Gardening

How do you like these nifty little plants? Spent part of yesterday cultivating the garden a bit — not much, the day having reached 110 by noon, but some. I found the posies at Home Depot, where I’d gone to pick up some pool chemicals and came away with a bunch of gear, including citrus fertilizer, bird seed, and a cute new hummingbird feeder. (Click on the image for a better view.)

The plants in one big pot outside the back door have long since croaked over. That’s been an annoyance for some time, but I’ve been too lazy to do much about it. Lured by the garden department, I picked up these things. The blue flowers are called angelonia; it’s supposedly almost heat-proof. We’ll see: the hot-weather plant reports come from places like New Orleans and Florida, which don’t hold a candle (heh!) to Arizona in the heat department. And of course, the pink and yellow number is a lantana. It loves an Arizona summer, though I don’t know how well it will do in a pot. If you don’t water potted plants first thing every morning here, they fricassee. Forthwith. Even if you manage to remember every single day, though, a pot acts like a steamer.

About half the pot’s soil had seeped out through the bottom hole. That was convenient, because the level was so low no digging and dumping was necessary. All I had to do lift the (rootbound) plants out of their plastic pots, set them in place, and fill in with potting soil…which I had to haul out of the car and drag to the backyard.

Then it was time to fertilize the citrus. I couldn’t lift the bag I’d bought at HD, of course, and so had to tip it out of the car onto a dolly. It immediately fell off the dolly, which was not very pleasant, but eventually I managed to drag it out to the back yard, cut it open, and spread 20 pounds of fertilizer around the trees, one two-pound can at a time. Drag the hose and water, water, water, water…

Meanwhile, the Ondt Queen is regrouping after her last engagement with the Bosch. She has built a new fortification in the side yard, extending deep into the earth under a flagstone slab. They haven’t tried to come into the house yet, but if you walk near their place, they will attack, and they bite something fierce.

Having learned that Ruby the Corgi Pup has a taste for ant bait and can handily weasel one out from under the fan cage that I’ve used in the past to dog-proof the things, I’m cast back upon more ancient battle strategies.

To wit: birds.

When I first moved in here, the backyard was just overrun with biting ants. To combat them, I bought a couple of bird feeders, filled them with seeds, and cast a lot of seed on the ground around the various ant holes. This worked well — within a few weeks, the backyard was almost ant-free.

Most birds will eat the occasional ant, and some will eat a lot of ants — mockingbirds and Gila woodpeckers and thrashers and flickers and towhees. Interestingly, even the little sparrows of which we have a-plenty, enjoy some ant protein in their diet. So I filled both feeders, one of which hangs from a rafter not far from the new Ant Castle, and sprinkled a trail of seed leading from the feeder’s vicinity to the ant holes.

But…well…

Yes, Houston, we DO have a problem…

Turns out Ruby likes bird seed even more than she likes ant baits! Took her all of four seconds to find that stuff, and she immediately started scarfing it down.

Godlmighty.

Dragged her into the house, mightily against her will. Locked her up. Raked the birdseed into small areas. Retrieved some wire garden border fencing and stuck it in the ground so it would surround the seed patches.

But meanwhile, when I brought this container of seed home from HD, what I didn’t know was the lid on it was not attached. When I’d picked it up on the back patio preparatory to carrying it over to where the feeders were, the lid fell off and about a quarter of the damn stuff dumped out on the ground — and into the wide, river-stone-filled cracks between the flagstones off the porch! Ruby was trying to Hoover that stuff up, too. Even though I broomed it up off the concrete, I couldn’t get it out from between the flags.

So before Ruby could go back outdoors, I had to drag the shop vac out there and shop-vac up as much of the seed as I could, in the process sucking a ton of stones into the vacuum.

Lovely.

So the rocks had had to be cleaned out and placed back where they belong and the vacuum wrestled back into the garage.

See what I mean when I say every job around this place morphs into three or four jobs? Never fails!

Anyway, this morning the birds found the seed and by about 9 a.m. had picked it all up off the ground. Presumably, too, they discovered the colony of their rightful prey. It is to be hoped they will not forget anytime soon.

Moving on, I cleaned the algae off the pool walls (again) and applied the daily water to the potted plants that are not on the watering system and dumped some of the citrus food on the baby olive and watered that in and dosed the dog for the unsurprising new round of diarrhea and for crying out loud. Trimmed most of the dead stuff off the moribund lavender plant, a much-loved garden resident that appears unlikely to survive much longer.

The heat is ferocious at this time of year. The first part of July usually hosts the hottest day of any given summer, and though we haven’t had an extremely hot day (110 is about has high as it’s gone), the plants are prostrate. Unless we get rain, and a fair amount of it, I’ll lose quite a few of them when I’m laid up with the pending not-quite-but-just-about cancer surgery. And God only knows what will happen with the pool: it now has to be brushed every day, and will until November, when I can drain it and replace the phosphate-saturated, years-old water with new, fresh water. It’s frustrating. And annoying.

### Sorry, folks! I don’t know what’s wrong with these photos or why they all uploaded looking underexposed. The fix doesn’t appear to be easy — reuploading brightened pix doesn’t work — and I don’t have time to fool with it right now. Wrote this post over the weekend because I knew there wouldn’t be fiddling-around time this week…argh! Will try to come back to this later today, if the opportunity presents itself.

Spring has noticeably sproinged here. My gosh, it’s been gorgeous. And flowers are blooming all over the place. The air is saturated with the perfume of orange blossoms, has been for weeks. Check out what’s growing in the yard:

As usual, click on the image for a larger, higher-resolution view.

The iris have erupted in gay profusion this year, after several years of near dormancy. I forget what those red things are next to them — some other kind of bulb. But here’s some of each, close-up:

Long as we’re peering at things close-up, isn’t echeverria charming?

Here’s a blue hibiscus, a plant that’s never bloomed before. I’ve always assumed it wasn’t happy in a pot. But after I moved it under the shade of the olive tree, it perked right up.

In the blue and purple department, the mountain laurel’s in bloom again:

The lady banks rose is now big enough to hide the pool equipment. It’s only taken…what? three years?

The agave I planted when I moved in here — good lord! ten years ago! — has shot up an otherworldy bloom:

Strange, huh? Also in the xeric department, we have these things:

Cassia and bougainvillea. Neither requires (or gets) much water. Here’s a different rose, growing in a pot on the back patio:

And the salvia made it through the winter, amazingly enough. It really was a warm winter.

Not bad, considering we’re in the tenth or eleventh year of a dire drought.