Saturday, May 5, 2012

Zest Fest 2012, Taylor Texas

Dear friends,

We spent this morning acting like locals.  Because after all, we are locals now.  First thing we did was visit the small Hutto Farmer's Market and scored some delicious fresh produce from the folks there---fresh cauliflower, tomatoes and cucumbers.  The first tomatoes are just now coming in and we can never resist them.  We bought from farms in Thrall and Taylor, and other than my own backyard garden, that's as local as it gets!

Then we came back home to Taylor and went downtown for their annual Zest Fest celebration.  I'll admit, it was a lot larger than I expected.  The entire downtown area was filled with music and crafts, local organizations like the Taylor Garden Club, Chamber of Commerce and the Blackland Quilt Guild had booths, and a classic car show got both Rudy's and my attention.  Here are a few photos I took along the way.  Forgive the quality of the pics, it was in the upper 90's, my camera was being a bit flakey and the crowd of people were often in the way.


Quilts flapped in the breeze, hung from a building.  Sorry I didn't get the names of the quiltmakers.


My favorites are always the brightly colored ones.

The quilts had many admirers, young and old.


Husband Rudy liked this one the best.  The quiltmaker used all floral fabrics on an otherwise simple pattern.

Blackland Quilt Guild is the local Taylor quilting group.





The Taylor Garden Club had a booth selling plants.

The classic car show also caught our eye.  I love classic cars, especially the Chevys.  I've been a Chevy girl from the get-go. :-)












 After wandering around for an hour or so, I scored a grape shaved ice (we used to call them snow cones---when did they quit putting them in cones?  LOL), and we followed our ears to the live music.  We got quite a surprise when we arrived at the stage.  A young girl with a gorgeous, strong voice was belting out some contemporary songs.  Turns out, she's Courtney Ging, the very talented 16-year old daughter of our beloved plumber and wife, Wayne and Cara Ging.  Her performance deserves a blog post of its own, so stay tuned!

We also checked out the marquee to see what's coming next at our restored Howard Theatre in downtown Taylor.  YES!  Dark Shadows is coming next week, and Rudy and I already have a date for the first showing.  We haven't had a chance to see a show there yet, and  I'm looking forward to it.

Hope you've enjoyed this little picture of our new friendly, vibrant community!  The temperature eventually reached 96-degrees today.  Crazy.  But that didn't stop the Taylorites (as we're called, I found out) from getting out, having fun, and celebrating small town Texas.

Happy trails on Cinco de Mayo!

bobbi c.

Just a few random photos for Cinco de Mayo!

I realized I have hundreds of photos that I haven't "processed" or gone through, all taken over the last two months.  It's going to take me some time to do that.  As much as I love my digital camera, I long for the days when I had a stack of paper photos to flip through, organize, sort, etc.  But I do not miss all the scanning that was required.  Anyway, Feliz Cinco de Mayo, everyone, and enjoy the pics!

Side yard, with new Texas persimmon.  The mystery plant in the left flower bed turned out to be milkweed.

A very odd green rose.  Can't decide whether I love it, or hate it.

The pallet veggie garden grows, with tons of peppers and eggplants.  Trellis added to clothesline post holds a baby grapevine.

New raised beds--my "So Easy it's Stupid" method :-)

One of the few natives on the property when we bought it, a red salvia blooms

The backyard by the porch garden, with salvias, iris and other natives.
More later!

Happy trails from Taylor, Texas!

bobbi c.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Before and After Photos

Dear friends,

I'm trying a new feature using Photobucket to show Before and After pics of the cottage.  Not sure how this will work yet, so I've only added a few photos to start with.  Comments would be appreciated.  In the meantime, enjoy the slideshow (to the right of the posts, in the sidebar).

Since the tags don't seem to show up in slideshow mode, I hope you can tell which are the Befores, and which are the Afters.  LOL!

Happy Trails!

bobbi c.