Eleventy Billion Oxeyes; Tillandsia Baubles

Ball of moss. Kind of.

Ode to the Sprinkler
Matt's nursery dumped their oxeye daisy inventory--apparently, it's hard to get them to bloom in a pot and thus hard to get them to sell. We were the beneficiaries. I'd been want something daisyish to cluster around the roses and hide any knobbly knees, and oxeyes are--I hope--just the thing.

I spent several hours yesterday and several more today placing them, using a carpet knife to cut openings in the blasted weed barrier (in my head, I now say this word the same way Seinfeld says "Newman!"), and digging holes. It was pretty damned unpleasant, even at 8:30 this morning, until I turned on a sprinkler to give a little encouragement to the daisies still in 4-inches. I had flats and flats of daisies to plant, so I just plodded away under the spray and got completely, blissfully drenched. You've no idea (unless, I suppose, you've ever been wet yourself. Then you might just possibly have an idea) how cool and refreshing it was. I may do all my summer yardwork under a sprinkler. Beats the hell out of heatstroke, and goodness knows pretty much every inch of the yard could use some extra water.

The daisies are all looking a little appalled by everything (it was very hard to keep them from crispifying in their pots), but I'm hoping they'll bounce back now that they're in the earth. I do think they'll make a nice unifying motif in a yard that is often (charmingly?) heterogeneous.

Some traumatized daisies lining the front walk

On a side note, adding the daisies pretty much necessitates that we switch from spaghetti tubing to regular PVC+sprinkler heads. Digging irrigation trenches behind 5' roses: that should be... fun.

Suspended Epiphytes
In pond news, I bought some Tillandsia ionantha 'Fuego' plants a week or two ago to grow as a sphere and suspend over the pond. I'd like ultimately to have about 5 baubles, each growing different Tillandsias, all hanging from the Robinia over the pond. Tillandsias are the genus to which Spanish moss (T. usneoides) and ball moss (T. recurvata) both belong. I rather miss the Spanish moss from home, and its brother and sister species come in some really fantastic shapes and colors, so I think it could look really neat. Anyway, I installed the T. ionantha ball today. I used a grapevine ball and hot-glued (I know, but this is actually a recommended method!) the little plants to the ball. Turns out, it taked umpty-zillion plants to fill in a small (~5" dia.) grapevine ball--and I had seven. So it's looking a little sparse, but I'm hoping it will fill in over time. Or I'll buy more. (The idea was to look like this).

Bear in mind that this is the first of 5. I'm sure it will eventually make visual sense.

New Favorite Irrigation Head / Tree Inventory

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I wasn't nuts about most of our irrigation heads. Either the mist was too fine or the spray went too far or not far enough or the flow was too controlled or not controlled enough.

So we tried a couple of new (to us) flavors of irrigation this weekend, and I found one that I particularly like: the dripper stake. Unlike plain spaghetti, which can release too much water and sometimes wriggles around, delivering the water to the wrong spot, the dripper releases a robust but adjustable flow of water and is permenently pegged to the ground. Its height also allow provides better dispersal than a regular drip head or plain spaghetti. Low splashing and a heavier stream of water means less evaporation or drift. At the same time, the visible water output makes it easy to monitor the system as part of one's daily routine.

The dripper stake in action

Here's what it looks like fresh from the baggie. They come in 3-packs that cost about $4 a pop, which is a little more costly than I'd have liked, but for reasons of both plant health and water economy, I think they're worth it.

The dripper stake

I also finally replaced some of our mushroom bubblers with flower bubblers. These were a washout. We don't have sufficient pressure at the moment to get that umbrella of water I was looking for. Instead, the flower bubblers seep in exactly the same way as the mushrooms did. Moral of the story: 9 bubblers on a single zone is too many.

The long-desired but somewhat disappointing flower bubbler.

Tree Inventory
Last week I got some calipers from the TNLA Expo. I've been meaning to measure our young trees by height, but measuring their diameter is much simpler, and, besides, allows me to justify owning this nifty piece of plastic.

My calipers are a very flimsy rendition of this tool, posted by the Friends of Sligo Creek. They are demonstrating the correct way to determine the height at which to measure the tree's trunk: 5 inches up, or where the tip of the calipers reach when the tool is stood on the ground.

So here's the inventory:
1. Quercus buckley (Texas red oak) - 1"
2. Quercus macrocarpa (Bur oak--west side) - 1.5"
3. Tillia sp. (Linden) - .75"
4. Carya illinoiensis (Pecan--garage) - 7"
5. C. illinoiensis (Pecan--back corner) - 6.5"
6. Taxodium distichum (baldcypress--2/3 dead) - 2.75"
7. Magnolia grandiflora 'Little Gem' - 2"
8. Quercus polymorpha (Mexican white oak) - 1.25"
9. Chitalpa tashkentensis 'Morning Cloud' - 1.25"
10. Cordia boissieri (Mexican olive) - .75"
11. Quercus laceyi (Lacey's oak--southeast) - 7/8"
12. Taxodium mucronatum (Montezuma cypress) - 7/8"
13. C. illinoiensis (Pecan--by juniper) - 5.5"
14. Q. laceyi (Lacey's oak--gazebo) - 1.25"
15. Gingko biloba (Chinese maidenhair tree) - .5"

Not Measured (too big, misshapen, or unloved)
16. Melia azederach (Chinaberry)
17. Sapium sebiferum/Triadica sebifera (Chinese tallow)
18. Ligustrum sp. - mist house
19. Ligustrum sp. - pond
20. Ligustrum sp. - shade garden
21. Fraxinus sp. (Ash) - garage
21. Fraxinus sp. (Ash) - 10th St.
22. Juniperus ashei[?] (cedar)
23. C. illinoiensis (Pecan) - Ave. F
24. Quercus virginiana (Live oak)
25. Populus sp. (Cottonwood)
26. Lagerstromia sp. (Crape myrtle)
27. Celtis laevigata (Sugar hackberry)
28. Robinia pseudoacacia 'Purple Robe' (Black locust)
29. Quercus macrocarpa (Bur oak) - pond
30. Sophora affinis (Eve's necklace)
31. Sophora secundiflora seedling#1
32. Sophora secundiflora seedling#2
33. Sophora secundiflora seedling#3

* I am not receiving any remuneration from RainBird, Mister Landscape, or the Louisiana Nursery & Landscape association for product placement. Unfortunately. On the other hand, I'm not really endorsing RainBird or Mister Landscape over any other particular line of products. They're just what you get when you go to Lowe's.

**The notepad is loot from last weekend's TNLA Expo. I made sure to pick up pens and notepads from all the Louisiana-related vendors. In this way I express my loyalty for my native state.

Irrigation Heads: A Portrait in Parts

The irrigation system has now automatically turned itself on and off three times since we got the east and south sides of the house hooked up. Seems to be working very well. There is still a lot of crispiness, but I think it's a relic of the pre-irrigation days. Within a few weeks we should know for sure whether or not the system is doing all that we want.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd summarize what I've learned about the common types of irrigation heads you find at LoweDepot.

Mainly, what I've learned is that I'm not nuts about any of the options, but let's look at them one by one.

Spray Heads / Shrub Spray
These release a fine, light mist in fixed patterns. Adjustable-pattern heads allow you to set the pattern from something like a 10-degree to a 360-degree radius. Most commonly used in beds. Some, like the one below, emit two tiers of spray--a top tier to reach farther and a bottom tier to cover the area very near the head.

These sprinklers are driven by water pressure and are not hooked up to electricity.

I dislike the fine mist, because I don't think it penetrates heavily mulched or weed-barriered beds very well. I aslo dislike the fact that the fine spray is so easily blown off-course by the wind.

180-degree spray head pop-up sprinkler in the shade bed

Spray heads can also come in other spray patterns, like skinny triangles, squares, or--as in the example below--skinny rectangular strips. We have two of these, and I think they are the least effective heads in our whole yard.

Rectangular spray head by the gazebo

It is possible that if we had installed two skinny rectangles with the heads at opposite ends facing each other, that the double coverage might have been more effective. Spray patterns are indicated on the head labels using simple geometric icons like the ones below. #1 is what we currently have--one on either side of the gazebo. The red dots indicate where the head is relative to the spray.

If we had #2 + #3 facing each other on either end of both sides of the gazebo (total of 4 heads instead of 2), we might have had better success.

Rectangular spray patterns

Rotary Head
My preferred forms of spray head is this, the gear-drive rotor or rotary head. It puts out bigger, heavier droplets, which presumably do a better job of penetrating the mulch. These also come in adjustable patterns, which is the only kind I am inclined to buy at this point. Our approach is so experimental that the flexibility they provide is really handy.

They only come in variants of circles (half-circles, quarter-circles, etc.).

The down side is that the shortest of these that I know of is a 15' Orbit model. In a shrub bed, 15' is often a bit much. They are most frequently used for watering lawns.

Small rotary head by the study door

With all kinds of irrigation heads, you are supposed to strive for "head-to-head coverage" (which we unfortunately did not know when we installed the shade bed irrigation). This means that you want the outermost spray of one sprinkler to just reach the next head, and you want the outermost spray of that head to just reach your first head. While this seems like propaganda to sell more sprinkler heads, experience suggests that it is also good advice to achieving full coverage. Without head-to-head coverage, you tend to get scanty irrigation under the arch of your spray.

With rotary heads, using a head-to-head arrangement is more than usually important because they shoot a forceful stream that aims a minimum of 15' away. If you don't have overlapping spray, you'll get doughnuts of relative dryness.

Lowes' illustration of head-to-head coverage.

Bubblers
There are two kinds of bubblers: mushroom bubblers and flower bubblers (sometimes called "flower-head bubblers"). These refer to the shape of the spray, not to the plants for which they are appropriate.

We only knew of mushroom bubblers, and installed them in our Mutabilis rose Zone. They don't really spray, so much as seep gently. The head is basically designed to improve over a simple garden hose by slowing the flow so that it sinks in rather than runs off. The one below is fully open and on (they are usually adjustable flow.)

Bubbler in the mutabilis bed

In retrospect, I wish we'd chosen flower-head bubblers instead, as they pop up a little and emit several streams of water from multiple holes around the top of the head in a narrow (~2') radius.

Both are designed to soak deeply, which is great for small trees and shrubs, but I suspect the flower-heads achieve a slightly wider radius.

Spaghetti Tubing
Spaghetti tubing is like bubblers in that it is designed to soak, not spray. People frequently put emitters on the ends of spaghetti tubes to slow the flow down and simultaneously increase pressure in the irrigation system. For our roses, we generally prefer to just use the tubes as is in order to deliver more water.

Bubblers and spaghetti tubing are the most efficient forms of irrigation because they deliver water directly to the roots in large enough quantities to penetrate mulch and weed barrier, and with little to no interference from the wind.

The drawback to the spaghetti is that it is extremely specifc--it disburses water in a pretty tiny radius (~6-12"). Spaghetti best serves a bed with a relatively fixed population, mostly of shrubs. If you change out seasonal annuals or herbs, you'll constantly be adding new tubes and tying off old tubes, and as the tubes sometimes wander, some of your seasonal color will probably end up underwatered.

A headless spaghetti tube in the rose garden

Open 3/4" Tubes
This is not a particularly good solution--we will probably be changing them out for bubblers. Three of our trees just have open 3/4" tubes. Our arborist told us to mollycoddle our young trees by turning the hose on more or less full pressure within the little levees for about a minute every other day. That should be enough to fill up the levees, which should provide a young tree with the water it needs. This open tube approach was an attempt to automate that task. Now that the trees are older, they could probably use a slower, deeper soak.

3/4" Tube on a Quercus polymorpha

Finally, here's the irrigation computer we're using.

12-station irrigation computer

We got the "12-Station Super Dial - Outdoor" irrigation computer. It wasn't till I visited the Orbit website a couple of minutes ago that I discovered they have a range of products beyond the few available at LoweDepot. I've been so programmed by the LD folks that I often forget there are other home improvement store options. For example, I'm not nuts about any of the tubs on display at LD, and I periodically slip into tub-related despair because I forget that there are other stores that sell tubs. There is, in fact, a whole internet full of tubs. All of which is to say that although this unit is okay-ish to use, I rather wish I had surfed a bit and at least considered buying online.

I mean, look at this beautiful thing:

Fancy irrigation computer

It has a remote control! I'm sitting in the living room; it starts to rain; I just reach for my trusty Orbit irrigation control station remote control and BAM! irrigation cycle deferred! Plus, it displays in blue. Ah, well. Some other lifetime, perhaps.

The system's not perfect, but I feel pretty good about the fact that our plants are getting at least some water on a regular basis during the drought. The system, which is easily extendable, also means that any new plants we buy have a better chance than, for example, our poor, benighted baldcypress ever did. And hopefully we'll get some fast-moving shade that will help shield the house and bring down our power bills. Shade and water: two things I love.

As the Gentle Rain from Heaven

Project Mesopotamia: Phase I
After much travail, Matt got three of our watering zones fully automated. The hardest part, I gather, was finding a way to get the wires to go from the irrigation computer through the floor to the valves below. Poor Matt had to go under the house a lot, which is no kind of fun.

Matt ex machina

But the system finally works! O, glorious wetness! The lucky three are the shade garden and the two gazebo zones (the pecan side and the pond side). At present they're set to go off at midnight, one after another, but I may change that: I want to hear the posh-sounding hiss and gurgle of the watering system kicking on as I leave for work in the morning. The sound alone will make me feel happy and secure and adequately hydrated.

The new system may save the lives of the following plants:

1. Oak-leaf Hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) - has been wilting every 3 days
2. Monterey Cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) - crashed a few weeks ago; copious watering seems to have pulled it back from the brink
3. Spanish lavender (Lavandula stoechas) - hey, it's only 1/3 dead! It could still survive.
4. Fern-leaf lavender (Lavandula multifida) - and this one's only 1/2 dead--no problem, right?
5. Mrs. Burns Lemon Basil (Ocimum basilicum) - grown from seed--so little, but so spunky.

Also, the African hosta (Drimiopsis maculata) has been looking a little peaky, and the two Japanese maples, nurseryman's promises notwithstanding, have been crispy-edged and petulant. So the water should make a big difference for them as well.

Project Mesopotamia: Phase II
Next will be the bed around the front porch and the pole bed. This is particularly satisfactory, as the 'Yuletide' camellia has led a parlous existence ever since being transplanted from its pot, and the 'Ferdinand Pichard' has suffered dreadfully--possibly terminally--from Roundup drift. Both need regular water. Also, I've hooked our two 'Kimberly Queen' (Nephrolepis cordifolia) hanging ferns into the system, and so they'll give our front porch some privacy once they get enough water to really bulk up.

Fish Emulsion
Meanwhile, the roses have been growing and blooming, those enterprising creatures. For some of the plants near the foundation, the new growth is yellowy green between the veins. If memory serves, yellowness ("chlorosis") between the veins on new growth is a sign of iron deficiency. I'm guessing that the watering we've been doing has caused calcium to leach out of the cement and into the soil, where it ties up the iron in such a way that they plants can't access it. Sounds plausible, anyway. So I fish-emulsioned this morning, hoping that will help a bit.

I like organic fertilizers like fish emulsion because, among other things, they contain a wide range of nutrients. The bottle I was using this morning, for instance, claimed that it contained Nitrogen 2.23, Phosphorous 4.35, Potassium 0.30, Calcium 0.75, Sulfur 0.17, Glutamic Acid 8.03, Magnesium 0.04, Sodium 0.16, Iron 26.0 ppm, Manganese 3.0 ppm...

Manifold
I also started on the manifold for the west-side irrigation zones (the roses, blue-and-purple bed, mutabilis bed, and trees). Yeah, that's right, I made a manifold. Sounds complicated; is simple. I had thought it was some sort of arcane automotive component, perhaps involving some sort of pleated fiber, probably manufactured by 3M. Not so. It just means "a pipe with several valves attached to it." Still, I got to work with PVC primer and pipe cement. The former is purple, and I love they way the two of them smell. Even better than permanent markers.

So we'll need one long pipe to get the water from the central point under the mudroom over to the west side's crawlspace access point, and then we'll attach the manifold to the end of the pipe. We'll run a bunch of wire to the valves in the manifold from the computer in the mudroom. Et voila! Automation! Again!

Drought Flowers

Either because our plants are just that badass or because we've been watering more heavily, we do actually have some that are attempting to bloom in the midst of the drought and the heat. Brave souls.

For the most part, they are strange, tortured versions of themselves, which is actually kind of interesting in its own way. For example, you would never guess that this was 'Lichterloh.'

The bleached and emaciated petals of 'Lichterloh' in July

Similarly, the normally delicate, genteel, and shapely blooms of 'Duchesse de Brabant' have become ragged and irregular.

A gasping, titanic effort from 'Duchesse de Brabant'

'Graham Thomas' conserves his resources by drastically reducing the number of petals he produces. Usually fat, golden, and fully double, he's become a pallid semi.

'Graham Thomas,' like Sir Eliot, reluctantly retrenches

The passionflower is bearing up well--it does indeed appear to be dark purple! Wonderful plant--so extravagant.

'Dark Purple' passionflower

The frill bursting from this passionflower bud looks like wayward bits of Silly String.

Interesting passionflower bud

And the most surprising and delightful news: one of the 'Ellen Bosanquet' crinums that we planted this May is actually already blooming. The buds are rather washed out, but the fact that it's blooming at all comes as a pleasant shock--I assumed it would take a year or two to get established. Of course, the bulbs Dad gave us were quite enormous--larger than softballs in some cases. They have an incredibly rich, heavy lily fragrance.

The precocious bloom of crinum 'Ellen Bosanquet'

Project Mesopotamia
(Simulating the Land Between Two Rivers) The irrigation project continues. Hopefully, we'll be able to hook several of the systems up to the computer this weekend. Getting everyone on a regular system is essential if we're going to survive August; otherwise, some plants will inevitably slip through the cracks.

We still need to hook up the shade garden and the two gazebo zones, change out the two heads by the pond, put mini sprinklers over the hanging 'Kimberley Queen' ferns and make the front porch a separate zone, and pipe the rose bed, mutabils, and blue and purple bed zones to the central location. We may also make the pole bed and pecan a separate zone and add lines out to the Eve's Necklace and the linden.

Irrigation Schedule
We also need to think about scheduling. I think all of the zones need twice-weekly watering until the heat breaks (~late September, I assume). The weeping yaupon (rose bed), baldcypress (blue-and-purple bed) and Montezuma cypress (pond/gazebo bed) probably need water three times per week, since they're in a fragile state.

If we start getting rain in September (as some people predict, pinning their hopes on El Niño), we can reduce everyone to once per week. If the weather really improves, we'll be able to take the rose bed, blue-and-purple bed, front porch bed, pole bed, and gazebo beds off irrigation altogether in November and just turn the system on manually as needed. I think we'll want to keep the mutabilis bed and shade garden on once-weekly water indefinitely, though.

Next March, we'll put everyone back on once-weekly to take advantage of the growing season and get everyone juiced up for summer. And if the summer isn't too brutal, we may be able to leave it at once a week the whole season. Imagine it: a garden robust with plump, healthy plants, getting enough water to actually grow steadily rather than just enough to stave off death, full of flowers and green leaves... a beautiful sight. And in the long run, very little need for watering at all, once the roots are nice and deep and assuming the current weather pattern is a hiccup, not a terminal case of climatic cancer.

Ug. I Did It Again.

We mulched and irrigated till 9 last night and till the afternoon today. I dug more trenches (I'm getting better at it). I laid metal edging. I bought miles of PVC. I'm actually slightly amazed at my own productiveness.

All of this virtuousness had made me headachy and disgruntled. Probably because while great strides have been made, nothing is actually complete.

I re-mulched almost all of our existing beds, but we need to dig several new beds around the trees and at the end of the kitchen patio. I pulled weeds, but there is still bermudagrass growing up through the rose bushes--I have no idea how we can ever get rid of that pernicious stuff. We've laid pipes, but the system still isn't automated. I mowed, but the yard won't look really tidy till it's weed-eaten. or -eated. or -ate.

And although the AC is on, I'm still hot. And it's 7 o'clock at night, but looks like it's about 3 in the afternoon--stupid planet with its stupidly tilting axis.

I can't even think of anything to take a picture of, if I were even willing to go outside in order to take a picture, which, in this heat, I bloody well am not. Everything looks crispy and stupid and stunted and joyless. We have a baldcypress that's warped, a weeping yaupon that's four-fifths brown, a '4th of July' rose that's bleached to pink instead of being a lovely deep vermillion, climbing roses that have stopped growing, an oak-leaf hydrangea that wilts every other day, and a bunch of herbicided bermudagrass that needs weed-whacking.

God, I'd better stop before I implode from the sheer gravity of my own grouchiness and turn into a little black hole, sucking happiness and light out of everything around me.

Hey--just remembered--the spider lily is in bloom. So that's a happy thing. Perhaps I can defer imploding for a few days.

Spiderlily. All that stands between me and the abyss.

But I Had Scheduled a Weekend of Utter Slothfulness!

Against all my principles and my better judgment, I worked outside this weekend. It started innocently: I just wanted to dump a few bags of mulch over the dead bermudagrass in the rose bed. Just to make things look tidier. It won't take a second...

But the new mulch was so much darker than the old mulch that one corner of the bed was black, while the rest was light brownish-grey. And thus one thing led to another, and I ended up buying 20 bags of mulch from our nursery-around-the-corner, Bloomers. So I spread a lot of mulch yesterday. And then today, I felt (grudgingly, unwillingly) morally obliged to help Matt out with the water on the 'Mutabilis' bed--my part of the effort took till around noon (his took till about 2:30). Among other things, I learned that I have no talent for trench-digging; mine meandered and veered all over the landscape, while Matt's cut from Point A to Point B with the precision worthy of a Roman civil engineer.

The whole thing was a massive pain, but we hope to see ecstatic, lush plant growth towering audaciously toward a harsh blue sky. And then it will have been worth it.

Some Blooms
In other news, our Mystery Pink Globes rose bloomed recently. The oddest little pink balls of flowers--unlike any other rose I know, yet also completely unidentifiable, so far. This is how they look at full bloom.

Mystery Pink Globes rose

Also, during one of my many trips to Bloomers this weekend, I happened to spot the same unknown plum-colored perennial that I bought at Finch's Farm a month or so ago. Its name is Angelonia, possibly 'Serena.' You know what's amazing about the Angelonia (and its buddies, the little leadworts)? They aren't dead, despite having been planted in May/June in our meanest flower bed. Good little Angelonia!

Our tough little Angelonia

Requiem for Four Pines
Finally, a refresher on why I hate drought:

Sad stumps of once-proud great big trees

This, of course, is not our house--it's an utterly adorable little bungalow "downtown" (i.e., two blocks away). Until last summer's drought, it had 5 massive, ~50-year-old pine trees in its front yard, of a stoutness that is pretty rare for pines in our area. Then four of the them succumbed to drought after surviving decades of scorching Texas summers. You can see the effect that the loss of those trees has had on the lawn, and you can imagine the effect it's had on their electric bills. It's drastically changed the feeling of that block of the street, as well, which went from a shady green tunnel to a bleak and exposed bit of desert. Hence our watering efforts. And hence the need to water even very established, adapted specimens in the midst of a really ghastly drought like this one. Do you have a tree that you take for granted, that's always been there, unobtrusively providing shade and cooling your yard? For the love of Mike, water it!

In the midst of prolonged dry spells (let alone a really vile drought like this one), I always think of the passage from Out of Africa, in which Isak Dinesen describes a drought that felt "as if the Universe were turning away from you...

Everything became drier and harder, and it was as if all force and gracefulness had withdrawn from the world. It was not bad weather or good weather, but the negation of all weather, as if it had been deferred sine die. A bleak wind, like a draught, ran over your head, all colour faded from all things; the smells went away from the fields and forests. This feeling of being in disgrace with the Great Powers pressed on you. To the South, the burnt plains lay black and waste, striped with grey and white ashes...

Our droughts are a little different from Kenya's, I think, but the sense of joylessness and blight--we know that all too well.

CSA: What Do I Do with All This... Zucchini, Chard, and Beets?
I made another attempt at CHARD, the vegetable that loathes me. This time, I boiled it with a little red wine vinegar, browned some butter and then browned a cup of leeks in the butter, and then stirred in the drained chard (A variation on this recipe). Matt, when pressed persistently, gave this one 3/4 of a star out of a possible 5 stars. But, he hastened to emphasize, it's way better than my last attempt at chard. Well. Progress is being made.

Also, I'm making some ice cream cookie sandwiches as a treat to my hard-working Spouse, and I folded in a cup of finely grated ZUCCHINI. These were double-chocolate Andes Mint cookies (mentholated and adapted from here), and the zucchini gave them an interestingly cakey texture. We'll see how they react to being frozen and slathered with mint chocolate chip ice cream and then frozen again.

And this evening, I'll make my BEET-and-beef meatloaf (a beet-ified version of this). I'll let you know how it goes.

107°F is TOO MANY DEGREES

Here's how the Seasonal US Drought Outlook describes conditions in Central Texas this summer:

It purportedly reached 107F today in Austin, though it was only a balmy 104F here in Elgin. IN JUNE.

Concomitant bad plant news: the new weeping yaupon crashed this week, the baldcypress that's been struggling grimly ticked several notches toward "mostly dead" and away from "partly alive," and the Montezuma cypress, hitherto so blithe, is suddenly full of rusty leaves--oh, it's not good, not good at all.

Bright spots in the crispy, sere gloom: Some plants that are practically never watered seem perfectly unconcerned about living in the heart of a neutron star* (I just threw "neutron star" in there because it sounded good--what I'm really trying to convey here is that it's quite, quite hot. Are neutron stars very hot? Or are they sort of wussy little failed stars? Because we're like a raging inferno of nuclear fusion--not like a chilly old has-been of a star. We're talking greater than 3,700 degrees Kelvin in my backyard.) The troopers are Lacey oaks (Quercus laceyi), the antique rose 'Georgetown Tea,' the antique-ish rose 'Belinda's Dream,' and the Eve's Necklace (Sophora affinis). Honorable mention to the Tilia, which does get some water, but grows and thrives far beyond the effort put into it.

So. More water.
This weekend, the 'Mutabilis' roses and the 2 oaks on the south side of the house. And the Chitalpa as part of the blue-and-purple garden. The 'Mutabilis' don't actually need water the way some of our plants do (O, baldcypress, nothing we do is good enough for you. Why? WHY?), but they are plants with a mission--to make a big, dense hedge for privacy--so Matt really wants to give them every possible advantage. The oaks, children of that blissful rainy summer 2 years ago, need next to no supplemental water, but I'm becoming tree- and shade-obsessed. I'm desperate for some relief on the barren, exposed southwestern sides of the house. So we're giving the oaks a steroid shot, metaphorically speaking. Grow little oak trees. We need you.

Of course, it's too hot to work (or think or breathe) outside when the sun's up, so Matt & I were out between 9 and 10 this evening doing yardwork, pruning the moribund baldcypress, and watering with the zestful abandon of a freshwater Poseidon. Meanwhile, Elgin's got a festival going ("Western Days," I believe this one's called), and the music from the park--of the "Margaritaville" and "All My Exes Live in Texas" variety--wafted across the backyard. Not the accompaniment I'd have chosen, but I suppose it's local color. (There is an inevitable repertoire of songs played by bands at street festivals. And sure enough, before too long they were covering "Brown-Eyed Girl," which will be stuck in my head for the next three days.) Anyway, there's something oddly decadent about doing yardwork in the dark.

And there is also something peculiarly liberating about being completely hot and sweaty and disgusting, at least at night, when the sun's gone down. You pass beyond all hope of keeping up appearances or maintaining a genteel pretense of hygeine. You abdicate all responsibility and just glister wetly in the moonlight: reechy, humid, and torpid. You are the wetness and the wetness is you and everyone is completely feral and gross and unlovely and no one cares. I suppose it's the sort of defiance of les convenances that nudists find so intoxicating.

CSA: What Do I Do with All This... Okra, Beets, and Chard?
The BEET risotto went well. I roasted the beets for an hour, then finely diced them and cooked them into the risotto. Also added a handful of chopped prosciutto. I thought the taste was pretty good, though I had some slight qualms about the discernable texture of the beets. Matt didn't have "qualms," as such--he just hated it. A texture issue for him too.

I made OKRA beignets (substituted 1 c boiled CSA new potatoes for the 1/2c rice) to use up about half of the okra--wow--very tasty! Very crisp and delicious and creamy and tangy, and they improve after sitting in the fridge and then being refreshed in the skillet the next morning. I struck out here too with Matt, which didn't surprise me. You could taste the okra and the slices were very apparent in terms of texture. No slime, though.

Shall be trying seared leeks with CHARD and stealth beetloaf--meatloaf with grated beets mixed in. Here's hoping both the flavor and texture are subsumed by the beef. I don't want to send Matt into despair or anaphylactic shock or something.

Thus saith Wikipedia: Neutron Star - "The temperature inside a newly formed neutron star is from around 10¹¹ to 10¹² kelvin. The neutrinos it emits carries away so much energy that the temperature falls within a few years to around 1 million kelvin." Yeah, that metaphor will work.

A Pleasant Afternoon Outside?!?

It was, actually.

Thus the astonishing power of shade. Matt's installing a sprinkler system in the shade garden to coddle some of our pickier cultivars. I'm especially concerned about the oak-leaf hydrangea, which is sensitive to drought and doesn't yet have much of a root system; the cordia, which needs to establish a root system and needs to grow quickly to replace our decrepit ligustrum; and the tiny wisp of a palmetto (one sad, scrawny little leaf), which, if it keeps a positive mental outlook, eats right, and gets plenty of exercise, could someday form a very nice component of our privacy screen. The Iris virginiana and the Japanese maples are also looking a bit dubious about life here in Elgin, so I wanted to reassure them. Eventually, this ghastly drought will end. For the shade bed, it ends now.

So, in my role as consultant/cheerleader, I perched on the porch glider and, you know, consulted. And what was really mindblowing and amazing was that it was nice. There were breezes, some of them cool. There was gently filtered light. And the temperature just wasn't particularly oppressive--maybe 85F or so degrees in the shade, compared to 95+ in the sun (this was in the early afternoon--it's probably closer to 101F now in the sun. And I'm no longer outside). And before Matt buried the system, he had to test it, which I felt wasn't reason to enough to get up off of the porch glider. I may have looked slightly crazy to the neighbors sitting blithely under the spray, but lemme tell you--the kids are on to something. Playing--or in my case, lolling--under sprinklers feels good. And all of this pleasure is due, ultimately--well, largely to Matt--but other than that, to the power of our giant cottonwood. Hail cottonwood! Long may you reign, Father of Gardens!

I'm also rather excited about having a more formal irrigation system with actual sprinkler heads--it seems so bourgeois and la-di-da. One or two paychecks down the line, I'll buy a 12-station timer as well, which we will eventually use to control irrigation throughout the property from one centralized, automated location. S-e-x-y!

That said, the hope is that after this area is a bit more established, we won't need to use the system very often. I do feel a bit guilty watching all that precious water arching profligately through the air. But we are in the middle of a drought, so even xeriscapes need water these days. And it isn't as though we're watering our lawn, anyway. Just our young trees, shrubs, and perennials that will ultimately help to cool the property, consume CO₂, and, uh, do other productive things for Planet Earth. Provide earthworm shelter or something. Yep. No rationalization here.

Surviving a CSA
Or, What Do I Do with All These Zucchini, Pattypans, and Oriental Cucumbers?
To return to what is, for the summer, my domain (the indoors), I joined a CSA (community supported agriculture) a couple of weeks ago. The interesting thing about this project--and it is very much a project--is that I'm forced to come up with ways to eat things that I--let alone Matt--would never ordinarily eat. So it's an adventure!

We get a box every week, plus eggs every other week and an extra--jelly, pesto, &c--on intervening weeks. Thus far, we've gotten some good stuff (tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots, and garlic), some indifferent stuff (Oriental cucumbers, zucchini), and some horrors (beets, chard, yellow squash! Bleh!)

I'm rather proud of the interesting ways of prepping veggies that I've tried. Zucchini became chocolate chip zucchini bread--oh hell yeah! Tasted like chocolate chip cookies. One batch of beets became beet-and-tasso consomme (adapted from epicurious)--which was surprisingly tasty. Probably helps that they were golden beets, so the soup didn't look like blood--always a plus. Last night I broke out the mandoline to make fritto misto out of the squash and zucchini (adapted from astray.com, plus dill and smoked salt). It was delectable--crispy, salty; so good, I didn't even make a dipping sauce--that would have obscured the flavor. The bacon-zucchini quiche wasn't half bad, either. Thing about zucchini--if you slice it thinly enough, it loses both flavor and texture, and then what's to complain about? And the squash-lemon-poppyseed muffins are okay, too (loosely adapted from a GardenWeb forum). Not fantastic, but better than a kick in the head.

And there have been the bombs. Underdone stuffed pattypans, overly charred chard, inedible chard-based eggs sardou, dreary little cucumber sandwiches--I must be the only person in the world who can't make a decent cucumber sandwich.

For this week, I've used up most of my Oriental cukes in a cucumber-based gazpacho (threw in the last of the yellow cherry tomatoes, too), and I'll be tackling a beet risotto for dinner. Hopefully, the sherry and parmesan will join forces to mask the fact that beets taste like dirt.

The Unbearable Mugginess of Being

We finally got some (1 measly inch of) rain, which has had a most electrifying effect on our lawn. I really thought the drought had permanently killed our intermittent patches of loathsome Saint Augustine, horseherb, and sandburs (I knew the bermudagrass would come back, of course). But lo, after a smidge of rain and a blissfully overcast week, our "lawn" has not only greened, it's grown to a great, mounding shagginess.

The downside of all this fecundity, of course, is that that miniscule sip of rain somehow translates to days on end of truly stupifying humidity. You have but to step outside to rain sweat. In the morning, this is endurable (if smelly), but by the afternoon it's really too oppressive to think straight. Talking takes too much effort. I abandon all my lovely polysyllables and start talking like E.T.: Yes home now, or No, store first or Where lunch? is the sort of sparkling dialog I come up with after about 30 minutes outside in August.

Meanwhile, our plan to bring a steadier supply of water to our languishing garden is proceeding apace. This morning, Matt laid some PVC line to set up a spigot at the gazebo with another line running out to the baby bur oak (Q. macrocarpa) that Mom & Dad gave us.

Matt's trenches for the new irrigation lines--to the gazebo, pond, and bur oaklette

He'll also send a line + spigot out to the pond, and he talks of installing a "float valve" to keep the pond topped off nicely. How fancy! Fancy and, sadly, necessary. We let the water level get too low a week or two ago and actually killed our equisetum. Equisetum, a plant that watched the extermination of the dinosaurs with equanimity, that has seen ice ages come and go, that didn't even blink when the woolly mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers and giant ground sloths collectively shuffled off this mortal coil, a plant that grows in cement--this plant we killed. I expect A&M to revoke my hort degree any day now.

Rare albumin print of early human-sauropod interaction. The dinosaur is crunching on a giant primordial equisetum. Just trust me on this.

In other mortal news, we're having fungus problem again. What is it with Elgin and fungus? I grew my roses in pots for years, often in too much shade with too little water, and never lost a one. Now they're in the ground in Elgin and they constantly have the vapours. 'Wild Blue Yonder' got the Black Death again, this time low on a stem right by the rootstock. You''ll remember that I sprayed (with Immunox) two or three time in early spring and seemed to pretty well have solved the problem. Apparently, spraying is actually a way of life for this stupid rose. Gross. I'll try to spray every couple of weeks in in September and October, and maybe for a couple of months in the spring--but if that doesn't bring us to a permanent solution, then WBY will have to join the giant ground sloth, the woolly mammoth, and our unfortunate equisetum in eternal oblivion.

Stump of infected stem--fungus has most likely penetrated plant's crown, dagnabit.

'Belinda's Dream,' interestingly enough, has the same leaf discoloration that WBY has (though no sign of any stem infections), so I gave it a shot of the toxic stuff too, while I had the bottle out.

'Belinda's Dream' with diamond-shaped leaf necrosis starting at tip and moving towards base of leaf. Drought stress or Black Death?

Still more distressingly, the twice-transplanted pear isn't doing as well as I thought. a few weeks ago, it developed these cankery-sort of patches on 2 stems. The patches girdled the stems and made the tissue above wilt and wither. This was upsetting, but it was fairly contained, so I just pruned the nasty bits off, making my cuts, naturally, several inches below all visible infection.

Nasty bits on our 'Moonglow' Asian pear

Much to my dismay, however, the same cankery-looking infection recently appeared below the cuts and started creeping down past the next leaf buds on both affected stems. It's possible that this is actually the same pernicious fungus that has plagued my roses (roses and pears are actually members of the same plant familys), or it could be a completely different stem infection. In that case, we've got two nasty stem diseases running amok in Elgin, which isn't a happy thought. Either way, I pruned again and drenched the pear in Immunox. Here's hoping.

Late-Autumn Renaissance
That wee bit of rain plus the cooler temps (in the 80s and 90 rather than then 100s) has allowed a sort of renaissance in my garden. All sorts of things have perked up and popped into bloom. Lots of pix in no particular order:

'Fruit Cocktail' shrimp plant (Justicia brandegeana)

'Mutabilis' rose. This is our 1-year-old--it's getting quite big. I bet it'll be 4-1/2 feet tall by next July.

A pleasant surprise--some of the bulbine I planted in late May (a) survived and (b) is actually blooming. Look how fuzzy the stamens are!

'Cramoisi Superieur' rose.

"Blue Butterfly Bush" (Clerodendrum ugandense)--it's been blooming since July, but it recently put on an extra heavy flush of flowers

Society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea)

'The Fairy' rose (was one of the centerpieces at our wedding)

And in the "Hey, how 'bout that!" category, one of the mostly withered Crocosmia has gathered its energies to pop into bloom one more time this late in the season. Thanks, confused Crocosmia!

'Tuscarora' crape myrtle, chugging along as it has been doing for most of the summer

I Claim This Mountain in the Name of Belgium and King Albert II* **
The City is (supposedly) paving over the stretch of 10th that runs on the east side of our house. I think they must have run out of funding or something, because they graded it, put out flags, sprayed some paint, and deposited two pieces of culvert and a mountain of debris in our yard a month ago, and have never returned. Eh, well. It's a big yard--we weren't really using that particular corner anyway.


*Ever since I learned that some of my Cajun ancestors originally hailed from Belgium, I've been subject to (very intermittent) fits of Belgian pride. Vive la Belgique!

**After Abert's death, Queen Victoria put a lot of pressure on her children and grandchildren to name their decendents Albert (and Victoria). She particularly wanted her son, Albert Edward, to take the throne as King Albert I--I think she envisioned, Banquo-like, an interminable line of King Alberts and Queen Victorias stretching towards the historical horizon. That son, who ultimately adopted the name Edward VII, declined that particular honor, as his father and mother had caused him major grief for most of his adult life. And now I don't think there are any first-named Alberts in the British royal family at all, nor can I think of any other Alberts in Victoria's extended European family who ever became kings. So I'm rather tickled for her sake that a couple of Alberts managed to go the distance in Belgium.

Irrigation Plan

...Or, Fun with Visio
Matt's been sweating and swinking (good word, no? It's archaic for toiling & drudging) on an irrigation system for us for the past month or so. The most important, of course, are our new trees (Magnolia and baldcypress), the hedge of jasmine, and the re-transplanted pear, so those got attention first. But whenever Matt has time and spare money to pick up a valve, some emitters, t-connectors, barbs, or converters, he's been adding on. The system has become sufficiently complex that I decided to map it for my own benefit and that of whoever buys the house next.

Plus, I wanted to play with Visio before my company closes and I have to give their laptop back to them. (And, by the bye, why the hell didn't I do this sooner? Visio is far and away the easiest tool for mocking up blueprints and landscape plans I've ever tried--way better than that cheap crap from Broderbund or my pointlessly arcane and convoluted efforts in Photoshop. This is easy.)

So here's what we've got (click on the picture to see a larger [legible] version). The solid black lines are our main lines. The thinner black lines are thinner tubes. Dashed lines are buried.

Aqua is for places where we plan to put irrigation. The aqua bits don't connect to anything because we haven't quite figured out how it's all going to tie together. The quartered circles represent valves. The two aqua spigots (called "bibs" in official Visio-speak) are existing spigots that do not actually work and never have during our entire tenure here. I hope we'll get them operational someday.

Neat, huh?

Irrigation plan--click to enlarge

We don't have any automated timers yet. I'm not much inclined to buy one, since (as you know), I'm not a fan of regular supplemental water. It's all very well to have a system that (A) nurtures baby trees along or (B) gets the garden through a severe drought, but I'm not interested in trying to create a rain forest here. On the other hand, as Matt will probably want to point out when he reads this, I do have a tendency to turn on hoses and sprinklers and forget about them till the following morning. Some water conservationist I am. So the jury's out on a timing system at the moment.

That mention of work reminds me--some of you may not know that Fusion is shutting down this August. This is rather a downer, but I found a well-paying long-term contract position with the Texas Education Agency (doing tech writing with a soupçon of business analysis and project management), so all is well. Or mostly well--my cube at the State is the most ghastly hole you ever saw--barely 3' square with a giant pillar taking up about a quarter of the space, no natural light in the entire cube farm and the ugliest florescent lights--all sickly and yellowy--and of course everything is beige everywhere. Worst of all, they move people around so much that no one bothers to decorate their cubes so the beigeness reigns supreme. And it's about 81 degrees in there--apparently, we're singlehandedly compensating for the rest of America's inability to reduce greenhouse emissions. But everyone seems very nice and very smart and I think it will be a good opportunity to add some skills to the old resume.

The other happy thing about the job is that it will enable Matt & I to go ahead with our plans to buy a replacement sofa, plans we had to abort when we first heard that Fusion was going to close. We went to Ethan Allen yesterday and spent a small geologic epoch contemplating fabrics and pondering firmnesses. (Matt was very patient about this, by the way. Although he did put the kibosh on some of my more... exciting selections.) We had really liked the Crate and Barrel experience earlier this summer--good firmness levels on the sofas (we like a firm sofa--probably because we're accustomed to a 33-year-old sofa will very little stuffing left), reasonable prices, good service, but I have lingering concerns about the fabric options. So there is more shopping to do before we come to any decisions. This is momentous, you know. Our first real sofa. Our first big furniture investment. Not some fly-by-night, temporary solution, like our $25 Ikea coffeetable, our hand-me-down kitchen table, or our silver-painted yard-sale dresser. This is for real. WE. HAVE. ARRIVED. Adulthood, give us a nice, big hug.