6" depth within two to three hours through mixed clay and sand. (Still first weekend)
Encountered rock - crumbly limestone embedded with flint chert, rocks, and fossils. Drill rate decreased to 1/2 inch per hour - about 4 to 6 inches per each weekend of drilling. This continued to depth of about 8 ft 4 inches. (About 2 ft, 10 inches of limestone/chert slow drilling over many weekends with lots of stops to pull rig out of hole to release rocks that jammed the bit and stops to vacuum rocks out of the hole.) It took six to eight weekends to punch through chert.
Rock changed from limestone/chert to siltstone. Drill descent rate increased to 8 inches per hour, resulting in weekend drill depths (about 6 to 8 hours drilling per day) of 4 to 6 feet.
As of today, March 17th, the well stands at 24 ft. depth. More than half way to the goal of 40 ft depth. (3 to 4 more weekends left spread over my crew's weekend availability and continuing through faster siltstone.) We drilled through 16 ft of siltstone depth so far and the siltstone section has taken 2.5 weekends, because the first weekend we still drilled limestone/chert Saturday and broke through to the faster siltstone Sunday morning. (And it felt great to go from 1/2 inch per hour to 8 inches per hour because you could easily see the progress.)
The total drilling weekend count stands at 10 to 12 weekends to drill to depth of 24 ft. Weekend drilling achieves a bonus of halved compressor rental cost as the place I rent from closes on Sunday and as long as I get the compressor back to them before 8:30 a.m. Monday, they only charge me for one day's rental.
As a closing note, Nathaniel from Well-Tek - the company behind the How To Drill A Well link above, proved extremely helpful from the start, answering emails promptly and quickly replenishing ordered supplies (such as a new drill bit after I wore the original bit out in the limestone and siltstone.) Solid thumbs up on the whole drilling process and especially with working with him!
The drilling process requires water and in the video demonstration of the drilling process water is available from a garden hose. I don't have a nearby source for water so I tote in water using two 35 gallon tanks and water from my 330 gallon water harvest tank. With the drought we're suffering through, the latter source is about dried up. Water harvesting doesn't work if it doesn't rain, which is why I'm drilling a well.
Today we spent a quiet weekend at Gruene Weide as it had rained eight-tenths of an inch the night before excusing us from watering the orchard and garden. Almost all the trees in the orchard have budded out and a lot of the Elm trees in the wood began dressing in green too. I don't recall seeing any green trees last week.
We chopped brambles in the woods again today, though Inge chopped a lot more than me. My energy levels have ebbed after my travels so I took it slow. As we departed we took the south trail out and there in the bluebonnet patch I mentioned last week peeked the first bloom leading the way to what looks like will be at least one thick patch of flowers in the coming weeks.
This Little Blue flower usually delights us first in spring.
This weekend our trip to Gruene Weide indeed found signs of impending spring. The grass is starting to sprout shoots and on the way out we spotted the first meadow flower. I looked in my photo archive for a picture of that flower, as I have taken numerous flower photos, but that particular flower wasn't in the archive. The flower was a very tiny 5 or six point blue flower, that grew very close to the ground. I have seen it often before and will take my macro lens out next week to photograph it for my archive.
Normally we would expect around 3.5 inches per month from December through March/April but we haven't been getting any where near that amount of rain. I am fearful that we will have another long, hot, dry summer if we don't get more rain in the next couple of months. This also means we will likely see fewer flowers this spring.
Our main work yesterday, besides the feeding and watering of Herbie, was to grab the loppers and shears and head into the woods to bust brambles. These thorny vines grow everywhere in our woods, choking out trees where left unchecked. So Inge and I tackle the beast, chopping and lopping the thorny curse, clearing paths and rescuing trees. While taking flower photos, I'll take and display a blog photo of one of the thicker patches for your viewing pleasure.
