This is an Agave. Before I tell you about the pictures, I gotta tell you I had a major computer crash. Lost my C drive and everything on it that wasn't backed up on discs. I just had installed the new IE 8 disc a few days before and when my AVG virus definitions downloaded and installed, the whole thing went tit's up. Had to F10 the thing to get it started again and found C drive wiped out. Had to restore back to basics. Just now getting things back to normal. The top picture is what the agave looked like sunday when I took this pic. Lost the other one when the thing looked like the ones below.I wanted to show you just how fast these things grow. The stem on this sucker is over 6 inches across. I should measure what it is around.
Today this guy here is almost as tall as the top one. This pic was taken last sunday. This next sunday I will take pics of the same ones and post them . These babies will have to be cut off before we leave here because they are under the eaves of the house. So far we have 4 going to bloom this year. There are lots of little ones that have come up all around the big plants. I was watering my new flowers coming up in the new beds and dropped the hose into one of these agaves. Sliced a hole in the hose and had to tape it up. They make excellent break-in guards.a burglar would get sliced to ribbons if he fell into one of these. Needle points and sharp as a razor.
I got new flowers galore coming up from the seeds Bill sent. Going to bring up a few small plants with us when we come north. I think they will grow if planted in a protected place.
I lost all the Granny cartoons I had drawn up to post here on the blog. Makes me mad. I will wait til I get back from up north to draw new ones. All the pics I took since last fall are gone. I did back up Phillips pics because I was making them into a movie on the lap top.
Beginning to heat up down here. Phillip and I went back up into the mountains and did some more panning in a different spot. Didn't do too bad either. Will post pics of this spot later.
This spot makes a guy wish they could just lay back in a lounge and listen to the creek and the birds sing, while the rest of the world sailed right on by. Big pines, ash, box elder and elm trees all around. Just heavenly. Granny
2 comments:
I did some panning yesterday. It was kind of slow so I cut out of work a bit early to head up the creek to see if I could find some Au. The water is still running a bit high so perhaps some of the good stuff is still en route to the settling areas (slow water behind big rocks?). I have a favorite spot where I usually get a fair amount of black sand and a few grains of Au. But it is also really close to town so you get all kinds of riff raff (drunken yahoos that like to break glass bottles and be loud). So I tried up the river a ways to an area I had never been before. I still got some black sand but this new place had bigger pieces of gold. It's still pretty small but these pieces are about twice the size of the pieces I get at my normal place.
I have learned to be patient because the gold I find is really at the very bottom. In the place I typically do not see anything resembling gold until I get down to about a half teaspoon of stuff left in the pan. The good thing though is that I have employed Grandmas technique of saving the black sand in a container and working it out later. That way I can burn through three or four full pans of stuff saving the residual black sand collectively. This saves time and usually the amount of gold I get from the collective batch of black sand is bigger than finding one or two tinsey specks if I worked out each individual full pan.
The one thing I don't like about this technique is that I don't know if my spot is good because I don't work each pan all the way out. I've decided the best metric to decide if an area is "hot" or not is by judging the amount of black sand there is and by trying to work out many different pans in about a thirty yard stretch of river. If I cover too much area and I get a lot of yellow stuff when I get home and work it out, then I won't know where to go back to next time.
It's a learning process but I'm getting better and I haven't been skunked yet. Granted some pans yield less gold than I could squeeze under my pinky fingernail.
Oh yeah, Grandma, thanks for the "dishsoap trick" that works like magic keeping the "flour" from floating! Although I have also learned to not get too nuts with the soap as it makes bubbles which impairs vision down into the pan!
Jake; Best to work out 1 in about 4 pans to the nth degree, Especially if moving up or down stream. That way you know if you have a hot spot.
On the dish soap thing, a drop is all you need. Take a toothpick and dip it into soap, then your water. Enough. Another thing, move rocks and try the top of the gravel under them at the side of the creek as soon as the water level drops. I have found pickers this way. Especially when you have an area that gets high swift water in the winter. This can be high up on the bank in some places. This is what we are reaping in the area we are in now.
When we were in MT. I had Phillip get me a pan of dirt from the dirty dirt high on the bank and got a picker in it. One place we panned here in AZ that is where we found the biggest nuggets. They were left high and dry from a long ago flood. If you reach an area with steep hills close to the creek, it is a good idea to sample the bank off and on. If you didn't get that Garret Super Sluice Pan yet you should. And a 1/4 inch screen. Any nuggets that won't go through it you will spot fast as soon as you flip the screen over onto the ground. They will be right omn top of the pile. Take the pan with the screen in it to the water and wash the stuff good before you flip. Swirl the panning good then tip the pan about 10 degrees and with just the back end out of the water a little , swirl the pan (under the water) and let the water do the work. All the fines stuff will just wash out, then you can pan out the rest. Practice with a few bb's to make sure you can do it. I can pan out a pan in under a minute with this pan. Damn near impossible to lose your gold if you do it right. Couldn't find the right box for the sucker tube so will have to make one out of a bigger one. Granny
Post a Comment