Gardening | Funny about Money

Low-Rent, Low-Harm Weed Killer?

February 23, 2017 by funny

Well, needless to say, with all the rain we’ve had here in lovely uptown Arizona, weeds are taking over our xeric landscaping like the jungle invading a Mayan ruin.

I’ve grown a little tired of pouring RoundUp on the ground every spring. In the first place, it’s expensive. And it gets more expensive every year. In the second, it’s supposedly carcinogenic. The stuff they put in the newer formulations to keep it from washing off the plants makes it darned hard to wash off yourself, too. Which makes it creepy, in my book.

And in the third place, when my neighbor Sally was here, she used to kill off the weeds on her side of the alley. But the new kids that moved into her house do not give one thin damn how their house looks, and apparently haven’t a clue (or don’t care) that the weeds create a fire hazard. So it’s hardly worth spending a lot of money and risking your life to beat back the alley weeds.

Last summer, I discovered that you can kill off weeds by pouring boiling water on them. Right out of a teakettle. I only tried it on a few milkweeds and dandelion, because I’d already dumped RoundUp on most of the invaders.

But lo! On those few plants, smartly boiling water worked…and it worked just about as well as RoundUp. It killed the plants quickly, and they didn’t grow back.

So this spring we’re going to see if a much more vigorous onslaught can be beaten back with just plain old boiling-hot water poured out of just a plain old teakettle.

We’re supposed to get a little more rain the first part of next week, from the tail end of yet another California storm. So of course that will germinate even more seeds. But between now and Monday, it should be possible to see if the hot-water trick works.

It’s a little more of a nuisance than mixing up RoundUp…but not much. I have to tellya, I do consider mixing RoundUp from a concentrate to be a darn nuisance. The problem with boiling water is that a teakettle doesn’t hold much, so you have to go back and forth from kitchen to yard several times. I happen to have two of them — an old, chipped model that I kept to hold flowers and the one I use every day to make coffee. So that sped up the process some. Still, it was a bit time-consuming.

If you have nothing else to do on a nice day, though, it’s OK.

And for a change, I didn’t. When I woke up this morning I was so whipped after the last eight weeks or so of nonstop work, I could barely move. Cut this morning’s meeting, feeling way too feeble to drive to Scottsdale. And found there was darn near nothing constructive I could do.

In the past month, I’ve billed $7,000. That is almost as much as The Copyeditor’s Desk earns in a year. While I’ve made more than that on a single project in the past, nevertheless since I “retired” from the Great Desert University, it’s a record. Normally, the Desk earns about 10 grand a year, which is typical for most U.S writers and editors.

Given the feast and famine nature of the business, alas, I don’t expect this to continue. But…gosh! Wouldn’t it be awesome if it did?

No…not really: day after day after day spent unmoving in front of a computer is not good for your health.

But I could do with about half that much on a steady basis. Three grand a month would cover the overhead and then handsomely pay the bills, allowing me to reinvest the forced drawdown from savings and probably stretching the retirement savings to the end of my lifetime. And that is much to be desired.

It’s more likely weeds, though. Editorial weeds. 😀

Images:
Dandelions: DepositPhotos, © Meggan
Filaree: public domain

Gardening, Baking, Loafing…

December 30, 2016 by funny

Eat your hearts out, East-Coasters and Midwesterners and Canadians! It’s almost 70 degrees out here in the Leafy Bower, deep in the heart of the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun! Ha haaaaaa!!!!!!!

So instead of actually Working 🙁 (heaven forfend!), I decided to spread the compost that’s been rotting away inside last summer’s Amazon purchase. A month or so ago, I put some on the potted rose plant, but plenty remained for the climbing roses on the west side and the endlessly struggling Perfumed Delight that fries all summer long on the northwest corner of the house. And YES, I was too damn lazy to dig it into the ground. Don’t worry. It’ll work its way in sooner or later.

Kinda pretty, isn’t it, fresh out of the compost barrel? Nice and dark and rich-looking.

The Mexican lime tree, one of the critters that shades this bower, is in the middle of its midwinter leaf-drop. Amazingly, it has spawned a new crop of juicy little limes — this after last summer’s frenzy. I raked the leaves and some of the limes up and refilled the emptied composter, which worked well enough put promised some pretty acetic stuff.

During the raking activity, I reflected on the success of M’hijito’s and my scheme to bake the ribeye roast inside the propane grill. It worked, you know. The roast came out gorgeously cooked — a little more done than I prefer, but still succulent and delicious. Being low on food and not inclined to run to the grocery store, I considered the fact that I’d like a loaf of bread…but of course, I can’t bake bread without an oven.

Or…

Can I?

M’hijito and I realized that the way to keep the meat from cooking too fast was to raise it higher above the heat source — the propane burners — enough so that with the lid closed the food would be roasted primarily from heat circulating inside the cooker, rather than from the flames below it.

Well. The last time I tried to bake bread in that thing, it converted the bottom of two free-form loaves into layers of charcoal. The dough spread and flattened the loaves into thick pancakes. The result was, in a word, inedible. Out they went.

The ribeye roasting experiment revealed what the problem was: The heat inside a closed propane grill is actually rather slow. Even though you think it’s very hot, it’s not. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s kind of hard to describe: I think the issue is it’s quite hot near the griddles, but quickly as you move upward, the interior cools. Relatively speaking.

Thus an oven thermometer placed in a propane grill is only vaguely accurate. It’s better than the thermometer that comes with the grill itself (which is a silly joke), but it’s not really telling you what the temp is where the food sits. Especially if the food isn’t flat.

So. What if…you placed a device (such as a pan…or…lo! a vegetable grill) on the barbecue rack, and then on top of that you placed a roasting rack, such as the one we used to hold the meat fairly high above the grill’s heat source? So that would be the surface on which you would set your bread?

If that doesn’t work, nothin’ will.

And what if instead of trying to bake a free-form loaf like some ancient Babylonian would have made inside a brick or adobe oven, what if you just put the dough into a regular Yankee-style baking pan?

Yes.

So into a pair of Pyrex bread pans went two blobs of risen dough. Even though it’s pretty nice outdoors, it’s still a little cool inside the house — about 67 degrees…probably cooler than yeast likes. How to give the friendly microbes a sub-tropical environment, in the absence of an oven? Hmmm…

Ah! Of course! The superbly politically incorrect incandescent light!

Thank God I had the foresight to stockpile those things.

Mwa ha ha! So..within an hour or two, I expect, the two chunks of dough should be risen enough to endure their experiment inside the grill. Hope it works, because I am bloody hungry. And the plan is to serve up some of that leftover gorgeous beef roast in a sandwich made of the proposed bread.

Meanwhile, as these goings-on were going on, the yard activities proceeded. After all the lime-tree leaves were packed into the tiny composter, it occurred to me that citrus leaves and citrus fruit would make a pretty acidy compost. There had to be something else to add…

Well…no. Not so much. There was, I realized, the shredded junkmail. Not much, but surely enough to provide, at least, a little variety.

No, the paper is not blue. It’s white. Don’t ask. I haven’t a clue.

And how grows the grocery-store garden?

With superb mediocrity. The lettuce stump that I planted did in fact grow a few leaves. But then…yes…then it bolted to seed!

Say what? In the freaking middle of the winter!

Oh well.

I bought two packages of that hydroponic lettuce, the heads that come with their roots attached. One package, containing a head of butter lettuce, was mostly consumed by M’hijito and me with Christmas dinner. So the remains of that took the place of the romaine experiment (which went into the compost bin). I’ve found these things grow quite nicely if you leave a few leaves around the stem.

The other package contained not one but four small heads of exotic leaf lettuce: two green and two ruby. Tomorrow those will go into a salad that will be my contribution to New Year’s dinner at my dear friends’ house. And you may be sure the root ends of all four heads will go right into a pot. So with any luck, in a few weeks we’ll see not one, not two, but five heads of lettuce thriving in the backyard.

Excellent.

Planting

November 7, 2016November 4, 2016 by funny

Perfect timing!! Yesterday morning I made a Home Depot run to retrieve some more Mexican primrose seeds to replant the garden trashed by the Invasion of the Grass Monster from Bermuda. Naturally, they didn’t have any. But they did have amaryllis and paperwhite bulbs for exactly half the price demanded by my favorite local nursery.

Who could turn them down?

While rummaging through the bulbs rack, I came across something called Muscari armeniacum. Never heard of it. But it looks extremely neat: bright blue flowers with long grassy-looking leaves. Apparently they’re very hardy and ultra-prolific — gardeners in some parts of the country complain they’ll take over a flowerbed and everything around it.

Well. That would be just fine by me. They also apparently will grow up through grass or other bedding plants, which would be great if the Mexican primrose has managed to reseed itself — which it’s fully capable of doing, bermudagrass be damned.

So I planted the 20 or 30 bulbs that came in the package, mostly by the pool but also a few near the west deck. The amaryllis went in a shady spot on the west side — those things grow madly, once a year, outdoors in a sheltered spot here. And two of the paperwhites went in the ground, two in a pot. And three eight-packs of assorted posies also went into pots and flowerbeds.

Shortly after all those babes got shoveled into the ground, the sky began to clabber up. Along about mid-afternoon, it started to rain. Not just rain, but pour! At first I thought it was hailing, but no: it was just a hard rain. It rained and rained and rained all afternoon and into the evening. It was still raining when I went to bed last night.

This morning the sun is shining and everything is magnificently deep-watered. Even got to turn off the watering system this morning. 🙂

Remaining to do in the poolside area:

• Prune the tea rose
• Prune the orange variant of yellowbell, which has turned into a kind of monster itself
• Prune the blue plumbago, speaking of summer monsters
• Prune the Lady Banks rose, which now does its job of hiding the pool equipment but wishes to return them to the jungle

Houses are a helluvalot of work. But on the other hand…what else have I got to do? And when all these little plants grow, they’re very satisfying.

I wonder if I’m still strong enough to lay brick. Hmmm…. The sand is out there…all I’d have to do is install some edging, level the sand, screed it, set the brick, and broom extra sand over it. Hmmm….

Once I laid a thousand bricks to build a patio in our yard in Encanto. Turned out pretty damn nice, too. But I was about 28 then. This is forty years later…hmmmm….. On the other hand, I do not propose to lay a thousand bricks. I propose to lay enough to build a pathway where Ruby and Cassie have created a racetrack around the orange trees. Where they run, they knock aside the quarter-minus ground dressing (which is basically nothing but coarse sand), creating an uneven and unsightly mess.

I could use that quarter-minus as a base for a wandering brick path, which they could race around on without digging up the desert landscaping. A-n-n-n-d it would add some charm to the backyard. There’s nothing like a mysteriously meandering pathway to make a garden. 🙂

But for now, it’s off to the races! Et alors, jusqu’à demain.

Second Spring y-Cumin’ In

November 2, 2016 by funny

Fall is Arizona’s second spring. The plants recover from their summer heat exhaustion and many begin to blossom again. And the Human always evinces symptoms of spring fever. To wit:

a) I do not want to work, and
b) All I want to do is play in the garden.

Fortunately rather little work is in-house just now. It looked bad yesterday when a prospective new client sent an inquiry for editing and indexing of a bilingual art exhibition catalogue. But mercifully, she’s far from the editing stage. So I can indulge in my favorite unhealthy habit: loafing.

In that department, I want to catch up with the many yard blandishments I’ve neglected during the summertime funk. Neglected longer than that, really: I fell into a kind of depression after the year of surgeries, from which I’ve never recovered. I simply have not felt like doing anything, and so have wasted unimaginable numbers of hours playing computer games.

One result, as I mentioned a while back, is that mountains of accursed bermudagrass took over the poolside flowerbed.

Honest to God. It should be against the law to plant this noxious weed in Arizona. Or anywhere in the world. Arizona’s answer to kudzu, it’s the most aggressive, invasive, unkillable monster in the plant kingdom.

Several doses of an Over-the-Top formulation that the company no longer makes did finally succeed in killing off the top growth. It’s almost impossible to kill the root system, but at least the existing growth was dead enough to cause me to get off my duff and dig it out.

What a job!! You can’t just pull it up. It sets roots like steel claws. If you try to pull up the yard-long runners, they snap off at the surface, leaving the underground parts to sprout another day. Another day very soon…

An ordinary trowel will not suffice to excise the roots, especially not when they’re set in Arizona’s clayey soil. So you end up having to get a shovel and lever the damn stuff out, to a depth of 18 inches or more. Even then, you can’t even begin to get it all out of the ground:

bermudagrassroots Here’s a nice view of what’s still in the ground out there. Any root you leave behind, any sprig you leave in the dirt will promptly sprout new ugly grass. It spreads by root, by runner, and by seed. Birds blithely carry the seeds everywhere, as does the wind.

People here have given up trying to fight it. Instead, we plant it as lawns and cover golf courses with it. It’s easier to mow than St. Augustine, a much handsomer and less invasive grass, one that (unlike Bermudagrass) will even grow in the shade of a tree. And because all you have to do is pour water on any bare patch of ground to get it to grow, I guess people think it’s easy to cultivate. That may be so…but it sure as hell isn’t easy to uncultivate!

You really don’t even have to throw seeds down, since the entire state is infested with blowing bermudagrass seeds.

Ultimately I ended up with a gigantic bag of stolons and roots, which I dropped by the back gate for Gerardo to drag off.

Happily, he and his dudes came by yesterday afternoon to shovel out the yard. So now we have a temporarily clean flowerbed next to the pool — you can see what a small area filled up the largest black bag available on the market.

Over the next year, I’ll have to spray Over-the-Top (or rather, its new iteration, Ornamec 170, which still contains the grass-killer that Fertilome has so kindly taken away from us) about once a week, until the resurgent grass gives up. Probably once the weather cools off, it’ll be more like once a month, but in the summertime, it will take frequent spraying and digging to get the damn stuff out of the ground there.

societygarlic361px-tulbaghia_violacea2010 — Society garlic

The Mexican primrose that hadn’t been crowded out was unaffected by the old Over-the-Top, as were the society garlic plants that have spread around in there. They’re stinky little plants, the garlics, but they make a pretty flower.

That stupid-looking white picket thing is there to help block Ruby the Air-Headed Corgi Pup from getting into the pool area. All three of the dogs who preceded Her Nibs had enough sense, after falling in the drink just once, to freaking stay away from the water. But Ruby? Ohhhhhhh no! She wants nothing more in life than to tear up and down the 18-inch-wide coping on the far side, where she invariably topples in to the deep end. Then I have to dive into the (sometimes startlingly cold) water to fish her out.

When I go out to buy some new Mexican primrose seeds, I’ll try to find some new, taller black metal garden border to stuff in there. Either that or get some black paint and spray the damn thing.

Ruby is slightly wall-eyed. Her right eye doesn’t point straight ahead — evidently dogs can get strabismus. It’s something she was born with, and it’s never straightened. I imagine it has the same effect in dogs as it can in humans: interferes with depth perception. SDXB has strabismus in one eye, severe enough that when he went into the Air Force a doctor was surprised he could see at all — in fact, he has 20-20 vision. But his depth perception is decidedly off: he’ll knock over glasses at the table, or hit them against the kitchen faucet when he’s washing dishes.

So I suspect Ruby simply cannot tell that the water is not a hard, flat surface. Cassie, Anna, Charley, and Walt all seemed to see that something deep lay there. But Ruby…she doesn’t doesn’t get it. Soooo….she falls in.

Nor does she swim well. Like Cassie, she panics when she gets wet — in fact, she panics more so than Cassie does. Cassie can swim, although she still can’t figure out how to find the steps. Ruby just flails. She sinks quickly when she falls in the water. So if she tumbled into the pool when I wasn’t right at hand, she would drown.

Welp, it’s past time to get up and run around: Back to Costco to return the pair of jeans whose right pant leg is three inches shorter than the left and the box of seed-bearing grapes whose label I misread as “seedless.” Then on to an ordinary grocer for a few avocadoes, and up to HD for the metal anti-puppy fencing.

Then, I suppose, I’m going to have to actually…work.

Image: Society garlic. Oyoyoy. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10394723

Microgardening?

October 25, 2016 by funny

🙂 I’d put money on it that I’m not the first to dream up that term, “microgardening.” And no, I’m not gunna google it to find out.

The various tiny gardens around the yard are springing to life, now that fall (Arizona’s second spring) is here. Not feeling excessively ambitious this year, I decided a) to plant things in pots, not the weed-prone ground; and b) to experiment with grocery-store gardening.

The latter entails sprouting new veggies from scraps left over in the kitchen. Check out this little guy, for example:

That is the stump end from a head of romaine lettuce. Turns out if you set it in about an inch of water for a few days and then plant it in dirt, it sprouts a whole new head of lettuce! It’s only been in the pot a few days, and it’s already put out a healthy-looking spray of deep-green leaves.

I planted another one in a different pot, only from a head of red leaf lettuce. It’s alive but not going to town like this one — possibly because it doesn’t get as much light?

We’re told, too that you can do this trick with little green onions: just plant the nipped-off root end in the dirt and watch it sprout. Okayyy…still watching:

Moving on, I did condescend to buy and plant some chard seeds, a totally can’t-miss plant in these parts:

They’ve sprouted like crazy…and now need to be thinned, something I’ll have to get to today or tomorrow. Today a lot of work is on the plate, but I’m sure they won’t have crowded themselves into extinction by tomorrow.

Also part of the fall microgarden are these two new additions to the herb collection: French tarragon on the left and rosemary on the left. They showed up this summer, have made it through the heat, and seem to be thriving.

This old standard has been growing for years — many, many years — in a kitschy pot from a locally owned nursery I used to patronize when I was employed but can no longer afford:

Apparently chives live forever and cannot be killed by neglect. I believe I brought that potful of chives over here from the old house…which would mean they’ve lived here for the past 12 years. Occasionally I add a little more dirt to the pot, to replace the soil that slowly rinses out through the bottom hole. Love chives.

The Thai basil and the regular basil also are in good shape, but they’ll die back when the weather cools. For the nonce, though, they’re great with tomatoes of any sort, cooked or raw.

They also live in the shade and don’t seem to mind it. That thing that looks like an onion isn’t (I don’t think…). I believe it’s an iris or some such. Though why an iris would decide to sprout now escapes me. Sooner or later, I suppose, we’ll see.

The weather remains surprisingly warm. Yesterday — almost the end of October! — I was in the pool and it was wonderful. Crisp but not bone-jarring. Temps have been in the mid-90s and the sky generally clear. So I guess the combination of the warm air and the direct sunlight is keeping the water a little warmer than usual. This afternoon, if I can get quit of the most urgent computer-based work, I plan to jump in again, after overheating myself with some more pruning and digging.

Sometime within the next few days (today?), I need to soak the ground in the poolside flowerbed and extract the goddamned bermudagrass that took it over this summer.

The evil weed has about been killed off from repeated applications of Over-the-Top, a grass killer, which I ordered from Amazon because it’s almost impossible to buy in these parts.

Unfortunately, it’s not its old self. The current product contains Sethoxydim, which only sorta works. The old Over-the -Top really, truly did work on grasses without taking out broad-leafed plants. But it’s no longer available…at least, not as Over-the-Top. The new product stinks something fierce: you really need to use disposable gloves when applying, so as not to get it on your hands. Yuch!

As it happened, a few days ago I decided to clean out the garage cabinets. And what should I find but a years-old squirt bottle of the original Over-the-Top! Instead of Sethoxydim, the original stuff contained fluazifop-p-butyl. Wondering if it still worked, I tried it on the still-vigorous, barely scathed bermudagrass. And LO! The old stuff WORKS! As in it really works: the bermudagrass promptly croaked over, leaving only the chore of yanking it out of the ground and freeing air and water resources for the surviving Mexican primrose.

You can still get fluazifop-p-butyl — apparently it’s not one of the effective products that have been taken out of consumers’ gummy little hands, after all. It’s in Ornamec 170 herbicide…also available on Amazon. A US Forest Service risk assessment of this chemical suggests the risk to humans is fairly low; don’t spray it on food crops, don’t pour it in ponds, lakes, or streams, and don’t saturate the ground with it. Use it, literally, “over the top”: a little goes a long way.

And so…to work.

Summer is y-goin’ out

August 31, 2016 by funny

Lhudly sing huzzah!!

Another beautiful morning, as the heat moderates and the days grow almost imperceptibly shorter. And lookee here! The wee Easter lily cactus that clings to life in the shade of the devil-pod tree expresses its joy:

It’s been in that pot for years and barely grown, even though it gets a great deal more water than it should. The burly fellow next to it is a golden barrel cactus, given to me a very long time ago by my friend KJG. It was a housewarming gift…so arrived here 12 years ago. Strangely, in all the years it and its companion in front have been here, I’ve never seen either of them bloom.

But Easter lily cacti in their various varieties bloom in wild profusion.

I am SO not in the mood to work today. Fortunately, except for my own book and for rehearsing tomorrow’s dog and pony show, there isn’t much to have to do, at least so far. But history tells us that every time the dust settles, a new shamal will blow in forthwith.

Still…fall is y-cumin’ in, and here in Arizona, fall is our second spring. Soon the plants will revive, flowers will bloom, vegetables will thrive.

So I’m thinking maybe instead of (ugh) working all day, I’ll disconnect from the computer and spend the day gardening: pull out the dead stuff, haul off the pots whose residents have fried, maybe even buy a new plant.

One of my favorite indoor plants has some sort of infestation or disease that seems to be killing it. This is probably the time to get rid of the thing.

It’s living in a fake terra-cotta pot. I’d like to buy a new talavera pot to take the place of the dying plant in its plastic pot. Maybe I’ll run over to Whitfill’s, buy one of their pots, and then move on to Home Depot in search of a tree-like houseplant to live there. That would kill some time and continue the job of murdering the budget.

Heh! I love those things. One like that would look SO PRETTY in that spot, and then maybe I would feel less crabby.

Then I could go so far as to refill the hummingbird feeders and the seed dispensers for the ordinary birds. That would be good.

It would’ve been good if I’d kept those filled for the poor little critters when it was hotter than the hubs of Hades and I was too lazy or too timorous to stick my nose out the door. But better late than never. I suppose.

What I’d really like to do is get a couple of those raised gardening bed kits and set them, side by side, in the sunny spot in the far northwest corner of the yard. The view of that space is blocked by the orange trees, so I wouldn’t have to look at a truck farm from the back patio and the pool. But if I had two long, narrow troughs set up with enough space for a pathway down the middle, I could reach all parts of the raised garden without putting my back out.

Probably could build something like that with a few two-by-sixes. It would be easy.

Still feeling more or less out of sorts today, though better than the past two days. Last night I refrained from dropping another melatonin pill — or half thereof — yet still slept seven hours. So presumably one of two things has happened:

• either a residual amount of the stuff remained in my system, which would explain a lot; or
• a couple doses somehow realigned my sleep cycle with the sunrise.

Whatever, I suspect the generally shitty way I’ve been feeling has something to do with this drug. Guess I’d rather feel shitty from not getting enough sleep than shitty from the side-effects of some chemical.

I’ve also been unduly affected by the death of my client and friend, the Mongolian Bank Magnate. It makes me feel terrible. And that’s unreasonable: he lived to 68, a decent enough age, and he had a great life.

But still…from the perspective of early old age, 68 seems pretty young. He was a vigorous man with a young wife and a little girl just ready to toddle off to preschool and a great deal more that he wanted to do in this world.

He died of pneumonia incident upon leukemia.

Damn! What awful luck.

Especially when you think of the legions out there who so richly deserve such a fate: rabid terrorists and child molesters and drug dealers and tobacco magnates and pharmaceutical company billionaires and clowns who would ride into the presidency on a tide of hatred and fear and all those who would take away from the world rather than contribute to it…

Oh, hell. What can one say?

I am going to cultivate my garden.