Hardscaping

“Chicken and Hell-Strips”

ESPatch May 2, 2010 5 comments

Everything in the Patch is in full spring swing…myself?

I have spent two days swinging a shovel at this…a new and most welcome pile of decomposed granite in my hell-strip. A few weeds had already started to pop up here and there, it was time for the final push. My hell-strip has looked like a construction site ever since I laid down sheets of weed suppressant material and subsequent bricks to hold it down, it looked really bad. This was all about to change…I wrapped an iced turban around my head, took a deep meditative breath, cursed a few times just to get me in the mode, then filled up my first wheelbarrow full of the golden soil… I was off!

Some hours later things were looking a whole lot calmer in the Patch’s hell-strip. I divided and transplanted a bunch of bamboo muhly from the back of the Patch, these now line both sides of the pathway from the street. This will ultimately hide the edges of the pathway and visually soften the approach from the street. The agave in the foreground courtesy of Lori at: http://gardenerofgoodandevil.blogspot.com/ will eventually fill up this entire front corner, hence the intentionally sparse planting scheme. Toward the sidewalk are some blackfoot daisies and a couple of bulbines.

On the other side a couple of whirling butterflies (gaura) went in, both white and pink varieties. That is another artemesia hill in the background, oh yes, you can’t have too many of those silver hills, right Pam?

These artemesia were snapped off from my plants in the back of the Patch, and just stuck in the ground. I had about an 90% success rate on these transplants in the most atrocious and unamended soil conditions known to mankind.

It will take a while to fill in but I am so happy that I can now say I am 100% grass/Bermuda free.

“Hurah… Three cheers for ESP ladies.”

One last shot of the front, yes I like rosemary can you tell? And why the gathering crowd?

Only in the Patch!

This visitor just turned up, clucking away under our car, the hobbits were delighted to feed it some seeds. This chicken and a recent visit to Callahan’s general store has fueled the desire for a few chickens in the Patch. I am not sure how long my delaying strategies and excuses will work at this point. To make it worse my eldest watched a young girl in the store purchase a baby rabbit…Arrgh!

“Why can’t we have a rabbit daddy? (repeat 27.5 times in the car) …the .5? …Well, that was when I started to get annoyed.

Some time later…

I always get a little nervous when things go too quite for any length of time in the Patch, the silence just sort of seeps into my psyche until it is so loud, that I inherently know that some snail, worm, or pill bug is getting involved in some form of bizarre, and totally inappropriate experiment. Even worse are the “soup” creations, these culinary masterpieces usually involve critters, water, sand and plants in a particularly disgusting combination. This is especially gross when the obnoxious “soup” is unknowingly thrust directly under ones nasal passages when you are least expecting it.

The disturbing silence is usually followed by a hunched over scene like the one above… the crazy scientist hard at work in a secluded corner of his lab.

What is he doing?… I hid deeper in the ornamental grasses and quietly observed.

He swung around completely out of control as the force of the jet stream made the hose lunge, he hung on for dear life, the force of the blast immediately creating a Donald Trump hair style.

He had discovered the hose next to my feeder tank, and it didn’t take him long to harness its power.

“Promising, this hobbit looks.”

He had the time of his life, though it was quite difficult to keep him focused on filling up the feeder tank. Spraying the jet skyward was naturally a lot more entertaining, and a bonus if the water came down on top of himself. That would initiate the belly laughs .

All the time he was doing this water play, his sister was striking a pose in her latest cowgirl outfit on the Patch’s front porch.

Is your Giant Timber not quite right this year?

What manner of witchcraft and skulduggery is this?

All of mine are acting very peculiar…very peculiar indeed. I have few black culms, this is a first, not sure if these are dead or not, so far there has been no lateral growth on these now exotic looking culms. The other thing that is out of whack is the amount of small culms emerging from the base.

“It is like the bamboo has regressed Captain”.

“I see that Spock”.

I am optimistic the large culms are on the way up, getting prepared to push up a few more bricks on my brick patio…I can only hope!

Oleander is one of the most poisonous plants in the world, it contains numerous toxic compounds, many of which can be deadly to people, especially young children.

Toxic or not I have to have them, and when blooming they are hard to beat for their tropical flare.

Talking of flare, I caught this hairy character on the porch of my in-laws house on a recent visit…

This caterpillar is known strangely as the Laugher,

Charadra deridens

it feeds on the leaves of beeches, birches, elms, oaks, and other broad-leaf trees.

Its body is pale with very distinctive long, silky white setae. The Head is black with yellow band between eyes (usually) or white with darkened band across the front. This caterpillar turns into this…

The laugher moth.

“I like this moth, I really do.”

Moving on…

It looks like a fern…it looks like a flower…

It looks like something that I will be gathering the seeds from quite soon. This plant was given to me at a recent Austin “Design a GoGo” gathering by Bob at Draco http://dracogardens.blogspot.com/

and it has grown at an amazing rate, a really interesting and unusual frond bloom. More on this one later.

As I wearily trudged to my bench for some R&R after a full day of granite shoveling and hell-strip action, I was feeling quite satisfied.

“Hell-strip action, baby…yeah”!

I cracked open a freezing cold beer and looked across the Patch, happy to take the weight of my legs which always take the brunt of the work if you are shoveling correctly. I took my first cold sip, then heard a cluck, clucking directly behind me in my neighbors yard.

Eeek, Eeek, Cluck, Cluck!

Was it following me? I immediately remembered the ridiculous scene from the movie “Withnail and I”…

I decided to ignore it.

I took another deep sip and continued to look straight ahead of me for fear of catching it’s crazy eye.

Stay Tuned for:

“Knotty Dreads”

All material © 2010 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

“Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop” – Garden Benches

ESPatch Apr 3, 2010 21 comments

“Smell my finger”…

Err…”No Thanks”!

I would rather smell this, thank you very much! The aroma from my

Pittosporum tobira ‘Variegata’

or more commonly known mock orange, is hard to put into words. It is filling the entire back quarter of the patch with the most amazing scent right now, in fact, I am making fake journeys and excuses to go back there just to catch another whiff of it.

The sweet orange blossom aroma from this shrub / small tree will perfume a garden with an aroma that will last for weeks. It makes an excellent specimen plant and a beautiful tree form when trimmed correctly. I have trained mine in the same fashion that I do with my mountain laurels, Vitex and Opuntia …that is as high as possible.

Now to business…

The past few days in the Patch I have spent contorted into unusual body positions, performing unusual maneuvers with rather antiquated tools, namely a hand saw, a screwdriver and a drill, I ache in places I never even new I had. What was I doing? Well for some strange reason I sort of fell into a project that I have been thinking about for ages. I have just never really known how to get started or where to begin. Having some spare lumber already on hand to form the backbone of the project, I decided it was time to jump in and give it a bash. I was going to build a bench!

“I am Maximus Decimus Meridius and this garden bench SHALL prevail”.

It turned out that this activity was perfectly timed with The Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop – “Garden Benches”, over at: http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/?p=11763

This bench would not be planned, it would not be exact, it was not going to adhere to any ergonomic standards, in fact the whole thing was going to be improvised, winged, made up on the spot…

No spirit levels, no circular saws and strictly no set squares, oh no, that would make the job too easy. It was either going to end up looking like something from the Beverly Hillbillies or miraculously turn out looking like something that resembled a garden bench, I had no idea.

My intent was to develop some form of seating between these two trellised vertical posts, I say “some form” as I really had no idea what was going to form, or how I was going to build it. The two posts were also not aligned, the right one was actually twisted…mmm, I would deal with this little inconvenience later I told myself. Early on in the non-planning stage it slowly dawned on me that the Mexican weeping bamboo that I had only removed from the front of my house a couple of weeks back was slap-bang in the middle of the right hand side of where the future “seat” needed to be. As much as I dreaded digging the beast up once again it just had to be done.

A few Home Depot brackets and a bit of concrete later I had the skeleton of my Frankenstein’s bench blocked out. Photo courtesy of elder Hobbit.

I was determined at this point, that whatever I built, it was going to have a building code equivalent to Fort Knox…oh yes, this bench was going to be solid and quite large as it turns out.

Putting on the seating slats had to be one of the most mundane jobs…ever, especially considering that I was screwing everything down by hand, it took me the best part of three hours, each panel having four screws in it. While I was performing this mind-numbing task I actually taught my daughter the meaning of the word “tedious”, just to take my mind off it. The smell from the blooming Meyer lemon was the only thing that kept me sane.

Here is the final Alice in Wonderland throne in all her pre-stained glory. In order to secure the backboards to something in the middle, I found that I required yet another post to be concreted in for support, digging that hole was such a joy! Not! I used the top of this new post for a small shelf, I figured it may come in useful for something in the future, like citronella candles! You can see it behind “Alice”, she is already hosting a tea-party on it!

“Interesting proportions ESP.”

Likewise Helena !

The bench seats all members of the Patch with room to spare! Just a couple of finishing touches…

Well you have to have one of these…

“Nice touch ESP”!

…and a couple of lucky horseshoes to ensure your arse stays splinter free! Now I need a few more coats of stain, a seating mat and some pillows and its done. An improvised bench that took three days. My oldest hobbit calls it the garden sofa, me? I have many names for it, most of which will make your hair curl!

This new bench offers a great lounging place from which most of the garden can be viewed, in the shade!

The unintentional over-sized proportions really gives it a sense of presence in the Patch…where has it been all my life! I have another two vertical beams that I am thinking I may use to construct another, but not until the memory of building this one fades into my subconscious.