Is It Fall Or Is It Spring

Looking around the gardens it is hard to tell whether it is fall or spring. With all the rains lately the gardens have blooms everywhere. Even some of the plants that are not usually thought of as fall bloomers have a few blooms on them.

The summer Shrimp plant stayed looking good all through the heat but its blooms are gone now, replaced by the fall Shrimp plant. I staggered the two when I planted this bed so I would have blooms from spring all the way to frost. The summer plants have more yellow and green in the blooms than the fall ones. This is the summer Shrimp back when it was blooming.

These are the fall Shrimp plants now. You can see how much darker in color they are, showing a more maroon color.

The little Spanish Flag that hardly got up in the summer has come back and even got a few blooms on it. I didn't plant this and have no idea how it got here but I am glad it is. I had to look it up to know what it is.

While all the other Austin area bloggers were posting pictures of their Ox Blood Lilies, all I had showing was a few leaves. I had hardly watered them all summer and thought they may not make it let alone bloom. But let the deluge begin, water and then blooms.


The Duranta had a pitiful blooming in early summer but came on strong after the rains.




The Hummingbird plant, while not blooming prolifically, did bloom a little all summer. With mega doses of rain it is a stunner. Please excuse the dirty hand, I am a gardener and I never wear gloves, ever.

The Garlic Chives that has never bloomed since I've had it finally bloomed. I guess it will only bloom when flooded.
I felt lucky to have all the roses put on a few blooms one more time before settling in for the winter. The Mutabilis put on the most and had roses in the all the different hues that it's capable of.
The Belinda's Dream only had a couple but they were beautiful and smelled great.

And the Knockout has the most blooms. That's why they call it a knockout probably.

Because of my total lack of gusto in pruning any plant, the Don Juan only had blooms so high I couldn't get close enough for a picture without a ladder. I could still smell the blooms though and that's what counts. The Chief says she is going to prune it this year as I'm such a wuss at it.

The Turks cap hasn't had a bloom on it for most of the summer but is making up for it now, it's really loading up.

The Stone Crop is running a little late this year because of the drought but it finally made it. The bees are loving it as well.


What happened here? I think a Zinnia bloom must have fallen here and all the seeds came up in one place.

The fall Astor is right on schedule, drought or no drought. Being a native, you can expect performance, no matter the weather. Although I knew it was a native, I had never seen it in the wild. While on a kayaking trip on the Llano river at Junction last week, I saw it blooming in a profusion of color all along the banks.
We didn't plant much of a fall vegetable garden this year because it was just too hot when the planting needed doing. We did, however, plant a couple of beds of beans. They are going to make, I think, before frost. They have little beans all over them. You can also see the huge Cinnamon Basil in the middle of the photo. I always plant a few of these in the beds because I just love the smell, my favorite of all the aromatics. I also think they help keep the bugs away from the other plants.

There are still two cantaloupes on the vines that were planted in the spring. I think they are going to make it before frost as well.
I have two watermelons as well. I haven't gotten to eat one off this vine yet this year. All the vines died in the heat except this one, and it has gone crazy since it rained. Maybe it will be like one year when I got to eat a fresh off the vine watermelon at Thanksgiving. That would be great.
Why would anyone plant radishes like this? I love radishes and always have them in the beds when it's cooler weather. Favorite is a Russian radish that is an heirloom, so I save the seeds. It takes a few more days to mature but gets as long as a carrot, takes heat well, tastes good and doesn't get woody. Back to the first sentence, why? When they came up and I saw how they were, I at first didn't understand. Then I saw the edge of a chewy sticking up and knew the secret. My dog, Bonnie, had buried it, shoving all the seeds into one row. I know I will have some deformed radishes now as I don't intend to thin them.
There's more but you get the idea of just what rain will do. It's too bad we went so long with out any of it.

Rain Water Collection System is Getting Bigger

Last week I was able to get my friend Andy to bring his backhoe over to finish the excavating that the little Bobcat skid loader wasn't able to do. He did a very accurate job and I won't have to use a bunch of sand to level things out for the tanks. Lyn was very nervous with him digging so close to the existing tanks that were full of water from the recent rains. I wasn't the least bit worried as I've seen Andy operate so many different pieces of equipment and he is very good on them all. He bales hay for a living and is always running huge tractors and dragging even bigger implements and I've never known him to damage anything. He knows I'm a plant person and always asks before he drives over or plucks out any plants. He drove the backhoe seven miles here, did all this work, and drove it seven miles back home and would not hear of me paying him a cent. That's a true friend and I know I'm a lucky guy to have several of these true friends. I don't think he reads my blog but if he does, thanks Andy, I owe you.





The next day Lyn and I were back to shoveling sand and making ready to move a couple more tanks in. Getting the sand at the same level as the existing tanks is hard work and takes a lot of time. Moving the tanks around is even harder. They really aren't that heavy, around 400#, but they don't have handles. I weigh about 185# and Lyn weighs about a buck ten so pushing these around is really tough. We got it done, however, and now I'm ready for the rain on Monday and Tuesday.

It's starting to look quite impressive. With the eight inches of rain we had last week, all of these would have been full. As it was, we got 9,000 gallons in the tanks. The tubes at the top are the overflow tubes. I made them long enough to have the overflow fall beyond the pole that holds the sand back. After the last rain it was evident that it was important to do it as we had a major washout of sand. There is screen mesh over the ends to keep mosquitoes out.

Here is one of the reasons I'm doing this. This is the entrance to the Lauren concrete plant north of Seward Junction on Hwy 183 at 3:00 in the middle of the day, watering their driveway. Talk about wasting water. Hardly any of it is falling on the grass. That's my drinking water they are wasting.

Rain Water Collection

Work on the rain water collection system has been going slowly. Friends have been busy so moving them has been impossible with just Lyn and me. Also I just had no idea how difficult it would be to level them to the first tank. I had no illusions of perfection but thought I could keep them within an inch or two so as not to lose too much of capacity. The plumbing has been extremely difficult and has changed from my first concept of how it should be.

The inlet hole in the top of the tank is only 1 1/2". Where the water comes out of the gutter is 4". You don't have to be too bright to figure that the four inch line would have to be attached to several of the 1 1/2" lines or water would be lost. That was my first plan but after hooking up the first tank I could tell that the weight of the PVC pipe would need supports. Sometimes it is better to just start over and that is what I did.

This is the first configuration.

I really didn't like this as I would have to have a line to every tank. It finally registered that I could just drill a hole in the center of the top and put in a larger line. I already had a 4" hole saw bit so I went with 3" PVC as the outside of the fittings are 4" and it would be a perfect fit that I could caulk to keep mosquitoes out of my water. The unused 1 1/2" holes would be the over flow holes and I could easily put screen wire over them for mosquito protection. It is also a little easier to do the plumbing as I can get by with only having the inlet line go to three tanks.

I now have three tanks hooked up to receive water. The new hook up looks like this.


All I have to do now is level off 50' more ground, shovel in a lot more sand, move and level five more tanks and do the plumbing only on the bottom of them, and then I can start on the pump and filter house. I'll keep you posted.

Too Many Goldfish

The big goldfish give-a-way got rid of about seventy goldfish. It helped but was no where close to the number we need to move. Lyn has been running her trap line several times a day getting the little ones out and moving them to some tubs in the back. The tubs make for easy extraction when we find a sucker, errr, I mean someone who needs fish. We called Hill Country Water Gardens and asked them if they wanted any little goldfish and were surprised to learn that they needed fish in some of their ponds. You can see in the picture there are a lot of little fish in the buckets. I would guess a little over a hundred.

The fine folks at Hill Country Gardens are some of the nicest folks around and I didn't mind helping them out as they were helping us out as well. I would say that there is at least a hundred more that will have to come out of the big pond so if anyone out there needs any goldfish just let me know. They are in all colors, most but not all fantails. Other wise they are going here.

More bugs

I was playing with my dog this evening and seen a red and black streak go by, close to the ground. I immediately ran for my camera. I had wanted to get a picture of one of these wasps for a long time. It was a Tarantula Killer. It's a huge wasp, second in size only to the Cicada Killer for wasps in central Texas. This one was almost two inches long. They have bright red wings and an evil black body, the kind of black like a Black Widow spider. Like all non nest wasps they are very non aggressive. Even though they will take other spiders, Tarantulas are their main prey. They only take the male Tarantulas as the females are just to big for them to fly with. It's hard to believe that this wasp can fly while holding onto it's prey that is several times bigger than it is. However I know this to be true as Lyn and I got to witness it at our house when we lived in Liberty Hill. We had been working in the garden and were sitting on the porch steps, resting and enjoying a Shiner. I saw the Killer looking around and under the rocks that made up our walkway. I started to explain to Lyn about them when suddenly the wasp went under a rock and drug out a Tarantula. He had a hard time of it. When they were out in the open, the fight was on. It actually looked like the spider was winning for a while. We noticed that the spider started to slow down in it's movements. The wasp flew off. I thought, what's going on here, you kicked his butt and now your leaving. I have learned since then, the wasp was checking on the hole that the spider would go in. A little while later the wasp returned, flipped the spider on it's back, folded it's legs together neatly, grabbed onto the legs, and flew off, low to the ground. I felt that this spider was about as big as this wasp could handle as it could barely fly with it. You see, the wasp didn't kill the spider, it merely paralyzed it. If it had killed the spider it would rot before the egg that the wasp would lay on it, would hatch. The wasp stuffs the spider into a hole, lays an egg on it and covers it up. When the larvae hatches it eats the paralyzed, but still fresh spider. [This is where the much more computer savvy, Philip, at ESP blog, would insert a picture of the guys in the Alien movies all trussed up, but still alive] Think about this, for every egg that the wasp lays, it has to risk it's life fighting a much larger prey. I like 'em.

Gardening Gone Wild Down Low

I had to crawl through a lot of Petunias to finally get a shot I liked. I'm telling my wife that the dog mashed them down. This is my first time to enter this photo contest. It sounded like it would be fun and it was, certainly a different view. Here is my entry.

Watch out, it's a Vinegaroon

A friend dropped by today, recently back from a hog hunting trip in the panhandle. No hogs. His group was staying in an old house on the ranch. Just after he went to bed he felt something crawling on his foot. He turned on his flashlight and saw a huge bug on his foot. He jumped up, screaming like a little girly man. Everyone got up with lights and then they found a bunch of them. Whip Scorpions or Vinegaroons [Mastigoproctus giganteus] are not poisonous but they are ugly and big. He told me everyone slept in their trucks the rest of the trip. He scooped one into a coffee can and brought it back with him. He knew I would want pictures. He tried to catch a big one but couldn't. The one he brought back is a medium size one-he says.


You can see the whip tail here. They sling a vinegar like substance out of it, hence the name.
You can see that it has two pincers on each forward arm and both work. They use them to catch bugs as they are strictly meat eaters. With the penny in the picture you can tell it is a very large bug. Although it looks like a scorpion and is called a scorion, it really isn't a true scorpion. It's an interesting bug none the less.

You don't see one of these every day

A gentleman [I can't remember his name] in my native plant club has one of the animal rescue operations. After our club tour here earlier in the year, he asked me if he could release a Ringtail close by the house here. There was everything that he needed to survive, especially the water in my ponds. I thought it over and decided it would be okay even though I know he will get some fruit off the trees next year. They are really cool little animals and I like the idea of having one around even though I think he is eating tomatoes to survive right now. I was pretty sure I saw him scurry off the other night from right at a tomato plant. Their main food source is berries and seeds, especially Hackberry seeds but they eat fruit and veggies as well. With this drought I'm sure my garden is his only food source.

When checking the next morning I found this.


I don't really care though. He couldn't put a dent in the damage the Cardinals do. Here is a picture in the animal carrier before he was released. As you can tell by the huge eyes, Ringtails are almost completely nocturnal and this is probably the only picture of one I'll ever get.