Mysteries of a tree-ish nature.

There are a few mysteries growing in my wild bed that are starting to look more like trees than is appropriate for a plant living in such close quarters with the garage foundation and front walk.

Any ideas as to the general variety? If they’re this intent on surviving (and miraculously non-invasive and yet invading my bed) I’d like to attempt a transplant. If they are invasive, I’ll have to turn them into soil food.

Nancy Drew requested a close-up on the first one:

And from a distance:

Second on the agenda for Encyclopedia Brown  is this one with a less tree-like habit:

And the Hardy Boys had to have their turn as well. I’m fresh out of Tree-like Mysteries, but here’s a tall mystery all the same:

The story of the Oxalis.

This is not the whole story. The majority of the story is shrouded in mystery and intrigue. This is only the latest chapter.

My mother has an Oxalis. It lives in a pot. If memory serves, the pot lives atop a stereo in the storm corner of the House on a Hill. The stereo plays its stories for the House on the Hill. Ballads and rocky stories. Long sad songs, dancing in the kitchen songs, and teenage acoustic love songs. The Oxalis soaks it all in, root to clover-leaf-tip. It turns up its leaves in protest at times. Turning a sea of dark cheeks to the House. Other days, the sun shines, the wood warms, the rainbows dance along the dust motes and the Oxalis unfurls a blossom. Then two. Then seven. This dance has been going on for decades now. Decades. Plural.

I vaguely recall the Oxalis before the House on the Hill. It resides in a foggy recollection of an indoor passage between dark wood and historic plaster. Although that may have been where the spider plant nested. For all of the spit-shined memories of that life, the Oxalis resides in the recesses. Years before that life, this life, my life, the Oxalis was. It was with my mother for decades prior. Now years ago, not a decade yet, she carefully, lovingly, removed a few of its tubers. A few pockets of life. A few layers of story. She packaged them up. Each in its own small vessel. A twine-handled gift bag, from a birthday or a shower, one carried on in my hand through the air to Texas. The other found its way to a quaint urban kitchen.

My chapter found its home on a mini-fridge in the living room. It inhaled, exhaled, and swelled within its confines. I went on the prowl. A hermit crab for a new shell – not for me, but for this. This life. This story. I found one. Just right. I brought it home only to discover it couldn’t breathe. Carefully. Ever so delicately, as delicately as you can with power tools, I drilled through the shell. It held. I drilled again. Still it held. A third and fourth time. The shell remained whole. The Oxalis moved in. It moved back to the mini-fridge. I waited.

Not once did it flash its upset blush, but neither did it share a blossoming beam of joy with the sun. Again it moved, and again. To a kitchen window sill, to a bathroom’s frosty light, to a guest bed’s bright view of the world it stayed green, but I wasn’t sure it knew how to dance. I wasn’t sure it cared what music was playing, which storms were coming, or knew that wood could warm in the rays.

And then it was too late. They’d found it. They moved in like an army. Soft, white as snow, and innocent as the Ice Queen. I tried to fight them off. I marched into battle each morning, but each night they would emerge with renewed forces. I coaxed the Oxalis to find its strength. It fought valiantly. It drank the elixirs. It sacrificed stalk after stalk in an attempt to save the rest. It withstood painful downpours and finally chemically burns until it could take no more. With a heavy heart weighted with loss and defeat, I set the scarred, empty soil, still in its shell, outside. I couldn’t stand to bury it just yet.

Spring came and went. Summer landed with an earth-vibrating heat, and the empty shell baked in the outdoor oven. It was the least of my worries. I scurried here and there, begging my seedlings to hang on. I arranged shelter for them in the garden. I collected empty pots full of lost causes on the front porch waiting for an afternoon to re-sow. To re-plant. To try again.

It was months later before the heat broke and I’d thought I’d found such an afternoon. I soaked the empty pots gathered on the porch in preparation. I gathered my seeds. I gathered my notes. I gathered myself. And I was called away. I was needed over here. That bed needed me there. Work needed me out of town. And again. And again.

And there it was. A little bent hiccup. A little elbow of green. I gasped. I showed DH. He grinned at me and nodded. The Oxalis was returning. Marching slowly, steadily, it was returning and this time, it knew just what to do.

 

Color me touched!

Shannon over at Dirt n Kids gave me an award! I feel so special.

I was really excited to have found her blog. It’s not very often that I find another gardener with a blog who is also in Texas. Nevermind that she writes great posts about her gardens, and her family, and BUGS! (and lizards! and compost! oh, my!) I thoroughly look forward to her posts when they appear in my Reader.

I’m not terribly sure how this award business works, so forgive me if I break protocol. I gather that I’m supposed to share random information about myself now? Let’s see…

  • I’m a fairly private person. As much as “overshare” has become a thing in our vocabularies these days, I would be much more guilty of being an “undersharer” than an “oversharer.”
  • I didn’t know the name of my favorite flower for the first six years it was my favorite flower.
  • My favorite flower is the blossoms on a Pride of Barbados. I don’t actually have one in my yard (yet.)
  • I like bacon more than I think most people do. I probably eat a pound of it a week.
  • Before I gardened, I made quilts. I still haven’t finished the last quilt I made (sorry, Brother and Sis-in-law!)
  • I don’t actually like to eat tomatoes, jalapenos, onions, cucumbers, or a handful of other things that I like to grow.
  • I played soccer for thirteen years growing up. I started up again a couple years ago. I dropped it again this past spring. I miss it and plan to start up again in the fall. As my mother said, if I want to do it, I’d better do it while I still can! 😉

As for who bring sunshine into my days?

Marie over at Garden Fresh Tomatoes aka My Little Corner of Rhode Island really does. Not only is there actual sunshine in many of her pictures, she’s so real and full of sunshine herself!

And Claire over at Promenade Plantings also brightens my days! She not only takes great photos, but has a real down to earth (ha!) perspective that I find simply refreshing.

 

 

 

Garden time?

Work has been swallowing up my days more than usual these past few weeks. I’m happy if I can disengage after a 12 hour day. When I get to this level, where 12 hours is a normal day…the garden suffers.

I drove by a community center today, a couple of gyms, and a handful of churches, and thought about the people who also travel for business, and find their peace in a workout, or in a temple, and they can find those things while they are out of town on business. It made me wish there were such a place. A place where I could go pull a few weeds. A place where I could go play in the dirt for a minute. A place to take a breath and sit and pause for a moment.

Enjoy your gardens for me. I miss mine.

I’ll see if I have a draft hanging around to share with you before I can make it back home, and back to the earth.

Onions from seed: Attempt number six.

My fall garden is planned. It’s sketched. It’s charted. It’s timeline-ed. And this year, I’m also ready with Plan B through Plan E so that I don’t encounter the same issues as last year and spend most of my winter with an unnecessarily empty garden.

I ordered my garlic, some Chiogga beet seeds (because Cylindra was just too tiny for my tastes), and have had my seed trays going for awhile now – cat interruptions aside. I have have plenty of greens seeds, carrot seeds, and other plotted plants seeds leftover from previous trips to the drug dealers seed catalogs…

I tried to order my onion starts. Sold out.

I tried another farm. Sold out.

Another, and another. They all ship January through May and are asking me to check back this fall, to pre-order for next spring.

Well, crap. A decent section of space has been designated onion space. I know our climate will allow for onions planted in October. Apparently the climates of those who sell onion starts are a different story.

I recently learned the difference between Short Day Onions and Long Day Onions (who knew?) and that solved the Mystery of the Failed Onion Seeds of 2009. The Puzzling Case of the Attempts of 2010, 2011, and 2012? Still puzzling.

They germinate just fine, as seen here in January:

And they gain some height just fine, as seen here shortly thereafter:

And that’s about as far as I can get them. From that stage, they put out itty bitty little white legs, that may or may not be roots, and try their hardest to die while I try my hardest to keep them alive.

I have a three-pronged approach this year.

  1. Richer seed-starter mix. I learned this past spring that onions are hungry little guys, but want the food far from their root zone. This will be for the indoor attempt.
  2. The bird method. Meaning I’ll prep the soil where I want the onions in the fall, sprinkle the seed, and water if needed. Otherwise, I’m going to leave them be and see if I’m just getting in nature’s way.
  3. Order onion starts from a company that ships as early as December. If my indoor sowings and outdoor sowings both fail, we can still have onions.

Anyone out there grown onions from seeds before? Any tips to getting them from leggy little blades of green to actual plants?

An Anaheim Tower.

Speaking of plants that can withstand  the heat but are admitting their guilty pleasures (6″ inches of rain in 30 minutes) – the Anaheim has gone bonkers!

I picked all the Anaheims last Sunday, and this Sunday – these aren’t even all of them. DH already had the grill fired up for some hot sauce brown sugar chicken, so they found their way over the flames and into our bellies less than an hour from harvest.

The rest of the peppers aren’t to be outdone!

We have three little poblanos that were left to redden-up on the vine, a purple bell that decided to go a little green?, and an orange bell that’s looking more red to me. Oh, and a pile o’ jalapenos, fish peppers, and cayenne. As you can see, the tomatoes have slowed down. The Cherry Chadwicks are still going, the yellow pears are making an effort, and a previously unproductive red cherry variety (whose name I lost track of) has just started up. I lost a few multi-pound Black Princes, Zapotecs, and others to the birds and the bugs during my neglect, but that’s ok. They’re thirsty, or hungry, and my freezer has plenty of tomatoes in it already. (Unless the hungry bugs are squash bug nymphs. Then it is most definitely not ok and they find their way under the sole of my boot in no time.)

Ever planning ahead as I look behind, I can’t forget to show my appreciation for the prolific output of this plant by saving its genes again for next year.

For anyone who hasn’t saved pepper seeds before, it really is that easy. Scoop them out, lay them on a paper towel (label your paper towel!), and let them alone until everything’s dry and crunchy. Fold up the paper towel, wrap a rubber band around it, and store it with any other seeds you sow at the same time.

Sweet potatoes bought and grown.

In the foreground are the sweet potatoes, followed by the pepper patch, and finished up with the tomato jungle. Nevermind the leaning shovel and sunhat taking center stage.

Isn’t the foliage on the fish pepper lovely? I didn’t expect a varigated leaf from the description on the seed packet, but am absolutely adoring this plant (and it grows a lot of peppers!) DH says they taste like “a jalapeno bite without the jalapeno heat.”

The things I’ve read on sweet potatoes say how much they don’t need watering once established. They sure do seem to like the water we’ve had lately though. They’re trying to escape their bed, climb the corner post, and move into pepper territory.

Those are the sweet potatoes that sprouted in my pantry, that I cut into thirds, dusted with diatomaceous earth, and buried. I did buy some sweet potato sprouts this year as well. Let’s check in on their progress…

Unless the pantry potatoes are all show and no potato, I know what I’ll be doing again next year…

Calamine, calamine, calamine lotion…

Oh, no no no, not the lotion.

The mild mannered attempts at fire ant removal are a thing of the past. Today, while pulling grass from beneath the tomatoes, I felt a bite. Not at all new, as each visit to the beds awards me with anywhere from one to three bites usually, and usually on my ankles. This time, the bite was on my forearm. I looked down.

My entire leather glove was black and red. My arm, nearly to my elbow, looked like it had been dipped in a teeming ooze of fire ant. Angry, and mildly terrified, I quickly ripped my fire-ant-clad glove from my hand with my other gloved hand, and dropped it to the ground. I beat my poor arm like it wasn’t attached, dislodging as many fire ants as I could with each swat. It worked. So well, in fact, that the ants had rained down and grabbed hold of my thighs, my calves, and my shoes. I beat them off as well. When I was satisfied that I had no more on me, I gingerly picked up my fallen glove and beat it soundly against a board. Ditching both gloves to be abandoned by any possible hangers-on, I went for the hose and doused my arm in cool water.

Thankfully, while allergic, it’s not a life threatening allergy. I got to feel a little light headed and a fair bit of woozy for the rest of the afternoon, and this evening I’ve watched the swollen white welts turn to a swollen red arm, turn yet again into the usual little blisters the ant bites leave behind. Although this time they’re tinged with green, instead of the usual creamy yellow. I’ll try not to think about it.

Within the hour I was at Green and Growing picking up a bag of organic fire ant bait. If the weather holds, the onslaught will commence at sunset tomorrow.

In the meantime, I did not think to run for the camera when I saw my arm coated in crawling fire, but I did notice a previous nest had grown. Remember the failed ant trap? It’s time to show you its neighbors.

They were a bit peeved that I had just watered the earth they had claimed as their own. I gave them a wide berth.

Enough about the ants though, there are still some plants growing thanks to this lovely mild-for-us summer.

 

I’m not sure who ordered all of last summer’s rain at once, but…thank you?

I only had my phone camera, so the quality leaves much to be desired, but I simply had to capture this moment. This piece, I call: “Car? What car? There’s not a car in the next lane…”

The second installment in this piece is entitled: “Field? There’s a soccer field? Where?”

Alternate title: The Sidewalk River

And finally, the piece fretfully called: “Hang in there, bridge!”

This beast of a washed out gully is usually dry, and occasionally a trickle any small child could hop across, or adult could take in stride. By morning the water had all drained away, filling our aquifer, engorging the Colorado, making its way to the Gulf. No one here complains about the rain. Not after last year. Instead, children run barefoot from their homes once the danger of being swept into storm drains has passed. People gather on concrete bridges to watch the water rush underfoot. Everyone is grinning, ear to ear, cameras in hand. Why? Because this year, those thunderheads are unzipping their buckets of sky water. This year, the trees are going to survive. This year, the fires don’t have a chance. This year, the farmer’s do. Before last year, the record of days in a row over 100 degrees was 21 days, last year was 27 days in a row over 100 degrees. Total days over 100 degrees? That record was 69 days (set in 1925 and tied 2009, I believe.) Last year? 85. Three months worth of triple digit days. We also tied our hottest day ever at 112. The heat may not have been so bad had it not been for the complete lack of rain. It rained for four days in January, 2011. It didn’t rain again, not a single drop, until the first week of June. When it rained perhaps 20 drops. (The sidewalk had spots about 18″ apart, that dried within a minute.) It didn’t rain again until September, when it rained, so much so that I took pictures!

(yes, those dark spots are all of the rain we got.) Nothing again until November. The drought last year was the worst drought on record. Not by a little bit, or even a medium bit, but worse than the 2nd worst draught by more than double. Even with our rain this year (plentiful and glorious as it is!) we have yet to recover. They predict it will take years to recover. Nevermind the loss of trees, wildlife, and those who lost land, homes, and lives in the fires. The evacuations reached within 4 miles of our home, but luckily the winds shifted.

So we’ll take the rain. Every single nourishing drop. And this year, the complaints about the heat have ceased already. August will be a scorcher, but that’s ok. August is supposed to be a scorcher. Today is the first triple digit day in weeks and with the perspective of last year still fresh in our minds, we are each grateful for the last few weeks of 90s and thunderstorms.