Some country roads

I was out today with my camera in southeast Travis county, hoping to see a caracara or a harrier. A harrier did fly across the road ahead of me, but by the time I had stopped the car it was over the crest of a low grassy ridge, and gone.

So I was driving around on these back roads, and I was astonished to go past a group of 3 or 4 young people working in a winter truck garden. It surprised me because commercial farming of food crops has almost disappeared from central Texas. Another unusual thing is that the people doing stoop labor in the field were "Anglos" as we say heareabouts. They were all more or less the same age, and seemed unlikely to be members of the same family, so I'm thinking it's some kind of a neo-hippie organic farm, but by the time I thought well, I could stop and ask, I was already down the road. I did slow down enough to take a photo through the car window. Now I wish I had stopped, because my photo is so bad I can't even be sure what the crop is. I'm guessing broccoli, but it doesn't look quite right for that--broccoli, the times I have tried to grow it, has big leaves and the florets bolt almost immediately. I really don't know what the hell this is.



Then I drove past a giant landfill which keeps exotic game on unused (or restored) acreage. This particular landfill actually has a very good reputation, environmentally, unlike any other landfill I know about. So I can't complain too much about their introducing non-native species. They seem to keep them fenced adequately, in any case. What we have below is a sort of odd couple, a dama gazelle from the Sahel area of Africa, and an American bison.



And here, about 5 miles from my house, is a country Baptist church--very unlike its megachurch cousins in town.