The Allure of the Nocturnal Chorus
Last night after returning from a pleasant dinner with friends, I took a quick walk through the garden as dusk approached.
Funny, I have to do it or I’m not settled for the night; even if there is no pressing task to do and nothing really needs checking. These quickie trips often seem to provide for the more interesting and unexpected results; it seems that I always notice more when I am looking for nothing.
The one “task” I had on yesterday evening’s walk-about was to double check the blackberry netting to make sure the same not-so-bright young robin had not trapped herself inside for the 3rd time in 24 hours. (Apparently the instinct to hunt above wormy ground is sufficient to make this bird push under the bottom of the net, which also happens to be fairly well secured to the ground with assorted bricks, boards and the like.) Thankfully she was not there and my mind wandered off into survey mode.
As I was standing in the boxwood garden trying to get a feel for how I should go about reconfiguring the strawberry beds in the area, the tree frogs began their quadraphonic signaling on the approach to the pond, undoubtedly for another raucous night of frog-orgy bliss.
Behind me the Camellia let out a very loud and high pitched salvo to start the night. The sweet autumn clematis on the fence behind the pond responded. The bamboo behind Lizzie’s followed and soon there were frog bleats (or calls or?) sounding from 360 degrees at varying distances from ground zero.
Then it all stopped as quickly as it started. Silence…..
As I turned to look again at the strawberry patch I caught a movement on the ground near my feet. By all measures it should not have caught my eye and in the fading light I would have placed low odds on actually finding the object in the dark leaves.
But here is what I found:
Don’t see it? How about here:
Still no? One more try:
The motion was from this tiny 1 3/4″ long “Cope’s Gray” tree frog heading southwest to the pool party that was about to commence.
Was he one of these babies that hatched from the pond last year?
Baby Tree Frog Picture Day 2012
I’ll never know but one thing is for certain: there will be more babies this year.
By the sounds of things, a lot more.
Black Tuesday
Or more accurately “Blackberry Tuesday”…
The first plump blackberries of the season fell off in my hand this morning. The bottom halves of each plant that survived the storm are covered up with berries; judging by the number of red ones we are probably going to be entering the blackberry zone right on schedule just as the strawberries are petering out…
In an amazing demonstration of consideration and willpower, 100% actually made it inside to be shared with Mrs. cohutt…..
Big Sky Country
Wow.
Sunshine, come on down…..
The rice paddy is pointing pretty much due east….
Now that this is done I can repair the damage to my rear fence and clean up that back corner; I delayed this project in case the tree men needed to back their bucket truck in a little to reach the trees. (They didn’t)
Here Comes The Sun (Again)
My neighbor to the east/southeast (whose backyard jungle caught the largest piece of roof back in April) had Bobcats, bucket trucks and stump grinders running full bore yesterday. One of the two remaining oaks on our line was split and hung up rather dangerously over part of my garden; the crew had arrived to remove it and all the smaller junk trees and bushes that thickly blanketed the property. We are relieved to see this……
What this means is virtually all of the back 2/3s of my yard is now full sun whereas a year ago there was enough shade to prohibit utilizing a good part of this space.
Time to review the long term overall layout again.
A job I would not want:
The tall tree to the right and most of the lower mass to the left (the hanging split half of the damaged tree) are gone this morning.
Watercress?
Watercress?
Why not?
I decided that I didn’t need a double rice paddy system again this year and reserved the upper one for watercress.
This was fine, except I had no known source of watercress locally. I’d read that really fresh cress from the market will survive and take root and I figured this would be my bailout option if I couldn’t find some growing wild first.
In the meantime, I learned that rice regenerates along the lines of say, parsley, in that it will reseed itself even if the hapless backyard rice grower was certain he had harvested all the grain last year. The good news is that rice seedlings just sort of float around for a while before the roots get purchase in the soil, so moving them to the lower paddy was no problem.
Back to my watercress issue, or more accurately my lack of watercress issue…
Before I gave up and actually went to the produce section of Kroger and paid $ for some starter cress, I decided to check out a spring fed creek that is on the campus of the high school I graduated from far, far back in the last century. I know that section of creek very well; or at least I did back 40 years ago when I splashed around looking from crawfish for bait when fishing in the pond fed by the same spring.
A friend claimed he’d seen some of our little Guatemalan immigrants harvesting something from it in a sunny section near the baseball fields and I did recall that part as having a lot of aquatic plants in the cold flowing water. So off I went yesterday to poke around and see what I could find, careful to be as discreet as possible under cover of dark sunglasses and a massive garden shade hat. (Headlines I wanted to avoid: “Local financial professional found stealing aquatic weed from private high school campus; claims it was for food” or even worse “Local financial professional seen fighting in a roadside creek with tiny Guatemalan women over alleged watercress food source”.)
I pulled in and peeked over the bank; there before me was more watercress than the entire country of Guatemala could harvest in an afternoon. A half dozen frogs immediately jumped in, so I took this as my sign that this section of the creek wasn’t a “superfund site“. With my bucket in tow, I managed to get in and out of the creek in about 30 seconds and was soon on my way.
S0 here it is, spread out in my small upper rice paddy (or cress bed or?), already perking up and putting out tiny new leaves in just 24 hours. I will leave the misting nozzle running most of the time into the top bed in order to keep the water fresh and relatively cool; this will in turn spill into the lower paddy where the thirsty volunteer rice is coming up.
And a closer view:
I have read that cress likes sunshine but tastes better in cool weather (like other members of the brassicaceae family); flowering tends to be the sign that it is warm enough to turn it slightly bitter. I’m not sure if the cold spring water deters this (or cold well water here going forward) but I am optimistic after the small sampling tasted when I brought this batch home.
We’ll just have to see, won’t we?
Summer Snowballs
These, the product of discarded grocery scallion bases 18 months ago, were worth it if only for the giant snowball blooms that have been up for weeks now.
Lizzie’s House
When we bought our home way back in 1987, we learned that the small house in the back had always been known as “Lizzie’s house”.
The structure was original to the home when built in 1869 or 1870; there was also a carriage house in the far back that was torn down sometime in the 1930s. Lizzie’s would have been called the “servant’s quarters” and consists of 1 16′ square room with 1 window, 1 door, 1 fireplace and 0 bathrooms. While indoor plumbing was available and included when the original house was built, it would have been “indoors” only to the occupants of the main house.
Well, servants “had to go” too, so there was a tiny bathroom accessible through its own door via the main home’s back porch. The door remains (although now nailed shut and a part of the wall) and our master bathroom’s shower occupies the space once taken by the servant’s bathroom.
Lizzie’s is unique and is the thing most commented on by people on their first visit to our home. I’ve done a good bit of work on it over the years (heat, power, cable phone, rebuilt porch, insulation, drywall, repaired and replaced much of the exterior batten) and may be undertaking a substantial project with Lizzie’s fairly soon (hint: indoor plumbing).
We love Lizzie’s as is even if we still have to go back inside our house to find “plumbing”. The Confederate Jasmine and Dremel-art gourd lights are beginning to blend together nicely and some fresh Adirondack chairs reside on the porch. The massive old pecan tree that hovers above provides just the right amount of shade in just the right parts of the day and a fat kitten often is seen lounging on the porch surveying his domain. Lizzie’s is our back yard.
OK, but who was Lizzie?
Lizzie was the last full time occupant of the house; she lived there while working for Dr and Mrs Lindsey in the 30s and 40s we believe. I present Lizzie, circa 1940ish, and by her looks someone who undoubtedly was not to be trifled with:
And her house, circa 2013:
Long live Lizzie!
🙂
Tut-Tut
It looks like rain….
(AGAIN…)
It has been a wet spring with an especially wet May so far where a couple of weekends have effectively been rained completely out as far as garden work goes. We’ve been under some level of drought conditions for several years now, so any level of rainfall at any time should be welcomed and appreciated. It is appreciated (I promise),although it does tend to make me more than a little stir crazy when the spring calendar is flying by and I’m inside watching the puddles form out back.
How much so?
Eventually it gets to the point where I pull on my Zartic* boots, grab my camera and umbrella and head out. (*Industrial “Wellingtons”, locally referenced as “Zartic” boots as at one time workers from a local chicken processing plant could be seen walking about the west part of town in them. Yes, yuck.)
The results? Not much worth showing or keeping until the rain dripping on Lizzie’s steps catches my eye.
Below I present the entire productivity I managed to generate on a recent waterlogged May Sunday:
Frighteningly, the lyrics to a song from 1993 song pop into my head as I am finishing this post:
All I can say is that my life is pretty plain,
I like watchin’ the puddles gather rain.
And all I can do is just pour some tea for two
And speak my point of view but it’s not sane.
It’s not sane.
(Blind Melon, “No Rain” 1993)
Is it?
Good News Bad News
The good news:
Our little pond has certainly aged well over its first year; the “borrowed” bog bottom sod over my purposely soggy beds bordering the pond seems to be right for what we were seeking. Ferns have come back despite the abundance of warm sun the spot provides them….
The interesting “grass” sphere that became so prominent last year is as pretty as ever and additional similar clumps are developing.
The bad news:
The “garden side” of the pond settled and ended up being slightly lower than the “fence side” where the soggy beds are. This meant that the automatic topping off of the pond didn’t keep the beds as wet as it could have since the water seeped over the other (garden) edge and not into the beds. I’ve adjusted this (with an ugly temporary fix) and it seems to be flowing correctly again. Unfortunately, the beautiful ferns that doing so well got “burned” on their tips as they were coming out; they may still do OK but it was a disappointment regardless.
The really bad news is I spent the time to identify the “grass” that is doing so well….. it is actually sedge, which is a cousin to the nutsedge aka “nut grass” that is impossible to eradicate from my lawn and parts of my garden beds. It came with the mountain bog sod, so I sent some pictures to my sis who conveniently lives in the mountains and has plenty of boggy ground around her home.
She immediately ID’d one of the sedges as an invasive nuisance and advised removing it immediately. I have started, but the roots of the main clump are connected to the building foundations in Bejing and it is going to take some work.
Oh well
The pictures:
The large holdover sedge specimen:
From 90 degrees, the same sedge with the new questionable one in the foreground.
A close up of the evil sedge’s seed burr:
Looking back across the pond:
Closer of same (note the volunteer willow I topped off too. Yes, I know, this is going to be a problem too but for now I am pursuing containment and not elimination. 😉 ):
The southern end with ferns from my sis and the pile of cover logs and sweet autumn wisteria. Some of the tree frogs migrate to the pond in the evening and begin their calling from this clump so it is being used as intended. And yes, I deposit the filamentous algae onto the fence upon removal from the pond where is dries a light brown and remains for months. Why? I don’t know….why not?
Closer:
Earlier shots of the ferns along the fence side soggy bed, before they suffered tip burn from my neglect:
The frogs are here consistently this year; I’ve spotted toads and the same Cope’s gray tree frog as I had hatch last year. There are a variety of tadpoles now (both in size and in species) as well as fresh deposits of eggs appearing on most mornings.
So overall I rank the “good news” as winning the day; I’ll try and deal with the sedges and be satisfied for now.
Behind cohutt's fence 