ESPatch

"My Sweet Olive Oil"

ESPatch Apr 7, 2009 1 comment

I have been calling this my road to nowhere.
My patio terminates and a pathway “of sorts” continues.
Here is a view from the opposite side. Is it a bed? Is it a pathway?
nobody could really decide. To make matters worse when it was
occasionally used as a “pathway” there were a few rather large
obstacles to be circumnavigated, namely a sweet olive shrub
and a bog cyprus that I had transplanted out of my pond.
This all had to change.

“Father, you have never liked
my curvy pathways”.
“Then I have failed you as a father,
forgive me my son”.

Here is the sweet olive shrub or Fragrant Tea Olive Osmanthus fragrans
perfectly situated slap bang in the middle of the new pathway to be.
Now why exactly did I plant it there in the first place?
I really hated the thought of moving it, and potentially killing it, as this
shrub has taken such a long time to grow to the height it is now.
It is not the most attractive shrub, but what it lacks in aesthetics it
makes up for in it’s amazing sweet scent when it blooms,
which it does sporadically throughout the entire year.
Tea olive has deliciously fragrant flowers that smell a lot like those
of fringetree Chionanthus virginicus, which is in the same family.
Tea olive is a traditional element in the southern garden landscape, the smell
has become somewhat synonymous with the city of New Orleans.
Unfortunately there is no room for it in it’s current location,
in my new master plan.

“ze olive tree has to go….I will chop down ze cyprus with my hand,
like this, and It will crash to ze ground.”

There was also a whole bunch of ornamental grasses, daffodils,
cone flowers and shasta daisies that also required transplanting
to clear the future pathway.

Here is the sweet olive transplanted in its new home and the bomb crater it left behind.
I cut the shrub back by about a third and watered it in with enough fish emulsion
to damage the alaskan economy to try to get it off to the best start I could.
I have my fingers crossed.

Here is the breakdown of the existing brick edging and the reformatted pathway. I am planning to build a small decked “lounging / seating” area off from the two wisteria trellised posts, against the fence line. I was really lucky in that I had inherited a whole bunch of these old bricks from the previous owners of the house. I had them around the side of my house in the form of a low wall. It was time these bricks had better visibility.

“Aye, a battle it may be, and a battle we wull win!”
“We wull build spears out of the bog cyprus, twice the length of a man.”

And here is the bog cyprus, also destined for an upheaval. This was just a bad idea to
plant it as close as I did to the wisteria vine! Duh! The tendrils of the vine seem totally
obsessed with seeking, and wrapping around the branches. This would be a constant
battle that I do not want to fight, (no offense William), as the tree matures and gets a
lot larger. Talking about the “intelligent” movement of vines, have you all read this book?

You will never look at a plant the same,
ever again!…Mindblowing.
Back to the new pathway…

Here is the new “defined” bed with brickwork edging almost finished, just
a few more shasta daisies to transplant. This new pathway now requires
a substantial amount of decomposed granite to finish it off and discourage
any seeds and weeds that may have been agitated by my scraping.

And from the other side. Is she picking loquats again?

Now where are my…

After pre-school it seems like there is nothing more relaxing than sitting down on a
boulder to quietly munch on a few loquats to wind down from the
screaming and tormenting events of the day. It seems she was not the
only one enjoying the ripe fruit right now,
this mocking bird was having a riot.

I thought it pertinent as we are on the subject of pathways,
to post a couple of shots taken about four years ago, before
any sense of “order” was introduced.

Four years ago…
You can see the whole left side of the property was obliterated by the
tunnel of trumpet vines (left), it visually shrunk the garden as you can see
by about a third. Pulling a pathway around the small circular bed in the foreground
created a lot more “breathing space” and allowed a more natural angle to exit
the steps down off my back deck. Interesting how my Weber grill has barely
moved in four years!
The right picture shows how it looked before my skinny island “middle” bed
gained any definition.

And here are the same scenes now. More definition and a lot less work!
It is funny just how much larger and wider my backyard feels, with
the addition of all the pathways. You can see the future site of my
latest granite pathway on the left. All of the paths converge around
my pond area, (further up the yard) before veering off again to facilitate
access to the more functional aspects of gardening…

a faucet, a shed, a my now completely un-scalable brush pile.

“Get that, that…’thing’ off my ship!”
Warning…Gross-Out Alert

Brrrrr! You have to be kidding me.
(involuntary, loud mouth clacks, followed by a sharp leg snap and an erratic left to right jaw motion)
You can’t even imagine the stench that emanated from this little piece of Hell,
it was disgusting.
Imagine the worst dead smell you can conjure up and then spray some more rotting carcass
cologne all over it, garnish this with a sufficiently decomposed rat and you would be about
halfway there on the gag reflexometer.
Even the flies were fighting over it. One particular type of fly that considers this fungi a
gourmet treat is the flesh fly Sarcophaga haemorrhoidalis, yes thats right, haemorrhoidalis! (now with a name like that I know this fly has no redeeming factors,
or discriminating tastes)!

“Oh what would you know ESP”!

I breathed through my mouth while I waited for all the flies to return to capture this
shot (as you do), so as not to inhale the aroma and hurl involuntarily into the
adjacent iris on my right.
When the flies returned, (and thankfully it didn’t take them too long), they were
creeping all over the camera and my hand which was about a centimeter away
from this stinky tower of evil…..(even more jaw activity),
I looked the other way, thought about happy things,
and continued snapping the horrific scene.

I believe this is some type of Stinkhorn (quite inappropriately apt) Fungi,
(although I could not find an ID that looked exactly like this one).

Phallus impudicus! Fnarr! Fnarr!
Honestly, I am not making any of this up!

The Fungi apparently uses its unique odor
to attract flies to its spore-laden body,
thus increasing the odds of its spores being
dispersed to new habitats.
Pretty clever, in a totally revolting way.

“And thats all I have to say about that.”

Finally…

And now to cleanse all memories of that last topic.
It got warm enough the other day to have some hose fun at the ESP,
which naturally ended in a torrent of tears, it always does.

New fuzzy blooms on my Mexican Bush sage.
I will be cutting these back soon to ensure a more compact habit for the fall bloom.
Fantastic plant.

Bees in the bulbine.

Lantana blooms forming.

Spring color…

on an oven glove?

Stay Tuned For:
“Belly-Up”
All material © 2009 for east_side_patch. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited

"Revenge of the Turds"

ESPatch Mar 31, 2009 0 comments

A rather crude title?
Well yes it is, but it really captures a situation that I hope nobody ever has to experience. The particular turds (I don’t really want to talk about) are still reaping their decomposing revenge as I write this latest post…and believe me, it is not pleasant.

My problem started when two dogs moved into the house next door, and no, the dogs didn’t rent it. Like a lot of rental properties the property had a lot of weeds and some stunning poison ivy specimens, some about six feet tall. It was generally un-kept and within a few months the two dogs had scraped away all things green and I mean everything green on the ground in the lot. They had reduced it to dust. You could provide these animals as a landscaping service, if it wasn’t for one thing, actually, quite a lot of things, lots of stinky, dangerous things that is!

Nothing as dangerous as this one though…

A giant inflatable dog poo by American artist Paul McCarthy.
This work of art, in a series of unfortunate events blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, brought down a power line and broke a greenhouse window before it finally landed again.
The art work, titled Complex Sh!t, is unfortunately the size of a house.
The wind apparently carried it 200 metres from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne where it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children’s home, breaking yet more windows!

Now here is an interesting fact you could have gone your whole life without knowing, did you know that dogs on average poop 23 times a week! They really do! Each dog creates about a half pound of excrement a day. With an estimated 100,000 dogs in Austin, that’s about 50,000 pounds of dog waste deposited throughout town daily!

I am a dog person, I have sympathy for these
two dogs, (well a little), a sentiment that does
not extend to the dogs “owner”.
Since when has letting your dogs defecate all over a
suburban yard and not cleaning it up ever been acceptable?

“Don’t look at me! Waaaaa” !

“Merry Christmas Clark !
Shitter’s full!”
Okay perhaps Eddie would be ok with that!

The dogs were outside, always, no-matter the weather, and they were also depositing a rather large quantity of their finest product down our property line, at a rather an alarming rate. The dogs owner never picked this up and very rarely took the dogs out, which exacerbated the already dire situation. Letters were written, letters were ignored, and the dogs continued to wake us at all hours with their panicked incessant barking, we complained on a regular basis.
I even started to light those 7 hour burning incense sticks!
After only a few months our backyard that we loved spending time in, turned into a small, unsanitary smelling zoo. When the wind blew in the right direction it was really bad, and against the law…at least I think!

Talking of unsanitary conditions…

Great soundtrack to the “Slumdog Millionaire” movie!
Here is another interesting doggy fact, oh yes there is no stopping me now:
The bacteria levels along Bull Creek are eight times higher on weekends than weekdays when park visitors increase in the off-leash area. Mmmm, I wonder why?

No! don’t do it!

This is what is written in the Austin City Code:
City Ordinance
3-4-6 DEFECATION BY A DOG OR CAT
“An owner or handler shall promptly remove and sanitarily dispose of feces left on public or private property by a dog or cat being handled by the person, other than property owned by the owner or handler of the dog or cat.”
I am a little confused as to that last bit. Does this mean it is okay if you own the property?
Potential fine: Up to $500 The owner of the dogs has since moved on to new, hopefully cleaner, more sanitary pastures and the aroma is dissipating. Here is the number to call in Austin if you are having any “pet-product” issues…

To report a violation in the case of an individual failing to pick up after their pet in an animal enclosure, contact the Health Department, 512-972-5600

Moving on finally to more greener, and more
sweeter smelling things witnessed in the
patch this past week…(takes a deep meditative breath)

My White Stone crop is blooming all over the place right now, I really like this little plant and tuck it into as many nooks and crannies as I can. The more shade it receives the less it blooms, so say the books, but mine seem to bloom pretty well even under the shade of the old post oak tree!

My Texas gulf toads Cranopsis valliceps have been up to their usual antics in my pond of late, here are the strings of eggs that are stitching all my elodia plants together. I am keeping a vigilient eye on these this year after they choked my pond and created a few fish casualties last year.

These toads have the most extensive physical
ridging of any toad in its geographic range.
The ridges extend from the nose, to the back
of the head. With a branch that wraps around
the back side of the eye. They are commonly
found here in Austin, Houston, and parts of Louisiana.
Like most toads, the gulf coast toad is an opportunistic
carnivore. It will eat almost any small bug it is able
to overpower and swallow.

I have absolutely no idea what this wiggly is, but it looked really interesting in it’s shiny skin, it looked like it was manufactured in China. Very futuristic!

Talking of looking manufactured, this plastic looking flower was
the first to pop up in my hell-strip. I laid a blanket of wildflower
seeds in the strip, plus a bunch of hollyhock and amaranth seeds
on the off-chance that anything would germinate in such awful
soil. I will keep you informed.

My Pittosporum tobira Pittosporaceae is in full bloom right now, and is filling up the entire back of my garden with it’s sweet scent. Something that I have come to really appreciate. Another name for this shrub is Japanese mockorange because of the aroma of these blooms. I have my variegated variety pruned up as high as I can tolerate, it offers a great “Japanese” look to the pond area. This lower limb pruning will eventually give a bonsai-like look to the shrub when the trunk thickens.

Quite apt for this post I thought, Stink bugs.
I recently had to move a whole bunch of plants to make way for a new pathway I am putting in, (more on that in my next post). I had to move a handful of ornamental grasses and decided to chop them back by two-thirds to stimulate root recovery, even though they had just regrown their foliage. I watered them in and these two stinkers boiled to the surface!

These old cedar carcasses have made great elevation structures for my gazing orbs.
I now have all three of mine up on these structures.

Here you can see all three, gold, blue and burgundy.

This is the scene every time I water this container,
and I mean every time. About two minutes after the
water has been applied and it has filtered through
the pot, you can audibly hear the drip, drip, drip of
the water exiting the pot. This apparently is the cue
to go spread eagle on the ground, usually flattening
one or more plants, to get to the “source”. This little
garden investigator usually comes up for air with a
substantial helping of Texas native mulch attached to
the side of his face or head, he eats a little then
pulls his “I should not eat mulch ever again” face.
Repeat above process every time I water this container.

New succulent growth.

A mixed bed of ivy, trying desperately to escape it’s rocky Alcatraz.

And finally…

New growth on a mexican feather grass.