Unlandscaping
I spent about half of Saturday removing the largest of two massive clumps of shell ginger that had completely taken over one of our side yards.
This was a major back-breaking undertaking, and it isn’t finished yet – just the hardest part. It falls under the heading of cleaning up someone else’s horticultural mistakes.
In this case, it was a big mistake to plant shell ginger right up against the dining room windows in a yard that’s already long and narrow anyway. And I’m beginning to think shell ginger is a mistake planted anywhere, since it grows way too fast, and after flowering or after getting frost burnt, each stalk on the plant turns ugly and brown and must be cut off and hauled away, or else the plant looks crappy. Each of those stalks can reach 8 feet or more in height, too, and hauling off about 300 of them at a time is no real pleasure, either.
I had read from someone reliable – who it turns out either must have had a comparatively small clump of ginger or a large number of workers willing to do the heavy lifting – that you can soak the roots of this ginger sufficiently in water that it will just “pop” up with a little pressure from a shovel.
In my case, the clump I removed from the crater in the picture was probably 9 feet in diameter. Instead of popping out of the ground after a good soaking, this ginger clump responded to my leverage by breaking the handle of my fiberglass shovel.
In the end, it turned out that a wood splitter was the proper tool. I used it to split chunks away from the main ginger root clump, dividing and conquering.
If it ever stops raining long enough to dry out the root chunks enough to reduce their weight, I will haul them down by the river and see if they’ll grow along the bank. Probably not.
But the good news is, after a little raking, I’ll have the side yard back to use pretty much as I see fit.
This is something the new homeowner may want to consider, as he or she sets about landscaping a property for the first time. If you overdo it, beginning in five years or so, you might spend more energy pulling plants out than you did putting them in in the first place.
I wish a certain past homeowner here would’ve considered how big and fast those gingers grow, and decided on planting something else.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 17, 2008, 02 11 pm
Snake Rescue
If I didn’t use netting, the mocking birds, jays and cardinals would rob us of a significant portion of our fig, blackberry and tomato harvest. Also, as it turns out, the little brown thrush would hop happily into my plumeria nursery and tear up all the seedlings.
But I wish I didn’t have to use bird netting, and here’s one reason why:
I came around the giant fig tree in the middle of our back yard to check on that plumeria nursery this morning, to see whether the seedlings needed water. Bosco the Spotty Dog, who has taken a shot to the neck before in a confrontation with a copperhead, pushed ahead of me to a little fence surrounding the nursery area, and started biting at something on the ground.
I could see it was a snake of some sort, and pulled him away. It looked like the snake was stuck in the bird netting, so I put the dog in the house and armed myself with a hoe and a pair of scissors.
Turns out it was a blotched water snake, one of three or four snake species around here that appear similar to the cottonmouth, and even mimic their venomous brethren’s belligerent behavior.
This was the fourth time over the past couple of years in which a big water snake has come up from the river, apparently hunting for something it finds tasty, and tangled itself up badly in my bird netting. The other three times involved diamondback water snakes, and two out of those three times the aggressiveness of the snakes coupled with the hopelessness of their predicament forced me to kill them.
I really hate doing that, because these big snakes eat mice and rats wherever they can find them (along with toads and frogs and a few insects), and play a role in keeping the vermin in balance.
Today’s snake, thankfully, was comparatively docile, probably because it had been tangled up for a long time. Long enough that fire ants were trying to eat its tail. I brushed these off, and was able to insert the scissors between the serpent’s body and the netting cells. These snakes seem to have no sense of proportion. If they can fit their heads through the net, they assume that their sometimes-much-wider bodies will fit just as easily.
It doesn’t work that way.
After cutting it loose, the snake was so tired that it crawled off slowly into the fig trunks, giving me enough time to snap a picture, and even allowing me to pull it back into the grass for a better exposure. Ordinarily, these water snakes will attack if you mess with them. And while they aren’t poisonous, they bite hard.
So it ended well today, and I’m batting .500 in the snake rescue department.
Also, Bosco will get a little something extra in the dog bowl today. If the water snake would’ve been an unfettered copperhead, cottonmouth or coral snake, he would have taken the bite in my place.
That’s just the kind of dog he is.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 13, 2008, 10 18 pm
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Aftermath of a Tropical Storm
The short version? A stiff back and sore knees.
The storm was Edouard. Up to the day it hit shore, the National Weather Service was predicting it would reach Category 1 hurricane status with winds of 75 miles per hour or more and come busting through the middle of Fort Bend County (which is to say, my back yard) after hitting Galveston Island and south Houston. Newly planted trees would be uprooted in the ensuing mayhem, the weather service said. Tie down loose thing in the yard else they become missiles, the better for launching holes in your houses, the weather service intimated.
So I obligingly removed the 150 or so plumerias from my garage roof and put them inside the garage, along with another 50 or so growing in various places around the grounds. Another 75 or so small seedlings went inside in the sunny but unfinished place we refer to as the Jethro Room.
Then I waited for the storm.
Ha.
It never turned into a hurricane, came ashore at Sabine Pass (hurricane magnet of the upper Gulf) and veered north of Houston’s center, missing Fort Bend County altogether. And leaving me with the chore of hauling all those plants (including some really big, heavy ones) back out of the garage.
Not that I’m complaining. I know perfectly well that if I hadn’t crammed all the plants in the garage, the storm would’ve run right over the top of my garage.
And I needed to get those things off the garage roof anyway. August in South Texas, with its intense sun and 100-degree daily temperatures, is bad enough without adding the heat index numbers that accompany life on a hot tin roof, even if protected by a layer of lumber.
So what am I doing with 275 plumeria plants? That story will have to wait until later.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 10, 2008, 12 35 pm
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Out of the Box
I removed the home-grown bananas on the right this morning from a box they’d been sharing for the past four days with a couple of apples.
As mentioned in the post below, ethylene gas given off by the apples helps speed the banana ripening process. Look at the photo down below to see how much their color changed in just a few days.
The bananas at your left were purchased from Kroger. As you can see, this home-grown variety yields fatter, flatter and a bit shorter fruit than the commercial types found in groceries. The flesh is pure white, slightly drier than the commercial types and slightly denser, too. I’d say on a sweetness scale of 1-10, with commercial bananas rating an 8, these home-growns are probably 7.5. Others, such as our Raja Puris, I would rate as sweeter than the commercial types – maybe a 9 on the scale.
As I noted earlier, we have no idea what the variety in the picture is, as its roots sneaked under a fence from our neighbor’s yard. But the quality of the fruit and its cold-hardiness definitely make it a keeper in my opinion.
While neither of our back-yard banana types produce much more than, say, seven “hands” of fruit in any individual bunch, the commercial types grown by Chiquita et al may have up to 20 hands and weigh more than 100 pounds per bunch.
The New York Times, Popular Science and other publications have been reporting lately (and just a little breathlessly, I would say) that the banana is headed for extinction because of disease that threatens to wipe it out.
It isn’t true, though. There are hundreds of types of bananas, and while the Cavendish varieties apparently are at risk for one or two serious fungal diseases, there are lots of other good-tasting bananas that aren’t threatened – several that taste better than the Chiquitas. As for the Cavendish, there are lots and lots of sub-types, and not all are as susceptible to the fungus among us.
We Americans eat a lot of bananas, true, but if the big growers couldn’t supply them for two or three years because they had to replant other types, my guess is we can survive on other fare.
Or eat what we have out back.
→ B.Dunn, Jul 14, 2008, 05 04 am