80AcresOnline

Every year we have to file an annual report with our county tax appraisal district.    We have to use the TPWD form, which–being written for much larger properties mostly focused on game animals–doesn’t really fit us.   So every year, in addition to filling out the state’s 9 page form, I write “Please see attached supplemental pages” many times and then devise a supplement that goes through the same required activities from our perspective, with pictures.    In detail sufficient to prove that yes, we are doing everything we say we’re doing, and yes, what we’re doing does fit the requirements.   Read the rest of this entry »

At a town meeting to discuss the new “weeds and trash” ordinance, I stood up for the value of natural “wildscaping” over manicured (and water hogging) lawns, and “nuisance water” rules.

You win some, you lose some. Traditionally, city governments have been told by health authorities that all standing water (bird baths included) are dangerous because of mosquitos, that tall grass and “weeds” (usually defined as any flower you don’t buy at the nursery) are unhealthy and unsanitary because they harbor rodents and snakes. The new ordinance–which our council insists they toned down from the version another town used–treats natural plants in the same way as human-generated trash. “Brush” is one of the things they prohibit.

Brush is habitat. Brush is valuable food and cover for desirable wildlife (and some less desirable, but the same could be said of a town–food and cover for humans, both the desirable ones that bring joy and the undesirable ones who bring misery.)