Here are the events:

• Fall Plant Sale and Gardening Festival (Saturday and Sunday, October 15^th and 16^th) — At the Wildflower Center’s Fall Plant Sale and Gardening Festival, sponsored by University of Texas, Macy’s and HEB, you can choose from nearly 300 species of Texas native plants. Stop by this event to also interact with artists and authors signing their works in the store, guided walks and talks, and tips for your garden from experts and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day at their garden set up booth.  http://www.wildflower.org/plantsale/
• Gypsy Picnic (Saturday, October 24^th) — Clean up before treating yourself to a gathering of Austin’s best trailer food nomads for a day of tasty treats, tunes & more at Auditorium Shores. http://www.gypsypicnic.com/event-info/faqs/
• Boggy Creek Green Corn Project (Sunday, October 30^th) — Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day is setting up some sinks as participants join in a delicious afternoon dedicated to food, music, gardening and farming. Over 20 fine local restaurants and food purveyors will be offering complimentary tastes of their artistry with local produce.  4 local musical groups provide live music from the farmhouse front porch. On the back porch, 3 local chefs demonstrate their food art and of course the audience eats the results! You are free to stroll the farm, visit the Hen House, and bid at our Silent Auction. A Family Friendly Event. http://www.greencornproject.org/2011-Fall-Festival

Sounds fun!

1) The KAB city-wide clean sweep happens this Saturday morning. You can volunteer to help beautify the city. Find more info here.

2) The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is having a plant sale all this weekend. It’s a great place to get some native plants, although there is a cover charge to get in. Here’s some more info on it:

Did your garden suffer from record drought and heavy freezes? Time for a refill. At the Wildflower Center’s Spring Plant Sale and Gardening Festival you can choose from over 300 species of Texas native plants. The event also features artists and authors signing their works in the store, guided walks and talks and tips for your garden from experts.

Spring Plant Sale 2011: April 9 and 10, Members Only Preview on April 8

Hours: Saturday & Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Admission: $8 adults, $7 seniors and students, $4 UT faculty, staff or students with identification, $3 children 5 through 12, members and children under 5 free.

Come join us for the third annual Austin Texas Funky Chicken Coop Tour! Have you been thinking about keeping urban chickens? Do you need coop design ideas? Then this is the tour for you! Hey, this is even for those of you that already have backyard chickens and are thinking about changing your coop design(there’s always room for improvement, right?). Also, feel free to come peck(oops, meant pick our brains on raising chickens.

Learn more here

2) Keep Austin Beautiful Clean Sweep,  April 9th

The year is the 26th annual clean up of the city held by Keep Austin Beautiful:

Clean Sweep is KAB’s annual citywide cleanup that takes place all over Austin.  The first 4,000 volunteers to register get a free event t-shirt and it’s followed by an awesome Volunteer Party and Environmental Fair at Waterloo Park which includes: free lunch, live music, kid’s environmental activities, recycled art, door prizes and more!  Last year more than 4,300 volunteers registered to cleanup 129 sites!

Get more info and sign up here.

Thursday, July 29: Birds of Prey – soar with us to explore the habits of hawks, eagles, buzzards and more birds of prey. At 7 pm only, don’t miss a flying demonstration provided by Blackland Prairie Raptor Center with their feathered friends in our Courtyard! Stop by the Travis Audubon Society booth for more information on local birding programs. Check out great activities at the Capital Area Master Naturalist booth.

so cute!

 photo credit

Statesman Watch spent several hours at the park last weekend… [t]he understaffed Parks and Recreation Department did make it out to empty trash cans, but the rest of the park was strewn with food wrappers, beer bottles and cans, cigarette butts, diapers and even spent charcoal.

On Saturday afternoon, a large family held a birthday party for a child. The next morning, beer cans, candy wrappers and an El Rancho Supermercado plastic bag of trash were left behind. Near the creek, three Budweiser bottles, an empty pack of Kool 100s and orange peelings were left where a trio of men with an ice chest had been the afternoon before.

On weekends, with little or no police presence, park users cart ice chests, grills and picnic tables and set up next to the water. Children swim by. Refuse litters the ground even though trash cans are a few feet away.

The park is located at at RM 2222 and Loop 360.

photo credit

Thursday, July 8: Reptiles - Dr. Travis LaDuc, Assistant Curator of Herpetology at the Texas Natural Science Center, will be presenting at 7 and repeat at 8 pm about Central Texas reptiles.  Meet a few of our slithery friends with Tim Cole of Austin Reptile Service in the Visitors Gallery. And celebrate these often misunderstood creatures at a discovery station with members of the Horned Lizard Conservation Society and with volunteers from Capital Area Master Naturalist program. Nathan Jensen, noted children’s illustrator, will be in the Gift Store signing copies of his children’s snake book.

Thursday, July 15: Bees – you heard the buzz about native bees? Take flight through our gardens and learn about the curious behavior of our winged friends. Native bee activities provided by Texas Bee Watchers. Check out an obersvation hive with live European honey bees, courtesy of Texas Beekeepers Association.

Thursday, July 22: Wildlife Tracking – take a guided prowl through our gardens and trails and look for signs of the kinds of wild animals that live in Central Texas. Join Koy Coffer, Education Specialist with Texas Wildlife Association, for family tracking activities, as well as staff from Texas Parks and Wildlife to explore the habits, habitats and culture of our native wildlife.

Thursday, July 29: Birds of Prey – soar with us to explore the habits of hawks, eagles, buzzards and more birds of prey. Don’t miss a flying demonstration provided by Blackland Prairie Raptor Center with their feathered friends in our Courtyard! Stop by the Travis Audubon Society booth for more information on local birding programs.

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has a lot of people thinking about water pollution, but you don’t have to go to the Gulf to help clean America’s coasts.

Bill Morris is with the Surfrider Foundation. He helps organize clean ups of Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin. On Sunday he was out with volunteers filling trash bags with floating litter.

“All the rivers and streams in Texas drain ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico,” said Morris, “and since we’re trying to protect the coast here, this is a great place to start.”

The Surfrider Foundation is just one group that has joined the nonprofit Keep Austin Beautiful to organize the cleanup every two months.

The article notes that the next cleanup is August 14th

picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/gttexas/

The house is really pretty and cool to look at, but you can’t get very close to it and there’s no historical information about McKinney or his house at the site of the house, which I would have appreciated.  The trail itself was flat and not challenging,  and since it’s only about 3 miles it’s not a good choice if  you want an intense hike, but it was still a nice walk.  We saw some interesting insects on the trip:

After our walk we were very hot, so it was fun to be able to go swimming near the waterfall at the park. This isn’t a very good picture of the falls, but it really is very  pretty – it’s a great place to go soon to enjoy  before the water levels fall!