Milestones and Progress

Progress, Meeting Milestones, Encouraging Tomorrows

These are exciting and rewarding times. 

Planting Potted Plants — Done

We've finally planted ALL the seedlings and cuttings we moved here. 

Big, big sigh. Starting with an original 800 pots a couple of months before we moved, losing a quarter to shock before they were planted, and giving away several dozen fragile susceptibles once we recognized their survival odds, we're so relieved to move beyond the yet-to-plant stage. No more guilt that anyone is left suffering in a pot in the corner, and we can all focus on doing our part to make lives successful.

A Tree Planted — Done

Take for example one of our recent plantees, currently our largest, a tree. (Let's not talk about the 8' duranta tree we planned as a focal of the back yard.) This is a plumeria from my master gardener friend, Jessica, who gave this to us in early spring 2014.  It's hung in there in a relatively smallish, temporary pot that wanted to be watered daily. And now it's blooming happily. Jessica will be happy. Hopefully, its few brown, burnt leaf edges are just the familiar shock stage it's going through, and new leaves will arrive and stay simply green. 

 To Baby Them or Not to Baby Them

We've now officially abandoned the philosophy of our native-purist friends who preach No Soil Additives, who claim plants will eventually stop growing once their roots venture beyond the additive, and should learn the reality of their environment from the start. They claim plants should either take what nature provides or die. Too many of ours choose door number two, so now we're doing a series of additives that include compost, peat, and expensive flower-saver dust that's supposed to prevent the shock of going into our quick(death)sand. Our results vary. The toxic composition to some extent affects essentially everything that wasn't born here.

These are a few that were NOT babied with anything other than water and toxic sand, and yet still are willing to reward us with their color.

Finally, one of the Pride of  Barbados blooms (Caesalpinia pulcherrima) accompanied by two Yellow sohora (Sophora tomentosa)   One of the stronger lantanas in pink and orange Native volunteers who joined the palm somewhere in the past More volunteers Pentas and sweet potato vine continue to expand their friendship I'm so pleased my that two of the three red lantanas my mom gave me are blooming, even if leaves are sparse

I didn't remembering having a native Turk's Cap! (Malvaviscus drummondii) One of two lone survivors out of more than a dozen, a Rock Rose (Pavonia lasiopetala) Numerous Mexican ruellias who self-seeded into pots of supposedly more desirable plants that died bring us gorgeous purple Another one at a different time of day The plumbago had a hard adjustment but won't give up, putting out a flower every now and again My white curse strikes again... this crepe myrtle was a volunteer in Austin five years ago, though there were no white ones visible in the neighborhood

Big Progress in Path and Circle Bed Definition

This is a very exciting topic because it involves the actual form and configuration of the yard. You recall one of our first pre-move yard tasks was designing a circle bed in a back corner, and after using little flags to mark the form and shape, then using marking spray paint, we've now had the time to move on to adding sand berms and river rocks to define all the outlines. 

In a mailing in my inbox today, I saw this affirming line: 

Psychological studies on design find that curves and rounded shapes elicit stronger positive emotions than do straight lines and hard corners. Rounder forms are linked to feelings of relaxation and areas of the brain associated with reward. 

Said outlines now also define most of the pathways. Odd looking so far? Perhaps to you. 

Glorious to us. Watching structure be born and evolve is spectacularly satisfying.

It was a Wild Critter Weekend

Besides toads and birds, we don't get too many close encounters with the wild things that wander here. This weekend brought us slightly closer than usual to two regular visitors.

Meet Critter One
It started early Saturday morning just after midnight. I woke to Ray waking me by taking hold of my feet as he stood at the end of the bed, startling me from a perfectly nice dream. He said, "I need your help. There's something in the garage." Ray is never the waker and always sleeps later than I do by one to three hours, so this unusual situation was cause for notice. Not to mention that something in the garage is generally a reason to pay attention in most any situation. My first question clarified an important distinction, "Is it a person?" and, "No, I think it's a critter of some kind." 

How bad could this be? Not a toad, not a bird, so that leaves... wait a minute. Remember those raccoon prints I saw yesterday on the garage floor in the powdery dust the electrician made when he added wiring for an additional outside light? Clearly, a raccoon had wandered in — fine — and then hid behind a box and got trapped there once the doors were down. Now that we've cleaned out nearly all the unpacked boxes and moved the cars in, it ought to be simple for two of us to locate it and chase it out. Let's go.

We go downstairs and stand ready at the door to the garage. "Let's open the garage doors, get in there, and start chasing. Ready, go...." In we go and THERE'S THE RACCOON! It's a slim, young adult, races across the floor, attempts to get away by climbing one side of the metal tracks the garage door rolls up, and as it reaches the ceiling... it jumps into the hole in the ceiling the electrician made and didn't close up, and disappears!

We both simultaneously let out a very, very long "Ooooooooh!," both sadly knowing that this situation just became very much more complicated.

We leave the garage door open about a foot and go back to bed, hoping it will make its exit, but noise a while later lets us know it isn't done with us. We raise the door to two feet, making the outside more attractive, we hope, and go back to bed. What else was there to do? Perhaps put back the things it had knocked off of shelves, or restack my hundreds of carefully size-sorted and stacked plant pots that lay in a jumbled mess across the floor? 

This is NOT our raccoon, but is as cute as ours was.

Fast forward more than 12 hours later and we've bought a humane critter trap (which coincidently happened to be on sale at the local Tractor Supply store), Ray has set it up, and I've helped place it into a tight surrounding of boxes and heavy things that keep the critter from reaching from the side through the bars to steal the cat food bait without going inside. (I've seen nice raccoons in action before when Liz's visiting cats spent the night on the front porch in a wire cage.) We go to bed, we sleep, no more noise, no disarray. Oh good. Looks like we no longer have a critter, but we have a nice trap for next time. A happy ending for all involved.


Meet Critter Two
We'd seen evidence of this bothersome second critter in our yard on several occasions, which we'd anticipated for years before even moving in, knowing it and its kin live in abundance all along the islands. This one didn't come inside, but I was about as close to it as the nice raccoon as I went out to discourage it that same morning.

Imagine the scene. It's Sunday morning and I've been sleeping a little while after the excitement of the raccoon. Suddenly, I hear a noise and jump out of bed to go chase the raccoon again. But wait, the noise is Ray in his office -- he couldn't sleep and has been trying to be quiet so I could rest. I get him to take a turn going back to bed and, knowing from experience that I won't be able to sleep again, I go into the kitchen, drink hot tea, and find things on my computer to run my eyes over. I get so tired of that nonsense that I think surely I can sleep because I can't clearly can't think. The sky is bright, but a morning nap could help get me to church, which I promised I'd do after taking the summer off. I start down the stairs and stop to look out at our slowly evolving yard. Little plants, some brown-leafed, some getting greener. The outline of a small berm of sand running alongside the interestingly-shaped beds that define their edges. The pile of noticeably grayer sand in the middle of a bed.  Wait, whaaat? And movement in the center. A critter, going down into a hole and coming back up with an armful of sand, which it pushes out into the bed. Its little brown head looks around each time it comes up, then back it goes for another load. A dreaded pocket gopher whose piles we've seen several times finally makes itself visible to our world.

We've seen the piles of sand all over the island, read about the little gophers and how annoying they are, the damage they can do eating plants, the way they can disfigure a yard. And there is ours, doing its annoying little job, almost completely covering the nice tropical milkweeds beside the hole. Wait... wasn't that particular milkweed bushier than that? Oh, little gopher has had some breakfast.

This is NOT our gopher, but is how ours looked.

I wouldn't want to hurt our critters, but I want to discourage this one. Just then, Ray gets up, so I point out the creature for his viewing pleasure, knowing he also wants to know all he can about those we share our property with. Then, as he watches, out I go and in it goes, hiding from me. (We like this reaction in our critters.) I turn on the hose and give the new tunnel a proper baptism... the water runs and runs, seemingly filling a swimming pool size void. Enough of that. Next comes a refilling of sand into the entrance and plenty of stomping, and though all of this is probably not at all anything more than an inconvenience for little gopher pal, the goal is to be annoying and discouraging. And I do thank it for the gift of the nice pile of sand to shore up the bed's border. 

The Plague of Egypt or We Love Our Zillions of Toads

We thought we'd have a single crop of toads after the winter rains came, but new batches keep joining the herd. From tiny little dot toads to cute thumb-sized versions to the four-inchers. When I join them at 4 a.m., they're everywhere and so appreciative of the drip from the overfull rain barrel (which collects AC condensation) and the bowls of water I provide. At least some seem to be Gulf Coast toads, Bufo valliceps, or Coastal-Plain toads, Bufo nebulifer, both of which seem to have light center back stripes. Which do you think they are? 

Usually, they just hop, though sometimes they hide in my clogs and surprise me, or just sit in the water. Once, there was a larger toad seemingly trying to eat a small one, which was large enough to have gotten firmly stuck in the mouth. Normally, I try to leave nature alone for fear of naively making a poor choice, but the big toad was trying to push the little one out, so I gave it a tiny helpful pull on a wigglying foot, and ploop, off they went in their separate directions. Life before dawn is full of adventure. And groups of prowling toads are preferable to coyotes, at least that's my current position.

Live free or die

If you missed the explanation last time, many of the plants we've bred this past year or so and moved here have died from stress while waiting for our truckloads of sand to be shaped into a yard. Or we planted them and they died from salt shock. This includes most of the small, healthy little lantanas we recently bought in an end-of-spring closeout. Sad. They must have had the salt-tolerance bred out of their ancestry, so they've chosen the latter choice of New Hampshire's infamous Live Free or Die motto -- death. Or maybe their roots will revive in September and at least a few will bounce back. We're giving them water and the rest is up to them. Ya gotta be tough lantanas, or we'll rip you out of the ground. (Actually, we won't. We'll leave the roots to hold the sand in place.) Here's one of the rare ones that is not giving up.

Living Free

Here are several others that are doing OK.

Hidden within the nice blanket flower (imported from the continent, not the island native variety) is a tiny Mexican fan palm, Washingtonia robusta, we dug from a friend's yard, which then lived in a tiny pot for a year. Small, stunted, brown-tipped, but accepting the challenge of its new life. This small set of our purple trailing lantanas, Lantana montevidensis, which I thought we'd have everywhere, is doing quite well. I still want a couple of hundred of these to cascade down the slopes. Another trailing lantana, a store-bought gold one of two Ray came across and surprised me with. It and its sibling love it here and never even blinked when they tasted the salty sand. Ray's pentas, which — like the dollar lantanas — came from the markdown rack, but are holding up without a care. Wait... are these pentas or am I confusing them? Is this a green thread, Betty? I did a 7-mile nature walk on Austin's Onion Creek back in the day and the master naturalist leader referred to them as ADYFs. Another damn yellow flower.

A gift from my mom years ago and planted in Austin, we ripped this red lantana from the ground to make the move south with us. It and its two siblings were was doing great until we realized their roots had snuck out into the ground. They never forgave us from putting an end to that, and pouted for the next two years. This one seems to have made it while its two sisters found the salt to be the final insult.  This Oyster plant looked gorgeous all winter and then suddenly began losing leaves and almost died when spring came. As soon as it felt the sand around its roots, it was reborn and is delighted with its new life. We could use more of this keeper. Ray read a gardening column in the Sunday newspaper and was reminded of this plant he likes, a sweet potato vine. Beware a man with a credit card. This is one of two and was taken a couple of weeks ago, so now they've doubled in size. One has grown considerably toward the wind, which occasionally likes to flip it over like a bad comb-over. The most noticeable of all island natives, the silverleaf sunflower,  Helianthus argophyllus. They grow to 7' tall and get close to that in width. This one is now about 3' tall, which is close to as large as I let ours get. I remove their lower limbs, which makes them more tree-like, then shorten them into an oddly shaped bush. I want their sand-stabilizing roots, but don't like their encroachment style.

Why Kill Expensive Trees?

We had planned on purchasing three tall, expensive palm trees to give our front yard a mature look, but if past behavior predicts future behavior, we feared we'd possibly be risking their lives to the dreaded salt-death. It's heartbreaking to watch free seedlings die, but killing store-bought trees that cost muchos dineros and involve additional delivery and planting charges brings on emotions beyond sadness. 

Instead, we decided to take advantage of a mid-summer palm inventory-reduction we wandered into, and brought home a half-dozen young Mediterranean palms marked down from between $100-220 to $10. What fun we had planting the first three by the light of the full moon before dawn. It was noticeably more fun than planting the other three after work when the Death Star was giving its final pre-setting blast. 

See them looking like three little asterisks on the far right of this photo (taken from the third level looking toward the street). To the left of the palms are several yuccas and thornless cactus. The other two groupings mid-picture and towards the left are Washington robusta palms. See the row of little circles above the curve of the dry creek bed in the front-left quadrant? It's a ribbon of Agave americanas, aka century plants, of varying sizes, most of which were rescued from their mother's stalk, prematurely cut while the pups were still underdeveloped and rootless, carelessly thrown to the curb. The second such ribbon is to the right of the driveway. Ribbons are helping take care of the 200+ plants I could never get rid of after saving them. Please don't let them all bloom the same year or you'll be able to see them from the moon.

Hey Jude, Hey Sister Soul Sister, Hey-Ho

After each planting session, we add a layer of hay around each plant and its surrounding slope to protect its sand from the dreaded erosion brought about by the rain gods, Zeus or Jupiter or whomever is reported to be in charge. Or maybe it's the goddess of sand, Psamathe, who might be watching over it.

See the goldish hay, only partially covering the yard so far. This photo shows the other three Mediterranean palms on the far, with cactus on their right, and more Washington palms. Native volunteers are bottom center.

We've done other planting alongside the east side of the house, but they're to small to be seen from the third level.


The last two photos of the day.

The house p.m. shadow

The house a.m. shadow