"AAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!", an Ant Story

"Once upon a time there was an ant colony. They were industrious, ambitious little bastards, and they made a bed the entire length of a woman's house, and concealed it in leaves. 

 

One day, the woman, tired of seeing the garden hose coiled on the ground, hung a pretty metal hose hanger on the side of the house, and yanked up the hose from under the leaves and dirt.  Little did she know, the ants had made the hose their own: not only was it half-buried in their vast bed, they had extended their colony inside the hose itself, from end to end. When the woman picked up the hose, she showered herself with millions of ants - they were in her shoes, her clothes, even in her hair!  

 

The woman screamed and screamed! She threw the hose away from herself violently, and brushed off all of the ants, thankful that they were NOT the kind that bite. The ants panicked and ran all over her body and face, and all around the hose, inside and out. They must repair the hose colony! 

 

But, unfortunately for the ants, the woman hooked the hose up to the faucet, turned on the water, and blasted those little fuckers to kingdom come. Then she spread poison all over the bed, and went inside the house and showered and showered and showered.

The end".

 

So that was my weekend, how about you guys?  *shudder*  

That was what I posted on Facebook about it yesterday afternoon, just after it happened.  It's 100% true.  I knew there was an ant bed out there somewhere, because they'd been coming into the house by the thousands.  

Yes, thousands: 

(I feel I should point out that I'm not respon-
sible for this wall color, and it's changing soon)

 

This is just ONE short wall in my master bathroom, after not having vacuumed for a couple of days.  Yes, just a couple of days.  There are more on the other side of the bathroom, in the closet, in the master bedroom, and in my roommate's bedroom, which shares the same exterior wall as these other spaces. They're coming in and dying - I see maybe three or four lives ones per week.  This started about three weeks ago. 

I thought maybe it was the weather - it's been wet, so they're not coming in for water.  But it hasn't been wet enough for them to be coming in to get away from the water. It was super cold for about a week, but it's warmed up since, and they're still coming in. I really have no idea what's going on. 

 

What's killing them? Why are they coming indoors to die? WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?  

Turns out the answer to that last question was outside where that hose was lying on the ground.  Ugh. As for the other questions, I have NO idea.  

 

Rest assured, that whole area outside has been thoroughly poisoned, and the entire foundation of the house, all the way around, has been dusted with diatomaceous earth to try to keep them from coming in.  I'm not usually big on the "nuke it from orbit" pest control philosophy, but...desperate times, you know? 

 

 

*

So, yes, anyway, I did hang a couple of pretty metal hose hangers.  I also put up some house numbers on the post on the front porch: 

For most of the long holiday weekend, I worked indoors, painting rooms and building shelves.  This coming weekend is another long one for me.  Provided the weather holds (and it's supposed to), this will be the first major gardening weekend I've had since I moved in.  I'm hoping that next week I'll have some pretty cool stuff to show you.  

P.S.:  thankfully, miraculously, none of the ants in question were fire ants, and I didn't get a single bite! 

P.P.S.:  a LOT of ants were harmed in the making of this post

The Last Day of Fall

It's going to be a while before I have spectacular gardens to show you.  I'm still deep in the process of cleaning up and fixing up the new house.  But something happened recently that took me completely by surprise:

Fall color!  No, no, see, I didn't have that at my old house.  Sure, the Mulberry turned a little yellow before it shook off all its leaves at once like the Whomping Willow at Hogwart's, but the Chaste Tree and Mexican Orchid just kind of died and defoliated.  The little live oak out front was evergreen - in fact, 99% of the trees in that neighborhood are evergreen oaks, so, no - no fall color for me for the past twelve years.  In fact, Austin in general hardly has any, at least, not on the scale that you see pretty much everywhere else in the country.  The whole city just seems to blacken and die in November, except for the oaks.  How boring.

This neighborhood, however, is brimming with color. I know what I'm doing, more or less, and I don't recognize half the trees I see around me most of the time, living here.  (Which is neat!)  This red-orange fellow above is some sort of plum tree growing on the property line between my house and my neighbor's.  And the Lace Bark Elm in my front yard carpets the entire lot with this: 

Which, yeah, it's messy, but it's beautiful.  Plus, look at this trunk:

Is that not amazing? It feels really weird.

Here's the whole Elm - still somewhat green, and with green live oaks behind it.  (You can see, a little, how big my yard is in this picture.  You're looking at less than half of it).

But enough about trees...wanna see my front garden?

Impressive, no?  Okay, so it's been fallow for several years. The soil is good - it's had leaf mould from the elm every year, so it's richly composted.  I had grand plans of tilling up the whole thing and mulching the heck out of it, then loading it with plants before the cold set in (see the bag on the porch?), but then...the cold set in about a month early.  The day I took these pictures it was a gorgeous, sunny, 65º day; but then it dropped to 25º  that night and hasn't risen out of the mid-thirties since.  Oh, well.  There's still plenty of time to get the beds in shape before Spring.

 

This, meanwhile, is my actual "garden".  Or rather, pieces of it:  irises, lilies, chives, and Australian indigo salvaged from my old house and quickly heeled into a box planter to await a time when I could put them into the front bed.  Looks like they'll be there a bit longer - at least until I can get another sunny weekend with a temperature that at least starts with a four.

Meanwhile:

With Confused Heart

I've tried to write this post several times over the past two months, and I think I'm finally ready to say this without breaking down:  I sold my house, and moved away.  I'm fine with it all, for the most part.  I never went through any weird nostalgia and regret phases - it was purely a financial decision, and I was SO ready for a change.

But the gardens...oh, the gardens!  My front bed, my "gift garden", populated for twelve years by plants given to me by friends.   My American White Mulberry, planted for me by the birds, grown from a wee stick to a ragged behemoth half the size of my house.  My Mexican Orchid Tree, given to me by a botany professor at the University of Texas ten years ago, which I can replace exactly nowhere.  The corner in the backyard, in Raven's favorite spot, where I buried his personal effects and planted his favorite flowers [to dig up and sleep on top of].  All gone...not yet, but I know it will be.  I'm sure once the new owners find out what a pain in the ass it is to maintain the Mulberry and the Mexican Orchid, they'll both be ripped down without a second thought.

I didn't even manage to save any of my bedding plants - I'd planned to devote an afternoon to bagging up an armload of things to take with me to plant at the new place - the black irises, the Amaryllises that my friend Lorrie gave me, the pink Australian indigo that I planted practically the first year I moved in and which once comprised about half of that front bed. The black Clematis 'Romantika' that I grew in a pot since I was 23 years old, and transplanted to the backyard in 2004 when I moved into the house.

It wasn't like the move happened out of nowhere; but it did happen fast, only two months between decision, and move, sale.  Before I moved 100% of my attention had to be on packing, and fixing up the house to put on the market.  And because I moved into a fixer-upper, 100% of my time since October 1st (the date I moved in) has gone to fixing up that house, and trying to arrange furniture and get things put away around an ever-changing schedule and constant parade of repair-people and contractors.

All of that being said...

Things are settling down a bit.  There's still a LOT to do at the new place (if you're interested, you can read about that here at my other blog). But things are calm enough now that I'm starting to turn my eye toward the new landscape...or rather, toward the inviting and promising lack thereof.  The new place, a rental, comes with carte blanche from the owner (a friend of mine) as far as the interior and the landscaping are concerned.  It's on an enormous corner lot filled with mature oaks and elms, as well as a pear of some kind,  and a Crepe Myrtle that, sadly, isn't getting enough light to thrive, sandwiched between two massive oaks, and will likely have to come down before it hurts somebody. The back yard is small, but there's space enough for a small vegetable and herb garden, and it's got a huge patio that's just begging for a container collection.  So, we'll see.

I was going to end this post with pictures of my beloved trees, which I'll never see again.  I've been missing them terribly, but in the past few days I feel like I'm getting over that loss.  But I grabbed a neat snapshot in one of the oaks the other day, and so instead, I leave you with this: 

HOPE.