Rainy Days and Grateful Mondays

Any chance of rain is welcome. These clouds helped reduce water use this week and lowered the electric bill.

It kinda bothers me when I hear the weather forecasters apologizing for rain in the forecast. I look forward to rain, and we have had a little this week. Not much—only about .7” over three or four days, depending on how you count. But that has been enough.

I was able to forgo watering the lawn this week (even if the neighbors didn’t), and I only had to water the least drought-tolerant planties once since Wednesday. The rest are doing very well indeed on the available water.

But wait! Isn’t water the new oil? Why is ELAB watering at all?

OK. Suna did a really good job picking low-maintenance (if not xeric) plants, but we have added more color this year. Some of these, particularly the lobellias that have already gone, the sweet potato vine, and the coleuses that get the most sun are thirsty buggers. I don’t water the lawn more than once a week, no matter how it complains, and I try to limit watering the garden to what is absolutely necessary. I don’t want to waste water. You won’t find runoff from the lawn watering flowing down the gutter to the storm drain, but I do water enough to keep my little planties from shriveling up and blowing away.

So that is why I am grateful for any rain we get—even when it storms and floods. This week’s rain didn’t do anything to alleviate our first stage drought, but it did let us hold our own for another week. The overcast also kept the temperatures down into the lower-to-mid-nineties. That reduced evaporation and kept the air conditioning from running quite so much. For all of that, I am grateful this Monday.

Heat Kills: A Gardening Ramble

These poor phlox keep trying. They looked so good just a few days ago.

My garden is suffering under the sun’s merciless onslaught. The John Fannick phlox have withered, as would most of the other plants if I failed to give them their daily watering, and the lobelias are gone.

Mr. Stripy is still barren as is the newcomer. Shaking the plants and threatening them doesn’t do any good. I am beginning to think that the pollinators prefer the other flowers to the tomatoes. In a couple of weeks, I will pull up Mr. Stripy and plant a rank of fall tomatoes from a real nursery.

Even the sunflowers that Beccano insisted we plant (I grew up thinking of them as weeds—sorry, any Kansans who stumble on this post.) are wilting in the unrelenting solar oven we call a climate.

The remnants of the last tropical storm to hit the Texas coast brought us ¾” of rain. It took less than two days for that relief to become only a vague memory. The storm that hit yesterday brought us almost nothing. It did keep the temperatures down to the upper 90s for a couple of days, so I’m not complaining.

One star is the Jacobi, which is flowering again.

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11 August Update: Added phlox photo taken at the time but not uploaded.

It’s a Dry Heat

Lobelia Queen Victoria in bloom

I determined that the problem with the lobelias is the heat, not the amount of water, although frequent watering does seem to help them cope with the heat. Last night, I came home with what I call a migraine—a splitting headache that starts where the skull attaches to the neck and tortures the head forward to the eyes. It often encompasses only one lobe. Last night it was the left. Pain relievers like aspirin or ibuprofen don’t touch it.

I know this isn’t a real migraine. But the symptomatology is similar, and the pain is equivalent (level 3-4). These headaches stem from “something being out” in my spine or neck. The only cure I know of is to lay flat on my back with my neck supported on a “dog bone” pillow for eight to twelve hours. That’s what I did last night.

Anyway—as I dragged myself to the front door, I noticed that the lobelias were sagging almost as much as I was. Oh, god, I thought. I’ve got to water them or I might lose them. But I didn’t. I laid down for an hour or so, ate dinner, and went back to bed. Suna was really patient with me and took excellent care.

When I remembered to check on the lobelias this morning, they had perked back up. They have lovely, delicate flowers that remind me of bromeliads: delicate, colorful petals along a long, graceful neck. I will post a photo this evening when I get home and can work on it.

Lobelia Sadness

Now that we’ve had three days in a row that approached the century mark, it turns out that the lobelias (Queen Victoria) are not as happy as I thought they were. They get a bit droopy if I forget to water them twice a day. Although they were listed as full sun and are planted where they only get that in the afternoon, they apparently are not rated for Texas sun. Sigh.

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6/2/08 Update: The Backyard Gardener identified the problem for me. Queen Victoria, “Prefers moist, rich soil and will continue to self-sow once established.” And a table lists “Water Range: Normal to Moist.” Unless you live in a river bottom, nothing in Central Texas can be considered “normal to moist.” Everything here is well drained. This certainly explains my the lovely LQV wants so much water.

Compost Happens, and You Can Waller in It, Too

Me loading my new compost sifter

Photo by: Beccano

After mowing and watering, I spent the rest of the day today building this compost sifter. I found a set of plans to fit a standard wheelbarrow here, but I didn’t want to bend over that much. So I modified the plans to fit my planting table. (Yes, that is a recycled shower pan.)

Other than one piece of 2x4 and the ½-inch hardware cloth, it is made of recycled materials. (There is an interesting story about the guy who worked in Home Depot’s hardware department not knowing what hardware cloth is, but I’ll save that for another time.) Later, I found another 2x4 in the scrap pile that would have let me say this sifter was made of 100% recycled wood. Sigh.

Heaving the unfinished compost into the wheelbarrow

Photo by: Beccano

I put two forks of compost in the tray. As I move the tray back-and-forth with some gusto, the finished compost falls through the hardware cloth onto the planting table. I dump what remains into the wheelbarrow. I repeat the process. This time, I leave the tray in the wheelbarrow and scrape all of the finished compost down the drain. It falls into a small bucket on the tray under the table. Three of the small buckets fills a large cat litter container, and I take the finished compost to wherever I want to distribute it.

These Queen Victorias are some of the happy plants getting ready to bloom.

It took a little over two hours today for me to process my whole pile and distribute the finished compost. The plants all said, “Thank you, Lee.” I heard them.

Once I finish working the pile, I put fresh compostables (from cleaning out the fridge) at the bottom and move all of the unfinished compost from the wheelbarrow and other temporary storage devices back into the pile.