Winter Scenes

Brain:  *GASP*  SPIDER MITES!!!!  *preemptive hatred begins* 

Actual culprit.  Whew. 

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YAY WINTER WITH NO POSTS BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS DEAD

Two Things

1.   A dear friend graciously loaned me her lawnmower for a while, and so:

(this week)

(last week)

2.   I bought a couple of cans of Rustoleum's "Brilliant Blue" spray paint to use on some small fencing panels, trellises, chairs - whatever I end up feeling like blue-en-ing.  It's going to look cool.

It's a start. 

It's not exactly Le Jardin Majorelle, but the blue accents are going to look cool once I get a bunch of things spray painted and into place.  It doesn't look like it in the picture, but the blue is actually the same color as you see here: 

Things That Need To Be Trimmed

These Clematis vines (Sweet Autumn on the fence, Romantika on the pole)

This dog. 

DAT GRASS OMG. 

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Foggy Friday Fotos

It's been raining like crazy here for a few days now.  It seems every week it rains at least once, this whole year so far.  I know it hasn't been that frequent, but at the moment, it feels like it's been raining forever.

Notice I'm not complaining.  I love rain, and so do my plants.  This time of year the front garden's looking a tad shaggy.  It needs weeding and pruning, and there's a great big hole where that lavender used to be. But I like it all shaggy.  So I snapped some pics with my phone this morning to show you, as well as some shots of the side yards, which I don't believe I've blogged about yet.  Enjoy.

Front garden and porch from the outside

The chives and Loropetalum at the end of the garden are going nuts;
The east side yard lined with Yarrow and Amaryllis (and dead tree branches, lol)

The west side yard - Rosemary and chives at the front; Esperanza by the a/c

A little cobblestone landing in between,  handy to have for mud purposes. 

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The First of What I'm Sure Will Be A Sparse Handful of Fall/Winter Entries

Here's the thing about central Texas:  you may have heard the joke, "We have two seasons: hot, and rain," or something similar.  Every place has a saying like that, and everyone thinks their weather is nutty.  We DO have a very long Summer here, though - it tends to be in the 100s for three months out of the year, above 90 for more like 9 months, and the remaining three it's either clammy and wet, or freezing and wet.  (To us.  I understand people in "the north" can deal with temperatures well below 30º, but we can't!)

Anyhow, once the crushing heat of the Summer is over, my fall gardening schedule is all about cleanup, maintenance, and hardscape changes.  This year, once again, we went from 9,000º outside to 60s and raining.

"On Ferenginar we have 178 words for rain.

Right now it's glemmening"

So, not much is going on in the yard right now, unless you count my three dogs pooping on the patio because they can't bear to be farther out in the rain than a foot away from the porch.  (I guess I should be grateful that no one's pooped on the porch;  as it is someone peed in my sewing room last night because he didn't want to go outside! Little bastard).

As soon as it lets up a tad, probably tomorrow evening, I have some things to do.  Wash the mud off the porch.  Pull some of the wild Hemlock out of the backyard by hand, while the soil is still soft enough to get the roots out (I mow them, but they just spread, and it bothers the dogs' feet!)  I need to divide all the Irises and Amaryllis in the front yard (which is doing really well right now!) but the soil's too wet right now for that.  I don't want them rotting.

I recently moved my homemade pot-rack from the kitchen out to the back porch.  I put some stuff on/under it without any thought, just to get it all out of the way in a hurry.  Soon as it stops raining I'd like to dress it up some, put some nice plants on it, stuff like that.

Also visible: overgrown weeds, stack of small
fencing panels, tools.  This was on a work day.   

Top shelf: 

• An ailing Peace Lily I'm pretty sure isn't going to make it. 
• A One-Leafed Colocasia (where the f&%* are the rest of the leaves? I know these things can grow more than one at a time!) 
• A Rex Begonia I picked up on clearance somewhere recently

Second shelf:

• Gloves
• Empty wall urn that used to hang on this wall

Underneath: 

• A new "mystery plant" in a pot, and two lamp jars that I put out here to strip and re-paint but never did.  

The aforementioned Begonia.  

Purty. 

It's still in its 4" plastic nursery pot, tucked into a violet pot as a cachepot.  MAN I love violet pots!  They're so useful, and so pretty!  This is my favorite one. 

This is the "mystery plant" I mentioned.  I rescued it from the empty house next door to me - the former tenants left it behind, I'm guessing they thought it was dead, but it came back when the rains began.  

I agonized over what kind of orchid it was for like two days before I realized it's just a lily, LOL.  Yay!  I wonder what it looks like when it blooms! 

It hasn't got any ancillary bulbets; but both stalks (only one is visible in the picture above) have several stem bulblets at the base, and probably more under the soil.  I can't wait to get in there and divide them up!  

These bulblets might not produce stalks and flowers for 2-3 years; but the parent bulbs should, provided they're not rotten in there. 

Last, but not least:  the backyard just to the left of that shot of the shelf on the porch, in all it's, erm, "fall splendor."  

The Esperanza (yellow) and Mexican Orchid (white) are still in full bloom, and will be until the first frost.  

The Mulberry tree's roots have spread out enough that they're soaking up all the water that used to feed the grass beneath it, so it's looking pretty bare under there. I need to find a groundcover that will thrive in the dry soil and shade, if there is such a thing.  

Since this photo I've begun work removing stones from the ex-patio and moving them elsewhere in the yard to shore up dirt to prevent erosion and help grass take hold; part of the first couple of sessions of rock-digging and -moving was to level the depression next to the Mexican Orchid and re-pave around it.  

More to come...if it ever stops raining.  

Man.  In 2007, it started raining in October, and didn't stop until the following August.  I had Cosmos flowers that were ten feet high, I shit you not.  It was awesome. 

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It's Time For Another Round of What's! That! Plant!

No, seriously, what the hell is this?

Here it is on my desk at work, planted in some plastic cups.   I liberated it from the landscaping.

NO, I didn't STEAL it from the landscaping - it was a "volunteer" plant, not supposed to be there, not a single other one on the building grounds.  It would have been cut down by the landscapers, if they ever bother to show up again.

Soft, floppy leaves with serrated edges.  Medium, regular, plain-ol' green.  No fuzz or hairs or spikes or anything.

Nothing interesting on the undersides, either.

Pairs of opposite leaves;  the pairs alternating from each other.  I don't know what that's called.

There's some axillary budding here - it looks like they're going to be more leaves?  But I can't tell yet.

Also the stems are a bit...not really fuzzy...they look almost as if they've been dipped in very fine sugar.  But it doesn't look like something that's happened to the plant, it looks natural to it.

There are new branches/leaves sprouting opposite each other, from the "trunk" of the plant;  as well as bark forming on the lower/oldest portions of the trunk and branches.


At first I thought this was a Hydrangea, but I'm confident it's not.  When I looked into trees, I thought maybe a Texas Ash...but it's not.

What IS this?










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No Groundhogs In Texas

People up north have Punxatawney Phil, that odd-looking round beast who pokes his head up in February to see if it's still too cold to go outside, or if the sun is finally out.

'Round these parts we hide on our screened porches and our fan-cooled solars, sipping iced tea, and long about this part of the year, one of us walks out to the yard for a sec, to see if it's still 105º goldurned degrees out.

Okay, so, maybe it's not quite that romanticized.  In fact, August is basically "Fuck Texas Month," at least for everyone I know.  You can forget trying to get anything done in the yard, for damn sure.  But now that it's September, and temperatures are finally only in the upper nineties, life resumes:

The front garden lives! Yay!  -1 lavender

Look, I got plants for the baskets on the front porch, finally!!   (variegated Lilyturf
(Liriope), and some Vincas to trail downwards; both on clearance for $1/plant) 

Love!  I hope I remember to water them this time.  I'm
horrible with these baskets. 

Experiment: two tall silver florist's buckets as cachepots - love it, but not
HERE.  I ended up moving them in front of the garage, at opposite sides.
The Sansivierras came from a $5, 3-gallon "plant" which actually held like
seven or eight individual plants.  So I split them up into these two buckets,
a pot on the front porch, and a pot for the house.  

One of the other Sans, along with my Jade Plant,
and an extra Lilyturf that I forgot to plant. 

Over the weekend I also mowed the grass, trimmed back a huge rosemary bush, and trimmed up all of my trees to get rid of suckers and low-hanging branches, including the oak in the front yard.  Pics of that, and stuff in the backyard, later this week.  :)


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CRAAAAAP.

Well, the lavender plant that I put into my front bed has grown big and strong - it's like two feet high now, and three feet wide. Yay!

Oh, and also, it's dying.  I saw a wilting couple of branches in the back, snipped them off, inspected the rest of the leaves for signs of whatever (found none at all), and then watched it for a few days...more and more of the plant is wilting.  Over half by now, in like two weeks.

Oh, god, I thought, the Martian Death Fungus is STILL IN THE SOIL. I don't think that's it, though.  After thinking about it for a while, googling around, and still failing to find any evidence of pests or diseases on the plant itself, I've come to the conclusion that it's just basically drowning.

Where did I plant it?  On the east corner of the front garden, where there was a great big open space in need of a giant, pretty lavender plant!

Wait, wait - let's try that again, shall we?  Where did I plant it?  Right next to where the gutter downspout drains...the wettest part of the front garden.  What the HELL was I thinking??  ARGH.  NOrmally, I doubt it'd be a problem, but it's been a wet year.  I guess my first clue should probably have been that I *never* have to water the front bed anymore, because we've had such good rains.

WAY TO GO, LAURA.

Plantkiller.

@#$%^&*!!!

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I Just Blogged To Say I Love You...

Just a note to say that I'm sorry I haven't been blogging this month.  I've been:

• extremely busy out of the house
• not feeling well, physically or emotionally
• spending a lot of my free time sleeping, and trying to heal

Back soon as I can.

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It Was An Ambush

Let's see...

• roomate moved out, been focusing on the house mostly, not the yard
• yard grew to like nineteen feet high, and
• became overrun with these weird, indestructible weeds that went from "what is that cute little thing?" to "WE'RE SURROUNDED! RUN!" in like half a day
• oh, and also, like half the damn yard is suddenly covered in spiders mites.  What??  AUGH.  
• Plus all the veggies died because I quit smoking and forgot to water them. 
• best part: the yarrow has taken over the front beds so thoroughly and rambunctiously that I got a letter from my HOA about it.  FML.  

Sigh. 

Update soon...

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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Oops + Spider

Well, the aforementioned non-smoker's veggie garden has officially died.  That tomato I was so proud of ripened before the plant died - mind you, it was supposed to be as big as my fist but it was the size of a regular cherry tomato - was completely nasty.  So we'll try again in the Fall.

The rest of the yard is going well.  The back is completely overgrown, because I cannot seem to get the dogs to mow the lawn, try as I might.  The front garden is huge and fluffy and green, and I love it!   I haven't been doing any actual projects in the yard of late (mostly been working on house stuff; see other blog), but I do have a couple of photos:

A juvenile Green Lynx Spider on my roses in the front garden

Front porch with new light fixture (what I've been working on this week),
and the aforementioned rose + spider on the left 

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@_@

I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING.

That's not a camera trick.  I'm not holding the yardstick like a foot in front of the plant between the plant and the camera.  HUGE flowers, omg!  YAY!




Yeah, that's all I've got.  I'm a terrible blogger.  Look at the flowers again!

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Not that I'm complaining, but...

Does it seem to anyone else like it's been raining for two weeks straight?   I sure haven't gotten anything done in a while, outdoors.  Mowed the grass once or twice, but that's about it.

I still haven't planted the mint or the Mandvilla I brought home two weeks ago;  the vine is fine, but the mint is really not happy in its little plastic pot.

All the rain - not just lately; it's rained at least once a week all year so far! - sure has done wonders for the lawn in the backyard.  The whole thing is green and fluffy, and there's only one bare spot left, and it looks like it's growing in fast.  Yay!

TO-DO:

• plant the mint in the east side yard near the foundation.  
• Plant the Mandevilla in the corner of the front garden so that it can grow up the post and the downspout. 
• Prune ALL the trees, front and back, before it gets too hot.  Not big pruning, which is best done in the Winter while trees are dormant; just removal of a couple of branches that are dragging, and suckers growing up from the base of a couple of them. 

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Bloomin' Trees

The Mexican Orchid Tree (Bauhinia) in the backyard, which is getting in need of pruning already this year:

And the Chaste Tree (Vitex), also in the back, and also badly in need of pruning - I promise that this is a tree, and not just a giant ball of leaves, hehe:

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My Two Favorite Words, Combined

"Clearance Plants"   

99 cents, you guys.

a red Mandevilla vine!  I had one many years ago that died in the 

drought; I've wanted another one ever since. 

A Coleus of some kind (apparently Home Despot doesn't

label its plants anymore), tucked in behind the begonias

in this planter.  I bought two, for the pair of planters in front 

of the front door.  They'll be HUGE in no time. 

Also: a "Moss Rose" succulent plant (Portulaca spp.),
which is native and will naturalize readily if I put it in the
ground.

And a Peppermint plant, which I plan to grow in a big, fluffy
pot...and then separate and plant in the ground along my side
yards.  Don't worry, I can control it with the mower in that
position, and meanwhile, it'll keep the ants out of my house.

(This little rack on the front porch is where new plants go 
until I figure out where to plant them, and get around to it). 

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Bit Late

Some late-blooming Easter Lilies, planted exactly a year ago this month - they were potted, Easter leftovers.

from above, in the front garden.  These are planted directly in the center, in the back of the bed by the front porch rail. 

a little green Crab Spider in one of them

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Uh...whoops.

Hey, guess what!  I quit smoking!  :D

Of course, the downside, is that I'm not going outside regularly, and therefore not keeping a daily watchful eye on the plants in my backyard.  It also doesn't help that after not gardening for two years, I'm no longer in the habit, it seems, of walking the gardens like I used to, inspecting for insect damage, water and fertilzation needs, fruit and flower progress, etc.

So some things have been a little under-watered, and have suffered for it.  My poor Bougainvillea has nearly uprooted itself reaching for the sun - and you'd think I'd have noticed that, since I pass it every single day on the way in and out of the front door, you know?

Anyhow, things are progressing a bit:

The "vegetable garden", looking not as healthy as it could, due to watering issues - although the two tomatoes and the pepper have just BOOMED as far as size goes.

There's even a tomato!



One!

A few more on the "Juliet" cherry tomato plant.  Like eight or so.

Early on, I dropped something onto the Juliet tomato plant and broke off a branch.  Curious, I planted it oustide the veg garden behind the patio (where I keep all my weeds), and it's actually growing!

And here we have the very wee-est Serrano pepper ever.  It's about the size of my pinky fingernail.

Lastly, a strawberry plant bereft of strawberries - they all dried out and had to be removed from the plant.  Here's hoping it flowers again.

I moved the Bougainvillea from the front, to the back porch here where it'll get more sunlight.  Hopefully this new placement will also prompt me to water it more often.

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