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.

Much Mulch

We ordered 3 yards of mulch delivered from Bert's Dirts to mulch in the new shade garden. One of the tricky things about ordering mulch is figuring out what 1 yard (the base unit of bulk mulch) looks like. In the end, we let our checking account decide how much to order, which turned out to be their minimum delivery of 3 yards. Sadly, 3 yards of mulch isn't quite as much as you might think it would be from the price tag ($185 or thereabouts, with delivery).


However, we did lay it on pretty thick since the shade garden was a wee bit weedy. An hour of shoveling later, and here's what 3 yards of mulch gets you:

The east side of the shade garden...

...the west side of the shade garden...

...and the south bit where the shade ends, plus one rose bush.

Since we have <--pause for counting on mental fingers --> something like 9 more flower beds that could use some mulch, I guess we should have ordered about 20 yards instead of 3.

Huh.

Next time, we'll have to see if we can pick the mulch up ourselves and load it into Matt's trailer (which is enclosed--not sure how that's going to work) to save some rhino.

The roses are doing absolutely beautifully. The shrubs are filling out nicely and laden with buds and blossoms. The excellent 'Duchesse de Brabant' and 'Cramoisi Superieur' are being especially generous with the blooms. However, I'm most transfixed by one of our mystery roses. Last year, it gave us a single, large, crushed raspberry-pink bloom. This year, it's giving us this:

Fabulous mystery rose - 'Alfred Colomb'?

Whoa.

For once, my camera captured a red more or less accurately. The flower is a sumptuous deep red with washes of purple and brown--it's incredible--very decadent. Matt has no idea what it is. I said, "Maybe 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain'?" He said, "Sure."

Though now that I've thumbed (virtually) through ARE's catalog, I wonder if it's not either 'Alfred Colomb' or 'Duke of Edinburgh.' Either way, I'm thinking it's a Hybrid Perp, though Matt leans toward the Bourbons.

Spring! So nice (aside from the brain-clogging allergies, that is. Live oaks, I love you--why don't you love me back?). Everything is green and perky and so full of sap and shiny newness that all the young leaves glisten in the sun. Matt took The Pony out and then weed-eated (weed-ate?), and we both weeded (some of) the beds, so things are unusually bright and tidy and colorful and altogether lovely. We've even been getting rain! The US Seasonal Drought Monitor for April through June actually predicts "Some improvement (drought ongoing)"!