You Are Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Buster!

For the past few months something has been rooting in the soil of one of my loquat trees which are planted in giant terra cotta pots. I placed chunks of spiky driftwood in the planter, thinking this might discourage the perpetrator. This morning, to my horror, I see that a critter has stripped chunks of bark from the trunk of the loquat, and then proceeded to gnaw on the inner pith!
WTF!!!!
I thought I had left this random wildlife predation behind. Gardening in Rollingwood meant dealing with deer, foxes, armadillos, and snakes. I don’t remember any problems with animal destruction when I gardened at my other former home in the Zilker ‘hood.
What animal is so desperate that they would eat bark? There is plenty of fresh water in the birdbath. My neighbors apparently leave abundant petfood out for any takers. The grackles are so surfeited they regularly leave abandoned bits of kibble marinating in the birdbath. And don’t raccoons have all the delicacies they could possibly need in any convenient dumpster? Squirrels? Aren’t they coming off the largest acorn crop in the past ten years?
I put pipewrap on the trunk of the loquat for the time being. It looks hideous and I am not happy. I may have to go all Elmer Fudd on this varmint and twap the wascally wabbit.

My Broken Back: Gardening is the Real Labor of Love

One of the things I find very annoying about garden blogs is that you never hear about the actual work.

“we put in the path”
“I moved the desert willow to a sunnier spot”

Okay: are people doing this themselves or hiring others to do it? I would appreciate full disclosure on this matter. So I will make it clear in my blog what I am doing and what I am paying to have done. I have never paid to have landscaping plans. I steal my ideas from looking at other gardens and things I like. I buy retail plants, propagate from my own plants, have been known to rustle now and then (for example snapping off a small prickly pear pad from an abandoned house or taking pods off a seed-setting vine).

Back at the R-wood house, I more than once had a ton of limestone dry stack delivered to my house and deployed the entire batch in low walls around beds. I’m not sure I could do that anymore (I’m 57).

I have had masons build me some walled beds and it was worth every penny.

So this morning when I went out to confront the two boxwoods that need to be removed, I was ready to dig them up myself. But after a few minutes of digging, I realized I would probably need to be hospitalized if I was in fact able to uproot them. So I called my tree guy, a nice man who has cleaned out the ballmoss and deadwood from my oaks and elms for the past 15 years. He is sending over a crew to dig up the boxwoods. Whew.

Tomorrow: Key West Phase commences.