Pre-filter, New Doors

So our awesome new powerful pond pump has been pureeing fish and then getting clogged by their sad, lacerated corpses.

Gross.

We've lost both Thor and Jupiter, veterans whom one would have thought had the age and wisdom to... not swim into a sucking vortex of doom.

So I decided to make a crude "pre-filter," as they're called in the pond biz.  I got a cheap black bucket and drilled holes in it using a small keyhole drill bit.  You want to make enough holes to give the pump unimpeded water flow, but not so many that the thing loses all structural integrity.

Ultimately, I'm planning to fill it with very coarse lava rocks to keep out the little fish; but as it is, it will at least keep the big fish, who are larger than these holes, from Vita-mixing themselves.

So far, it seems to be working fine.

Meanwhile, our favorite carpenter, Javier, made us a pair of swinging doors for the living room. We needed to be able to keep the cats in the living room with us without losing air circulation. Matt and I were stumped for years--we though of turning wooden screens into doors, but that's expensive and it's hard to find a design that would harmonize with the house and have small enough holes to keep the cats in. Then one day Matt spotted some decorative aluminum panels at our local hardware store and had a brainwave.

I'll be painting the woodwork and trim, but I think we'll leave the metal as is.  The paint would only flake off, anyway.

The cats are mayhem-prone, so we don't like to let them into the front of the house unsupervised.  But of course, they often run off to the kitchen to counter-surf while we're watching tv, the little hellions. Hence the doors. Now they can't escape bonding with us! Yay!

Thanks to Chuck and Ladonna, whose Christmas present funded these doors.

Holiday Garden Additions

It was a good holiday for the garden.

I got a new pair of my favorite gardening gloves, which are stretchy and close fitting, so no bulk hanging off the ends of one's fingers, but with nice leather on the palms and insides of the fingers for dealing with thorny roses.

Mom and Dad gave me a bird feeder with pole for my birthday.  It's made by a company called "Droll Yankee," which they assure me is the best.  So far, it seems to have defied the squirrels and doves, so it's an all-round success.  (Also, I've switched to safflower seeds, which are said not to appeal to S & D and which fit better in my existing bird feeder anyway.)

New bird feeder in G-n-R bed, embellished with new baby grasses

 The climax, of course, was the awesome new Savio 2050 pond pump, which is currently sending gushing torrents of water through our waterfall. It's so strong, it picks pebbles up from the bottom of the pond and sends them through the waterfall. Yowza.

The amazing pumping power of the our new Savio 2050.  Actually, the camera doesn't really capture the full volume.  It's like this, only more.

 Then the denouement was my birthday present from Matt--eight (EIGHT!) new 'White Cloud' Muhlenbergia capillaris (the grass we saw at the Atlanta Bot Gar that almost made me miss my cousin's wedding) and a sample pack of 12 more grasses that Matt picked out for me from Dove Creek Gardens in Tennessee.  (Why isn't there a major grass nursery here in Texas???  We have lots of grass. And not a lot of water. No brainer.)

Matt's sampler of interesting grasses

Here's what was in the sampler pack:

Andropogon scoparius 'Prairie Blues' (little bluestem--some debate as to whether this cultivar is in Andropogon or Schizochyrium)
Carex buchananii (leatherleaf sedge )
C. pendula (weeping sedge)
C. testacea 'Prairie Fire' (sedge)
Eragrostis elliotii 'Blue Eros' (blue lovegrass)
Festuca actae 'Banks Peninsula Blue' (blue fescue)
Miscanthus sinensis 'Nippon' (maidengrass)
Panicum virgatum 'Heavy Metal' (switchgrass)
Pennisetum alopecuroides 'Moudry' (fountain grass)
P. messiacum 'Red Buttons' (fountain grass)
P. villosum 'Cream Falls' (feathertop)

We're using the 'White Cloud' as the background matrix for the Grass-n-Roses bed, studded with the various sampler grasses.  So far, everything is tiny little dry tufts, so it's a little hard to tell what it will ultimately look like.  I imagine some fine-tuning will eventually be required, just as it was for the Mexican feathergrass (Stipa/Nasella tenuissima), 'Dwarf Hamlin' fountain grass (Pennisetum alopecuroides), and 'Blonde Ambition' big grama grass (Bouteloua gracilis) we had already planted.  Oh, and the cute little nimblewill (Muhlenbergia shreberi), sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula), and big muhly (Muhlenbergia lindheimeri).

Pennisetum messiacum 'Red Buttons,'
glowing in the sun

 All told, that makes 18 kinds of grasses in the G-n-R bed.  Plus inland sea oats in the shade bed: 19!  Not bad.  It's not quite the Grass Garden at Kew, but still--not bad.

Another view of waterfall & G-n-R bed

Pond Pump and Iris

In what is obviously a Christmas miracle, today I accidentally came across two pieces of documentation that I really needed and thought were lost forever:

(1) Our current pond pump's capacity is (a puny) 560 gph.  It's a "Smartpond" pump, model #DP560

To put this into perspective, my Christmas present this year from Matt is going to be a super-powerful "professional-grade" Savio 2050 (we got $100 off at Amazon!).  In other words, it will have 4 x the pumping power.  This will obviously require some kind of weir or basin at the top of our waterfall, or it's going to shoot water straight out like a fire hose.  Am thinking of attempting something with one of those cheap aluminum catering pans.

There's a guy online who shows how to turn a plastic tool bin into a weir, and I'm thinking of imitating him, only I need the flexibility of aluminum because of the irregular shape of the aperture at the top of our waterfall.

(2) The second documentation-related miracle was that I stumbled upon--and read, stranger still--an old Lowe's receipt that (amazingly) listed the name of the iris cultivar that I bought from them and then promptly forgot months ago: 'Spartan.'  (I had googled 'Hector,' 'Troy,' 'Achilles,' and even, desperately, 'Trojan' trying to track this thing down to no avail.  Right culture, wrong piece of geography.)  It's near the volcanic rocks in our pond bed, and is a lovely sulky shade of burgunda, or so the picture indicates.

Iris germanica 'Spartan'

Pic from van Bloem bulbs: http://www.vanbloem.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=plants.plantDetail&plant_ID=14

Mid-summer Acquisitions; Water Your Trees!

New Tillandsia xerographica

In defiance of the miserable heat and drought, Matt & I have actually added to our collection this month. In addition to our Louisiana plants from a couple of weeks ago, I also bought a couple more tillandsias to hang over the pond: T. xerographica (top) and T. concolor × streptophylla (middle).

T. xerographica, T. concolor × streptophylla, and an incomplete ball of T. ionantha 'Fuego' Also, one of Granny's Louisiana irises is in a pot toward the bottom left

Closeup of the T. concolor × streptophylla

And, in the midst of general destruction and misery, a couple of the ionanthas are changing color! I had hoped they would, but I hadn't expected it so soon! Isn't that jewel-like carmine ravishing?

Two red T. ionantha 'Fuego'. This probably means they're about to bloom, and possibly to pup and die. It will be interesting to see how this works out in the context of a dangling grapevine ball.

The sawtooth palm (Serenoa repens) seems to be settling in, but the only iris that looks promising is the one I planted in the pond (see earlier pic of 3 tillandsias).

The beautiful bluey-silver of Serenoa repens

Meanwhile, we've upped our watering to three times a week, rather to my disgust (no water restrictions in Elgin--we have a very robust aquifer, I suppose). And while we're definitely getting more blooms out of our roses because of it, the plants still don't look happy. They're droopy and sulky. And the flowers are wadded and oddly colored.

Believe it or not, this is 'Duchesse de Brabant.' A number of our stouter roses are blooming intently--Archduke Charles, D de B, Souvenir de la Malmaison, Belinda's Dream, Maggie--but most of the blossoms are crumpled or strangely colored or generally off-looking.

A month of 100-degree highs will do that to a plant, I suppose. And--yay!--we still have all of August to look forward to!

The red line is our highs for July--averaging 100.35F. NOAA's seasonal drought outlook folks--who now predict the weather by aiming a flame-thrower at a map of Texas and pulling the trigger--say that for almost the whole of Texas the drought will intensify between now and October. Intensify! How?? How can we get less than no rain, I'd like to know?!?!

I'm not sure if any amount of water could make our plants look happy these days, though they are a little less suicidal now than when they were on the twice-a-week schedule.


Speaking of which, tonight we put a sprinkler on the old pecan, which we usually just leave to Mother Nature's tender mercies. But big old trees can crash abruptly in weather like this--even tough old natives, like blackjack oaks and loblolly pines. In fact, I just read the other day that mature trees are actually more susceptible to drought than young, springy, resilient trees. Plus, of course, people taken them for granted, since they look like they've been around forever.

Water your trees, including the venerable old grandfather trees! They make shade! They keep the heat off your roof/skin/car! They absorb CO2 and provide habitat for our furry and feathered friends! And did I mention that they make shade?

Please: think of the trees.

Don't less this happen to you. Unless of course it's November. Then it's okay.

Pics from http://www.wunderground.com, http://www.layoutsparks.com/1/168216/broken-heart-tree-branch.html , and http://thepineappletree.com/archives/store/products/dark-chocolate-i-heart-trees-shirt

Pondly footnote: two 'Steven Strawn' blooms. I love this weird silver hue he's taken on, presumably in response to the heat. It's not Steven's normal color, but really, everything he does is lovely and full of grace--I do adore that waterlily.

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.

Fishy-fish & Catch-up

It's hot. I'm not a fan. So I've been inside a lot during the day lately. When I go out, I put on SPF 70 (seventy, forsooth!) and a huge straw hat and still get burned. Screw this.

Matt's more rugged than I am (by a lot--when the apocalypse comes--apparently not on schedule--Matt's pretty much my meal ticket. If he breaks a leg or a tree falls on his head on our post-apocalyptic homestead, we're both doomed.) Anyway, he's been plugging away an extension to the irrigation system to cover the roses in the AC bed. I tapped a little more edging into the ground on the grass-n-roses bed, but otherwise I mostly sit on the patio, communing with the fishes and fanning myself pinkly.

Catalog of the Fish

A small swarm of fish, a couple of weeks ago

Speaking of fish, they've made babies all over the place, plus I bought some pretty fantails. The total (named) fish population consists of:

NEW GUYS (Fantails)

• Fred (Looks like Bob, but with a fan tail)
• Ginger (All white with tiny red dots at the base of her tail)
• Myrna (All white with a red flare from fin to tail)
• Orangina (unusual shade of fluorescent orange)
• Safety First the Second (Safety First the First, RIP)

BABIES

• Zoro (a baby Shubunkin! With a black mask on his head.)
• Blue (another baby Shubunkin! Mostly pale blue.)
• The Golden Ghost (yet another! Mostly pale gold.)
• Fiamma (all white with a red flare from dorsal fin to tail)
• Spike (light orange with a black dorsal stripe)
• Redtip (All white with a red fin and tail)
• Bob Jr. (looks a lot like Bob Sr.)
• Lyn Jr. (looks a lot like Lyn Sr.)
• Chaplin (white with pronounced red mustache-shaped mark over mouth & dorsal stripe)
• Pearl (solid white. There are about 5 of these. I call them all "Pearl.")
• Penny (solid red. There are about 5 of these. I call them all "Penny.")

OLDIES

• Bob (red with white splodges on underbelly near head)
• Lyn (red with white splodges on underbelly near tail)
• Thor (big red)
• Big Olaf (other big red)
• Jupiter (white with red dot on his head)
• Drusilla (solid white, short tail. Kinda dull.)
• Lena (solid white, long swishy tail--very glamorous)
• Spooky (light blueish Shubunkin with a few pale gold splodges)
• Crazy Eye (dark blue/grey Shubunkin with big dark orange splodges)

There are other babies that haven't developed a name yet, but I think this is all of the main guys.

Roses
In other news, 'Hot Cocoa,' 'Francis Dubreuil,' 'Belinda's Dream,' 'Souvenir de la Malmaison,' 'Mutabilis,' and 'Green Ice' are blooming, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. 'Mrs. Dudley Cross,' a transplant from the Brazos River bottom, has seemingly decided--after a protracted period of hesitation--to live. It was a big, mature shrub, and the catalyst(s) appear to have been (1) hooking up a watering system (2) cutting it back hard when it refused to leaf out, and (3) dousing it generously with Immunox (was starting to exhibit signs of Horrid Fungus).

Ongoing Projects
???

I really don't know. Heat has scrambled brains. I guess plant a few more Mexican feathergrass. Pound in some more edging. Hibernate till September. Then we can work on filling in the rest of the grass-n-roses bed and taming the AC bed.

I'm told that Texas was unusually cool and moist in the 19th century. Immigrants from Germany, Bohemia, Sweden came here and thought they'd found the land of milk and honey. They wrote their friends, "Pack your bags! It's gorgeous here!" And then the wet spell ended and the poor bastards were stuck in Texas in August.

Immigration propaganda for 19c Texas. Looks nice, doesn't it?

Just Me and Mr Shovel

There were big doings around the pond last weekend. Here is a hint:

Something has changed--but what is it?

To be a little more explicit, this is what it used to look like:

Great big honkin dirt pile on right--4 cu. yds.

Now it looks like this:

That dirt pile is ALL GONE.

Where did it all go? In the new beds around the pond:

The new beds wrap around the pond, are interrupted by the baby bur oak, and then follow the walk around to the shade patio

We plan to put the barbecue pit here, behind a trellis.

We've been having fires on the terrace at night.

And I moved it all by myself. Zoiks, that was a lot of hard labor. And we have to do it all over again with the crushed granite to fill in the patio. :-(

Worth it, though. Love, love, love the pond, terrace, and beds.

Scary Black Foam and Other Pond Endeavors

We put it off as long as we decently could, but it was finally time to dismantle the waterfall that came with the property and rebuild it in a new, shiny, more waterproof fashion.

The three key elements for this project were:

1. a large scrap of pond liner
2. a lever + Matt's muscles
3. pond foam

You can see all three (minus the muscles) in the pic below. We used the liner scrap to make a sort of diaper beneath the top layers of rock. The hope is that any water that doesn't drop straight into the pond will collect in the diaper and drain into the pond from behind the waterfall.

The waterfall rock pile, in the middle of our reconstruction efforts.

Many months ago, Bob from Draco Gardens had suggested the use of puffy foam-in-a-can to stick the rocks to the edge of the pond. It was only later that I discovered that foam-in-a-can actually comes in a special pond flavor (i.e. black) to blend in with the liner.

It's like Easy Cheese, only black!

It's useful stuff, but watching an oozy black blob suddenly erupting from within the crevices of the waterfall is a little unnerving. Reminded me of some low-budget horror film about The Thing from the Swamp (actually, I think it was Creepshow II. How the hell I know anything about Creepshow II is a mystery to me, but there it is.) Ultimately, we will need to cut off the excess foam, but we're letting it cure first.

So after putting the diaper in place and using the foam to create a channel on the main tongue of the waterfall, Matt worked on levering the massive top rock back into place. What's weird is that this actually worked. One man and a stick. Moved that giant rock several feet. Kind of amazing. Am now so unimpressed by ancient Egyptians and their weenie little pyramids.

Matt, showing the ancient Egyptians how to get stuff done

We still need to put more rocks on the waterfall tongue, cut off the extra foam, and put more foam inside the waterfall to control the water, and there are more big rocks to be levered into place somehow. Nevertheless, we're very close to having a working waterfall here. How the fish will enjoy all that water circulation and oxygenation!

At the same time that Matt was levering like mad, I was shoveling. We bought 4 cubic yards of topsoil from Bert's Dirts and 3 cu yds of crushed granite to finish off the terrace and build up the bed around the pond. Matt didn't want my help with the boulders (he seems convinced--perhaps not entirely without reason--that I would find a way to drop one of those 400-lb boulders on my own head. I'd argue the point, but I've still got a knot on my right foot from where I dropped a flagstone on myself a month ago. Ouch.) So I worked on the dirt. I shoveled about 1.5 cu yds of the soil into the new bed (will add pic later), which filled the existing part about 2/3. We still need to edge about as much space again, so there is more shoveling in my future.

...hooray.

7 cubic yards of stuff that needs to be shoveled. Oh my God.

But after that--more roses! Will it be the eglantine rose? 'Abraham Darby'? 'Mme Wagram'? 'Bayse's Purple'? 'White Pearl in Red Dragon's Mouth'? 'Wedding Cake'? 'Honey Dijon'? 'Tipsy Imperial Concubine'?

(Actually, I can pretty much guarantee that it will involve 'Tipsy Imperial Concubine.' That's a name too good to pass up, nevermind that it's a rather prettyish old Tea rose.)

Unrelated Addendum: Guess what's happening right now? It's raining! For the first time in over a month! I love rain!

Llama Poop, Firepit, Farewell to a Fish

Something like 10 years ago, my husband had access to a copious supply of llama manure. He used it on his gourd vines, and they grew an absolute treat.

Now that we're adding new beds, I thought I'd see if I could find a local source for the good stuff. The South Central Llama Association was able to hook me up with some charming local farmers and their fetching camelids who let us shovel away all the brown gold we wanted. I think they were slightly disappointed that we didn't take more.

Llama poop

Llama poop is funny stuff. It comes in large, dry pellets that smell like a petting zoo (much less stinky than cow, horse, or chicken poop, for instance--more like goats or sheep, I guess?). They're very compact, and they neither squoosh nor crumble when stepped on. Kind of remarkable, really--might be suitable as insulation on the space shuttle.

The poop isn't composted. This seems risky, but there will be a lull of at least one or two months before the plants start to go in, so it should at least be weathered by then. Also, interestingly, the llama farmers actually grow their tomatoes and peppers in raised beds filled with nothing but fresh llama poop and a little sand! Apparently, it doesn't burn the way other kinds of manure do. Odd, but convenient.

You can see the poop in action below: we're wrapping a new bed around the pond, and we've sprinkled the area generously with llama offerings. Next paycheck (probably) we'll buy topsoil and mulch to raise the bed to the level of the pond ledge and hide all the black pond liner.


I can't remember if I've actually shown any pictures of our rock in action. Lovingly hand laid by local artisans (i.e. Matt & me). It was not quite as much work as it looks like, but it was fully every bit as expensive as you might imagine.

We put down groundcloth to keep back the weeds, added 1-2" sand, and laid the rocks on top. In that same paycheck in which we buy topsoil, we'll also buy crushed granite to fill everything in. Till then, the patio's a little dangerous--the rocks aren't at all stable yet, and they like to suddenly pop up and tip you over, as my scraped ankles and elbows attest.

Matt & I have started using it, all the same. The nights have been so beautiful all month that we've been lighting up the fire pit and sitting out by the pond. So serene. It's so strange to really do nothing--not read, not mess around on the internet--nothing. Just look at the stars, watch the fire, and listen to the water. I think it might be good for me.


Our other essential pond project is a modest amount of landscape lighting. We don't often get random drunks or zombies straying across the property, but should one lumber on over, I don't want them falling in the pond. Also, it's slightly easier to balance safely on the flagstones if you can see them (the flagstones, that is, not the zombies. Though those too, come to think of it).

We've got the transformer, wires, and a handful of fixtures, but we need about 10 more path lights and we still need to hook it all together. Still, you can see the two that will go at the edge of the terrace in the picture below. Hopefully, they'll be fairly unobtrusive but still effective. I'm not looking for the full-on LET-THERE-BE-LIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!! Effect--just some subtle glowy spots to prevent bloodshed.


Meanwhile, amidst all this progress, some sad news: I can't find Safety First anywhere. I've looked for him every time I've been out there, but no sign so far. We haven't lost any of our adults up to the point--I wouldn't have thought the cautious Safety First would have been the first to go. But perhaps he sacrificed himself heroically, distracting a voracious heron that was eying the small fry. If so, it was not in vain--I counted over 30 baby/adolescent fish yesterday. You may be gone, Safety First, but your legacy lives on.

Back to the Pond

We've pretty well let the pond sit for most of July and early August. Come to think of it, we haven't put a lot of effort into the rest of the house/yard either. It, as Ella Fitzgerald so justly observed, is too damn hot. Plus, it's been the season of niecephews: the first of the next generation of both my and my husband's nuclear families were born during the past month (Hello to little Delilah (b. Jul 11) and Andrew (b. Aug 13)!)

But various friends and family members keep threatening to come and see the pond, even in its present, tattered, unfinished, and semi-functional state. So. Time for the next big push: time to buy some stones.

We went to a number of different stone suppliers in town, trying to match the flat, orangey rocks that came with the property and that now partially encircle the pond. After some initial disappointment, we found a good match at Jacobs and Son way out on 620: apparently, we've got something called "Texas Bronze cotton rock," which comes from the San Saba region. So we measured the remaining exposed bits of pond liner and the terrace in front of the pond, and we bought (yeek!) 4 tons of rock, to be delivered this Tuesday. So moving that into place will no doubt be a breeze.

A pallet of Texas Bronze; pic from the Jacobs & Son site. We ordered 3 of these.

A note on the geology: Jacobs and Son lists this as a "cotton rock." The internet draws a blank on "Texas Bronze cotton rock," but cotton rock in general is supposed to be a whitish limestone. So here's the question: have we rimmed our pond in limestone (which would explain the pH problems)? If so, why is it such a brittle and crumbly rock? And what to make of the fact that it's not remotely cotton colored? All are mysteries.

And speaking of pH, I mentioned an entry or two ago that the pond plants looked like hell--even more tip burn and general poutiness than usual, plus the waterlilies were sadly puny and diminished. So it was clearly time to undertake a late summer cleaning of the pond. Bother. So I removed dead leaves and flowers, fertilized the prima donnas (which I really didn't want to do, but they were looking so depressed), and once again tackled the pH.

This time I followed the advice of the Emerald Gardens guy, who said to pump out the top 10 or so inches and replace with fresh water. He also recommended stuffing pantyhose with peat moss and sinking them into the pond for a gentler, long-term buffering action. So I used 1 complete pair of pantyhose (the last in the house--if there's one thing I love about the aughts, it's the demise of pantyhose as a fashion accessory. Lemme tell you, the genie is never going back in that bottle.) I chopped each leg into thirds and made a seventh bundle out of the torso, and I put a piece of broken pavestone into each bundle. Then I deployed them around the pond. Some sank, and some floated for a while, looking like corpses that had been imperfectly hidden; we took to calling the little bundles jimmy hoffas. Eventually, they all sank to the bottom. Not sure it wouldn't have been just as effective to empty the peat bale directly into the pond and let the peat float loose, but the jimmy hoffas are at least a little tidier, if creepy.

And good news! As of this morning, the pH was down from a piping hot 9 or more acceptable solid 8. Let's see if it lasts. The fish continue to endure my experiments with admirable sang froid.

Meanwhile, we're also reshaping the prospective terrace (to bring it closer to the baby Burr oak so as to be able to lounge in shade, once it's big enough to make any), pounding in metal edging to shape the beds around the pond, and making some necessary and long-deferred extensions to the irrigation system (linking the primrose jasmine to the automated system and adding a sprinkler head for a particularly parched abelia in the shade bed).

We didn't finish anything--by 11, I could barely drag my braised and dripping carcass from one end of the yard to the other--but we made noble beginnings.

Patented Rose Grabber, More Baby Fish

Check out my patented Rose Grabbing Horticultural System:

Rose grabbers

I use one in each hand to grab fly-away bits of climbing roses and pull them down to be woven through the gazebo lattice. Obviously they are not, in fact, actually patented, and the method of manufacture is probably pretty self-explanatory. The only other thing you need to know is that it's best to use those dry cleaner coathangers that have a cardboard tube on the bottom: that way, the prongs that stuck into the tube form a convenient rose pushing platform on the opposite end from the hook. Because when you're engaged in rose-taming, sometimes you have to grab, and sometimes you have to push.

Weary Plants, Happy Fish
Meanwhile, the pond is getting clearer, according to some inexplicable internal agenda of its own. Some days it's murky, and some days it's clear. That's all I know. The plants are all starting to look a bit ragged (except the bulrushes, water hyssop, and water clover. Those guys are stout.) I'm not sure if it's the sustained high pH, my dislike of fertilization, or just the fact of its being practically August in Texas, but there's a lot of yellowing and undersized leaves and caterpillar damage and general whininess going on.

To put it in perspective, mind you, there's a lot of the same going on in the rest of the yard, too. We've had an unusually green and pleasant summer, but we've been consistently in the 90s for over month now, and the plants are starting to feel it. The chitalpa's grown into a giant shaggy monster, but the leaves are looking a bit mottled and dull. The Salvia vanhouttii are bloomless and naked from the knees down. The oak-leaf hydrangea blossoms are dark brown and battered. The red verbena are only blooming fitfully. The rose garden is chlorotic and droopy. And on, and on...

In the pond, though, I'm going to experiment with some remediation. I finally broke down and bought some pond plant fertilizer pellets :-( I really dislike the idea of adding any chemicals to the pond that are not strictly necessary, but all the water lilies--especially 'Colorado'--are looking really puny. So, fine. I'll fertilize the damn things. But I don't like it.

I also bought something called barley pellets at the nursery up the street, Bloomers. The copy on the bag was incredibly unpersuasive (it more or less said, "The peat in the pellets will break down and release hydrogen peroxide, which will cause the peat to break down, which will release hydrogen peroxide, which will cause the peat to break down..." Never explained why I would want hydrogen peroxide in my pond. Do I want hydrogen peroxide in my pond? I just don't know) but other sources have spoken of the mosquito-murdering, algae-defeating properties of barley straw, so here's hoping. We do have a lot of that nasty, stringy kind of algae that makes me think of the warriors' hair in Tolkien's Dead Marshes--whitish, wispy, and sinister. Plus with slime!

But slime and weenie plants notwithstanding, the fish are flourishing. They love it when I stir up the muck, so I did that and threw out some fish food in order to take a Census. All of the adult fish are accounted for, including the 2 shubunkins, and now that the water's clearer and the food made the fish extra friendly, I picked out some more identifying features on them all. Like: Safety First's big orange splodge has a sort of nibble taken out of it on the right side, so it's really shaped like a C, not like a circle. Unlike Big Olaf, Thor has a little white frosting on the top of his dorsal fin. Spooky is smaller than Crazy Eye. Bob's irregular white coloration on his belly comes highest up his sides near his head. Lynn's comes up highest on her sides by her tail. Jupiter and Drusilla are the shyest and sulkiest of the lot, even though Jupiter's head splodge is much nicer than Safety First's--bigger and more regularly ovoid. Big Olaf is about 5-1/2 inches long now!

But the biggest news is that I saw five--five!--orange babies at once. Holy cow. I can't give them all different names--they all look the same. I'll just call them Penelope 1 through 5.

There are also at least two babies with lighter orange sides & bellies that have dark grey streaks down their backs and black fins, and there are at least two dully browny-taupe ones that are really hard to see. I get where the Penelopes came from (perhaps I should have named them after the Sharons in Battlestar Galactica? They keep multiplying and I can't tell them apart or remember which one it was that shot Bill Adama), but the others are a complete mystery. Perhaps some neighbor is dumping his unwanted aquarium overflow in our pond?

At any rate, whatever weirdness is going on with the flora, the fauna are having a rockin' good time.

Blurry Pictures of Indistinct Fish

Steven Strawn waterlily with Safety First (sarasa comet) and Thor or Big Olaf (red comets)

Sorry, folks. This is all I've got. Darn fish won't sit still or come up to the surface to be photographed. And the water's been very murky of late. Still, for the very interested, here are some pix of our pond's inhabitants.

I had the most luck photographing the baby orange fish Penelope, who is oddly fearless, and the sarasa comet Safety First. When I first introduced SF to the pond, he was the last to leave the plastic bag he came in and had to practically be poured into his new home (hence the name). Now he swims over to check things out at the least sign of disturbance, nibbles my toes affectionately (okay, that's probably hunger, not affection, but let's just pretend) and has even let me stroke his dorsal fin! What a great fish!

Safety First, who belied his name to become one of the pond's most intrepid explorers

Penelope was the second baby fish we spotted (after Pearl, who has been worryingly AWOL). She's got a light orange splodge down the length of her back, with a white head and tail. None of the grown ups have quite this coloring nor anything like this pattern. I can't help but wonder if some of our pond plants didn't bring a few hitchhiking fish eggs with them when I bought them.

Baby Penelope, who doesn't really look like any of her possible parents

Penelope's odd enough, but some of the other younguns... We've got a dark browny-orange fish with two big grey splodges on its head (as yet unnamed) and one or more dull taupe fish that lighten toward the tail and have black tips on their sheer fins. These in particular don't look like comets at all--they look like some completely different species. Where could they have come from?

A particularly egregious (and now highly doctored) photo of the back end of one of the mysterious brown baby fish

I was (sort of) able to finally capture a shubunkin, which are curiously mottled blue-grey fish. Not sure if this is Spooky or Crazy Eye--they're so elusive that I haven't learned to tell them apart.

A shubunkin and a red comet

And, after several months, I finally got a picture of Bob-or-Lynn, the two goldfish we got from Bob & Lynn at Draco Gardens. I eventually realized that you can tell them from Thor & Big Olaf because B&L are orange on the top and irregularly white on the bottom, while T&BO are orange all over. The difficulty, of course, is convincing them to roll over so I can see their bellies. You can definitely see a white splodge on the top goldfish here, so it's either Bob or Lynn.

Bob-or-Lynn and a friend

The first creatures to move in to the pond were the tadpoles--hundreds upon hundreds of them. We've already gone through several generations, which start out minuscule, like the one below: smaller than a peppercorn. They eventually become scores of tiny, adorable baby toads, and then I'm not really sure what happens to them, because we don't have as many adult toads as one would expect. I'm hoping that Claude, our resident 3-foot ribbon snake, doesn't have anything to do with it.

Tiny tadpoles love to rest on my feet and legs--perhaps they like my mammalian warm-bloodedness? They're cute, but they tickle.

Sometimes the fish congregate together in big groups, but they usually disperse rather quickly.

A cluster of goldfish

6-legged Pond Dwellers
To my surprise, I've discovered that bees seem to really love water hyssop (Bacopa sp., probably B. monnieri). Given all the bad news on the honeybee front these days, I think I'll buy some more of this stuff and give our melliferous friends a nice lakeside buffet. Also, it seems to be harder to drown water hyssop (and clover fern) than it is to drown creeping Jenny and aquatic mint, both of which have been relentlessly whiny since the heavy rains a couple of weeks ago.

Three bees were busy sipping nectar until I whipped out my camera. Then all but one fled. The last one is snuggling up against a stem (above) instead of in a flower. Good luck spotting him.

The other first and most enthusiastic of the pond denizens have been dragonflies and damselflies. I've been amazed at the diversity of colors--mostly electric blues and this lovely neon burgundy, a color I've never seen in dragonflies before.

My camera didn't really do justice to the jewel-like intensity of this dragonfly's coloring. He's a beauty.

And just this morning, this incredibly bright crimson fellow took possession of a Thalia stem and chased the others off.


We've also seen one or two bright green ones and green-headed damselflies with bright blue tips on their tails.

More Steven
And another picture of gorgeous waterlily 'Steven Strawn'. Because I love him. Our camera can't seem to quite capture his unique strawberries-and-cream coloring--he's more red and less pink than this picture would suggest.

'Steven Strawn': not that pink