Animals

“The Good Life”

ESPatch Apr 14, 2011 11 comments

I happened to witness the Patch witches harvesting their annual cull of gulf coast toads the other evening with their wretched smelling hessian sacks.

I could see their protruding moles and dark silhouettes stumbling up the ladder with their ladened croaking bounty, dragging it up high to their treacherously positioned home in the upper canopy of my recently leafed-out post oak tree, no doubt for use in some horrible disfiguring spell.

Naboo rumor has it that the warty trio are very close to signing a major contract with Whole Foods Market to commercialize one of their herbal remedies, if this happens they have apparently expressed interest into moving into a downtown condo! Their preferred form of transport being the broom negates the pothole issues we humans face driving in the downtown region…(Oh yes, I am not stopping with my “state of the Austin roads” rant).

I love deep shadows in a landscape, they add so much depth and intrigue to a space though I must say we have all stayed well away from this dark cavern between the feather grasses, below my Arizona ‘blue ice’ cypress.

Painting: “Once Upon a Time” by Henry Meynell Rheam.

My feather grasses are now entering their Patch prime and putting on a great late afternoon light show with their newly formed panicles. These plants are a couple of years old and have been through some vigorous experimentation and a couple of Brazilian blow-outs:

http://www.eastsidepatch.com/2010/05/knotty-dreads/

Imagine my surprise when I recently lifted the lid on my trashcan.

“Yeah Nassella tenuissima Baby, yeah”!

And then who popped up with his dry British wit from my neighbors trashcan?

“Hairstyle Plagiarism, that’s what that is!”

…I quickly slammed down both lids before anyone heard the chat-up lines begin, I looked around and listened nervously for a big white van drawing up to the front of the Patch…I apparently got lucky this time.

Enough nonsense…

I said enough!

If you are like me and have this little abomination popping up all over your garden you will totally relate to this next segment and my mentally unstable relationship with it.

Melothria pendula?

(anyone know what this weed is called?)

I cannot describe to you how deep the level of my hatred goes for this incredibly obnoxious weed…perhaps even deeper then Bermuda grass, yes I said Bermuda grass.

This aesthetically strangling plant loves nothing more then tucking itself in tight to the base of plants, in this case my artemesia, (of which it appears to be quite fond, I imagine due to the delicate nature of this plants stems). Pulling it is completely futile, and nearly always results in an emotionally demoralizing “snap” leaving the roots to shoot up foliage once again the very next day.

This abomination of nature is also very fond of sprouting between bricks, Mexican bush sage and rosemary, okay practically anywhere it can inhabit. Snap. It seems to know if it grows like this, snap, the gardener can not, and will not, attack it with RoundUp in fear of destroying the “host” plant it is cleverly growing under and through, snap…

…“a most cunning plan…t”

Scrambling along:

Stonecrop is blooming everywhere right now,

it is amazing how it casts down these long red ropes over the sides of my Texas holey rocks in an attempt to scale down and propagate the new terrains below.

“I could do with one of those red lifelines right about now!”

This garden snake gave me my first full-on conniption at an install I am working on. It came out waving around on me at waist height from a retainer wall I was clearing out. In usual fashion I recoiled and almost stumbled over another lower wall, another foiled Darwin Award!

It slithered around for a while trying to find cover, it eventually took refuge in this small hole between the boulders.

The scales were quite something.

Finally:

The candy blooms on this aloe vera look good enough to eat.

Gaura is in full bloom,

as are larkspur.

(Thanks for the seeds M) http://www.zanthan.com/gardens/gardenlog/

Moody datura is once again blooming,

An unusual moment of Zen for him…

and a moment of excited expectation for her…the tooth fairy (her very first loss) she also lost some blood this week and required a couple of staples in her head after a playground accident.

And to finish, some classic old English comedy:
We had our own “Good Life” moment this week when we gathered around to pull up a test carrot, a major family event.

unfortunately,

It was more carrot top then actual carrot, but she enjoyed it.

Stay Tuned for:

“The Rock”

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

“Men in Blackfoot daisies”

ESPatch Apr 19, 2010 5 comments

“Show yourself, we know who you really are, no point in pretending to be a daisy any longer”…

The Men in Blackfoot daisies turned up in the Patch shortly after my eldest snapped this shot in the sky, not being a conspiracy theorist or UFO advocate, I was initially skeptical of her proud “Its an alien, it’s an alien” claim…but then I decided to look at the picture in more detail, in fact, a lot more detail.

I downloaded a premium digital enhancement program online and zoomed into the pixels faster than Captain Picard could say…

“Pull my finger number one”.

I was shocked to see what the image revealed…

I zoomed in 1000 percent:

I zoomed in 2000 percent:

And at maximum magnification I was shocked to see this “Grey” staring back at me out of one of the UFO’s portholes. He appeared to be scouring our planet with somewhat envious eyes.

“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

Enough nonsense.

This week in the Patch my two strawberries ripened and were devoured immediately. I grew a single strawberry plant this year just for this moment. The hobbits have been following this plants progression from flower to green fruit, to blush and finally to a ripe red…well almost ripe fruit. They could not believe it when I said today “go ahead, pick them”, as I have been constantly telling them not to bruise them and touch them as they developed! They both looked at me with a “is he serious” expression, as though they were getting away with something… then quickly knelt to pick the fruit, fearful that I might suddenly change my mind!

The strawberries were gone instantly…

…even though they were still a little sour apparently!

Sour they might have been but nothing tastes better then something you have waited and waited for. My next vegetable experiment for them? Eggplants… more on this later.

Can you tell I like Mexican feather grass?

The slightest breeze in the patch makes you feel as though you are at sea. This grass adds so much animation and graceful movement to a landscape…

It lines my pathways…

it creates natural theatrical curtains, for who else, but a center stage sotol.

It contrasts great with spikey plants like this soft leafed yucca, but one of my favorite combinations…

has to be feather grass and Gaura

Gaura lindheimeri

I have the white and the pink cultivars. This plant moves around as much as the grasses hence one of its common names: “whirling butterflies”, and if you look real close you will see that the panicles on the feather grass pick up on the pink/purple coloration of the gaura blooms. (Adjusts nerdy glasses)

Oh yes I will be dotting many more gaura around these grasses for quite some time to come. Did I mention how tough this little plant is?

Another new combination I am itching to get going is…

Gulf Coast penstemon and artemesia. I think this should make a great combination, the penstemon being the perfect height to rise out and above the silver artemesia.

Moving on…

The Prince of the inland sea-oats is straining to keep his pale head above them all.

A toadstool spore some how managed to develop high up on the wooden ladder into my post oak tree. I am surprised that the ESP witches have not used it yet in one of their hideous spells.

The color on the leaves of this African Hosta

Drimiopsis maculata

is quite eye-catching right now.

The African Hosta is a native of Africa, but it is not technically a true hosta. The advantages of this plant over it’s more well-known namesake, is that it holds up to our hot, Texas climate. During cold snaps, it will freeze to the ground, but when things warm up in the Spring, the fresh new leaves will have a distinct mottled look like this one. The leaves become more evenly colored as it matures.

I unearthed this colony of pill bugs today, I was about to ignore them when I happened to notice the intricate markings on their armor.

I was told by a Naboo elder that the story of the entire universe is written on the backs of pill bugs. He told me that each plate hieroglyph is unique and if you laid out all the pill bugs on the planet in exactly the right order, on the blank pages of a rather huge book, there would be a coded message that would liberate and save the entire human species. Who am I to argue? And what better creature to carry the message through the ages than the ancient Armadillidium vulgare

Okay, perhaps her!