Oh yes, we’re under starter’s-orders and we’re off to a very classy start…poor Ron, a mandrake looking root AND an elephant butt comparison shot. I am not sure which is scaring him most?

We have had yet another week of hot temperatures in central Texas in tandem with some ridiculous humidity. My belt buckle (in reaction to the latest install I am executing) retracted one notch by Friday and my already full laundry basket is now officially out of control, yes best keep pulling that face Ron, I do every time I have to shimmy by it.  It seems like the recent humidity has also triggered the Texas “barometer plant” to flush out its purple blooms all over town. Texas sage or…

Leucophyllum frutescens

also called purple sage, texas ranger, silverleaf, white sage, ash bush and sensia. Purple sage comes from shrublands on limestone slopes in the Chihuahuan Desert of Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico.  This is one tough plant, it can face droughts, freezes, high winds, salt spray, hungry deer, and blazing heat and keep right on performing beautifully. It can also apparently make for a good container plant, though I have no personal experience with it in this capacity…do you?

The plant does have a tendency to get very large and leggy.  I keep both of mine trimmed extremely tight to promote a denser habit and I remove their lower branches for better form.

I grow other plants like Mexican bush sage and rosemary to obscure and detract from this plants lower ‘bare’ areas.

And when they do bloom their soft purple blooms…

all manner of insects take advantage. The flowers are really unusual looking set against the silver backdrop of the foliage.

Some major events happened this week in the Patch:

Training wheels came off…

…and we got a new addition to the family:

Mmm, not quite,

but I can see some similarities.

Meet Kumo.

Like me he has an infinity for Mexican feather grasses,

and he is keeping the halflings very, very busy. I cringe every time his dashes across my central bed which houses my barrel cactus.

Damianita

Compositae Chrysactinia mexicana

seems to thrive in the current furnace, as you can see it is already on its second wave of blooms. This is a great native evergreen plant with a low mounding growth, the plants aromatic foliage is also a deer and rabbit deterrent.

Bristly sunflowers have also started to unfurl and spring into action.

attracting their usual band of garden outlaws:

Sunflowers are sometimes planted as trap crops for Stink/leaffooted bugs, providing superior food plants for the bugs while also attracting their natural enemies.

Umbrellas in combination with a sprinkler have been novelty items this week. Okay if you insist – just one more insect. This one would be perfect for Halloween.

Swamp Milkweed Leaf Beetle,

Labidomera clivicollis

Interesting visitor considering I have no milkweed.  Does anyone have any experience with swamp milkweed here in Austin?  This beetle comes in a quite a few color variations and looks like a really large ladybug. If you are interested in insects, bugs, snakes etc you should most certainly check out the great photography in this fine Missouri blog:  http://mobugs.blogspot.com/

Life in my swamps and ponds has gone berserk of late. I thinned these water lilies out only a week ago and now look at them! They do make for fantastically nutritionally-rich compost bin fodder though, I am not complaining.

How they continue to fly like this never ceases to amaze me, though I can guess who is probably in charge of navigation.

Inspirational Image of the week:

Stay Tuned for:

“Oh Yucca”

All material © 2011 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

You do not want to be with me on any type of public transportation…trust me, I am a traveling companion’s liability.

“Six coaches of the 1400 Glasgow to London express passenger train carrying about 300 passengers became derailed as the train approached Harrow and Wealdstone station. The train came to rest with the locomotive and leading four coaches standing on the rails in the station platform. The fifth coach was derailed and leaning over. The rear of the train (which I was in) had divided into two parts with a gap of 400m between the leading part and three derailed but upright coaches ; and a gap of 35m between those three and the last two derailed but upright coaches. Twenty-six persons were injured, none seriously. Twenty were treated locally, and six taken to hospital. The emergency services were called by the senior conductor, using a passenger’s cellphone, as the train came to rest. (conflicting reporting, I know).

I came across this newspaper cutting that my parents had sent me other day, it took me right back to that fateful dusk. Of course I just had to be on this train!  I thought I would share this story as a welcome break from my usual Hell-Strip rhetoric.

It is a really weird feeling to realize that something is going very wrong when you know you are going very, very fast, and this train, taking me back to my flat in London, had it’s pedal to the metal.  The first thing I noticed that I thought was very odd, was the sound of hail, large hail, hitting the roof of the train, odd because it had been a rare, uncustomary hot day.  As it turns out this hail was actually gravel from the more forward sections of the train that had already jumped off the track.  These carriages were ploughing through the gravel sending it shooting up into the air where it was landing on the rear of the train.  Before I really had time to think about this, all hell broke loose as my part of the train got dragged screaming and whining from the tracks.  On “disembarking” the tracks the carriage immediately filled up with gravel dust and it was loud…extremely loud. I held onto the seat top in front of me then I broke all of the crash-survival rules and stood up out of my seat for a little bit of insanely bumpy urban surfing, I think I was fighting a natural primordial instinct to run to safety, hard to do on an Intercity125 train, even if trying to escape the nasty on-board sandwiches.

The closest thing to convey this experience is when you know you are having a bad dream and you are falling, you know something really bad is going to happen to you, so you change it. You usually wake up, or change the script in that final white flash of the “impact” moment right?  Well it felt exactly like this, only your brain has made the delineation that this is not a dream, oh no it tells you, this is actually really happening and the white flash will most likely be your…well yes, that.  Lets just say adrenalin courses through one’s veins at an alarming rate when things get this far out of control.  When the train finally came to a grinding halt, (it took a while), a teenager sitting across from me at a table with her family, broke into some shock related language that targeted the driver of the train, oh and what a shocking monologue it was!

I always remember this, as I couldn’t tell if the parent’s horrified expressions were the result of the crash they had just survived, or their look of horror was the result of what was now emanating from their young daughter’s mouth?  They turned, ashen faced, and looked at her as if she was the…

“The **** of a ******, what the ******* WAS THIS *****….******* DOING?… ****!… ******!

Me? I only had one thought: “Must get out before another train comes along.” My carriage was pitched over which meant we could only exit from the high side, which required a hang and drop. We all made it out and started to head across the tracks and up onto an adjacent embankment. I could see sections of the train derailed further down the track. Our section had ploughed through a bunch of railroad ties that were now snapped in half and wedged up tight under the undercarriage, elevating the entire structure. I could also see a bloke in the distance frantically waving his arms and running toward our group screaming.  The tracks that we were about to cross to carry us to “safety” were in fact charged with enough force to sling-shot us around the moon.

Image nicked from The Reasoner

These tracks were the start of the London Underground rail network…and we were literally feet and seconds away from crossing them and getting instantly vaporized. Oh no, you do not want to get on any form of public transportation with me…

Here are a few other travel nuggets I think you should know about…

I was on a North Sea ferry that hit a force 10 full gale on its way from Hull to Belgium. Everyone was confined to sleeping quarters. You could feel this massive ship riding over waves the size of mountains. When the ferry would get to the very top you could feel the whole boat shudder as the propellers came out of the water, riding down these waves actually caught your stomach. I asked a worker the next morning if that was normal? “Oh no”, she said, “We would have turned around but the waves got too large too quick, worst sea I have ever been in, in twenty years of doing this crossing”. I avoided the piles of sawdust until I disembarked.

It continues…

Apart from the Chevy Tahoe hitting my house a few months back http://www.eastsidepatch.com/2009/09/dude-wheres-my-car/ I do have a few more travel-tales believe it or not.

I was on a Virgin Atlantic flight that was almost empty (which added to the surreal atmosphere).  About an hour and a half into the flight we hit turbulence, no big deal, oh but it was, it was turbulence that got worse and worse until the 747 felt like it was literally getting punched in the side of it’s fuselage.  I have traveled a lot and never had turbulence like this.  The captain commented numerous times with the last one being…“Well folks we have taken the plane as high as we can possibly go, and as low to get us out of this cell, but it looks like there is no avoiding it, please stay seated with your seat-belts fastened”. There was a young couple behind me, in the quiet darkness I heard the girl whisper: “The plane surely cannot take much more of this beating”, I looked out of the window, and immediately regretted it when I saw the wing of the plane flapping like a migratory goose…I slammed shut the window screen and continued to panic for the next five hours, it was exhausting.

I swore I would never fly again after that…whatever.

Oh yeah, you don’t want to get on any public transportation with me…

There was this other incident that involved… oh never mind…

Enough of this nonsense, back to more of my Hell-Strip rhetoric…You didn’t really think you could escape it did you?

I got a letter today from the leader of the Naboo tribe thanking me for expanding his tribe’s territories in the East of the Patch. The area is now cleared and prepped (for the most part), ready to receive copious amounts of decomposed granite, and some rocks…

…and the first of many gnarly holes have been excavated and tested for drainage, which I have to say did not go very well, not very well at all.  This hole took a good twenty minutes to drain, not good, and yes, RR, these holes needed some tooth shattering, pick-axe action to get them down to the deeper depths. Got to love hell-strips for supplying soil and drainage more reminiscent of an off-world, dead planetary “crust,” then soil you would actually plant anything in!

“The substrate is totally devoid of all life-forms captain, ESP’s hypothesis is correct.”

There were a few treasures to be found though, treasures like this old milk bottle, I think that is what it is…Spock, analysis?

The new home for a future planter. I think another burgundy canna lily will be going in here, along with some pea-gravel as a back-fill.  Sorry to make you tilt your head.

Here are some boulders starting to go in at the base of the mound to hold it all in place.  (Hobbit picture)

A few transplanted rosemary plants and an old cedar carcass will help fill-in and naturalize the area.

I used some of my compost tea that has been stewing for the last six months to water these plants in…this immediately caught someones attention, especially when it started to foam up and stink.  He would stick his face right inside this vessel and keep smelling it, I had no idea really why?

The next thing I will do is to plant yet more babies from my Mexican feather grass in front of the boulders like I have in my back garden to soften the scene up. I have transplanted about twenty-five babies so far this year and they are all growing well at about an inch tall. Excuse the stroller, it seems like this product is a camera hog, I take pictures and think “mmm, I think that will make a nice shot”…and sure enough, there she is, lurking upper frame in all her pink raggedy glory!

“I like the way it looks ESP”.

“Sorry Molly, I thought you might”. While I was out messing with these mounds of dirt and clay I did happen to notice that we now have moss, and a lot of it on my moss-boulders, and oooh how fresh and green it is. It amazes me how these boulders green-up with only a little moisture. It is also amazing that these mosses survive our harsh Texas summers…one tough, resilient, bounce-back tiny little plant.

Good enough to eat, balsamic vinegar and chop-sticks please.

Poppies are looking bumper this year…and

Finally…

With all of the construction going on with our house, a few bugs have been coming out of the woodwork so to speak.  This one climbed up my USB laptop keyboard light and succeeded in completely giving me a full-on conniption, complete with silly walk around the room…in my peripheral vision I thought it was a roach, I hate roaches. I instinctively slapped it to the ground with the back of my cordless mouse, where I found it lying on it’s back in this pose, cracking up laughing.

Inspirational “mossy” image of the week:

Stay Tuned for:

“The Shire”

All material © 2009 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized

intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and

punishable by  late  (and extremely unpleasant)

14th century planet Earth techniques.

I have two plastic rotatable compost bins that I constantly work, and leave to compost longer than what I probably need to. My favorite bin catches all the essential “juices” in a container base that I turn into compost “tea” which  works very well. I have come to realize that extracting finished compost from any of these above-ground plastic bins is reserved for individuals with 3 (or more) tiny arms, no fear of roaches, and a high tolerance for coping with copious amounts of fruit flies. I have adorned my oldest gloves many times to basically hand-scoop out the damp gold from the bottom of my compost drums into my wheelbarrow, a lovely job. It might be just me, but my compost has never resembled the fluffy, dry stuff found in gardening magazines and on infomercials. Still, to me it is golden, so good in fact I wash it down with a nice Chianti. (accompanied with the obligatory Lector noise)


My large rotating bin and my smaller spinning drum complete with juice catcher base.

I use large amounts of used coffee grounds from a local east-side coffee shop which forms the base of my compost, I then add 4-5 months of organic kitchen waste and dried grasses etc. When it has sufficiently decomposed I attempt to extract it from the bins. I then apply a good layer to the surface of the soil around the base of my plants, I do not dig it in.  It continues to decompose over the next 6 months, by then my 2nd bin is usually close to being ready.

“Sticking” on the subject of composting for the moment, I have a dark secret, one that involves multiple corpses of birds, frogs and the occasional fish.  It is 6 feet tall, 5 years old, and is full of clippings from my ornamental grasses and weeds, a general dumping ground. It smells like farmyard silage and a multitude of things live and hunt in it. . . . . I have reason to believe something much “bigger” inhabits its’ core chamber, it is my “Wild Patch”, and I have heard it burp at me. Or was that him? I intend to shred it all and compost once again.


Burp!               I think he may have set up house in the piles inner chamber.


Who needs a sculpture or a focal point when you have this!
My larger grass and brush pile – complete with all the debree the recent storm brought down
from my Post Oak (luckily no main limbs came down).

Other notables right now:

Canna Bloom                              Caladium blood vessels

First Dragons have arrived! and they are never camera shy.

Asparagus Ferns in the Amphitheater

Stay Tuned for:

“Throw Another Saints Leaf on the Barbie Mate”

All material © 2009 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by  late  (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.