Posts Tagged ‘Garden’

So far, this year’s experiment goes well. Cats have not peed enough (yet) to kill the vines. Things have not dried out to dangerous proportions. True, I’ve scaled back expectations- there are no truly exotic strains here, but I’ll be happy if we just get enough vines to really pop.

But it’s a start.

I didn’t know that tomato plants flowered at all, but apparently so:

They’re a sort of strange shade of yellow, but I guess that’s par for the course.

Now to defend them against the slugs and caterpillars. This is third time I’m trying this experiment, and the ‘pilars have gotten them both times before. Diligence will hopefully pay off with lots of gazpacho this summer.

Every spring around this time we get tons of these guys, and I’ve always just shied away from them, leaning on the idea that the orangey color was mother nature’s warning to stay away. But when someone mentioned they thought it might be a relative of the Black Widow, I figured I’d better look it up.

Turns out the scary colors are false advertising, which seems to be a pattern in our local spiders. The banana spider looks like it could rip your face off, but it’s the brown recluse that’ll do the serious damage.

If I ever really decide to turn tail and run away from New Orleans, I swear it won’t be because of the dysfunction, the heat or the hurricanes- it’ll be the critters that does me in.

After this winter’s gawdawful freeze, pretty much everything died. Things I didn’t think would ever be killed, even by flamethrower gave it up. Even the bananas haven’t come back up yet, which is shocking.

But guess what has come back with a vengeance? The absolute last thing I’d have guessed.

The freaking roses. They’re blooming all over the freaking place. I haven’t been able to keep them alive, at all, ever, but there they are.

The dead stick that had been Ebb Tide is blooming:

The Lady Banks went crazy:

St. Joseph’s coat is busting out:

For the first time, even Zepherine Drouhin put on a show:

And even Double Delight is living up to its name:

I’ve been at a total loss to explain this. I have watered, fed, pruned, and watched for blackspot with a level of paranoia that I didn’t have when Alison was learning to ride a bike. For naught. They die. Until they were subjected to true abuse…and then they thrive. Honestly? How contrary is that?

Roses are referred to as female, and women are generally contrary by nature. Maybe that’s the only answer there is.

Or maybe they were trying to lull me into a false sense of security, all the better to break my heart later. Which, in the end, might not be unrelated to the woman-thing either.

I am just getting back online after several days of being DOA, computerwise. I came downstairs on Sunday morning to discover an empty black screen with flashing white cursor in the corner. Rebooted, checked cables, and used my phone to search for the cause… the universal diagnosis seemed to be hard drive failure.

Incidentally, what is it about looking for something that makes you lose your mind? Seriously? Around, oh, hour 4 of searching for the driver Cds so I could start the recovery I started having hallucinations, having looked everywhere it could reasonably be- twice. “You know, maybe I put the backup disks in the pantry, it kind of makes sense” or “I could swear I saw them in the freezer awhile back.”

I decided to pull the hard drive out to see if I could at least transfer the data. I was going to have to wait for the replacement driver disks to come, but if I could at least pull the backups…and that’s where the horror show began. One of humiliation and nausea for me, but that’s made many people around me laugh.

Inside the computer was… a slug’s slime trail. Across the motherboard. Over the fan, the power supply, the inner casings. Shiny and gross, it made my heart sink. There was no way this could be good. But still, I had my mission. I got the hard drive out and went to work.

I slaved up the drive to one old computer. Nothing.
I slaved it up to another, more recent computer. Nada.

The drive had ceased to be. It was an ex-storage device. Bereft of life ‘e rests in peace. The backups, the original drive, nothing. Gone.

I schlepped the corpse to ye olde repair shoppe, whose techs laughed their almighty asses off. In front of me, even. They just couldn’t help themselves. They traced the trail, noting that it smootched its way up the outside and into a vent. They called other people over. I know they would’ve done that anyway, but for $75 an hour they could’ve done me the courtesy of waiting til I left, dontcha think? I talked with them 3 times over the course of the day as they updated me on the state of the patient- every time I talked to them, people were laughing in the background. I doubt this is a coincidence, tho I have to say they really did take an interest, even researching slugs to reconstruct the scene of the crime.*

Death by slug.  Only me.

People kept asking me how could this have happened (while they, too, laughed)- as if I keep slugs around the house for entertainment and one got off leash or something. I had no freaking idea how the slug got in my house, or why it would want to be there in the first place.

Until last night, when I discovered that apparently I’m running Club Med for disgusting creatures.

Holy crap.  This is the really nasty part, and I’m going to put it after the jump, just to give you fair warning.

I was understandably in a vengeful mood. Charlie told me he’d bought some slug killer and I should sprinkle some around, kill some of the bastard’s relatives, that kind of thing.So…

this stuff:

caused….THIS (last chance to turn back!): Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on repopulating the garden, and and of course the hibiscus are what draw my attention first and foremost. This one is Creole Lady, and has been blooming pretty steadily for the last few weeks, making me very happy:

She actually lasts 2-3 days, her colors changing. The pinkish fringe becomes orange and the center gets darker. IMHO it’s prettiest when it first opens, but any hibiscus is better than no hibiscus, right?

I was playing in the garden, so naturally Bianca arrives to show me what a real Creole lady looks like…

I just love their backs, so crazy.

And when we finally get some Fuschia, I’ll know we’re really out of the cold.

For me, winter in New Orleans is bookended by Camellias. First, as things cool off, there are the white ones. They’re like popcorn- they explode out of nowhere, powerful fuzzy blooms that fall apart almost as soon as they’re out. Around Christmas, the red ones come out and they’re pretty mellow, they bloom and hang around for awhile adding a little more color to the holiday season.

But at the end of the winter my favorite comes out- the Desire Camellia. Organized petals spiral around the center bud in shades of pink. Unfortunately they start to brown fairly quickly, and every year I tell myself I have to get out and take pictures, and then suddenly it’s too late.

Well, not this year:

I picked this hardy hibiscus up at the Farmer’s Market last year not quite sure what I was getting, but fell in love with it once it bloomed. It comes in bright white and fades to a deep pinkish red over the course of several days- the whole bloom lasts a good 10 days, which is fantastically long for these things.

Here are two blooms on the same bush- one had been out for about four days and had gone pink, and the other had bloomed that day:

And here’s two days later, the pink’s gone much deeper, but the white’s still white:

I just love how it’s chaos at its center, much more than a tropical hibiscus:

I was playing with my new toy and Ferd was watching from the porch, wondering what I was doing.The camera just seems to baffle all the cats who cannot imagine what’s so interesting.