Rosemary

“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.

“Feather Hugger”

ESPatch Mar 5, 2010 14 comments

This young feather hugger is totally into the feather grass, it jumps from clump to clump hugging and hiding under it.

This cat, according to it’s collar, is called “Nina Coconut,” and it seems like it has adopted the Patch as it’s playground, at least for the time being.

It can also scale my Douglas Fir in seconds to the delight of my youngest hobbit who thinks this is fantastic. It really is quite funny the way it sits on the small branches watching all the goings-on in the Patch with sharp head movements.

These Mexican feather grasses have supplied me with a good crop of babies that have been transplanted all around my pathways. What I have left should be just enough for my front garden endeavors. The loquats are all having a simultaneous growth spurt right now. The paler green new growth looks great set against the mature darker foliage. The cloud-like Arizona cypress, ‘blue ice’ (left) has aromatic, blue-gray leaves/needles that are flecked with white resin. I love this tree and look forward every year to it developing chocolate brown cones, but so far none have ever materialized. This cypress prefers full sun, and thrives especially well in hot, dry environments like Austin. It has a silvery blue color all year round, I love the way this one looks reflected in my feeder pond. The tree gets up to 50ft tall.

Imagine one of these in a hell-strip, under-planted with a mass of artemisia , now that would be a silver statement!

Talking of the feeder pond, this body of water was recently the venue for the “2010 H S R”.

“Husk Sailing Race”. These bamboo husks with their post oak leaf sails work great, flying across the pond on the slightest of breezes.

“That looks like fun Huck”!

“It sure does Tom.”

I did notice this strange bit of oily something-or-other floating on top of the water, perhaps one of the sailing vessels had developed a leak in it’s fuselage?

New martian growth in my main pond

March Kale Felling:

She planted this Kale when it was about an inch tall, it was barely visible above the soil. Today she used the big-girl snippers and cut it down for dinner. There was an element of sadness associated with cutting it down though, I had to keep telling her that she grew it to eat it, so we all could eat it, she just kept saying…”next week, we will eat it next week.” She had grown quite attached to having it around apparently.

And the light shoneth down on the cut kale and peace and order returned the Patch.

Who am I kidding…naturally the freshly cut kale started an immediate fight…“Its mine!“ “No Its mine!” “Get off”! “Its mine” (Repeat until nerves are completely frayed, and temporary insanity has set in.)

The kale was made into an Asian noodle dish, and the grower ate so much of it! This was really surprising as it had quite a bitter taste, just goes to show, food always tastes better if you grow it yourself.

The warmer weather brought out the bees on this blooming rosemary today. He kept insisting that the bees needed a “drinky” from his watering can, which was just an excuse to pour water on a few of them. I grew and wrestled this prostrate rosemary over a cedar carcass while it was young. I am now testing a theory with another young plant to see if this actually forces the plant into a higher growth habit. This one has turned into a monster, it spent the first two years of it’s life braced painfully up on the side of a cedar stump. My theory is that once it has been forced skyward in it’s formative years, it remains like this when mature?

Here is my young test subject…Mohahahaha!

On a closer inspection of the interior I was shocked to find the wreckage of this yellow convertible hung up in it’s interior branches. A Naboo tribal member on a joy-ride perhaps? I couldn’t be sure.

“O,o, makes me so o,o, angry…I did warn them it was a stick-shift.”

Have the tribe succumbed to modern society to the extent that they are now using sports cars to circumnavigate their territorial boundaries? I scoured the ground around the wreck for tiny bodies, but I naturally found nothing. And why the random, angry, Naboo-speaking monkey? I have no idea.

Disturbed, I looked up to see this dwarf conifer blooming it’s very strange flesh colored oddities…this was no comfort.

And finally, (drum roll),

the patch has had a face-lift:

From a flaking white and horrific aqua, to shades of green and brown, oh yes we are all very excited. Spot the hobbit face in the right picture?

The stock tank where the Chevy Tahoe hit will be moved around in front of the now painted electrical boxes (flattened side against the house, naturally)…Well I may as well take advantage of it. I plan to stain the concrete foundation a dark brown to match the window trim. Not quite finished, but it feels so much more Patch-like already!

The containered golden bamboo culms and foliage look amazing set against this green color. An added bonus.

Blast from the Past:

Imagine if we still had to compose our blog content on this?

Released in 1981 by the Osborne Computer Corporation, the Osborne 1 is considered to be the first true portable computer – it closes for protection, and has a carrying handle. It even has an optional battery pack. While quite revolutionary, the Osborne does have its limitations. For example, the screen is only 5″ (diagonal) in size, and can’t display more than 52 characters per line of text. To compensate, you can actually scroll the screen display back and forth with the cursor keys to show lines of text up to 128 characters wide. A little bit like inserting images in WordPress!

Woohoo!

The Osborne was designed with transportation in mind – it had to be rugged and able to survive being moved about. That is one reason that the screen is so small. Designed as a true portable computer system – it can be considered airline carry-on luggage, and it will fit under the passenger seat of any commercial airliner. I love that screen.

I would love to pull out an “Osborne” on a flight, struggle with it, insert the optional battery (you know this would be quite large) and start working on my airline tray. (I wonder if the tray could even take it’s weight)?

Over-sized headphones and some “work related” head shaking, followed by some repeated insertion/ejection of an old floppy disk would complete the in-flight nonsense. Mr Bean could have a field day with this!