Another Hot, Dry Saturday in August

The kids use a grid like this to play. When I was a kid, we had to draw our own grids on graph paper and the DM never commented about the accuracy of what we drew.

I’m taking a break to cool off and write this short update. Suna is on sabbatical with some of her friends this weekend, but I’m holding down the home front.

Mr. Stripey is gone. I ripped him out of the ground and ran over him with the mulching mower. Mostly, he is now part of my compost pile. The good news is that I now have room to plant a couple of fall tomatoes, and the unnamed variety that Suna bought now has a fruit. That little ’mater signed Mr. Stripey’s death warrant.

One of the New Guinea Impatiens I transplanted to the front yard has also returned to the earth. About a week ago, it just started dying back. I cut the affected stalk off, but the others soon followed and left a gaping hole. I haven’t got a clue why. The others in the bed are all very happy.

Not much else is going on. TubaBoy brought over a bunch of male friends, and they played D&D late into the night. They were not overly boisterous, but they did make enough noise to let me know they were having fun. Mostly, I tried to stay out of their way and let them have fun. Maybe sometime they will let me play, too. I really enjoyed that game when I was their age, but I stopped playing when I couldn’t find anyone who was interested.

Oh, and I’m putting up some shelves in the guestroom closet. I can get some of my books out of boxes that way. Let’s hope we get some rain tonight. I’ve been doing my part: leaving car windows open and watering the lawn when it clouds up, but still no measurable rain.

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18 August Update: The kids played again last night. I was able to update the picture to reflect their actual game area. Sigh! I guess I’m getting too old to really want to stay up all hours of the night to play. They didn’t get started until after Suna and I had gone to bed, old fuddies that we are.

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.

Shaking Hands with Mr. Stripey

Suna stands in front of Mr. Stripey

It’s funny how a small thing can lead seamlessly to a big thing.

Mr. Stripey has put out lots of wonderful foliage. (BTW, he is taller than she is, even when she stands at the same level.) He has even put out a few of those ugly yellow flowers, but so far, no fruit! I have begun to wonder if Mr. Stripey is shaking hands with Mr. Happy. I had always thought that was OK for tomatoes. Can’t they self-pollinate?

Well, just in case they can’t, Suna and I went shopping for a friend. We bought another variety of tomato, a pretty John Fannick phlox, and a trio of rose bushes. These are the first roses for this address. Of course, we don’t have any place to plant them.

So I took out a chunk of my original front flowerbed. I’m going to run it down the side of the house in a nice windy meander. And you know what? July is a freeking hot time of year to do that!

The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty

New raised bed with retaining wall

We are all just flowers in God’s garden

That is why He spreads the shit around

—David Byrne

This weekend was spent doing what Robert Heinlein called “pick and shovel work to prolong life.” OK. It wasn’t so much to prolong life as to make the yard look better.

Yesterday I built a nice retaining wall and flower bed. It was the first time I had ever built this kind of wall. The hard part is getting the first row of stones level. After that it takes care of itself. It will be nice. We can sit on the wall to weed the bed, and I can reach the center of the bed from all of the edges.

The picture is the finished product, but Suna posted a couple of pictures of the work in progress, if you’re interested. Beccano even helped turn the dirt and mix in the garden soil.

Today, we bought a little more soil and the plants for the bed. I turned in the additional soil. The local soil has very little organic material—something I hope to rectify over the next few years. Then the plants went in.

Catelina Midnight Blue

Beccano’s choice

Suna wanted red petunias to carry forward the red theme. I bought a tomato (Mr. Stripey) and some sweet basil). I planted the petunias a couple of inches in from the center of each top stone. Then I made another row a few inches in from that. I planted 10-15-Y onions in between each onion. (Can you guess which song I couldn’t get out of my head? Right—except these were onions in a petunia patch.) The tomato and the basil (turns out there were two in the same pot) are in the center.

Then I went to work finishing the new gate I started yesterday when Suna and Beccano went to the home store to buy the rest of the rocks I needed to build the retaining wall. It turned out beautifully…except that I laid the skeleton down the wrong direction. So I built the prettiest gate I have ever made up-side-down and backwards. So since I was running out of daylight, I repaired the old dog-chewed gate enough to last the season.

The good news is that I used 5/8” staples. When I picked up the new gate, one of the boards popped off. So I shouldn’t have too much trouble taking it apart and rebuilding it. Sigh. It’s like erasing a whole sock of knitting, but with a lot more physical labor.