I generally try to post every Monday at the least. Well here it is Tuesday afternoon and I am just now getting to it. Life gets in the way at times. We just now get back from the grocery store. We had to replenish a lot of long term things we have used up over the last pandemic months. So we fed the economy at least.
We took a quick trip farther into the Hill Country to see if there were any wild flowers this year. We missed going last year and maybe the year before too. I didn't hold out much hope since we had the killer freeze apocalypse late in the winter. It hit about the time a lot of wild flowers are just starting to set buds. We didn't see many on the way up as we usually do. But there were a few as we got farther north, not a lot but is was good.
The thing we noticed most, that detracted from our pleasurable viewing, were the oak trees. The Hill Country is just full of Live Oak trees and a lot of other strains of Oaks that I can't tell the difference. We passed thousands that were dead. I don't think I saw a single tree that didn't have broken limbs with a pile at the bottom of every tree. That was snow and ice damage along with some strong winds. I don't understand why so many seemed completely dead though. None of mine suffered enough to kill them and there wasn't that great a temperature difference between here and there. Now we do have a lot of that disease called Live Oak Decline. It's a fungus that gets into the tree from a beetle. It can kill a tree very quickly. The Hill Country has seen a lot of it. Yet nothing like we saw yesterday. I just can't tell you how bad it was. I didn't even think to take any pictures, but I may have some video from my dash cam. It really put a damper on our trip and we headed home earlier than we had planned. I may do a little more research and try and find out more.
Happy Trails
1 comment:
They may not be dead, my neighbor had one that lost ALL of its leaves, but today I saw some new leaves coming out. Hopefully, those will come back too!
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