Hoja Santa

“Starsky and Husk”

ESPatch Nov 22, 2010 9 comments

Ridiculous.

My tomatillos appear to be exploding, imploding and generally disappearing inside their husks, Noooo!

What is going on here? This is the first time I have ever grown tomatillos and at this point I am dumbfounded.

They started out great…

and would get to this stage, but never turn green? I did read that in a ripe state their color can vary significantly with purple being one of the colors mentioned, but when cut open…

the flesh is mealy and just bland? I cannot image what a salsa would taste like with these used in it.

And now this happens! Shriveled tomatillos and barren husks!

Oh don’t even schtart Goldmember.

The Patch is turning shades of brown once again, cattails are about to rip open at the seams and this bog cypress is about to shed all of its foliage, something it likes to do very fast,

I wish I could say the same about my pecan trees, it seems they just keep shedding for months! My strategy this year is to wait until it is quite finished before the mammoth clean-up. “Don’t look at the mess..don’t look at the mess..do…”

The leaves on my post oak are also falling at a steady rate. The post oak’s scientific name is quercus, which is the genus for all of the oaks, quercus stellata. It gets the name stellata because if you look on the under-surface of the leaf with a magnifying glass you will find tiny hairs.

Not now Jeff!

On a post oak these tiny hairs are not uniform across the whole thing, rather they are in little bunches that grow in star-like clusters. Stellata being Latin for stars…pushes glasses high up on ridge of nose, snorts quietly.

The spherical object on the underside of this leaf is not a seed but a leaf gall. These leaf galls are formed by a variety of insects or small wasps that commonly infest oak trees. Most leaf galls on oak cause little or no harm to the health of a tree. Galls are abnormal plant growth or swellings comprised of plant tissue, they are usually found on foliage or twigs. These unusual deformities are caused by plant growth-regulating chemicals or stimuli produced by an insect or other arthropod pest species. The chemicals produced by these causal organisms interfere with normal plant cell growth…one loud involuntary finale snort.

I recently noticed some feather grass broomsticks propped up against the base of this oak tree…I can only assume the ESP witches are doing some fall cleaning, in preparation of decorating their rickety house for Christmas with strings of illuminated, inflated gulf-coast toads? I believe they got this nasty interior design idea from National Geographic, I have recently noticed that they are getting it delivered by raven.

James Snyder took this striking photo of a frog that ate a small light bulb. It was featured in National Geographic’s “Daily Dozen”

“This is a Cuban tree frog on a tree in my backyard in southern Florida. How and why he ate this light is a mystery. It should be noted that at the time I was taking this photo, I thought this frog was dead having cooked himself from the inside. I’m happy to say I was wrong. After a few shots he adjusted his position. So after I was finished shooting him, I pulled the light out of his mouth and he was fine. Actually, I might be crazy but I don’t think he was very happy when I took his light away”.

This unusually large chrysalis showed up in the Patch this week, I caught it hanging under my hoja santa plants, well you could hardly miss it!

I believe this is the rare

Argumenti selecthearingus

I will be studying this ones development very closely over the next 15 years or so.

Not all things are sepia though…

This mammoth giant elephant ear

Colocasia

is quite impressive with the light hitting it. This plant surprised my this year with a remarkable rebound. You may recall that after my “carnival” incident: http://www.eastsidepatch.com/2010/01/carnival/ that attempted, but failed, to protect my Mexican lime tree last winter? It was at this pivotal point that I made the decision to not cover anything ever again, ever…oh no, not me…the large bulb of this colocasia took quite the beating under this new traumatic Patch policy.

“Beeeeeeeltch”

Now I know you could have gone your entire lives without seeing these pictures again (just think about that green leaf) but if you recall, It went from a moist elephants foot to a smudged over, horrendous smelling garden treat of rotting flesh…I knew I shouldn’t have pushed on it, but well, I just had to.

The rotten ear, now flat to the ground, formed a hard crust which did nothing for a few months, although that part of the garden had a rather “unsubtle” aroma during this period. When anyone visited the Patch during this dark time, you could tell when they were anywhere close to it from their falling expressions and ashon pallor.

After a few more months of apparent fermentation, I was surprised to see it come back to life, green shoots sprouted forth from the fizzing kimchi. I was impressed. It sent out some tiny side shoots that I thought were not going to amount to much, but I was quite wrong as you can see. So if your colocasia freezes and you have the stomach to put up with its unearthly rotting aroma for a while, don’t dig it up, I just bet part of it will prevail.

A recent visit to Copper Rock wholesale nursery…not sure what type of agave this is but I sure do like it!

Wintery illumination in the Patch.

A cardinal in the silvers.

Another tiny Cypress ‘blue ice’ gets planted along the perimeter of the Patch this week.

Final crop of peppers.

I caught these armored centurions huddled together on my porch.

Largus californicus

Finally:

I recently found this…

and more great rain water collection solutions from a local company that also are addressing space sensitive solutions to harvesting rain water. Existing rain-water collection barrels are really not that practical, filling up in seconds in our Texas sized downpours. But this on the other hand…

They also look good placed in tandem down these tight spaces.

http://www.watercache.com/

Stay Tuned for:

“Voodoo”

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

“The Eve”

ESPatch Oct 15, 2010 20 comments

It has been a crazy week in the Patch this week, lots of pruning, lots of pea gravel laying and a few more floggings from my pampas grasses, naturally.

The Botox lady has got herself all dolled up for the Garden Conservancy Austin Tour tomorrow. She has had her hair fixed, and has even started to wear this ladybug as a beauty spot!

“Ya! Yoo-Hoo ESP…over zere, over zere…you like mine hair ya? Notice something else? Oh and look at ze asters, look at ze asters, have you seen ze asters ESP”?

Oh yes, the build up to the tour has made her even more obnoxious then usual, if that is even possible, I hope she tones it down on the big day!

Oh you complete and utter asters!

You just had to do it didn’t you! I am hoping these blooms hang in there until Saturday. The hardest part of the week has been the weeding and clearing out of leaves in ridiculously inaccessible areas, requiring insanely strange contorted poses to even reach them. Doing thousands of these oddly positioned squats over the last few days has made my legs feel like they are dropping off…

…as this grasshopper can surely appreciate. This find gave me the opportunity to closely check out the spines on the legs…oh yes a kick from this chap would most certainly draw blood…(draws finger across teeth)

This anole could not even look at the dismembered bodily carnage, perhaps he even perpetrated the dismemberment and was hiding under this leaf while he consumed the more delectable parts.

Check out that huge Jurassic right foot, complete with talons!

Like a grazing antelope this huge “Obscure Bird Grasshopper” was most certainly alive, gnawing his way through one of my satsuma leaves, it ate half of a leaf as I took these images.

Where is…

when you need him?

Amazing eyes on these creatures. While I was clambering around under this satsuma thinking about how sharp the spines on the dismembered leg were and how my fingers were now almost touching the real thing, I rounded a small limb to get a better angle and came face to face with this disgusting fellow…

and it was one of the biggest giant swallow tail larvae I recall ever seeing. It blocked out the sun. There was snow on its peaks.

Papilio cresphontes

Fruit farmers often call these caterpillars orange dogs or orange puppies because of the devastation they can cause on their crops.

Judging from the size, this one must be really close to changinginto a chrysalis. Oh yes, who would want to eat this?

Moving On:

This back area of the Patch has always been a sort of no-man’s land, so I decided to move this old and cracked container from behind a stand of giant timber bamboo where it was mostly obscured and give it a new purpose in life.

I elevated it on a couple of breeze blocks to give it a little more presence before…

filling the area in with granite. Well what did you expect?

I have been up-pruning this pittosporum/ mock orange on the right for quite a few years, the small agave vilmoriniana (yes I am STILL planting those pups) planted all around the pot will get quite large and fill in this scene over the coming years. The blues of the container and the Mexican beach pebbles goes well with the adjacent silvery-blue hues of the foliage, the inside of the container referencing the brown color of the granite and background trellis.

The browns on my Mexican weeping bamboo have also began to stand out recently. Note: Never place a rotating hose next to a weeping bamboo, the annoyance factor as strands of bamboo get caught up in it as it rotates are completely off the scale.

As have the now crispy brown seedpods from my pride of Barbados plants, very Halloween looking. I planted a lot of seeds from these plants this year, mostly in the hell-strip. Staying with seeds and Halloween:

The seedpods on my celosia are swirling to now comical lengths. Walk down my sidewalk in the dead of night and you may just feel the touch of these slender seedpod fingers trailing over your shoulders. Brrr.

What a firework display.

Another firework, a tiny sparkler sedge courtesy of Pam at Digging http://www.penick.net/digging/

Moving on to some greens…

A hoja santa leaf catching some fall rays…

…and somebody is really looking forward to selling some fresh limonada at the tour tomorrow.

Me? Lets just say weeding and collecting leaves will not be high on my priority list for the next few months!

I hope to see you in the Patch tomorrow, and a big thanks in advance to my illustrious band of volunteers who will be helping me throughout the day. I did decide to do a quick “Plan of the Patch” in preparation for the tour, this should help me remember those plants that I can never seem to remember: