Insects

“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.

“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!