777 Blanton Hill Road

A large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything. ~Laurence Sterne

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, / There is rapture in the lonely shore, / There is society where none intrudes, / By the deep sea, and music in its roar: / I love not man the less, but nature more. -Lord Byron, 1824

Roadrunners are in all the Southwestern states.

Mating Season: Spring
Incubation: 18-20 days
No. of Eggs: 2-12
Birth Interval: 1 year
Lifespan: 7 to 8 years

The legendary roadrunner is famous for its distinctive appearance, its ability to eat rattlesnakes and its preference for scooting across the American deserts, as popularized in Warner Bros. cartoons.

Its carnivorous habits offer it a large supply of very moist food.
It reabsorbs water from its feces before excretion.
A nasal gland eliminates excess salt, instead of using the urinary tract like most birds.
It reduces its activity 50% during the heat of midday.
Its extreme quickness allows it to snatch a humming bird or dragonfly from midair.

Farrmersville Farmers & Fleas Market set Jan 5
The Farmers & Fleas Market will be held in downtown Farmersville at the historic Onion Shed on Saturday, January 5. Sales hours are 9 AM - 4 PM.

Historical photo of the Onion Shed when Farmersville was known as the Onion Capitol of North Texas. The 1920s Onion Shed was one of several onion sheds in Farmersville, built by the railroads for the packing and shipping of onions.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite. You do not know what will come back: a new life, a new friend or a new country. -Anais Nin, 1903

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tami_sutcliffe_portfolio/sets/72157601369264874/

So then we bought a Cub Cadet 1550 tractor because we need to mow eight acres in a reasonable amount of time, and haul things, and harvest things, and otherwise be farmer-ly in an amateur way. It is a quiet little thing that can push a 1977 MG convertible with flat tires gently into a storage building, which is all we have used it for for so far. But it is December and come March, we will have plenty of jobs to do. So here are the specs:
* 25 HP* Kohler® Courage™ V-Twin, OHV engine
* 50" QuickAttach™ deck
The Cub Cadet arrives!

Old things from the farm house Nothing is as quiet or sad as an abandoned house, especially a 100-year-old working farm house. The buildings at 777 Blanton Hill had been abandoned for eight years when we found them. The windows are broken, the doors are off the hinges: they will never be a home again. This is intensely sad and hard to look at. We have plans for a beautiful new house, a shining new shop, a whole new life for this abandoned place. So the old buildings will only spend one more Texas winter sheltering squirrels and snakes and mice, and then thier time is over. This old mirror and photograph were salvaged from the farmhouse in September 2007. We will carefully look again in the spring and then start rebuilding.

National Collection of Genetic Resources for Pecans and Hickories
We harvested this bowl of pecans from our two trees in about 30 minutes of hand-picking in late October. This was a tiny percentage of what was available. The other creatures on Blanton Hill get to eat the rest this year. The enormous "caps" are from the burr oak nearby.

The word pecan is noted as having an origin from the Native American Algonquin tribe, meaning a nut requiring a stone to crack.Pecan was known in the Old World only from the 16th century. The nuts of the Pecan are edible, with a rich, buttery flavor. They can be eaten fresh or used in cooking, particularly in sweet desserts but also in some savory dishes. In addition to the pecan nut, the wood is also used in making furniture, in hardwood flooring, as well as flavoring fuel for smoking meats. Although wild pecans were well-known among the colonial Americans as a delicacy, the commercial growing of pecans in the United States did not begin until the 1880s. Pecan trees may live and bear edible nuts for more than three hundred years. They are mostly self-incompatible, because most cultivars, being clones derived from wild trees, show incomplete dichogamy. Generally, two or more trees of different cultivars must be present to pollenize each other. In 1906, Texas Governor James Stephen Hogg made the Pecan tree the state tree of Texas.

"Oak wood has a density of about 0.75 g/cm³, great strength and hardness, and is very resistant to insect and fungal attack because of its high tannin content. It also has very attractive grain markings, particularly when quarter-sawn. Wide, quarter-sawn boards of oak have been prized since the Middle Ages for use in interior panelling of prestigious buildings. Barrels in which red wines, sherry, brandy and spirits are aged are made from oak. The use of oak in wine can add many different dimensions to wine based on the type and style of the oak. ak wood chips are used for smoking fish, meat, cheeses and other foods. The bark of the White Oak is dried and used in medical preparations. Oak bark is also rich in tannin, and is used by tanners for tanning leather. Acorns are used for making flour or roasted for acorn coffee. Oak galls were used for centuries as the main ingredient in manuscript ink, harvested at a specific time of year."



The house at 777 Blanton Hill was built in 1913. The oak tree might be older than that.

The Bur Oak, (Quercus macrocarpa), sometimes spelled Burr Oak, is a species of oak in the white oak section Quercus sect. It occurs from the Appalachian Mountains west to the middle of the Great Plains, extending to central Texas. It is a large deciduous tree growing up to 30 m in height, and is one the most massive oaks with a trunk diameter of up to 3 m. It commonly lives to be 200 to 300 years old, and may become significantly older. The bark is a medium gray and somewhat rugged. The flowers are greenish-yellow catkins, produced in the spring. The acorns are very large, 2-5 cm long and 2-4 cm broad, with a large cup that wraps much of the way around the nut, with large overlapping scales and often a fringe at the edge of the cup. Bur Oak typically grows in the open, away from forest canopy. For this reason, it is an important tree on the eastern prairies, where it is often found near waterways in more forested areas, where there is a break in the canopy. It is also a fire-resistant tree, and possesses significant drought resistance by virtue of a long taproot. The acorns are the largest of any North American oak, and are an important wildlife food; American Black Bears sometimes tear off branches to get them. However, heavy nut crops are borne only every few years. In this strategy, known as masting, the large seed crop every few years overwhelms the ability of seed predators to eat the acorns, thus ensuring the survival of some seeds. Other wildlife, such as deer and porcupine, eat the leaves, twigs and bark. Cattle are heavy browsers in some areas. The bur oak is the only known foodplant of Bucculatrix recognita caterpillars. The wood is high quality, and is almost always marketed as "white oak".

We spent the spring of 2007 searching, searching. We traveled from Gainsville to Greenville, from Van Alstyn to Denton, searching. We knew we wanted trees and water and privacy and more than one acre. We saw empty cotton fields and abandoned tract sites and restricted plats and blown-down trailer houses. We saw horse pasture for $16K per acre and "views" for $10K per acre and burned out desolation for $5K per acre.

And then, three miles north of Tom Bean, Texas, we drove up over a hill, past the Texoma vineyard, beyond the White Rock Church- and there we were at 777 Blanton Hill Road. Eight acres of rolling hillside covered in green grass and flowers and vines and pecans and monarch butterflies and oak trees and dragon flies. Home.

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous. ~ Aristotle