On Friday evening I pressed onward to make a new software release. I did get it done but didn't leave until 1am instead of my usual midnight. I still got home in time to re-program the Rainbird system not to water my trees on Saturday at 3am. Since it waters twice on Thursday, early morning and evening, a re-watering of the trees wouldn't make sense until Sunday at 3am, just over two days later.
On Saturday afternoon I hauled 6 bags of topsoil and one bag of sand from the driveway (where I had hurriedly stashed them on Thursday night, hidden just barely behind the trash cans) to Palmhurst for safe storage. I also hauled several Xeripave pavers to Palmhurst. The pavers I had placed temporarily on the driveway were forcing me to leave the trash and recycling cans pushed way out from the garage door, which wouldn't be good for my end-of-the-month party during which one guest likes to park in the driveway.
Then, I pruned the Viburnum near the northwest corner of the back yard because it was looking waterlogged and prone to fungus. It had several branches on the ground, many rotten leaves on the ground, and there was no good ventilation underneath. I cut back the branches and leaves so the ground is visible from all sides and no leaves are touching the ground. I cut off some of the yellowed leaves. On Monday afternoon it was looking very nice again, so I think I did the right thing.
I also put on my full face respirator and swept the garage, which had gotten very dusty during the installation of the Rainbird controller (much of the dust being nasty sheetrock dust from cutting the hole in the wall) and hadn't been swept in about 6 months anyway.
Looking at the clouds I checked the forecast and decided to close the doors to Lyndhurst.
I had been planning to do more garden work this weekend, but on Friday evening I decided instead to see two plays that a friend had told me about, so after getting up and ordering tickets online on Saturday afternoon around 3pm, there wasn't much time. I just barely got to the Jump Start theater to watch the play The Importance of Being Earnest at the 8pm showtime. Near the end of the play, an intense thunderstorm started. It was still an intense downpour when the play let out, so I holed up in the nearby brewpub until midnight, when there was a three hour break in the rain. At 3am the rain started in force again, ulimately dropping more than 1.5 inches. So it turned out to have been very wise and timely to have done all the things I did, otherwise I'd have had soggy topsoil, wet pavers needing a few more days to dry out, a sticky garage floor, and a rotten viburnum surrounded by mud.
The rain came just in time, too. During the great tree planting on the previous Thursday, I had been hoping for promised rain that weekend but none had arrived. So now, mid August, and finally my trees got a good raining. Now it looks really good that all of them, with only the possible exception of the sickly looking Wild Olive with just a few leaves still functioning, will come through my outlandish summer planting just fine.
There wasn't any time for me to do anything on Sunday before getting to the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at 2:30. I did get there on time and it was a long play.
But after that I was a bit out-of-sync. I went to North Star Mall afterwards to have my combined dinner and lunch just after 6pm, only to find that North Star Mall no longer has a Luby's Cafeteria where I had been planning to fill up. So I ate at Subway and had ice cream at Marble Slab because I was still hungry. The mall was closing at 7pm as I was leaving, and then I went out to Gabriel's Liquor Superstore on 1604, where I'd been meaning to go for 8 months (!) to get a special kind of tequila (single barrel) that I had been introduced to at the company Holiday Party last year. I had some difficulty finding the store amidst all the new construction and developments up there and was worried that by the time I got there, well after 7pm, they would be closed. Well, I needn't have worried, since it turned out they were closed all day Sunday. That meant it would have been more timely to go to Home Depot to buy new garden gloves instead. I wasn't sure how late Home Depot would be open. I got to Home Depot at 8:04 and seeing cars still in the lot was relieved. But it turned out they had closed at 8pm. So I got a different type of gloves at Target instead. It was very hard to find any work gloves at Target. I spent much time thinking about the discontinued solar lights on sale and finally bought one of those too. Then I did my weekly grocery shopping. The best part of Sunday was that my lady friend finally called me around 11pm, after a week of worrisome lack of calls and ambiguous texts. She had been apparently suffering from the milder form of West Nile Fever, and lacked energy all last week. I myself had just been thinking about mosquitos all last week (see earlier posts). Coincidentally, her daughter had just named a new cat Kronos.
On Monday afternoon I did some work on the AC drain which wasn't draining very well at the terminus of the new 30 inch splashblock which had replaced the original 12 inch one. A few years back I dug an artesian drain of sand going out 5 feet, but it has since been covered with clay soil and the new splashblock wasn't connecting well with the subsurface sand...making it a possible breeding pool for mosquitos, I feared (though it wasn't exactly still water, it might be still enough). I dug up the grass and clay soil at the terminus of the block. There was still sand underneath the soil, I was pleased to see. I replaced the soil and grass I dug up with more new sand to restore proper drainage away from the house.
I did NOT use any kind of pesticide on the block, because I have seen dragonflies drinking there, and I had just learned from reading on Sunday night that dragonflies (which I had always thought were just a nuisance) actually eat mosquitoes. No wonder there were so many dragonflies in my yard last week. I now realize it wasn't just me with my new sprinklers suffering from mosquitoes. In fact the whole state of Texas is having an epidemic of West Nile fever from an intense outbreak of mosquitos everywhere, and they're even spraying for mosquitoes in Dallas (which I think is a very bad idea because it also kills the dragonflies and honey bees).
Instead, I ordered some natural bacterial mosquito control which is toxic to mosquito larvae but not to pets or anything else, and I plan to put some on the splash block periodically, and perhaps in other areas around the yard that tend to stay moist too long. I also ordered some electronic mosquito wands that are claimed to be the best of their kind, and only $6.50 apiece. You may recall last week I ordered what appeared to be the best indoor mosquito trap. It hasn't arrived yet but actually there are no mosquitos haunting me inside now, I think the last one finally died or left. I've been investigating outdoor mosquito traps, more on that later.
On Saturday afternoon I hauled 6 bags of topsoil and one bag of sand from the driveway (where I had hurriedly stashed them on Thursday night, hidden just barely behind the trash cans) to Palmhurst for safe storage. I also hauled several Xeripave pavers to Palmhurst. The pavers I had placed temporarily on the driveway were forcing me to leave the trash and recycling cans pushed way out from the garage door, which wouldn't be good for my end-of-the-month party during which one guest likes to park in the driveway.
Then, I pruned the Viburnum near the northwest corner of the back yard because it was looking waterlogged and prone to fungus. It had several branches on the ground, many rotten leaves on the ground, and there was no good ventilation underneath. I cut back the branches and leaves so the ground is visible from all sides and no leaves are touching the ground. I cut off some of the yellowed leaves. On Monday afternoon it was looking very nice again, so I think I did the right thing.
I also put on my full face respirator and swept the garage, which had gotten very dusty during the installation of the Rainbird controller (much of the dust being nasty sheetrock dust from cutting the hole in the wall) and hadn't been swept in about 6 months anyway.
Looking at the clouds I checked the forecast and decided to close the doors to Lyndhurst.
I had been planning to do more garden work this weekend, but on Friday evening I decided instead to see two plays that a friend had told me about, so after getting up and ordering tickets online on Saturday afternoon around 3pm, there wasn't much time. I just barely got to the Jump Start theater to watch the play The Importance of Being Earnest at the 8pm showtime. Near the end of the play, an intense thunderstorm started. It was still an intense downpour when the play let out, so I holed up in the nearby brewpub until midnight, when there was a three hour break in the rain. At 3am the rain started in force again, ulimately dropping more than 1.5 inches. So it turned out to have been very wise and timely to have done all the things I did, otherwise I'd have had soggy topsoil, wet pavers needing a few more days to dry out, a sticky garage floor, and a rotten viburnum surrounded by mud.
The rain came just in time, too. During the great tree planting on the previous Thursday, I had been hoping for promised rain that weekend but none had arrived. So now, mid August, and finally my trees got a good raining. Now it looks really good that all of them, with only the possible exception of the sickly looking Wild Olive with just a few leaves still functioning, will come through my outlandish summer planting just fine.
There wasn't any time for me to do anything on Sunday before getting to the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at 2:30. I did get there on time and it was a long play.
But after that I was a bit out-of-sync. I went to North Star Mall afterwards to have my combined dinner and lunch just after 6pm, only to find that North Star Mall no longer has a Luby's Cafeteria where I had been planning to fill up. So I ate at Subway and had ice cream at Marble Slab because I was still hungry. The mall was closing at 7pm as I was leaving, and then I went out to Gabriel's Liquor Superstore on 1604, where I'd been meaning to go for 8 months (!) to get a special kind of tequila (single barrel) that I had been introduced to at the company Holiday Party last year. I had some difficulty finding the store amidst all the new construction and developments up there and was worried that by the time I got there, well after 7pm, they would be closed. Well, I needn't have worried, since it turned out they were closed all day Sunday. That meant it would have been more timely to go to Home Depot to buy new garden gloves instead. I wasn't sure how late Home Depot would be open. I got to Home Depot at 8:04 and seeing cars still in the lot was relieved. But it turned out they had closed at 8pm. So I got a different type of gloves at Target instead. It was very hard to find any work gloves at Target. I spent much time thinking about the discontinued solar lights on sale and finally bought one of those too. Then I did my weekly grocery shopping. The best part of Sunday was that my lady friend finally called me around 11pm, after a week of worrisome lack of calls and ambiguous texts. She had been apparently suffering from the milder form of West Nile Fever, and lacked energy all last week. I myself had just been thinking about mosquitos all last week (see earlier posts). Coincidentally, her daughter had just named a new cat Kronos.
On Monday afternoon I did some work on the AC drain which wasn't draining very well at the terminus of the new 30 inch splashblock which had replaced the original 12 inch one. A few years back I dug an artesian drain of sand going out 5 feet, but it has since been covered with clay soil and the new splashblock wasn't connecting well with the subsurface sand...making it a possible breeding pool for mosquitos, I feared (though it wasn't exactly still water, it might be still enough). I dug up the grass and clay soil at the terminus of the block. There was still sand underneath the soil, I was pleased to see. I replaced the soil and grass I dug up with more new sand to restore proper drainage away from the house.
I did NOT use any kind of pesticide on the block, because I have seen dragonflies drinking there, and I had just learned from reading on Sunday night that dragonflies (which I had always thought were just a nuisance) actually eat mosquitoes. No wonder there were so many dragonflies in my yard last week. I now realize it wasn't just me with my new sprinklers suffering from mosquitoes. In fact the whole state of Texas is having an epidemic of West Nile fever from an intense outbreak of mosquitos everywhere, and they're even spraying for mosquitoes in Dallas (which I think is a very bad idea because it also kills the dragonflies and honey bees).
Instead, I ordered some natural bacterial mosquito control which is toxic to mosquito larvae but not to pets or anything else, and I plan to put some on the splash block periodically, and perhaps in other areas around the yard that tend to stay moist too long. I also ordered some electronic mosquito wands that are claimed to be the best of their kind, and only $6.50 apiece. You may recall last week I ordered what appeared to be the best indoor mosquito trap. It hasn't arrived yet but actually there are no mosquitos haunting me inside now, I think the last one finally died or left. I've been investigating outdoor mosquito traps, more on that later.
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