We’ve had some spectacular full moons recently. I have an Android phone with Night Sight which helped me take these photos. I thought they were cool and surreal.
Not a lot of attention was put into taking these as Julie was waiting to go to bed.
Lisa of Lisa’s Landscape and Design has been posting plants on Facebook that do well in this heat. I’ve been feeling pretty beaten down like a lot of Austinites by this unrelenting heat and dryness. But it did inspire me to show off what is doing well. Because there are actually some things still blooming and not (too) crunchy.
What do you have that’s still keeping on in this heat?
One thing that people are frequently clamoring for in Texas are evergreen bushes. The problem is there really aren’t any natives that match what people expect. So they plant Privet and Photinias. Which are an eco-nightmare.
But I’ve been thinking for a while. I have two Mountain Laurels that are underneath trees that I see all the time. They’re living they’re best lives and seem to be in no way interested in competing as a tree. They’re just spreading as bushes.
Got me thinking – why don’t we use mountain laurels as bushes? I mean sure they grow glacially, but nurseries tend to sell them at exactly bush height.
I started playing with one in my yard that I planted too close to the house. This is what it looked like. It clearly can’t grow up or it’ll hit the eaves. It’s in the path. But it’s also a pretty dang happy looking plant.
So I decided to experiment shaping it a bit with a hedge trimmer, and it looks pretty ok:
I think you could definitely create a hedgerow of these. Have you seen anyone do it?
After a long day summer we’ve had a delightful number of fall flowers that are still going. I cut back my salvias in July based upon advice from some zines, and it has been amazing to watch them bounce back.
A few (or six) years back I bought some plastic rain barrels. They had nice little planters in the top. For a while I had succulents growing in them.
But the freeze and this summer killed off the succulents. And then the lid started failing. Turns out having 50 pounds of granite and mulch on a plastic lid might be bit much.
So I scooped out all the mulch and dirt, and took a saw to remove the old top.
I put screws along the edge, and ordered a mesh draw string netting off of Amazon. I tightened the drawstring around the screws and everything is in place.
Hopefully I’ll get a few more years out of this barrel. We’ll see how it holds up when the rains come back.
Midcentury homes with gigantic windows are wonderful. We love looking out at our garden. But the heat…. the heat…
In years past we replaced all of our windows with modern double-pane ones which was a huge upgrade and made our lives much more pleasant – especially in the winter. But in the summer, I sit at the breakfast table with my back against the windows and roast. We live in a greenhouse.
A conversation on Twitter brought up that in Europe they routinely cover their windows to keep the heat out or in, depending on the season, which is something we haven’t really done in the US. We tend to focus on interior window coverings, but those just trap the heat by your windows. The heat is still inside your house. The 50s and 60s had awnings, but those don’t work for the morning hours when the sun is blasting into our kitchen.
One of the things that has changed is that we have smart homes so having outdoor blinds no longer requires going outside twice a day to pull them down and roll them back up. We decided to give outdoor roller shades a try. We went with Graywind custom shades* with a Zigbee motor. They can be triggered with a remote control and/or smart home hub. They have a battery that supposedly last 6 months and can be charged with USB-C cables.
Installing them was fairly trivial although it took a while because it’s hot outside. Every time we went out to work; it sucked out our will to live. But it involves putting up two brackets to hold the blinds and two magnetic brackets at the bottom of the window frame. It’s 10 screws per blind so really not a huge job. You need two people to mark where the brackets go, but you can let your helper free after that. You can add wire cable guides if you live in a windy area, although we skipped that for now.
Getting the remote to work and setting the top and bottom limits of the blinds was fussy and irritating. But it’s something you can do sitting in a chair in the shade.
I use Home Assistant for home automation which is nerdy, but something most folks who have hosted a website or dealt with Docker containers can handle. I’ve setup the blinds to come down at 11:30pm each night. And to go up once the sun starts setting – i.e after the solar meridian. Here’s the trigger for that:
trigger:
- platform: template
value_template: "{{ is_state_attr('sun.sun', 'rising', False) }}"
A very nerdy post, but hopefully someone finds it useful. It is great for keeping the heat out of your house and enjoying the garden in the afternoon.
* Not a sponsored post. I received no compensation for this.
One of the things that I think can be a struggle for every native plant gardener is “what to weed”. We want our wildflowers to spread, but not our weeds. As part of that I thought I’d try to start doing comparisons. It’ll help me remember and maybe someone else.
I’m going to start with Gayfeather. It’s a plant you usually have to leave until fall before you see blooms so there are lots of opportunities to accidentally weed it.
I have two other plants in my yard that look like it. Here are the three:
Gayfeather
Horseweed?
Ragweed
Gayfeather’s leaves are very distinct and separated from one another.
In Horseweed the leaves are tightly packed.
Ragweed is apparently an artemesia and definitely has those delicate lace-like leaves. I find that when it’s short its color makes it blend in with Greg’s Mistflower.
Please excuse the pictures, but hopefully this is a helpful comparison.
I recently got Colleen Dieter’s “Let’s Care for Texas Plants” Zines. I love gardening books, but frequently finding information again can be a real struggle. Colleen has done a great job of creating 3 indexed volumes on plant care in Texas that are short and to the point. The first is about care for turf grass and trees. The second is common perennials. The third is common “other” plants like Agaves, Yuccas, and Roses.
She said she expects some of this to be controversial, but most of it lines up with my experience. Of course that makes sense. In a rather wild coincident we live in the same neighborhood a couple streets apart. We have the same street number and first word of addresses (think 123 Oak Ridge and 123 Oak Valley) so the mail person loves to give us each other’s mail. I’ve been walking over to return mail for years and admiring her yard, but somehow it took me years of reading her blog at Red Wheelbarrow to put two and two together.
I would recommend this for anyone growing plants in Texas. I’m also hoping other people start making zines like this.
I think I’m going to make and decorate a binder and put these inside. I’m going to add the City of Austin’s Grow Green guides and some well labeled tabs. It’ll be like a Better Homes and Gardens Garden Book, but actually relevant to my zone!
I highly recommend anyone who is trying to grow any plants outdoors in Texas buy this great resource. Pick it up over at Red Wheelbarrow:
Shop For Stuff — (redwheelbarrowplants.com)
Just keeping notes. This was my first time going on the weekend, and the line was long.
This past weekend I looked at the completely dead splotches in my backyard. The one thing that’s consistent about them is that they’re dead. I have St. Augustine under a live oak that is very happy. But the minute it gets out from under the tree’s shade the grass spends its time in one of two states – yellow and struggling or dead.
Looking at those dead splotches and the rain chances I got an itch to do some planting. I have been getting ads for “Plant Cowboy Delivery” for quite a while. I browsed their site a lot this summer knowing I shouldn’t buy anything during a historic drought. But this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give them a try.
I don’t know if you’re anything like me. But I tend to make fairly detailed plans for my yard. Then I go to the nursery and can’t find half the plants and so I substitute with what’s on hand. Half of what I buy dies or doesn’t look right. So having a way to order the exact plants I want is really appealing to me. And I noticed “Plant Cowboy” updates their inventory so I could plan for what I needed.
I ordered on Friday and got the delivery on Monday morning (they don’t work over the weekend which is fair). The plants were stunning. These are 1 gallon Big and Gulf Muhly. Aren’t they beautiful?
They were a bit root-bound, but for the size that is probably pretty obvious. I’m going to definitely order from them in the future.
There’s a $25 delivery fee, but I figure I easily saved that in not buying extra plants I don’t need at the nursery. And the prices are pretty great. Especially for agaves and cactus.
Anyway, check them out – Plant Cowboy. I don’t make any money off or free plants off of this. Just want them to stay in business.