Dis-aster

Those asters I planted last weekend started out looking pretty nice, but unfortunately I didn't get a picture of them – and the blossoms are almost all gone, thanks to something that has been steadily nipping them off until the plants look like this:


See those little white dots in the bottom half of the picture? (Click on it to see the larger version, which may show them better.) Those are the ends of stems that, until recently, held numerous blossoms like the one you can just see on the edge of the picture. I don't know for sure what's munching on'em because I haven't caught the bugger in the act, but my guess is the little brown bunny rabbit that I've been seeing around intermittently. Got to get me some rabbit repellent, because it's not my intention to supply this critter with a daily aster salad at $6.50 per plant .

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Throwing in the trowel

Too tired to write anything profound. I spent a big chunk of the day getting pot-bound plants into the ground – a Blue Star juniper that's been sitting here for months, a black-eyed Susan that's been around slightly less time than the juniper, and three asters I picked up at Lowes a couple weeks ago.

That leaves only a dwarf crape myrtle, one of the "Razzle-Dazzle" series (specifically, a Cherry Dazzle), that still awaits planting. I think I bought it at the same time as the black-eyed Susan. I just can't decide exactly where to put the darned thing. (I have a dreadful habit of buying plants that catch my fancy, when I don't have any specific plan for them.) So I guess it'll have to sit a while longer, because I don't want to have to move it once it's planted. I've already got an azalea that I really wish I hadn't put in its current location, and I don't need any more misplaced shrubs.

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon sorting stuff in the garage for my upcoming yard sale. Too bad I didn't get it together to hold the sale today; the weather was perfect. Keep your fingers crossed that next weekend will be the same.

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Poison ivy comes a-creepin' around

Last summer, I developed an inexplicable, very localized, highly uncomfortable, and long-lasting itchy rash on my left arm, right leg, and other random locations. When I eventually visited my doctor, I was pretty surprised to hear that it was poison ivy, because I drew a blank on how I could have gotten it. (Those of you who know me are probably aware that I don't spend much time outdoors in close contact with nature of the sort that might contain poison ivy.) Nevertheless, I started poking around the yard, and lo, next to my garage door was this small vine with leaves of three, and a bit of Googling produced a plethora of poisonous pictures verifying that this is, indeed, a fine specimen of Toxicodendron radicans (aka Rhus toxicodendron).

Well, that still didn't explain how I got my rash, because I certainly had not been messing with this vine, so I pressed on to the back yard, where I found the smoking gun, as it were – a larger stand of the weed under one end of my hammock stand – and suddenly it all became clear.


A few weeks before, I had hung up my hammock, on the stand which had been sitting out since the previous year. Now, hanging this hammock is really a two-person job, because it has to be strung tight as a drum to start with – it's cotton rope and it stretches a lot when you put weight in it, and then you have to take the slack up in the chains or else your butt drags on the ground. However, not having a second person handy at the time, I laid the hammock out on the ground across the base of the stand, hooked the chain onto the hook at one end (the end where the poison ivy is, as it turns out), then picked up the other end and hauled it as tight as I could before hooking it on that end of the stand.

So undoubtedly, I laid that end of the hammock right in the poison ivy, contaminating parts of the rope, which handily transferred a dose of urushiol to bare arms and legs when I lay down in the hammock. This explained the nature of the welts, which looked kinda like a rope burn. Duh.

Well, I got me some high-octane brush killer and tried it out on the vines next to the garage, and it worked, but somehow I never got around to spraying the hammock patch (actually, I think I can legitimately blame this particular piece of procrastination on the fact that I suddenly found a job and no longer had all the time in the world to do yard work). As a result, I never did get my hammock up this year, and the poison ivy has flourished mightily:


Would that my landscaping plants would do that well! Anyway, two weekends ago I was weed-whacking the hayfield back there and must have inadvertently clipped a few vines that have cropped up here and there away from the main mass, because I developed a few random blisters on my hands and arms that I'm pretty sure are poison ivy. So this past weekend I finally dug the brush killer out of the garage and went out and sprayed all I could find. The label says it's rain-proof after four hours, which is a good thing since it rained almost the whole next day. With any luck, the stuff should be dying by next weekend.

Of course, that's not the end of it, because dead poison ivy vines still contain plenty of active urushiol. Once the stuff has croaked, I'm still gonna have to pull up all the dead plants, seal'em in double trash bags for disposal, and then put my clothes through the laundry (twice, just to be on the safe side). Or maybe I should see if Home Depot carries Tyvek coveralls? Gaahh! I thought I was done with the hazmat business when I left chemistry behind.

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Chicken Little next door

The guy that used to live next door to me had a dog that was frequently out in their fenced-in back yard, where it would go into a frenzy of barking and jumping against the fence whenever it heard me in my back yard. It seemed to know I was there even if I was doing something as low-key as lounging in my hammock. Fortunately, he sold the house last year and moved (with the dog).

The new neighbors also have a dog that barks at anyone around, but that dog is usually inside the house. They do, however, appear to have another critter roaming their back yard, but I'm not sure if it's a pet, an egg supply, or an eventual dinner. See, I was out in the yard Sunday with my weed whacker, trying to do something about the hayfield that has flourished back there under my expert neglect, when I thought I saw something moving on the other side of the fence. The glimpse I caught through the quarter-inch gaps between the fence boards didn't look like a dog – and anyway, it wasn't barking, which pretty much ruled out the dog, which would have gone nuts over the weed whacker – so I took a closer look.

They've got a chicken back there. Dark brown feathers. I didn't spot any others, though admittedly I don't have much of a view through the fence, so I could have missed a whole flock.

The thing is, it's probably a violation of either the homeowners' association regulations, or City of Virginia Beach zoning ordinances, or more likely both. I mean, apparently it's OK to keep exotic birds around, like the macaw that escaped from another neighbor last year (resulting in my Bradford pear losing a good-sized limb when the macaw's crazy owner climbed the tree to try to "rescue" the bird), but chickens? That's not exotic, it's livestock, and cities tend to look askance at attempts to house livestock on a miniscule subdivision lot. So I don't know whether to turn them in, or just be happy that it doesn't bark at me when I venture out my back door.

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Landscaping procrastination

As usual, I began the landscaping season with good intentions, not all of which have come to fruition. The area behind the mailbox (you know, the one that attracts ants) had a low-growing juniper (or some such evergreen, I forget) that I planted last year, but it had mostly died back, and then the nice retired neighbor, who mows my lawn because "it's really no trouble" when he does his, apparently missed seeing the miniscule remaining green portion (not surprising, considering how dead the whole thing looked) and mowed over it, effectively eliminating any possibility of it recovering.

So I bought a bunch of annuals for the little plot – bright red salvia, plus white and deep blue/purple petunias (because I missed the pansy season) – and actually got them in the ground within a couple of weeks, which is pretty good for me; my annuals have been known to sit there in their flimsy plastic Home Depot containers right through the summer or until they die, which is their likely fate when I fail to keep them sufficiently watered in the typical scorching Hampton Roads July weather. And then I arranged a border of small retaining wall blocks around them and dumped a few inches of mulch into the bed.

With the block border ensuring (well, at least I hope so) that neighbors wielding errant lawn mowers won't just inadvertently mow down the greenery, I picked up a new juniper that's a little more upright/mounded than the previous incumbent, and stashed it (in the pot) temporarily behind the Cryptomeria I planted by the corner of the garage a couple of years back (which is doing pretty nicely, by the way). You can see the juniper in the photo at left, the little lighter green one in the pot with the tag still attached, peeking out from behind the cryptomeria.

That was, oh, a couple of months ago. And then it suddenly got too hot for me to have any ambition to work in the yard. The juniper's still sitting in the pot behind the cryptomeria. Despite watering, the petunias died off, first the blue/purple ones, then the white ones. (As you can see from the photos, I didn't get a shot of them before they croaked.) The salvia's hanging on, but it's now surrounded by a wild assortment of weeds that are doing very well, thank you very much (why couldn't the petunias have done so well?).

Got to get out there and take out that unidentified "volunteer" shrub before it shades out the salvia. Yes, it really is about twice the size of the salvia clump. Since my post two days ago, the first I tagged "procrastination", I'm discovering that I should have had that tag long ago. In fact, one of these days, I may even get around to going back and tagging some old posts as "procrastination" posts.

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Daffodil

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A field of yellow daffodils

OK, so this modest bed around my Bradford pear isn't quite a "field", but the fact remains that my yellow daffodils are up 4 to 8 inches and several are in bloom. And it's only February 7th, for Pete's sake!

After a downright cold (for Hampton Roads) January, we got a record high yesterday of 80 degrees (and close to a record in the mid 70s the day before). Evidently this unseasonable warmth has gotten these poor misguided bulbs confused enough to think spring is here. I don't even know just when they popped up through the mulch; all I know is, when I went out to fetch in my newspaper this morning, there they were.

I just hope they survive if we get another cold snap.

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A tree grows in Virginia Beach

Well, OK, a shrub. A couple of years ago, I ripped out the overgrown holly in front of the corner of my garage next to the front walk. For a while, the spot held some ivy and pansies, but I always figured I'd eventually plant another small shrub there, if I ever found something I liked that could be kept under control, size-wise.

"Eventually" finally arrived last weekend, when I got into the ground a Cryptomeria japonica (Japanese cedar) "Black Dragon" that I bought at Lowes the week before. (See, I'm getting a little better at planting in a timely manner.) They're supposed to stay relatively compact, so I'm hoping it won't require too much pruning to keep it from taking over the sidewalk. It's a nice deep green (more so than it appears in this photo, which looks slightly washed out), no yellow/gold coloration which I dislike. Now I just have to keep it watered and hope it lives through the summer.


In other gardening news, I spent a good bit of time this weekend digging out of my lawn some of the biggest damned thistles you ever saw. If the things I plant deliberately would grow even half as heartily as the thistles, I'd have a prize-winning landscape here. Pulled up a pile of clover, too, but hardly made a dent in it. I think it's going to take a dose of Roundup, which is also what the cracks in my driveway need. That's another place I manage to grow an amazingly healthy crop of weeds.

And finally, I bit the bullet and hauled the lawn mower out of the shed yesterday for the first mowing of the year. I was gonna do it last weekend, until we had a deluge. So I figured I'd best take advantage of a dry and sunny weekend to fend off the local grass police. It was so tall that I set the mower at maximum height (which I think is 3.5") so I didn't scalp it too badly. Of course, that meant when my buddy Tim stopped by just after I finished the front yard, he thought I hadn't started mowing yet. But then I pointed out to him the side yard where I hadn't mowed yet, and he revised his assessment of the situation.

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Unexpected encore

Among the plants I've put in over the last couple of years are some so-called "rebloomers", that are supposed to bloom in spring or early summer and then again in late summer or fall. But with the hellish heat this past summer, even daily watering didn't seem to be enough, and my Endless Summer hydrangea and Encore azalea wilted repeatedly. It looked like there would be no encores this year; I wasn't even sure they would survive.

Then, in late October -- only a week before Halloween -- some splashes of color caught my eye in the front yard. And lo, the azalea and one of the three hydrangeas had, after all, bloomed again. Not a lot of blooms, but the shrubs are still pretty small, and I was quite frankly amazed to get anything so late in the year.

With a little luck, fertilizer, and water, just maybe I can prod them into a growth spurt in 2007 and a more normal "endless" or "encore" blooming cycle.

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