Structure Changes

Sharing the Love

Others love the flowers more than we do and for reasons more important than their beauty — and here's one showing the love. I like the shots of the critters most, this one made possible by Ray happening to be on the porch for a sunset viewing when it came by.

Butterfly friends, can you please ID our friend?





Concrete Snuggling with Raised Beds

Here's the new elevated hot tub pad in the back-right corner of the yard with its somewhat smoothed slopes. Notice the concrete stepping-stone path Ray and I installed leading up the slope. We thought this might better protect the slope and offer our feet a chance to rid a little sand gathered getting to this point. I wonder now if it should continue a bit farther down the slope. 

See the german-chocolate-cake look of the area covered with hay to protect it from being blown away by the sometimes gale-like winds. Imagine apricot dwarf oleanders in that bed on the right. Or something narrower. Imagine flowery native ground cover on the slope to the left.

This shot is similar, but from the path leading to the pad.  

The fish chiminea was an early yard-warming gift to ourselves from the past winter's spring home and garden show in town.

Here, you see a walkway going around the pad, and the raised bed to its right, which is a middle-of-the-yard area with walkways on both sides. 

At the end of the bed is the just-added fan palm (marked down at our favorite nursery from $199 to $9.99), which will be a line-sight-breaking bush for numerous years before it realizes it's a tree. 

Moving even farther to the right, this shows the sloping mesa that is the hill the house sits upon. Future tall things are planted there, a Sea Grape (Coccoloba uvifera) and a Green-something bush whose name I cannot remember, but will go back later and look at the pot. We hope to add a few other interesting, tall and colorful additions to the area between the hot tub and the street. I'm thinking Oleander, Esperanza, Cape Honeysuckle. Think drought and salt tolerant.



Cattails, Love 'Em or Hate 'Em
My North Carolina buddy, Natasha, tells me she likes cattails and suggested I should be keeping them, not ripping them out by their stubborn roots every chance I get. I like the way cattails look dancing in the breeze together, but only when they grow in appropriate locations, like water. 

Our neighborhood has eight ponds, all of which have cattails, which is just fine. Our two ponds lie on the side property lines, one southeast and one northwest.Think strong seed-blowing southeast winds every day of the warm months, and northwest for the second half of the double whammy. With all the rain we had last winter and spring, we've had many hundreds of thousands of cattails come up all over our yard. And because they also reproduce by rhizomes, one cattail means two tomorrow, and four the day after. I don't find them attractive towering snugly against small flowering plants or any place but the ponds. 

News flash as we go to press: Yesterday's weed-pulling session revealed there are cattails and also a seemingly identical grass that has now started blooming. Actually, it has fuzzy little balls the same color green as the leaves, is rather attractive, and is a nice visual distinction between the two types of grasses. The cattails keep growing larger, this polite little blooming thing stays petite. It resembles photos I found of Cyperus eragrostis, Tall flatsedge.




Left of the Driveway
Ray was right. Putting a pile of sand near the front corner of our lot and then leaving it there for months as an attractive nuisance to growing things probably wasn't ideal. The original plan was to use the sand to protect yuccas and agaves from sloped rain runoff, and also do a little strengthening of the driveway. The sand where swale meets driveway was swept away by spring's rain-turned-river exuberance, and I'd hoped the cement folks would use leftover cement folks to shore up that spot. Time passed, we were busy elsewhere, things grew. The cement crew came and went, mistakenly dumping the left-over cement into the weeds out back, so it looks like we'll do swale cementing ourselves. Suddenly, my attention came back to front-left. Holy cattail, that sand pile is unsightly, so it's remedy time.

That was Friday. Today is Sunday. I removed the grasses on the pile. I bucket-carried sand to individual plants, creating water-catching/holding berms — I count over 60. My back says it feels like more.

The current plan for one of the next projects is to do our own repair using Quickcrete. While we're at it, we'll cement over the soft sand area around the AC units near the back-right corner of the house where rain water falls 36' and likes to take sand down the hill with it.

Coming soon... photos of this month's bloomings

Fall Has Arrived

Looking over the most recent posting from a month ago on Progress and Milestones, I'm reminded how quickly the perspective of where-are-we can change.

Where Are We?

We had four visitors during the Labor Day weekend who either had visited weeks before (daughter Liz and partner Jay) or had only seen landscape photos in our blogs (sister Betty and bro-in-law Ernie). They each shared reactions to changes they noticed since their last viewing. The consensus was the plants in the yard are finally starting to move beyond the newly-planted-and-shocked stage, and are starting to grow and look established.  The majority of the credit goes to the native plants that are large and healthy.

And that was two weeks ago. Since then, a number of the plants are starting to bloom and prosper. Photos have to wait; I've got to get this out so I can go outside.

Go Native?

Few of the natives are in a showy blooming stage, but this year — what the heck — we like healthy green leaves so much that we're gratefully loving every one of our native plants, maybe even more than those we planted. Except the sand burrs, the cat tails, bermudagrass, and other non-native grasses. They are growing ferociously and would require us to give more time than is possible, so I've settled for just removing the larger sand burrs as they start to develop burrs. I could be out there now, but no, I have to write about it.

This ISN'T a photo of the bird I saw,
but resembles it.

Is it a Flycatcher?

I added a bird to my life list recently. It might be a Willow Flycatcher, which seems to be the closest match I find for bill length, foot color, eye ring, coloring and markings, and behavior. Unfortunately, it was silent while I watched.

The photos of all the other flycatchers that are reported to migrate through this area appear to be so similar that a misidentification is likely. It looked much like this one, though with an obvious yellow circle on its upper breast.

I am an inland bird snob.

What about Indoors?

Eventually, we have to go inside (sigh), where many, many tasks are waiting their turn to be done. Like cleaning. Yuck. Like hanging art in my office or the entry hall, which may have to wait for winter. But what about installing the kitchen cup hooks? We finally located the right size hooks in the right color, and then ignored for weeks the hooks and cups waiting on the counter. Finally, the time felt right to measure and install. Finding a workable angle for measuring was the hardest part, but I finally found the best way to approach the task. This worked quite well for drilling the holes, as well. Not counting the sawdust and its friend gravity.

Back Outside... Cement?

It took threats and bribes, but we finally have our concrete hot tub pad in and ready for the next steps — electricity, water, screening, and the tub, though I've learned that expecting a certain order can be unrealistic. Getting an electrician is near impossible, and their work will be harder than you might guess, because the line has to run from the house out to the back yard. And it has to be in a plastic pipe buried 18" deep. And run through one of well-established slopes full of plants. I'll be carefully digging that trench after transplanting the unfortunates in its path. I'll leave the trench digging along the garden walkway to the hired help, a furpiece. 

I neglected to mention the new concrete ramp from the back "porch" down to the pathway (bottom left in the photo above). 

Here's a little image I did on FB for my North Carolina friend, Nancy. You can almost see the buried wine bottles that make the border. 

Time is up. I must go outside now. There's transplanting to do. And shoveling sand.