Monthly Archives: October 2022

20 Minutes Into the Future…

A lot of things are going on today, including my grandmother’s 99th birthday (alternately, the twentieth anniversary of her ascension as the Queen of Evil), and combining evening events with a Monday means that a lot of folks might avoid the rise of the big yellow hurty thing in the sky. For those who risked immolation in the deadly rays of the daystar, you might have caught a certain fast-talking pedant on Good Morning Texas talking with Hannah Davis. For those of us whose life in Dallas is a continuous cosplay of the film Near Dark, video will be available soon. Either way, between this and last weekend’s show at the Dallas Arboretum, look for a new announcement on an absolute last, final, full-stop, cross-my-hear-and-hope-to-die Porch Sale for November 6 to go with the Goth Flea Market at Panoptikon on November 5. And just think: it’s only going to get busier around here before New Year’s Day.

EDIT: And the whole video is now live. Feel free to pass it along.

Have a Safe Weekend

By the time you read this, the first of three days showing carnivorous plants at the Dallas Arboretum will be complete, with two more to go. If you’re already going to the Arboretum to see the Autumn at the Arboretum exhibition, the Triffid Ranch tables should be up near the front entrance. If you can’t make it, check back with Good Morning Texas on Monday morning: my grandmother’s 99th birthday would have been Monday, so it’s particularly appropriate.

The Aftermath: The (Presumably) Last Porch Sale of 2022

For what was originally intended to be a temporary drive-up event deep in the throes of Dallas COVID lockdown, the Triffid Ranch Porch Sales have turned out to be remarkably popular and successful. A quarter of a decade after the first, not only are they going strong, but new visitors courtesy of Atlas Obscura and the Dallas Observer keep coming. In a better world, the Porch Sales would continue all year, but two factors keep getting in the way. The first is that the temperate carnivores, particularly the Venus flytraps and North American pitcher plants, have to go into dormancy over the winter, which means they’re usually looking pretty scraggly by New Year’s Eve. The second is the reason they’re looking scraggly: we may not get below freezing in the Dallas area until the end of the year, but it gets cold enough, and setting up and tearing down a tent in near-freezing torrential rains is entertainment for a certain type of person I hope never to meet. Thus, with great regret, future Triffid Ranch events move inside for the year and into 2023, because visitors would prefer to get out from the torrential rains, too.

With that said, I wish to express the greatest thanks to everyone coming out for Porch Sales in 2023, from the families wanting to see live carnivorous plants for the first time to the regulars who just wanted to see what I was up to THIS time. A lot of plans were delayed this year due to circumstances, but the idea is to bring a whole new level to the Porch Sales next year, and I hope we can all have a blast with it when they restart next March or April. Since the Deep Ellum Arts Festival isn’t coming back, somebody has to step in and fill the niche.

Now, this isn’t the last Triffid Ranch event of 2022, and it may not even be the absolute last Porch Sale. The Triffid Ranch moves to the Dallas Arboretum on October 28 through 30, with a Learn to Grow presentation at 11:00 am Friday and then an ongoing plant show all weekend, and then we hop over to the famed Dallas goth club Panoptikon for the return of the Panoptikon Flea Market/Cookout/Cocktails on November 5. Thanks to a big upcoming development (of which you’ll hear much on Halloween), the gallery will probably open on November 6 for folks who couldn’t make the Panoptikon Flea Market. After that? Sleep. Blessed sleep, alongside the Sarracenia if I can help it.

The Aftermath: Crow’s Alley Dallas Flea Market 2022

The truism “If you don’t like Texas weather, wait five minutes” should come with an addendum: “You have four minutes to do EVERYTHING.” October weather makes things worse: Dallasites know in particular that when the weather shifts, it does so catastrophically, so a vague prediction of rain or thunderstorms leads everyone to rush out while the opportunity exists, or batten down and rush back outside once the debris stops falling. For those living in areas where everyone salivates over knowing exactly when a school-closing snowstorm hits, you understand the situation better than you know.

Hiding inside in anticipation, though, means missing out on some of the clearest skies you’ll ever see, which made the Crow’s Alley Flea Market gathering at Outfit Brewing such a relaxing experience. After the repeated near-tornadoes of September, getting out under clear and crisp evening skies for a plant show was worth the effort. The Crow’s Alley crew was both cheery and helpful, and working with them again is an option for next year. Outfit Brewing is a singularly cheery place, even for an involuntary non-drinker like me, and setting up in the interior courtyard was an honor. Once the weather allows more outdoor shows in spring, coming back to show off blooming carnivores is definitely in the cards.

Sadly, the window of outdoor event-friendly weather is closing, with the last outdoor Triffid Ranch show of 2022 running at the Dallas Arboretum from October 28 through 30 (and with the current weather forecast threatening inundation, thankfully the Friday show will be inside), but the plan for 2023 is to hit the ground running in April. With skies like these, it’s worth it.

Have a Safe Weekend

This next week is going to get busy even by Triffid Ranch standards, and my threats to develop a vaccine for sleep may stop being mere threats. Details will follow soon enough, but my parents are going to be severely disappointed once again. It’s to the point where this weekend’s Porch Sale may not actually be the absolute last one for 2022 (come out on Saturday between 10:00 am and 3:00 pm to see the explosion of Sarracenia leucophylla this autumn): again, details will follow.

The Texas Triffid Ranch Occasional Newsletter and Feedlot Clearance Sale – #33

For newcomers, this is a semi-regular newsletter from the Texas Triffid Ranch, Dallas’s pretty much only carnivorous plant gallery. Feel free to forward early and often, and to subscribe if you haven’t already.

Installment #33: “20 Years of Carnivorous Plants
(Originally published August 25, 2022)

My ex used to complain about my packrat memory for odd anniversaries. Throw out a random date, and odds are good I can relate at least two major life experiences with it. This foul Year of Our Lord 2022 has been full of major anniversaries (April 2 marked the fortieth anniversary of the near-decapitation that led to the distinctive scar on my forehead and the thirtieth of my finishing the manuscript for my first book, for instance, and August 7 and December 28 are two that I’m desperately trying to forget), but September 23 will always be a cherished anniversary, no matter what, as my life completely changed from that point on. Today marks the first day I viewed a carnivorous plant in person, in situ.

The backstory on how the Triffid Ranch got its start has been related ad nauseam, but especial credit is owed to the Tallahassee Museum. This day twenty years ago, after finally pulling my old Neon into town and getting checked into the local Residence Inn, the urge to explore was irresistible, and when you leave Paul to his own devices, that urge usually runs toward museums. The Tallahassee Museum is just as much wildlife preserve as museum of natural and cultural history, and a display at the main admissions building contained a collection of purple pitcher plants (Sarracenia purpurea) rescued from elsewhere on the Museum grounds. The real clincher, though, was going through the trails to view local animals and coming back to ask “Okay, everything else was well-labeled, but I couldn’t ID a snake and a plant in the skunk enclosure. Would anybody know what these are?”

Within two minutes, I had an answer: a king snake and a yellow pitcher plant (Sarracenia flava). When I discovered that the Museum gift shop had a book on pitcher plants, one I still have in my library, it was all over. The plants owned me.

This is a roundabout way of noting that after things settle down a bit at the end of this year, it’s time to head back to Tallahassee. 2023 may be a year of road trips, both for Triffid Ranch shows (Aquashella Chicago is very high on the list) and for personal reasons (my maternal grandmother’s 100th birthday is coming up, and that justifies a trip to Michigan), and it may be time to go back to the end of the beginning.

Outside Events
Texas Frightmare Weekend 2023 is confirmed. Information about next year’s Oddities & Curiosities Expo shows, both dates and cities, should be arriving shortly. In the interim, the big news with outside shows is being invited to lecture at the Dallas Arboretum on October 28 and then moving outside for a show and sale on October 28, 29. and 30. This means that the usual Halloween Porch Sale may have to run earlier, but heading out to the Arboretum means being able to see the Sarracenia pool in the Children’s Garden, so it all works out.

Other News
Well, the Triffid Ranch didn’t win the Dallas Observer Best of Dallas Award, but I mean it when I say I was honored to be nominated. It still worked out, as writer Kendall Morgan came out to the gallery to write about the renovation. Just wait until the back area is complete: she and everyone else won’t know what to think.

Shameless Plugs
It’s been a while since I’ve hyped up artist and amphibian breeder extraordinaire Ethan Kocak, but it’s definitely time. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably seen his scientist account avatars; if you aren’t, then you may have seen his illustrations in the book Does It Fart? Either way, welcome to yet another rabbit hole.

Recommended Reading
More stuff in the mailbox this month, but two have special importance. For obvious reasons, the new Redfern Natural History volume New Nepenthes Volume 2 is essential reading, but so is The Art of Ron Cobb by Jacob Johnston. With the latter, this is the first collection of Cobb’s film work since his collection Colorvision from 1981: his pictogram icons throughout the Nostromo sets in Alien have been a long-running influence for usability experts, and I’m very glad to see them and everything else Cobb did reaching a new audience.

Music
It’s been one hell of a month, which means finding an appropriate soundtrack, and September 2022’s soundtrack comes straight from the Gothsicles. Just trust me on this: between them and Stoneburner, I think I’ve already found the composers if anyone is masochistic enough to make a documentary on the Triffid Ranch.

Have a Safe Weekend

This weekend, the Triffid Ranch hits the road…well, a little. The plan is to head down Interstate 35 to Outfit Brewing on Saturday, October 15 for the latest Crow’s Alley Flea Market, running from 5:00 pm to 10:00 pm. With luck, we won’t get rained out. See you there.

State of the Gallery: October 2022

On final approach to the end of the year, and Busy Season at the Triffid Ranch is up and going from now until New Year’s Eve. Some of the frantic activity is due to the Halloween season, where everybody wants to get spooooooky plants. Some of the frantic activity is because of the impending general holiday season. The biggest burst of action, though, comes from the drastic changes at the gallery since the end of last year, and it’s time to ride that all the way into 2023.

(And along that line, it’s time to ask a favor of regular attendees and occasional visitors, as well as those understanding of the sad reality that currently polystyrene is a plastic nearly impossible to recycle with current technology. To wit, I’m looking for odd-looking Styrofoam packaging, such as from appliances [the inserts holding the rotating trays of microwave ovens are very desired], as well as any other chunks otherwise destined for the landfill, in order to finish up the back area of the gallery before the weather gets foul. Please feel free to give a shout if you have something you need to get rid of, and I’m very happy to pick up.)

Because this is the busy season as far as carnivorous plants are concerned, the Triffid Ranch is going to be on the road quite a bit for the next few weeks, including booths with the Crow’s Alley Flea Market on October 15 and Dallas’s best goth club Panoptikon on November 5, but the biggest event so far is the three-day lecture and show at the Dallas Arboretum on October 28 through 30. (As much as I’d love to have an event on Halloween night, various situations conspire to keep that from happening, but the last Triffid Ranch Porch Sale of 2022 starts on Saturday, October 22 at 10:00 am and runs until 3:00 pm, out in front of the gallery.) For those seeking temperate carnivorous plants such as Venus flytraps or North American pitcher plants, the Panoptikon Goth Garage Sale will be the last time until next April where you can buy either, as they all really need to go dormant for the winter after that. (Tropical carnivores such as Asian pitcher plants and sundews are available all year round, so don’t let that stop you from coming to upcoming events.)

As for gallery events, the rush of events in October means that the gallery won’t have another open house until the middle of November, but that means that the place will have a new rush of enclosures debuting by November 19. I won’t say much more, other than that the last few months of work combine new enclosure concepts with new materials and new plants, meaning that new visitors to the gallery are going to be extremely surprised by the time the annual Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas weekend events start on December 3.

And on that subject, because of other developments, it’s time to announce that those wanting custom plant enclosures for the holiday season need to make an appointment by November 23, because booking spaces are going to be filled until after the beginning of January 2023. As it is, based on last year, this will be the first year where new enclosure designs are going to be stockpiled until there’s room to plant and display them, because even with the gallery expansion and renovation, it’s a matter of available room.

Finally, we’re still two months out, but now is a good time to mention plans for a New Year’s Eve event at the gallery, early enough that people can come out before going to planned NYE parties but with the opportunity to thank everyone who has stuck with this silly little endeavor for the last year. So far this year, this has been the best the Triffid Ranch has ever seen, and it’s time to return the love. Keep checking back for details, but I have Ideas.

Winter is coming. Look busy.

A regular question at Triffid Ranch events and shows involves the notice on the ID tags for North American pitcher plants and Australian triggerplants: “Put into dormancy in winter.” Quite understandably, this concerns beginning carnivorous plant keepers, because “put into dormancy” implies all sorts of laborious and detailed activities that they may or may not have time to do. Many online guides to carnivorous plant care recommend a full dormancy period in winter, but don’t give much in the way of details. Others go well into overload, and yet others instill a near-panic about dormancy. The other questions involve which plants require a winter dormancy, which ones wouldn’t mind a good nap, and which ones don’t need it at all. And to make it even more complex, a few popular carnivores need a summer dormancy instead of a winter dormancy, waiting until things cool down to reach their full potential.

To distill it down to basics, dormancy is when perennial flowering plants shut down or slow down during winter to conserve energy and store energy for future growth. By way of example, roses lose their leaves in winter but continue to photosynthesize through their stems, resprouting new leaves each spring. Irises spend the winter catching as much light as possible while the weather holds, storing the captured energy in the form of starch in rhizomes below the soil surface and resuming growth and blooming after the last risk of freezing. Tulips and daffodils spend the year catching light and then die back to bulbs in autumn to wait out winter. A majority of carnivorous plants use the same strategies to get through potentially harsh winter weather, with the main difference being that carnivores require a lot of energy to produce traps, nectar, adhesive if applicable, and digestive enzymes on top of the energy needed for blooming. This is why many species need a dormancy over the winter, so they can focus on energy storage and not on new growth or on digesting captured prey. Even tropical species that don’t require a dormancy won’t mind a shortened photoperiod, which gives them time to catch their metaphorical breaths and save a bit of energy for their next big growth spurt.

(A little sideroute. When carnivorous plant people talk about “temperate” versus “tropical” plants, they’re talking about plants that live in areas that get down to or below freezing in the winter versus plants that live in areas where the temperatures never get below 50F/10C. Temperate plants include North American pitcher plants (Sarracenia spp.), Venus flytraps (Dionea muscipula), English sundews (Drosera anglica), and common butterworts (Pinguicula vulgaris). Tropical species generally include Asian pitcher plants (Nepenthes spp.), Mexican butterworts (Pinguicula spp.), and most Australian sundews, particularly Drosera adelae. Many genera of carnivores, particularly sundews, butterworts, and bladderworts, have species that run the gamut from near-Arctic to equatorial, so knowing which species is which can be really important to keeping a particular plant alive. Each group has different requirements or requests, but usually don’t require a lot of care during that dormancy other than light and regular waterings.

(Another sidenote. If you’re just starting with carnivorous plants, or you know someone who is, odds are pretty good that you or they started with a prepackaged carnivorous plant ensemble. These usually arrive in garden centers or home improvement centers with a Venus flytrap, a North American pitcher plant, and either a sundew or a butterwort, but sometimes with tropical species such as Asian pitcher plants mixed in. In the Northern Hemisphere, the end of October is a good time to separate these and put them in several different pots: some may get along well together, but keeping flytraps with Sarracenia usually doesn’t turn out well, and keeping flytraps with Nepenthes is a good way to kill one or the other or both. If you know that a group of plants thrive together in the wild or in captivity, leave them alone, but often it’s better to separate them for everyone’s sake.)

The next question that comes up is “How long should keep my plant in dormancy?” Here in North Texas, I generally tell Americans “From Thanksgiving to St. Patrick’s Day,” translating to “from the end of November to the middle of March” for everyone else. Around here, those dates pretty much mark the beginning and the end of freezing weather, although we have been known to extend that on either side a bit. Obviously, at higher latitudes, freezing weather will hit a lot sooner in the year, so check for your area’s frost zones. The big thing to remember is that dormancy is encouraged more by a shortened photoperiod than the temperature itself, so try to protect your plant or plants from streetlights or other lights that might throw that off.

Still confused? The following are guidelines based on 20 years of carnivorous plant growing in the North Texas area, and may be modified for your particular area and conditions. (Disclaimer: these are recommendations, and the Texas Triffid Ranch takes no responsibility for loss or damage caused by anomalous weather conditions or other factors outside of the gallery’s control. All readers follow these guidelines at their own risk.) The one absolute on every group is to make sure to keep your plants at least moist through the winter. If it dries out, it almost always won’t come back.

Outdoor Temperate Plants

With plants best kept under full sun under temperate conditions, such as Venus flytraps and North American pitcher plants, trim off any dead leaves or traps and keep them outside. If your area gets strong prevailing winds in winter, try to protect your plants from the wind, as it will dry them out, but otherwise leave them in full sun and keep them moist all winter. If temperatures get especially cold (below 20F/–7C), cover them with plastic sheeting or an old bedsheet for the duration, but remove it when the worst of the cold is over. If the particularly cold period lasts less than a week, don’t worry about the plants, but keep an eye on the pot or container in which the plants reside, as these can and usually will be damaged by long periods of subfreezing temperatures. For subfreezing temperatures lasting more than a week, the plants can be brought inside temporarily (try to put them in places with plenty of light but temperatures cooler than room temperature, if possible, such as mud rooms or laundry rooms with outside windows), and move them back outside as soon as the risk of severe temperatures is over.

Also, while most outdoor carnivores will keep green traps or leaves going, Australian triggerplants have a tendency to go scruffy by late October and then die back entirely by December. Do NOT throw them out, as they come back from their roots in spring. This goes double if the plant appeared to die after a massive freeze: if anything, a good solid freeze seems to encourage lots of blooms.

A special note: if you keep your plant in a ceramic container with a lot of sentimental or other value, moving the plant temporarily to a plastic container over the winter is very highly recommended. The water in the plant’s substrate can and will expand and split or chip the pot, especially in narrower pots.)

And a side discussion on refrigerators. A lot of older print guides suggest that for folks living in areas that don’t get cold enough to set off dormancy, rhizomes and bulbs can be uprooted gently, wrapped loosely in wet long-fiber sphagnum moss, and put in the refrigerator. Since that prevents the plant from getting light during the winter, this should be kept to a minimum, but it IS a good way to store Sarracenia rhizomes, leaves cut off first, until spring planting. Whatever happens, do NOT put your plant in the freezer unless you’re really bored with frozen spinach and want a new taste experience.

Outdoor Tropical Plants

If you happen to live in an area with high humidity but where temperatures go below 50F/10C, tropical carnivores such as Nepenthes pitcher plants will need to come inside over the winter. Over the winter, they’re best kept in high-humidity areas (bathrooms are usually perfect for this, especially with multiple people using the shower in the morning) with either a lot of light through windows or artificial light. Barring that, to deal with how dry most houses are in the winter, look into either a mister or ultrasonic fogger blowing mist or dripping onto the plants through the day. Honestly, a combination of natural and artificial light is best, but try to keep the latter to about 8 hours a day, matching the light outside as best as possible. This won’t guarantee blooms in spring (or, in the case of Mexican butterworts, blooms in late winter), but it should encourage them. When the low temperatures outdoors get high enough in spring to move your plants back outdoors, do so carefully by letting it acclimate to full sun gradually over the space of a couple of weeks. Do NOT just put it out in the sun without acclimation unless you want a critically sunburnt plant.

Indoor Temperate Plants

Several carnivores commonly offered for sale, such as Cape sundews (Drosera capensis), primrose butterworts (Pinguicula primulflora), and Australian pitcher plants (Cephalotus follicularis) are adapted to colder temperatures but don’t necessarily need a full winter dormancy. They won’t mind a good rest, though, and cutting back on their hours of light over the winter may encourage a blooming response in spring. This is especially true of South American pitcher plants (Heliamphora spp.), which love cooler temperatures anyway and bloom enthusiastically in spring if given a good real or simulated winter. Follow the advice for outdoor tropical plants above for light scheduling, and try to keep them in the cooler parts of the house or office if possible.

Indoor Tropical Plants

For Nepenthes pitcher plants, tropical sundews, tropical bladderworts, and other carnivorous plants already being kept inside, just keep doing what you’re doing if it’s working. If you want to encourage blooming, switch to a shorter photoperiod, but otherwise a 12-hour on/12-hour off cycle works beautifully. In addition, feel free to mist your plants more heavily during the winter months: not only will this compensate for heaters or other factors lowering the indoor humidity, but it sometimes encourages new growth and blooming by making the plant think that it’s in the middle of monsoon season.

Finally, there’s the last big question regularly asked: “And what happens if you miss your dormancy period?” If you get a Venus flytrap as a gift in mid-winter and putting it outside just simply isn’t an option, don’t kill yourself. If anything, keep it inside under lights over the winter so it can hit the ground running in spring, but follow a dormancy regimen the next fall. Flytraps are an extreme example, but as a rule they can live through one winter without dormancy but won’t live through two. Does that help?

Have a Safe Weekend

For those outside of Dallas, this weekend is Texas-OU Weekend, and all this really means to anybody outside is that downtown is going to be full of cosplayers living out the best documentary about the pregame festivities ever made. For those with an aversion to streets turned into rivers of margarita vomit and displays of boorish insecurity both on and off the football field, head north and gaze upon peace at the Porch Sale on Saturday running from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm. I promise: no pennants, no foam fingers, and absolutely no demonstrations of either alcohol poisoning or levamisole toxicity. To quote a childhood hero, “No flowers in this town. Only carnivorous plants.”

Enclosures: “Saga of the Gold Moai” (2022)

A preamble on the enclosure backstories:

For every subculture, there’s that one seemingly unattainable artifact that sums up the hopes and dreams of so many of its members. For computer buffs, it’s a piece of Charles Babbage’s original Difference Engine prototype, complete with Lady Ada Lovelace’s holotype programming guide. For chess fanatics, it’s the original Morphy Watch. For comics people, it’s the hope of finding a pristine copy of Detective Comics #27, and the chance to gaze upon one of the only remaining copies featuring the debut of Batman. For us tiki enthusiasts, it is and always was about the Golden Moai.

Okay, so you don’t get tiki culture. No big deal. I understand. It’s like people who don’t get the fascination with rugby or model trains or the artwork of HR Giger. If you can’t understand why people would give up time and effort to travel following the Grateful Dead or go to Burning Man or watch the Tour De France, you’ll never understand why tiki enthusiasts get so, well, enthusiastic. No skin off our noses. If you DO get it, though, you’ll find a welcome to the culture that makes kaiju people or burlesque fans look positively emotionless.

With every genre or subculture, you have two constants. The first is a patois sans glossary, a shorthand that everybody inside understands but that can’t really be explained without experience. If you explain it, you’re likely to explain too much, and that destroys the magic. The other is that there’s always one item or concept that perfectly encapsulates that little part of the culture that defies explanation. Think of an Euclidean ideal for the inherent mystery, that accents the mystery because of its rarity and memetic power. Don’t think of a splinter of the True Cross, but think of the sole surviving nail.

After a while, after you’ve gone past the collecting stage and the composing stage and the cooking stage and the “bleeding Dole Whip and rum” stage, you start to hear from your fellow tiki enthusiasts about the Golden Moai. Hints, suggestions, hidden longings. Naturally, it’s not actually gold: the idea of an actual golden sculpture being shuttled on Polynesian outriggers is as ridiculous as M-60 mounts on a Viking longboat. The suppositions, though, when people who searched or even claimed to view it got a little into their cups late at night, was that it might as well have been. This wonderful artifact, carved from a stone that evoked greenstone and rainbow obsidian, was inherently ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was that if you stared into the stone’s deep shifting iridescence long enough, it tapped into the viewer’s longing and helped them get there. People say lots, and drunk people say lots more, and the Golden Moai was just one of those tales that touched all of the buttons in your head.

Yes, naturally it hit all of my own buttons. Yes, I searched for years, for hints and clues as to where it was. Every time someone found it, they made a point of hiding it somewhere else. If you didn’t give it up after you found it, the magic wouldn’t happen, and the better the hiding spot, the better the magic worked. The previous handler was absolutely brilliant in hiding it, but receipts and travel logs and passport stamps will tell. There’s no need to go through all of that now. All that mattered is that I dug it out of a cairn of rock in what used to be Leilani Estates in Hawaii, looked deep into the iridescence that looked so much like a solidified gold and green dust devil, and wished desperately to leave. To go somewhere I could be alone with my thoughts, a tropical paradise with no demands on my time other than what I chose. The ultimate dream of every tiki advocate, right?

I’m glad that I learned navigation by astronomy, because it not only gave me an idea of where I went, but when. I found my tropical paradise, all right: to the best I can figure, I’m somewhere in what will become the Chatham Islands off the east coast of New Zealand. As to when, the first tipoff came from literally tripping over a dinosaur within a minute of getting here. Beautiful beaches and palm trees that would be even more enjoyable if those beaches weren’t patrolled by those dinosaurs. The islands don’t have parrots, but toothed birds with that same level of curiosity, and they’re absolutely fascinated by my hair. There’s a weird egg-laying mammal here, looking like an otter with a opossum’s face, that’s the birds’ favorite prey, and they gather in flocks of about 20 or so to take them out. Well, this mammal’s fur is the same color as my hair, which is why, besides the big dinosaurs wandering the beaches looking for dead fish and sea reptiles among the flotsam, I don’t sleep on the beaches. The fishing is great, if you don’t get your catch stolen by those sea reptiles or, worse, even bigger fish, and you do NOT want to go swimming. Other than that, it’s absolutely wonderful. I promise.

Here’s hoping that the next person searching for the moai gets what they want. Me, I’d kill a dinosaur for a Dole Whip right now.

Dimensions (width/height/depth): 18″ x 24″ x 18″ (45.72 cm x 60.96 cm x 45.72 cm)

Plant: N/A

Construction: Glass enclosure. polystyrene foam, vacuum-formed plastic, found items.

Price: Commission

Shirt Price: Commission

The Aftermath: October 2022 Triffid Ranch Open House

And now we’re getting into the homestretch. 89 days until the beginning of 2023 in the Gregorian calendar, 80 days until Christmas Eve, and precisely four weeks until Halloween. This is when things start getting busy at the Triffid Ranch, between the understandable interest in spooky plants, the Texas heat finally letting up, and the realization that we only have about a month before we have to pull out jackets and turn on the heat in the mornings. Heck, a month after that, we might see the first frost since last March.

In the interim, because the next four weekends are going to be just too nice to be trapped inside, the Triffid Ranch opened up for one big open house on October 1, because it’s going to be a while before the next one. Everything is moving outside, either for the last Porch Sales of the season or for other outside shows, giving a chance to get in some further updates to the gallery renovations and move in a slew of new enclosures. The idea is that by the end of November, if you thought the first stages of the gallery renovation were nicely surprising, you’ll be in shock as to what can get done in two months. Besides, the Porch Sales keep me off the streets and out of trouble.

As mentioned before, everything moves outside in October, with the Porch Sales winding down on October 8 and 22 and events going on the road on October 15 and 28 through 30. After that, the last out-of-gallery show for 2022 will be the Blood Over Texas Horror For the Holidays show in Austin on November 26 and 27, and then things really get busy.