Wild Flowers

I can't believe how time flies. I've been diligently taking all sorts of pictures for this blog, only to find 1. I have to go out and help Jerry with "farm work", 2. I'm at work and the camera is at home, 3. I sit at a computer all day and don't feel like it in the evenings. Well all that is going to change. I am pledging to post to this blog at least once a week. There's always interesting things going on at the farm at this time as we've been busy building our infrastructure for the past year or so and it's still ongoing, although we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel!
While making runs to the poop pile at an undisclosed area on our property, I have been amazed at all the wonderful wild flowers I have seen. I pretty much had decided that most all wildflowers are one of 3 colors, white, blue or yellow. . . wrong! So for the next few posts I am going to include pics of the flowers I have managed to capture with my very inexperienced shutter finger.

Of course the first picture is easy to identify, the Prickly Pear Cactus. I know this sounds mean, with such beautiful flowers, but my pledge is to eradicate each and every one of these from our property. They are the most prolific plant I have almost ever met. You can knock off a part of the plant and leave it laying on the ground, next thing you know, there's a new section growing out of the side of it, and it's rooted into the ground! Someone was telling me that the absolute worse thing you can do with a prickly pear is put it through a shredding machine, then you get new plants from EACH of the pieces you broke it into! Nature is amazing about reproducing isn't it? I just know that when you have alpacas, dogs and cats you are committed to taking the best possible care of, you can't have cactus, period, end of discussion. I must say that by eliminating each and everyone of them off our property is going to be a challenge, we've got a bountiful share of them.

I am with mixed emotions about this plant. Another alpaca farmer has taken the fruit fermented it and made it into dye which she said produced a beautiful pink on her white alpaca fiber. I will be collecting my harvest and trying this out for myself, not just on alpaca but on some the the merino wool that I also have. My challenge is to see if I can get that beautiful crimson color out of the fruit. I'll let you know.

OK so it's hard to realize size of each of these flowers as they have been taken as close up as I could get to show the actual blossoms. Prickly pear flowers can be as large as a woman's fist whereas the next one is half the size of a dime.

I don't know it's name, but it, like most wildflowers, is very prolific in Texas and other southern states. I can never remember if it's the small yellow flowers or the plant with the small lavendar-pink flowers that produce the goatheads, but I believe this one is just as treacherous. Why is that? Do they choose to tempt you with their pretty flowers, only to stick you with one of their seed pods that hurt like the dickens? I know, I know, even "cultured" flowers can do that, take the rose for instance.

I just know I am on a mission to eradicate "mean weeds" before they get to the mean stage. I will gladly allow all these pretty wildflowers to produce and delight me, I just remove the blooms before they get to the ugly stage.

OK, the next flowers, the 2 groupings I believe might be wild coreopsis, but I'll have to check on that.

This is a pretty flower that could be in a single clump, or in a cluster so I don't know if it seeds, or spreads by its root system. I believe a lot of wild flowers can do both.

I like this soft yellow. Talking of soft yellow, this one is almost a cream color. When these plants first started coming up I thought we had a strawberry field, they were very prolific and looked just like strawberries. It took a few months for the flowers to actually appear and again, they look like strawberries. I have not seen any fruit develop, but I'll let you know if they do.

This single flower I believe is a perennial and grows only one bloom.

Even though these flowers just all look like they're the same color, it's amazing the variations that they have. Some go towards the golden yellow, while others will have amazing orange or even red-orange centers.
While all I am showing are yellow flowers I thought I'd go through the groups by color. I must say that even though I thought I was pretty good at naming wildflowers, now that I'm in Texas I am totally stumped. I am going to go by the library and see if I can find a book that will help me identify the ones that I have found so far. They are stunning.

Here's one version of the Mexican Hat. These happy flowers are plentiful on the roadsides. In fact, I must confess, that these were on the roadside, along with some red ones and then some that had cross pollinated and were red and yellow. It's always a delight to see these during the late spring and early summer.

I do have a plan for all of this picture taking. . . . . more on my next post!