Xiaoniu 小妞

It seems that Mother Nature is beating us up and taking our lunch money. We’ve been suffering for four days with 90+ degree daytime temperatures and 80+ degree nighttime temperatures with 80-90% relative humidity. Needless to say the weather has been awful. Our central air can’t seem to keep up and even my 5 year old truck seems to have trouble getting it cold and comfy.

Thankfully for us the heat-wave has broken. The temperature dropped down into the 70s and the humidity dropped down into the 70% range, which is good seeing as it is poring rain and stormy outside. It’ll be down to about 50% humidity when it’s all over. Then it is time to open the windows and let the (free and) cool air into the house.

Last week we had a different problem. Instead of heat-wave we’ve been suffering (slightly) with a mild drought. Watering the lawn is a requirement, otherwise, all the grass will shrivel up and die. And it is currently spring so the flora are in full bloom and releasing all of its pollen. So much pollen has been released that after a couple hours this is what our cars look like:

I call it natures pollution. Everything is covered in this crap. The cars, the ground and my front porch. We sweep and clean the screen door (the damn screen gets covered with pollen too), but it is worthless. We just have to wait it out. To give you a better idea of how bad the pollen is we see the same dusty covering in our kitchen. Umm tastey.

It comes in clouds. I happened to be outside working on the yard and noticed a cloud a couple houses down the street. It blew over my way and I realized that the “cloud” was actually made up of pollen. Disgusting. It looks like smoke from a distance and it comes in waves in order to cover everything. Bleh.

The fauna are also on the prowl. We are dealing with a plague of ants in the yard, at least two very annoying and destructive chipmunks and as of this week at least one mole. The ants are awful. I put down insecticide weeks ago and it seems have to increased the number of ants instead of reducing the number. I have never seen anything like it. Every square foot of our yard has 1-10 ant hills.

This week we declared on the chipmunks. These little fuckers are destructive. They look cute and their chittering is sweet to the ears, but the little bastards are awful to have around. They dig burrows in the ground and leave 1.5″ holes (entrances) in the grass. They eat everything. We plants lots of summer blooming bulbs (that cost money!) and the bastards ate most of them.

Check out the next photo to see how many of the 70+ bulbs we planted have grown. The entire bed is full of indications of burrowing. More than half of the bulbs are gone (the daffodils and tulips don’t count as they were blooming before Chip and Dale woke up from their winter long nap.

And to top everything off I discovered that the chipmunks have started “nesting” in our gutters, which means I have to take them apart to evict them. Water does not wash out all the crap they put in the down spouts. Again I say they are destructive animals. I’ve done plenty of reading about them (chipmunks are actually “ground squirrels”) and they have a reputation for eating stuff out of your garden. Well, we can’t have that.

Everything I’ve read about dealing with them comes down to two things. You can either learn to live with them or kill them. Deterring and trapping them doesn’t work. You either have to live with their destructive behavior or get rid of the. I’ve tried to live with them for three years now. I can’t live with them any more.

Now, onto the latest animal to take up residence in our yard is a mole. I’ve never in my life had to deal with a mole, but here we are with a mole problem. This new bugger digs tunnels (burrows) and leaves a trail of bumped up looking law and destroys the grass. There are deterrents for them, but he’ll have to wait. I have ants and chipmunks to deal with.

Yet another tangent. I happened to be out in the backyard watering the veggies and happened upon this mess. I believe this was at once an animal. This “fur” was spread out through a big circle. I can only hope that it was a squirrel.

Since we are in a mild drought I’ve been doing everything I can to keep up with the yard. The well pump had to be replaced (the topic of another post), which meant that until two weeks ago we had no outside water and sections of the yard died completely. I whipped out my green thumbs and proceeded to complete my first seeding job. Unlike other jobs this one didn’t work out too great at first.

I learned the hard way that you cannot always follow the directions on the bag of seed. If I did not go against my better judgement and used mulch (straw) this would have been a lot better off, but this is what we have now for a side yard. As of today the ground near the house is much fuller, but I added straw a couple weeks after sowing.

The patch in the front is coming in great. I only wish the rest of the yard looked and felt like this patch. The grass is luxurious to feel. As of today (a couple weeks after this photo was taken) the patch is very full and is already being mowed.

Since I had relatively good luck with the bare patches I decided to take care of some other spots. The tree in the front had very little grass and the dirt has eroded away. Here is a before shot where I already added lots of dirt.

Today it looks pretty much full (the photo is a week old). You can still see some of the straw, but the grass is very full and growing extremely well. It took mere days for these seeds to germinate.

I seeds a few other bare spots in the front, but they are not as picturesque so I’ll leave them to your imagination. Two spots where trees used to be (years ago) and a random area were all dead. I dug out old roots and nasties, and added more dirt and seed. Those spots are doing well and will be ready for a mow this week.

The garden is coming along great. All but one of the tomatoes we started from seed died due to the heat. The peppers growing from seed are growing too slowly. At this rate they’ll be ready to be planted around September.

The tomato and strawberry plants are already producing fruit. We’ll have one strawberry this week and maybe a few tomatoes in a week or two. The spinach is growing well and the scallions are about 6 inches tall. The chives are not doing great, but they are growing. The Asian eggplant plants did not take the cool nights too well, but have perked up tremendously since the weather turned hot and humid. The rest of the plants (various herbs, marigolds and pepper plants) are doing well as well.

This past weekend we filled up the rest of the garden. I picked up some cucumber, green squash and napa cabbage plants. Sue picked up some seeds for Chinese veggies (si gua (louffa) and baby bok choy. I can’t wait. If all goes well we’ll have quite a variety of veggies and lot of herbs too cook.