I'm his new BFF in the whole wide world.

Meet my new best friend.

Isn't he just the cuuuutest thing ever? Well, the reason he's clinging so tightly to his new friend's finger is decidedly NOT cute, not at all.

Our story begins with the whitefly invasion I briefly posted about a couple of weeks ago. At least I think they were whiteflies. Maybe they were moths; perhaps they were gnats. Truth is, I really don't really know for certain, because the little jerks refused to sit for portraits. All I know is, they were whitish in color, they could fly, and they were EVERYWHERE.

Admittedly, I freaked a bit. You see, I had just planted half of the fall vegetable garden (with one hand in a cast, mind you) and I was certain these droves of evil flying creatures were out searching for a cheap brunch buffet. Since pesticides are out of the question in my garden, I quickly researched eco-friendly solutions to flying insect infestations, and decided to go with sticky fly traps.

And the traps worked swimmingly, on both flying and crawling insects. Oh, but I was pleased as Punch with the success of my sustainable garden whitefly solution, smugly oblivious as to whether I was trapping good guys or bad guys. Quite pleased, indeed. That's the way to do it!


Until this morning, that is. Heeding the old adage that a gardener's shadow is the best form of pest control, I started my day as I usually do, by surveying the back 40 (feet, that is; not acres).


After watering the bed where I planted the root vegetable seeds this past weekend, I checked out the pole bean and cucumber bed, and that's where I found the tiny baby anole, hopelessly glued down to a sticky whitefly trap, from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail. Sob! Anoles are good guys, eating flying insects like mosquitoes and, yes, whiteflies. Poor little thing was probably just looking for lunch. At first, I thought he might be...um, not alive...I touched him, gently, and he opened his eyes and began to pant. He's alive, yay! and yikes! I needed to act quickly.

I ran inside the house, fly trap in hand. How to get him off without hurting him? Scraping him off with any sort of garden or kitchen implement would surely cause severe injury. Aaugh! I tried rinsing anole+flypaper in lukewarm water, but dang that glue is water-resistant, precisely as advertised. Solvents were out - even vinegar could be too caustic for a baby anole to endure. Something inert, something with a neutral pH, something slippery...maybe oil would loosen the glue?

Twenty minutes and a Q-Tip drenched in canola oil later, baby anole was free, with every scale, tail tip and toe intact. Free, but weak from struggling to get loose for who knows how long. Trembling with fatigue and breathing heavily, he clung to my finger, never suspecting who put the traps up in the first place! Waa! What have I done? Would he be OK?

I took him outside and put him in the sunniest spot I could find, on a patch of spiderwort, and breathed a sigh of relief as I watched him crawl across the leaves, moving all his wittle feeties, toes, arms and legs with no problems. Whew. As soon as he spied the neutral-colored ceramic pot nearby, he started turning brown.


He attempted to scale a spiderwort stem to get to the pot,


and promptly slid off, landing softly on a sprig of horseherb. Oopsie. I guess I didn't do such a good job of rinsing the canola oil off.

After a bit of a rest, he took off, in search of a (hopefully safer) meal, and I took off to collect and dispose of every stupid whitefly trap in the garden.

And the moral of this story is, eco-friendly pest controls are not inherently harmless, d'oh. Sticky traps can traps lizards, butterflies, ladybugs and other garden good guys. Sigh. Instead of panicking and posting whitefly traps all about, perhaps I should have been more patient and waited for their natural predators to move in. It's always so hard to know when to act and when to wait. I feared waiting could result in a disastrous infestation. Unfortunately, decisions made from a position of fear are typically poor ones. Lesson learned.

October GGW Photo Contest - "Abundant Harvest"

(click on the title above to learn more about Gardening Gone Wild's monthly photo contest, Picture This, and enter your own photo!)

Here is my entry of the Marias harvesting okra at Boggy Creek Farm in Austin, Texas.

Thank you to those who gather harvests everywhere!

Aaugh! Whiteflies?

Little whitish/grayish mothlike creatures are flitting about everywhere, literally overnight, as I understand whiteflies are wont to do. But I've been reading that whiteflies are much smaller than these guys, who are about a third of an inch long. Any guesses as to what I might be dealing with? I don't have much growing in my fall garden, but what I do have is doing quite well, and I would hate to lose it to some little sapsuckers! Will try to get pictures but they move really fast and don't sit still for long...

Big Bend National Park

Inspired by Ken Burns' latest PBS series, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea", Pam Penick of the Austin garden blog Digging encouraged her readers to post their national park experiences on their blogs this past week. Apologies for my tardiness, but my broken write, er, I mean, right hand is slowing me down.


Big Bend National Park is, by far, my favorite national park. I've been to a few national parks -- Padre Island, Hot Springs, Rocky Mountain, Niagara Falls, a fort here, a shipyard there - but my most memorable national park experiences have been at Big Bend.


Big Bend is enormous, diverse, and unlike many popular national parks, sparsely inhabited by the human species, particularly in the summer. Its 800,000 acres include the flora and fauna of mountain, desert and river environments, and is home to the largest protected area of Chihuahuan Desert topography and ecology in the United States.


Altitudes within the park's borders range from 1,800 feet along the river to 7,800 feet at the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains.


I'm happy to say that I've personally experienced the full range of elevations and environments Big Bend has to offer, and there's so much I haven't seen. I could go there every year for the rest of my life and not see everything I wanted to see, much less everything there is to see.


The "big bend" in the Rio Grande River makes up the park's 118 mile southern border. That's one-tenth of the border between the Great State of Texas and the country of Mexico, folks. We're talking an immensely Big Bend here.


Yet at multiple points in the park, you could easily swim or even walk across shallow parts of the river into Mexico. Not that you should - the INS prohibits border crossings into Mexico except at designated immigration checkpoints, with or without a passport -- but you could. (I'm just saying, that's all.) See the rocky bank on the opposite side of the Rio Grande, opposite the hot spring Jack's enjoying? That's Mexico, and although you can't see them in this picture, several simple houses stand along the river bank.


The actual border proper lies within the deepest river channel of the Rio Grande River, a fact that makes talk of building a fence along the Texas-Mexico border seem downright wacky, not to mention futile. Can you imagine a fence down the center of this canyon?


Now, I've lived in Texas nearly all my life. I was born in Norfolk, VA (my daddy was in the Navy), but my parents were born and raised in the Texas Panhandle, and they returned to Texas when I was only a few months old, settling in Houston. However, my first Big Bend experience wasn't until 2005, at age 43. My husband, Jack, introduced me to Big Bend, while we were still dating; he'd been there before, and adored it.


Big Bend is a hiker's paradise. Laurence Parent's classic book, Hiking Big Bend National Park, lists 47 different hikes for people of all abilities. One trail, the Window View Trail, is wheelchair-accessible. This photo is from the moderately difficult Lost Mine Trail, a 3- to 4-hour hike.


On our first trip together, Jack and I hiked the Lost Mine Trail, the Hot Springs Trail, and the Santa Elena Canyon Trail, and drove the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive, making several stops along the way.


On our second trip, two years later, we hiked to Cattail Falls, then hiked the big hike, the iconic hike, what Laurence Parent calls the classic Texas hike, while we were still young enough and able enough to do it: a two-day, 6000-foot hike to the South Rim.


It proved to be an Outward Bound-like experience for me. I've never pushed myself that far, both physically and mentally, and I don't know that I ever could or would hike it again.


But the unparalleled vistas were well worth the effort. Here's the sunset we enjoyed the evening we reached the peak.


And, the splendid view the following morning, after we spent the night on the South Rim.


I have more of my favorite photos of Big Bend on my Flickr page. Thanks to Pam for encouraging me to share them with you. I can't wait to go back!

My new bird bath

I've been wanting a bird bath for months now, but not just any old bird bath. I wanted something a little different, and I didn't want to pay a lot of money for it. (Champagne taste on a beer budget, that's me.) I'd read on Great Stems how Meredith turned a cracked concrete bird bath into a beautiful and functional piece of mosaic art, and thought, how perfect...but alas, I'm not quite that crafty, or patient for that matter.

It was about this time that one of my neighbors cut down a 30-year-old ash tree that didn't make it through this summer's drought, and left the wood stacked up on his curb for weeks. One evening, I had a brainstorm, and asked Jack to help me select the nicest, straightest, roundest piece of that old ash trunk and haul it home.

And just like that, I had my bird bath's pedestal. Now all I needed was a dish for the top. I found a shallow ceramic planter saucer in a vibrant cobalt blue at Shoal Creek Nursery for $5; apparently someone forgot it when they bought the matching pot. It was pretty, but too small. Then I came across this huge shallow saucer in muted colors at Home Depot. It is glazed, which will make cleaning easier, but it has a bit of texture to it as well. (Birds aren't fond of bathing on slick, slippery surfaces.)

So, what do you think?

I like it pretty well, but I think I'm going to ask Jack to cut the base down a bit at the bottom to level it out some. I left the blue saucer on the ground, nestled in the horseherb, for the toads and ground-dwelling birds. I put a stone in the deep end for smaller birds to step on, but I may take it out to make more room. I've seen one mockingbird go for a dip so far, but it's been a bit cool for bathing. I'm hoping for more visitors this weekend, if it's as nice as the weatherman says it's going to be.

Happy Garden Blogger's Bloom Day!

Here's what's blooming in my garden. We'll start with the roses. This is reliable "Old Blush", an Earth-Kind rose. It was looking very peaked this summer, but as with everything else in the garden, the rains of El Niño have been restorative.


Up front in this photo is "Dame du Coeur", and she's never looked so good. "Hot Lips" salvia is to her left. I cut the salvia back severely in July at the urging of Cindy from A Daily View, and it responded really nicely. A Mutabilis rose (another Earth-Kind rose) is behind the salvia. It's easy to see from this angle why some call Mutabilis "the Butterfly Rose."


I'm not sure what to do with my poor Mutabilis. It's become a big old mess of gangly, floppy canes, seven feet tall and just as wide. I tried to prune it last February and it seems I just made it worse. Any suggestions?


Next, the herbs. The rosemary is covered with tiny blue blooms.


The wild woodsorrel is gone -- it really did not like that cold snap we had -- but the horseherb is coming on strong, and blooming as well.


And, last but not least, the zinnias are rallying.


Here's another 'hot mess' in this garden of mine. The zinnia bed is completely overrun with bermuda and nutsedge; luckily, the flowers don't seem to mind. There will be much work to be done here when the zinnias succumb to the cooler temperatures (and my cast comes off!).


Thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting GBBD on the 15th of every month. What's blooming in your garden today?

typing with one hand...

...the one that isn't broken. The left one. Yes, I'm right-handed (of course!). So all fall gardening plans involving heavy lifting are now officially on hold for the next several weeks. I think I can pull weeds one-handed, maybe, plant seeds, and start seedlings; everything else I can think of takes two hands. We'll see what the hand orthopedist has to say...