Seeds

“I Sand Corrected”

ESPatch Apr 15, 2012 6 comments

Remember this…

What I thought was a living sand dollar, actually turned out to be a….

a sea biscuit!

An ocean sea biscuit that is.

I realized my mistake when I was perusing these shells in a knick-knack / antiques shop in Apalachicola, on my way home from Florida.

Clipiaster Riticulatus

Sea biscuits are puffy on top and concave underneath whereas sand dollars tend to be smaller and flatter.

I need to back up a little.

My time in Florida had come to an end.

I met up with my family at Ft Lauderdale airport…“Oh don’t you even think about hopping on that carrousel!”

We had a couple of days of recreation in front of us before embarking on the drive back to Texas.

We decided to visit the Miami Seaquarium where the original Flipper show was filmed.

“Flipper?”

Imaginations ran wild observing the dolphins roaming around in their aquarium.

Eyes grew even wider when the star of the show Lolita, an even larger dolphin (Orcinus orca) started soaking the crowd. Lolita was captured in 1970 from the Puget Sound waters and has been performing at the Miami Seaqurium for more than 40 years.

I know they are well looked after, and that some of these creatures are held in captivity because of unfortunate circumstances, but still I struggle with the performing aspect and their confines. In the wild these creatures travel 100 miles in a day.

“NOO!”

It was a true Levwold experience.

One final trip to the beach,

for a snorkel,

a sandcastle, and another

sea-shell hunt.

The hunt was somewhat abbreviated after discovering this rather disturbing creature burrowing into the sand… Brrr.

This roachy-crabby-rollypoly creature is commonly called a sand flea, they are otherwise known as mole crabs.

Emerita talpoidea

They are very common and apparently make for great fishing bait.

“Mine, mine, mine, mine”.

After an equally abbreviated sleep, (it was a 3.am rise), we hit the toll-road doing 95, “let them truckers roll, 10.4” and kept up the pace for a good three hours, “making time” through a good portion of Florida…

…luckily with zero violations.

12 Harry Potters and five states later:

By now my enthusiasm for the journey had certainly waned.

I had strangely detached myself from the pain in my legs and backside, gone through the mental anguish of a hundred and five “are we there yets” and emerged on the other side of sanity with bloodshot eyes and a permanent grin / grimaced expression that even I found odd every time I would catch it looking back at me in my rear-view mirror.

We had finally made it home.

Back in the Patch:

This was my first time back to the Patch in over a month, and oh how things had changed.

In my now bloodshot minds-eye I had pictured the garden still in drought conditions, bare, anemic plants hanging on for dear life (as I am sure they will be again soon enough) but no, things looked, well, surprisingly healthy!

Some things a little too healthy:

Like these baby feather grasses and chickweed. It is a good job I have a couple of hundred small pots on hand, I think I am going to need them.

I had missed the poppies,

but there was still plenty of color to greet me in the front of the Patch.

This red passion flower,

Passiflora coccinea

.

virtually disappeared last year, it was good to see it once again, even if it is treatening to take over my entire front porch. The petals on the flower are bent backwards to allow hummingbirds easy access.

larkspur were in full swing, dancing around this sotol with their purple blue and purple white blooms.

But best of all…

were the feather grasses that were now in their prime.

I thought that during my absence, weeds would have run amok, but I was pleasantly surprised, apart from the feather grasses and front chickweed everything was ship-shape.

The two palm grasses that I had planted last year have grown significantly:

I like this plant a lot, and losing both of my mature plants a couple of years back, I had to give them another go. You cannot beat them for an exotic, tropical look in Central Texas and they work great paired with the contrasting leaves of Japanese aralia and thyralis for a splash of shady yellow color. Palm grasses also grow surprisingly fast, second year growth (like this one) can easily reach a 6ft spread.

I also returned home to fruit-ladened loquat trees.

We picked,

we gathered,

and spent some significant zen-time preparing.

It took us long enough to shrivel and stain fingers, and based on these sticky seeds, it looks like I will have lots and lots of small loquat trees in my future. The fruit made great margaritas, thanks Cheryl over there at the Conscious Gardening

Finally:

I do not recall my artemesia looking so healthy,

and this Persian ivy requires some immediate training.

Home sweet home.

Stay Tuned for:

“Exploding Goldfish!”

All material © 2012 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

Bewilderment by Benson Kua

“Yule-Tidy all that up…Right?”

ESPatch Dec 31, 2011 11 comments

Finally Christmas!

This pyramid candle really helped to bridge the long wait for Christmas having tiny gifts embedded into it. The prospect of retrieving some “Pharaoh’s treasure” fueled her imagination for hours…okay 4.5 minutes.

“Daddy? How long do candles take to burn?”

“Hmmph?…Zzzz”

The first eardrum shattering 7am squeals started when they both ripped open some junior golf clubs from their grandparents in Scotland.

She could not wait to try them out on the range a couple of days later.

He got a retro post-apocalyptic phaser,

that made the most annoying obnoxious sounds imaginable. (The psychologically damaging part of the holidays)

What was I thinking? Oh yes…cool design.

This made him very happy.

She got her…

La La Loopsie doll,

a not-so-Easy Bake oven,

and her long awaited rock tumbler that has been tumbling a bunch of rocks since Christmas day. It takes a month to turn sharp raw stones into polished gems.

We took a sneak peak at them five days into the coarse abrasive phase (naturally), and already the stones were significantly smoother.

Even Kumo got a prime steak chop on Christmas day!

He devoured most of it before frantically running around with a really desperate expression on his face, looking for a place to bury the remainder. For dessert he apparently opted for a large chunk of plastic attached to a string, this gastronomic episode sadly landed him in hospital requiring an hour-long stomach operation.

Poor Kumo.

He is still in the hospital and doing a little better, we all have our fingers crossed that he will pull through and make a full recovery.

Moving Sadly On:

Rosemary is looking particularly healthy and festive after finally getting some rain,

and so are the weeds. This green clump seemed to spring up overnight.

I planted a couple more Plumosa Ferns at the base of my steel gate a few weeks back,

and they have almost doubled in size with the recent moisture.

A visually frosty and festive scene courtesy of a neighbors China-berry and my Blue Ice cypress

Cuppressus arizonica var. glabra ‘Blue Ice’

And now we are having clear crisp days,

days perfect for…

lighting large fires with my new

“Bear” knife and magnesium striker.

Fires that keep the wild ESP cats at bay.

It has been a busy two weeks off school for the halflings,

I immediately got them to work on gathering seeds from this year’s rather poor crop of celosia.

It is tedious work but the challenge of getting the emptied husks into a bucket on the floor helped relieve the monotony, or so I thought.

“I am Sooo tired of shelling celosia”?

“Me too sis, I am ready to annoy everyone with my phaser again”.

Hey you two…did I say we were on a break?!

Finally:

A new “visitor” dropped into the Patch pond cypress tree this week…

Oh stop it!…It is an owl…just an owl!

Stay Tuned for:

“Just Leaf it Alone”

All material © 2011 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.