Psssssst...

Psssssst...The Fly on the Flower says to stay tuned as there is a FOLK Magazine Giveaway coming soon!

I promised to giveaway a copy of FOLK magazine to celebrate my pictures being published, so stay tuned for details of the giveaway.

Hope y'all are having a great short work week!  

Back Roads, Black Eyed Susans, and Barbed Wire

I love driving the quite country dirt roads and recently cut through this seldom travelled back road.

This road connects local farmers to their property and gives them access to the back side of the land. I grew up riding my horses down this road, knowing there wouldn't be much traffic to hinder our ride and day dreaming.

I have been seeing lots of Black Eyed Susans growing along the highways recently and always wanted to stop and take a picture, but the right opportunity hadn't come along.  

With noone behind me on the dirt road, I slammed on my breaks, stopped in the middle of the road, and got out and took a few pictures of the Black Eyed Susans and barbed wire fences.

You sure can't do that when driving 70 miles an hour on a busy road!

Garden Tour

Its been a rather busy month and I'm glad to have this weekend to spend some time relaxing and working in the junk yard.

For some crazy reason, I have gotten up early this weekend, even though I didn't have to go to work. I went out to water the flowers and decided to take a few pictures as well.

 

I love this ring-eyed day lily.

The hens are really growing well in this old rusty wheelbarrow and the chicks should start hatching soon!

More of the rusty-red and orange lilies.

The yellow lantana wraps all around the yuccas.

I started these zinnias and cosmos from seeds this spring and they are really starting to be pretty and colorful.

I changed the plant in the bicycle basket to this English ivy and like its appearance much better. I love how the ivy cascades over the locker basket.

The red alstromerias are filling in where the early spring bulbs were at.

Hope you enjoyed the tour. I'll try to share more pictures soon. Hope you all are having a great day!

Farm Fresh Pizza

I am enjoying this long weekend and the opportunity to be home and do whatever I want to! I've been working long hours and getting lots of "dashboard therapy" (driving), so I am enjoying getting to work in my yard, spend time doing tinkering around, and cook. Yes, I said cook!

I love pizza and having more time at home equals homemade pizza instead of the frozen kind.  I often get a veggie pizza when eating at Subway and many times the person behind me in line will comment "that looks good" or "I never thought of that."

I cooked this farm fresh pizza for lunch today and it was great! I had a 1/2 pound of hamburger meat, leftover from cooking burgers earlier in the week. I browned the meat and several cloves of chopped garlic.

I usually make my own crust, butI did cheat and use a crust out of the can this time.

I heated a small can of tomato sauce with fresh oregano leaves and then started layering the ingredients on the crust.

I started with the sauce, then added chopped chives, basil leaves, and more oregano. Then I added the hamburger meat. Next I chopped up two tomatoes that my sweet mother-in-law shared with me and then added fresh parsley from my yard. Finally I added chopped jalapeno peppers and cooked the pizza for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, I grated cheddar, pepper jack, and Monterrey jack cheese that was added during the last few minutes of cooking.

The pizza had a great farm fresh garden taste to it. I used all the fresh herbs from my garden to season the pizza and did not use any salt, pepper, or spices out of a bottle!

The pizza can be made with just about any combination of fresh garden produce and herbs you have on hand. When I buy a veggie pizza, I love to start with a layer of fresh spinach, but I didn't have any on hand today. I served the pizza with fresh carrots and homemade peach cobbler. My mother-in-law shared some of her fresh, home grown peaches as well!

Farmall H and the Answer

I took this picture recently when I went out back in my husband's junk. This is an old Farmall H tractor that he got at the auction.

As far as the answer about the space ship landing in the hayfield...Donna from Cottage Days got it right off the bat. I was driving my father-in-law's much newer tractor than this H, that had a glass cab, air conditioning, and a radio. The round object in the picture was a reflection of the steering wheel in the glass as the sun was settting from the west and I was looking east. No aliens landing in the hayfield!

Spaceship or what?

We have been working long hours on the farm over the past week, harvesting one cutting of hay.

After last years drought, we are very thankful for the grass growing and the opportunity to bale hay to feed the cows this winter.

I was stopped on my rake tractor, waiting on the hay baler to catch up with me, when I took this picture. This pic was taken with my iPod, no fancy smancy settings, nothing. Simply point and shoot then framed with an app.

So my question to you is... Can you explain the spaceship-like ring in the picture? What's your guess?

I'll share what's really going on in the picture later this week.

My Camper Dream

I have been wanting a vintage style camper for what seems like forever. I keep searching craigslist, eBay, and everywhere I drive in hopes of finding one for sale... Cheap of course and reasonably close. (All the ones on eBay seem to be way up north.)

If you follow on pinterest, you can tell that one night this week I pinned a lot of vintage campers and that's what I really want mine to look like. I have visions of how I will decorate it very shabby chic style and even bought bedding at a garage sale a few weeks ago that would be beautiful in it.

So after browsing and pinning away Monday night, I had this dream that I found the perfect camper for sale, in my budget. I had a choice of two different ones, owned by the same person. One was gray and north of Dallas with the second one being south of Dallas with a shabby chic white interior. I chose the white one.

I usually only have nightmares, but I shared this sweet dream with my husband Tuesday morning. I said it was either my lucky day or I stayed up way too late pinning!

So Tuesday afternoon I talked to him while I was at work... He had been working on a truck and a hoe (get your mind outta the gutter... It was a Backhoe!) with a neighbor who has a fabulous collection of junk. He mentioned I was looking for a camper and Mr. D said I could have one of his! He has a couple old campers amongst all his stuff.

This picture is how I found the camper this morning. It's a mess and will need a total over haul, not just decorating. There were two campers, owned by same person, except they were east of Dallas, one mile north of my house. Now I have to decide if I really want to undertake this big of a project or keep looking for another camper in better shape.

Oh and this one has white interior! Someone sheet rocked the inside at some point and added the crazy roof. Other than that, it's a mess and will need lots of sweat equity. But then I think about what the Junk Gypsies did with a gutted camper, and I think I might just be able to do this.

Decisions, decisions...

65 Ford Custom Cab

Donna at Cottage Days inspired me with a picture she posted this week. She spurred me to get "out back" in my husband's "junk" and take a few pictures! We have lots of rusty, junky, items in the equipment yard from old trucks and farm implements, to vintage tractors. I might just have to start photographing them all!

This 1965 Ford Truck was my husband's first truck. He got it running in his high school shop mechanics class and drove it for a while. Now he has dreams of restoring it back to running condition someday.

 A few wild berries are growing up through the grill of the truck. I call these wild black berries "Junk Berries", since they grow up around the rusty treasures!. If enough wild berries ripen at the same time, we can have a fresh Junk Berry Cobbler! I saw several berries tonight as I took pictures, so we might need to buy some ice cream in anticipation of hot cobbler!

I took these photos this afternoon late and edited it Picasa, using the 1960's effect, after all its a 60's era Custom Cab Ford 100.

I do hope that one day we can take this truck for a ride, preferably pulling a vintage style camper behind it!
I keep searching for an old rounded style camper or airstream to fix up and decorate and I'm having no luck finding one for sale in this part of the country.

Chives and Dandelions

 This year we didn't plant a big vegetable garden, but I do have a few pots of herbs and some tomatoes growing in a rusty trash can.

This is one of the chive flowers. They are really tiny lavender blossoms. I like being able to cut fresh chives to go with a baked potato for supper or to season food while I'm cooking.

This dandelion flower is pretty much just a weed, but yet it has a pretty bloom! It was begging to be photographed ;)

I'll never forget what my college ag teacher told us about a weed. He said anything growing where it is unwanted is a weed...Your grass growing in my flower beds is a weed, My flowers growing in the cow pasture is a weed.

Sunset on the Farm

Its been a while since I shared any sunset pictures.

I took these pictures on the farm one afternoon last week as the sun slipped below the horizon.

Hope everyone is havind a wonderful week!

Cactus Garden

Along the front fence in our yard, we have cactus, yuccas, and pampass grass growing. The cactus was grown by my husband's grandmother, then his mother. My sweet mother-in-law shared with me as we were establishing our yard and the prickly pear makes a great border. The animals do not want to pass through the "live" fence.
The yellow blossoms are pretty this week.

I played with my camera and switched to manual focus, so the centers of the flowers would be in focus better.

 A bee and grasshopper seem to like the cactus blooms too!

I'm in FOLK Magazine!

So I've been keeping this little secret since February and its been killing me...I submitted a story to Folk Magazine during the winter and found out my pictures from the Ennis Bluebonnet Trails would be included in Issue V of FOLK Magazine!

I didn't want to tell anybody in case something happened and my submission failed to make the final cut. Today, I went to the mail box and there was two copies of FOLK with MY pictures and editorial piece in it! I got two whole pages with seven pictures! Our dog Trixie even made it into the Southern issue.

Somebody please pinch me!

It was a dream to get to see the Texas Bluebonnets in person and a dream to one day have my work published in a magazine. I get to scratch two things off the bucket list now!



This is a picture from the Ennis Bluebonnet Trails this year.

We enjoy driving the Ennis Bluebonnet Trails and getting to see all the beautiful wildflowers in bloom during the spring. We returned this spring and took even more pictures. To me nothing says Texas like Bluebonnets and Longhorn Cattle.

To find out more about the Ennis Bluebonnet Trails you can visit their website.

To see more of my pictures from the Bluebonnets Trails, when I originally published them on my blog, please click here.

This issue of FOLK magazine can now be found at Barnes and Noble bookstores and independent bookstores across the country. Check out the FOLK blog to find locations near you.

(When the rest of my order arrives, I will be doing a give away of one issue on my blog!)



Whats Blooming in my Yard

I took a few pictures of my yard this week. Things are really starting to bloom pretty and I'm loving all the color in the landscape.

This day lily started blooming a few weeks ago and many more of the lilies are budding.

 I have lilies planted along this rustic rope fence and scattered throughout the yard in different flower beds. I love that the day lilies are pretty much care free and I only have to water them in the driest parts of the summer.

This picture is when I first planted my wash tub.

While this is a picture from Sunday! The petunias have taken over and the fountain grass is really growing. I tried growing ranuculas (orange flowers) for the first time this year and they didn't seem to last very long at all. The petunias are filling in really nicely though and you can't tell that part of the flowers have faded away. I doubt I will try the ranuculas again.

Here's a wide view of the yard when standing in front of the gazebo.

Did you notice my "new" lawn mower in the picture above? Hee Hee...I got it from my uncle's estate sale a year or so ago and had it in the greenhouse and decided it needed to be displayed.

The catalpa trees have been covered in worms and last weekend we went fishin'. I love fishin' with my cane pole with catalpa worms and caught a dozen fish and released them in our other pond.

 Pansies fill this vintage crock on my porch with lilies, and thyme filling in around it.

Larkspur and lilies are two of my favorite spring flowers...

I'm curious, what is your favorite spring flower?