Rural north of Austin, HELP!?!~ (San Marcos, Brushy Creek: houses, to buy, subdivisions)

[TexasHorseLady]

Oh, burr oak acorns can get larger than that!

[brucemc777]

I find the leaves on these trees to be roughly an inch and a half and oval in shape, the trees rather small - 12' to 20' or so.

[TexasHorseLady]

Okay, which of these did it look more like?

Pecans

Pecan Tree Leaves

At that size, you'd be talking about small pecan trees, by the way.

Sounds more, from the description of the leaves, like you're talking about a live oak:

Two kinds of live oaks, photos of leaves

Live Oak acorns

[brucemc777]

That live oak looks like the right one, thank-you!

Once again, weird. The only oak I had come to know of were the kind with a 6" or so scalloped kind of leaf - Red Oak, White Oak and Pin Oak trees. Learn something new...

Now if it would quit raining I could go out to a park and look for a scorpion or two. Do they tend to be the little inch long critters, or might I find them more of the "pet store size" (hopefully not by accident)(same goes for snakes)?

I also now quite clearly see what was meant by the homes around here being built on rock and therefore no basements. In the small park next to the subdivision we live in there appears some discarded cut rock, and I am amazed as the trouble someone had to go to to cut pieces of the size they are. To see a cut-away view of what is under the soil is something, too; just a huge slab of solid rock. I came from an area that all the substrate beneath a house was almost purely sand. I guess you do not have all the new home settling problems here (other than an occasional scorpion :-) .

[TexasHorseLady]

Well, those of us that are on black gumbo clay (not all soil in Central Texas is the same) have some interesting issues. I'm on pier and beam, a 1930's Hyde Park house moved out to the ranch in 1970, and it "dances" - depending on what the weather's been, sometimes doors won't stay closed, sometimes they will. I've just come to consider it the personality of the house!

But those built on stone, not so much.

Now, originally, I came from East Texas, so I know what you mean about the sand!

[HappyTexan]

And east of I-35 (Pflugerville area) we have "all dirt-no rock" and it's heavy clay.

[TexasHorseLady]

Yep, black gumbo clay. (Archealogists in future are going to find at least two mud boots in what is now our paddock that I lost after heavy rains when they sank so deep that I couldn't get them out.)

[HappyTexan]

ROFL..then send them guys over to my place. We had a mudboot sucked into the banks of our tank years ago when my son was small. He got so stuck I had to pull him out. One mudboot didn't make it. We never did find that boot. I swear it's like quicksand when it gets totally wet

[TexasHorseLady]

Yep, pretty close. Our place is half Austin Chalk (rock, limestone), and half Houston Black (mudboot-eating clay, will grow ANYTHING, though). I've learned the "gumbo walk" over the years, but it gets dicey sometimes - not looking forward to going out to feed this evening after a whole day of rain!

[brucemc777]

I used to have a place on clay - in the dry Summers you would have to use a pick axe to cut through it if you wanted to plant anything, and when it was wet, it was slime. Now which I preferred...

Anyway: We used to go canoing in Michigan (on the Au Sable River, if anyone cares) where you could be dropped in in the morning, go along with the current for seven hours (paddling to avoid the occasional rock or tree) and be pulled out in the late afternoon. Anything like that around here? I guess I am going crazy quicker than I imagined; Cedar Park, and specifically, Forest Oaks, is nice enough, but being used to farm field, the fields of roof tops are driving me batty.