Cactus

“Bread Rock”

ESPatch Apr 1, 2010 18 comments

Gross Post Alert!…Gross Post Alert!

The stench inside this cavern I cannot put into words, for fear of involuntary retching over my laptop keyboard once again just remembering it (mops side of mouth with Kleenex). It really was the most diabolical combination of fermented sweet and sour, and I am not talking about a kimchee – esque aroma, (which I love) oh no! Let me try and explain it, just to get you in the appropriate gag arena: Imagine a sickly sweet pumpkin pudding aroma, combined simply with fizzing rotten chicken (description courtesy of my oldest hobbit, minus the fizzing), it also had the texture of moist bread! (Burp… starts to look around worried).

This nasty cavern, (caverns being a popular post-topic recently in the Patch), was created as I started to examine this thing of immaculate beauty…

My largest

Colocasia

or giant elephant ear. Granted it is looking more like the painful stump of an elephant’s foot right now, but not for long, not for long at all!

I have left this tuber in the ground for the past four years, no problem, but this year’s prolonged cold winter temperatures had apparently taken their squishy toll. I prodded it, my hobbits prodded it, it started to ooze flesh, this could not be good. Then we all prodded it some more. Remember the infamous scene in poltergeist when the paranormal investigator started to touch his face, then proceeded to dig in his fingers and pull off his face?

Well that’s how we got started with this Taro…A prod led to a poke that led to a gouge that…

led to a push…

That led to the Taro finally “giving way” in a scene reminiscent of the horrible resuscitation scene from “The Thing”.

I think we all remember what disgusting “thing” happens next! I digress. When the head of the taro rolled back everyone recoiled and “ewwed” simultaneously, turning our faces away from the smell that hit us like a tsunami of flatulence. A stink horn is a terrible thing (right G?) http://thegerminatrix.com/?p=637 but this rank atrocity came pretty close as far as tickling ones stomach release valve.

“It’s just a rotten Taro ESP, nothing to be scared about”.

If you say so scary Kane! Brrrr

A couple of hours after the decapitation, I reluctantly revisited the carnage and found these tiny iridescent

Dolichopus

flies having a great time, their wings flicking back and forth in sick excitement.

These tiny, tiny flies are really interesting visually, looking like molten metal, their segmented bodies are really quite amazing. This one is about to make a left turn apparently.

Enough nastiness…

What!

Okay I promise that is it on the gross front…

Today was the day to move a rather large rock, a rock that has stayed where it fell from a truck that delivered a large delivery of decomposed granite some time ago.

The rock was wiggled and pried, rotated and shuffled down the slope until it came to rest and leveled in a more appropriate location…Thanks Bob at Draco! http://dracogardens.blogspot.com/ (and “PP” for the pry-bar and strategic leveling).

…right in front of my beautiful gas meter. While I was messing around in this part of the Patch I decided to relocate a plant or twelve, the agave and agave parryi var. truncata all coming from this container:

None of these plants were doing particularly well, buried in the shade of the vines that are slowly coming back into the land of the living.

This area took a real beating when the hole where the Tahoe hit http://www.eastsidepatch.com/2009/09/dude-wheres-my-car/ was being repaired, it received a lot of foot traffic and compaction as the house was repaired and repainted. Here it is the area planted up, the bed also has Mexican bush sage pushing through that will soften the scene and provide good contrast with the agave’s as they mature. The two silver Agave , known as Parry’s agave or mescal agave, are slow-growing agave’s native to Mexico (Sonora), hopefully these will reach their full potential in their new, more sun-loving home.

An old ceder carcass is added for a “Waltons” moment.

Now to wait for the scene to fill-in. There is also a line of tiny transplanted feather grasses in front of the moss boulders, well it wouldn’t be the Patch without them after all!

While all this transplanting and rock shuffling was going on, my Hobbits were being way..way too quite…

They had found my last trowel, (my favorite trowel has been missing for the last couple of weeks), I surmise that somehow it has found it’s way to “Davy Jones’ Locker“ at the bottom of my stock tank fish-pond. Mmm…Now I wonder who would do such a thing?

Apparently the hole was to house a pill bug and this snail, a few leaves were thrown in then the hole back filled.

The raggedy pram makes it into yet another shot. After the hole was filled in, my oldest hobbit went to the back garden to check on her new container garden that she has taken over as manager…

…and things seem to be growing very well. This is all hers!

Moving on…

Snail, cactus and verbena…

Here is the same purple verbena in full flight…

attracting once again the zombie / Thestral eyes of this swallowtail butterfly.

“I see the swallowtail too Harry”

Looking like a glittering harlequin’s hat, the blooms on this ghost plant are really quite involved… when you get up close.

This paper wasp is looking pretty sharp, color coordinated on the blooms of this gopher plant…

and my Mexican lime lives, it lives I tell you! This is the first bit of green it has developed at the base of the trunk. I knew she would pull through!

Tiny seed pods are now replacing the fading blooms of the mountain laurels.

The ESP is jumping further out of winter everyday, the survival of my Mexican lime tree and my Barbados cherry has made my week, even both of my dwarf bottle-brushes are steaming back to life. Although spring usually lasts a matter of hours in Central Texas, I plan to make the most of it…an iced turban will be in my future soon enough after all!

That little sotol in the middle of my circular bed is finally starting to develop a presence!

And finally:

I told you I was not finished with these four “nervous” daisies quite yet.

Inspirational Images of the week:

Anybody visiting Zilker Gardens in Austin last weekend for the plant festival, probably noticed this crazy Texas red bud specimen…

MacCrimmon’s Lament [Song]…Mac Umber

Stay Tuned for:

“If you Mock Orange Me, I’ll Satsum ya!”

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intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

“Journey to the Center of the Patch”

ESPatch Jan 31, 2010 17 comments

journey_to_the_center_of_the_earth_sequel

“Is there anything left alive in there”? “Look how brown everything is”. “Is that a frozen Naboo tribal member stuck on the Botox lady’s lip”? “This is serious”.

Central Texas is back once again in the grip of yet another cold spell, I knew we were not going to get away with just one killer freeze this year.

I am just really glad that I did not clear out all of the leaves from the top of the hundreds of agave pups that I planted when my agave stalked bloomed over a year ago. It seems this insulating thermal blanket is performing well, when you consider the mushy state of all the agaves in pots that were sitting out in the Patch unprotected…

It is not a pretty seaweedy sight! The ones under the leaves are actually looking pretty good, but I will keep an eye on them for any sign of them rotting under their brown blanket.

And the less said about the poor old browned sago palms the better. Even the poor Botox lady has had more cold temperatures than she can endure, she now resembles one of the survivors on the movie “Alive”, I won’t mention her frost bitten lip. She is also having a hard time getting her words out, something that right now I am appreciating. All my sago palms are still alive though so I should probably not complain. I have seen so many younger ones around Austin that are now corpses in their own container coffins. RIP.

So what is the best thing to do when the cold creeps into the ahem,…bones?

“Pull a ridiculous face like this ESP ? (strikes pose)… long-johns perhaps”?

No Dr McCoy…

some mindless moving of rocks from one place to another of course.

This area has been irritating me for longer than I care to remember. These sunken Home Depot stones, I have to say, I have come to hate. What started out as a “mmm, thats quite nice, look how they form a circle and frame the stock tank like that,” to… “those have to be the most ugly and badly laid bricks ever to grace humanity.” They also give me an unpleasant “commercial” taste in my mouth, oh no, this was going to have to change, and change it will today. I looked around the Patch and started to find a bunch of buried river rocks hidden under piles of leaves around my pond area, rocks that were about to disappear due to the natural passage of time and debris build-up. I had rediscovered them just in the nick of time.

I decided to leave the Home Depot rocks exactly where they were and just built up these rocks on top of them (shhhh), with a little help from my day laborer, naturally, it worked out a treat. This area is slowly starting to work, the silver color of the feeder tank and the blue river rocks reference the color of the agave and Arizona cypress ‘Blue Ice’ tree. The dark blue of the container and background piece of fencing adding depth to the scene.

And looking from the other side, a mirrored agave (a pup) and more dark blue from the “fish on the hill.”

Mmm, to remove this flagstone or not? What do you think?

Now… if I can only find a way to remove that label from the stock tank I will sleep well again, knowing that this area has been fully addressed, at least for now. I am a firm believer that the adhesive used on these “Callahan’s” tank labels actually was reversed engineered from…

“Click, clack, chirp, chirp fuddy dunster” …or translated: “Look, He has discovered our rather stubborn adhesive George, our master plan is working. All he needs to do now is analyze it’s molecular structure, only then will he reveal the true secret of the…….!”

I cannot believe how many of these river rocks were hiding in the center of the Patch. I need quite a few more to cover this entire area, but you get the general idea, very Brighton Beach…anyway I feel better.

Feeling cold? I strongly suggest hauling a bunch of river rocks from one place to another, it really does work.

While I was in this ancient, moving rock, Egyptian mode, I did notice a bunch of these tiny grasses springing up down the edge of my moss boulders that line my pathways. Yes, my Mexican feather grasses have sown a new generation, and I cannot wait to transplant them all around the patch. I love this little grass. I will wait until these babies get larger in the granite before digging them up and reorganizing them into positions more appropriate.

A plant that has remained greener than green despite these harsh ungreening conditions has been this containerized horsetail reed.

Equisetum hyemale

Backlit from the low winter sun, it seems like it is in its prime right now, so green and irritatingly (to the rest of my plants,) healthy. The evergreen stems are particularly noticeable in winter, providing a welcome relief from all things brown. They also make the best Harry Potter wands available anywhere in the Diagon-Alley-Patch.

“Now you tell me”.

The blush on these small cacti seems to have intensified this winter.

So-far-so-good on the barrel cactus front, these lethal anemones appear to be holding up to Jack “irritating” Frost pretty well. Got to love that hat, I bet she keeps tortillas under there!

Can you be anymore irritating!

I will finish up with another rather sharp character…

…and a crisp story in the Patch…

Inspirational image of the week:

Office garden pods. What a great place to compose a post!

http://www.officepod.co.uk/