Patio

So it seems I haven't posted since January.  There's been rather a lot going on.  The biggest thing (thankfully) is that I moved house. Sylvan and I now live in a duplex on the opposite end of town, and aside from some freak-accident plumbing issues in the first couple of weeks, we both really love it.  The place is small, but good.

And it has a lovely backyard patio area.  It was finished, freshly power-washed, and just waiting for someone to love it when we moved in.  Here's a quick sketch:

made with Icovia

The patio surface itself is tumbled aggregate cemented over the slab - kind of golden brown and agate-y.  A lot of people hate this kind of surface because it's outdated (the house was built in 1965, after all); but I like it.  It's natural-looking, and easier to keep clean than plain concrete.

It also coordinates well with the 3' wide gravel-filled garden bed to the north of the patio (sorry, guys, north is at the bottom in this pic), and to the south underneath the big paving stones that are set into the ground there.  On top of the gravel are a trio of stepping stones in the same tumbled aggregate. 

On the west (left) side of the patio is a wooden trellis built into a frame, which comes down from the roofline - the whole thing is covered, and shaded. Woohoo! 

I put an outdoor rug down to cushion my (and my dogs') feet against the aggregate, and matching blue chairs.  I also put nearly all of the former houseplants out here. 

The poor houseplants got no light at all at the old house.  I crowded them around every available light source, and rotated them from room to room, but by the time I moved out, nearly all of them were dying.  Being outside, however, has perked up every single one of them.  "Dying" plants are now blooming and putting out new branches for the first time in years!  With the exception of one scorched Dracaena which I placed in direct sunlight by mistake, everyone's done great.  Everyone also got a new pot, and fresh dirt, about three weeks ago, and they're loving it. 

Daisy surveys her domain

One day I'll figure out how to get a nice picture of lights,  but for now, I'll just tell you that to the left of this picture, , I have several tiny hanging plants in little pots hanging from hooks on the trellis, as well as several little colored glass "Moroccan" candle lanterns with LED tealights in them.

There's also a string of 1" cracked glass globe lights lining the entire top edge of the patio area.  When it and the candles are all lit up in the evening, it's really lovely. 

Too bad my camera HATES it.

Here's that bougainvillea. I have no idea what variety it is - I rescued it from a table full of sad-looking plants that were marked down and ready to be thrown in the trash.  It's a little stringy and slow, but it'll be just fine eventually.

This little guy starts out white, then slowly turns to pink, then hot pink. 

Almost-mature flower bracts.

A little scene I made on the table by my chair, hoping to learn to draw silver, and reflections in shiny metal.  It's harder than it looks.

A Rabbit's Foot Fern, which has fuzzy rhizomes that [will eventually] stick over the side of the container.  They look like tarantula legs.

Tiny spotty neighbor is a Scilla of some kind, but I forget which.  The only thing I really know about this plant is that cats LOVE it and will mow the entire thing flat in a single night while you're asleep. 

Tarantula legs!

A wee "Moss Rose" Portulaca.  I have grown these for nearly twenty years.  I love their little waxy flowers. And the fact that you can practically just LOOK at them and they make more plants.

I can never remember what these are called. 

But no kidding, this died over a year ago. I forgot to clean out the pot and just left it - keeping plants at the last house was just a Sisyphean clusterfuck, and I got so disheartened. 

I stuck this pot out on the patio to see if I could figure out what to put in it. In the meantime, it got watered along with everything else, and after about two weeks, it sprouted a leaf! And then it sprouted another one!

This is my Asparagus Fern, now about 4' across.  It was drooping badly, pale and dusty looking.  In addition to lack of light, it was ridiculously potbound.

All of the plants got new pots and soil.  About three weeks later, this guy threw up a THICK new stalk - it was so big, I thought another plant had taken root in the pot.  It had been so long since this thing made a new branch that I'd forgotten what a new branch looks like.

Ghost branch.

A Coleus, and a Dracaena (var. Janet Craig). 

Fun fact about me: I think I might be a hoarder.  Or at least, was headed down that road, before the move.  Thanks to that, at least, I had a BUNCH of nice flowerpots in the garage.  I used them all on this patio, and recycled all the plastic, and threw away all the broken, ancient terra cotta. Didn't spend a penny, and everybody got a new outfit. 

A red Mandevilla I picked up at the store when I went to buy soil for the pots. Oops. 

This is on one of the stepping stones to the north (bottom) of the patio, in the gravel area. The metal trellis behind it in this picture is an old Ikea iron headboard, which has made a really good trellis over the years. 

Two Dracaenas (Warneckii) and a pot full of itty bitty Sansivieras. These plants are the ones that are struggling the most to come back from the half-dead.

Especially since the Warneckiis were a single plant until about three weeks ago.  It'll be fine - this plant is over 20 years old, and I've split it and repotted the parts probably a dozen times.















That's all for now.  I've got some woodworking projects and some art I'm working on. My duplex-neighbor is moving out this weekend, and the owers are going to be doing some work around the place.  I think I'll talk to them about maybe doing some real, in-ground gardening, now that my neighbor's 15,000 dollar-store lawn ornaments will be out of the way. 

A Bit-of-Everything Update

Firstly:  I FINALLY GOT A JOB!!!  Seven months! Egad.

I haven't gotten much done in the way of yardwork or gardening for the past couple of months, because my asthma and allergies have been kicking my ass so severely that I've basically been couch-bound for two months.  But I'm back to it, and have a few small things to share:

In May, I found this little (1") Golden Orb Weaver spider
in my yellow roses.  I call her Margaret. She's now got a
4" legspan, and has made her home in one of the archways
on my front porch.  

Exactly a year ago, I did a post on some weeds I found in my yard - after the
last bout of severe allergies kept me on my ass for two months and my yard
had gone to hell while I wasn't looking, in fact, which is where I'm at again. I
I found the Mystery Weed again, and this time took photos and looked it up
online:  it's Pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus).  

Plants at work: Scilla violacea and a Jade Plant.  And a wee
brass Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. 

My 'Romantika' Clematis climbing the post on the back
porch.  Behind it you can see Raven's Garden, which is
just a freaking MESS.  The Morning Glories and Cypress
Vine have completely ignored the back fence and wire lines
 I gave them to climb on, and have made a little mound on
top of the strawberries I planted there.  The Cosmos are
doing alright - you can see a couple of them (orange) behind
the Clematis.  More on that soon. 

Meanwhile, I've got a LOT of work to do in the backyard.   Like I said, I've been sick for two months and everything has just gone to hell.   Yesterday I spent about three hours pulling weeds by hand in the backyard.  Today I'll mow, prune up the trees, and see about getting those flower vines off the ground, or at least also onto the fence where they're supposed to be.  I also have to clean up my tomato plants - they all fell off the stakes while I wasn't looking, and had patched out into the yard and made a great big, tangled, tomato-y mess.  I ripped them off the ground yesterday while I was weeding around them, and just threw them back into the vegetable garden, hehe.  

Updates soon. 

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Aside

I really love the way my Chaste Tree grows.  When I planted it in 2011, it was about a foot and a half tall.  Now it's up to ten feet, and will reach twelve or more by the end of this year.  How can I tell?

See the long, thin branches sticking practically straight up from the top?  The rest of the overall form is fairly rounded, but every Spring, a few whip-like branches streeeeetch out higher than the rest of the tree, and throughout the remainder of the year, the rest of the tree catches up.  It actually tells me how tall it's about to get.  

Hee. 

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I did three new things with the Chaste Tree this spring.  Firstly, I finally caved and lopped off the "extra" trunk that it had in previous years: 

2013, at two years old

See the little guy on the left?  When the tree was small, it contributed to the whole plant looking fairly balanced.  But as the tree has grown, that extra trunk on the left side grew unevenly, ending up tilted far to the left and much weaker than the rest of the tree.  It also isn't attached to the rest of the tree - I think this may have originally been two saplings in the same container, and I didn't realize it when I planted it.  Anyway, I cut it off to allow the main tree to grow, and it looks far more balanced and sculptural now.  

The second thing I did was to remove the little ring of stacked [cement] stones that I placed around it in 2012, to keep a certain black fuzzy dog from digging it up.  In the picture above, there was a good 3-5" of space between the trunk of the little tree and any one side of the stone ring (you can see the whippy branches on top in this picture, too; the tree doubled in size in 2012 and in 2013!)  But this year, the trunk of the tree has gotten so wide that a couple of the stones were nearly touching it.   Time to let the tree free! 

Lastly, I nabbed a little Texas Gold Columbine plant on my last trip to The Natural Gardener, and planted it a few feet away from the base of the Chaste Tree, to sort of anchor it in the growing landscape (pun intended) and to add more color and more native plantings to the yard.  You can kind of see it in the first picture - a little blob of green with a couple of those stones placed around it to keep it safe while it gets established.

It's part of a larger plan, but before I launch into what should really be its own blog post...

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Backyard Progress In Pictures

Some stuff:

Most of the backyard, as seen from the west side behind the Mulberry tree

Morning Glory seedlings, yay!  I don't remember if they're blue or purple.

I love Yarrow, as long as it isn't the Yarrow taking over the front garden. 

Another view of the whole (mostly) yard from the other side of the tree, from the SW corner. I stood in dog shit to take this. 

The Mexican Orchid Tree, with a pair of little lavenders flanking it. 

The Chaste Tree, with a wee columbine in front of it, Yarrow and compost bin behind. 

The first flowers on my Citronella geranium, potted, on the back porch. 

Cosmos and Cypress Vine seedlings! Squee! 

new leaves on the Chaste Tree (Vitex agnus castus)

One of the wee lavenders near the Orchid Tree (Lavandula dentata)

More soon.

More Work In the Back Yard

Today's list of completed chores:

• run to the dump for more mulch
• mulch the rest of the garden beds I've recently built in the yard
• plant the two lavenders and the columbines I purchased last week
• clean off the back porch

I still have a couple of herbs I need to pot up, which I imagine I'll do this evening or tomorrow morning.  

I was so pleased with myself for mowing the backyard and getting the gardens going.  Then my weed-eater died (after I was finished, thankfully).  I don't own a mower;  I "mow" the entire property with my weed-eater.  SIGH.  Thankfully, one of my costuming clients has offered to pay me for a new dress with a new weedeater, hehe.  Let's hear it for the barter system, folks!  

More soon. 

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Spring Doesn't Start 'Til I Do

I've finally gotten started on the backyard for the year!  I did a bit of work a few weeks ago before I left for my big SCA trip in Mississippi, but the BIG work is all in the backyard.

Since the Martian Death Fungus of Aught-Ten and the horrific drought of '11 and '12, I've kind of let the yard go.  It needed time to recover.  The few things that survived (my Mulberry, Vitex, and Bauhinia trees,  my 'Romantika' Clematis, a couple of Daffodils, and a whole bunch of Garlic Chives and Yarrow) have been doing well on their own, but they're all badly in need of pruning and shaping.  Last November I spent a couple of weekends crawling around on the ground pulling what felt like millions of Hemlock and Ragweed plants out of the ground one at a time (to make sure I got the taproots; controlling them with mowing wasn't helping at all, even though it works great for annual weeds).  Since then I haven't mowed the grass once.  The Bermuda grass the house came with in '04 has finally all been replaced with wild, native grasses and groundcovers that do MUCH better in the heat and sun, and I let them go wild for a few months to establish a good hold on the earth and reseed themselves as they saw fit.

This morning I spent about three hours out there mowing half the yard, then raking up all the trimmings and tossing them into the compost bin, layered with half-composted mulch I picked up from the city recycling center yesterday for free.  I cleaned off the back porch (which had, I'm embarrassed to say, become sort of a dumping ground for things I took out into the yard, mostly tools and things, and never brought back into the house), and then I grabbed a roll of baling wire fencing from the garage and wrapped them around the post on the back porch for that Clematis to climb up onto this year.

A New Kind of Dog Garden

I'm heartbroken to say, my eldest dog, Raven, died last week on the 19th.  He was fifteen years old, and riddled with all manner of Old Man Problems.  He collapsed while I was in Mississippi on my trip, and my roommate, bless her, took him to the emergency vet while I drove back the next day as fast I could.  I met him at the hospital as soon as I got back into town, where I got to spend a few final hours snuggling him and brushing his fur, and then we said our last goodbye.

I had had a feeling that he was nearly at the end of his time before I left for my trip - and I almost didn't go.  I think we all hope it will happen peacefully in their sleep.  Knowing that that might happen, I made arrangements for some friends to come and help my roommate out if it happened while I was out of state, and before I left, I dug a plot for him in the backyard, in his favorite napping spot by the back porch.  Instead, he ended up at the vet, and they took care of him for me there.

Amongst the plants I purchased today were "Sensation" (pink and red) and "Bright Lights" (orange) Cosmos flowers.  I started growing Cosmos around the fence line in the backyard in '07, and ever since then, Raven loved to burrow into them, dig himself a little dirt bowl, mat down some of the stalks, and make himself a little nest in there.  He also LOVED strawberries - so much so that although I always grew lots of them, I never got to eat any, hehe.

The first new garden I'm going to build in the backyard, then, will be a garden for Raven.  His collar will go into the place I dug for him a couple of weeks ago, and the whole area will be filled with his favorite flower, and his favorite fruit, in his favorite place to nap.  :')

<3 

Veggie Gardens Yay! 

Next up will be the creation of a new vegetable and herb garden.  The veggie garden will be in the same space as the old ones - why mess with a good thing, right?  The soil there is still in fantastic shape, and the grass hasn't even taken over the space fully yet, so it'll be easy to clear it out again and top it off with compost from the bin.

Today's haul from It's About Thyme includes (from left to right, above): 

• "Yellow Pear", Roma, and "German Johnson" tomatoes
• "Tam Mild" and "Mucho Nacho" Jalapenos
• "Texas Gold" Columbines (Aquilegia chrysantha)
• Citronella Geranium (Pelargonium 'Citrosum')
• "Goodwin Creek" Lavender (Lavandula 'Goodwin Creek Gray')
• French Lavender (Lavandula dentata)
• Comfrey (Symphytum officinale)
• Catnip (Nepeta cataria)
• Cilantro (Coriandrum sativum)
• Orange Mint (Mentha citrata)

Most of this will be going into the "vegetable" plot this year.  Once I figure out what to do with the old patio area (once covered in cobblestones, now covered in grass), and where to put a new, dedicated herb garden, I'll expand it, but I'm trying not to make too much work for myself all at once.  I've missed gardening the way I used to, but the SCA keeps me extremely busy these days, so I don't want to overload myself by biting off more than I can chew. 

The Orange Mint and geraniums will be going into pots on the back porch;  the catnip will live in a hanging basket (to keep neighborhood cats and possums out of it.  Possums looooove catnip!)  I also purchased an Asparagus Fern for the house.  

And now, I'm headed back out to the yard to make some gardens!   I'm hoping as I finish mowing the yard, I'll find my long-handled loppers, so that I can start pruning my trees.  Where the heck have those things gone??  

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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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Back From My Camping Vacation

And boy, am I tired, sunburnt, sore, and swollen.  But it was a great trip, barring a few hairy moments where some friends of mine were injured.  Since I've been back, I've been puttering around with pots and things, and hitting the post-early-spring sales:

The strawberries from the front porch, now potted in the wall urn on the back porch.  

Two tomatoes ("Juliet" cherry and "Beefmaster") and a
Serrano Pepper bought for a buck each at the grocery store. 

A Battle Gnome in the houseplants

 (the foil is a cat deterrent)

My rain-soaked Mexican Orchid Tree (Bauhinia mexicana) beginning
to bloom before it's even fully leafed out!  

Daffodils still blooming after all these years,
in the long-defunct vegetable garden. 

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