bark, bugs, leaves, & lizards

Pesto Is The Season

Basil is our most productive crop.  Grapefruit and lemons are on the way, and cherry tomatoes grow out of the compost pile.

DIY WTF

For a moment after seeing this:

I thought, “Yeah, it’d be great to have a fire pit in the backyard!”  But then I thought, “WTF am I thinking?  It won’t be hot enough in the backyard this summer?”  Maybe a $20 outdoor pizza oven …

Lookit That

I must still be a Midwesterner at heart because I’m shocked–shocked, I tell you–that our banana tree* is producing … wait for it … bananas.


Now I’m wondering if they’d be good cooked …

* I know they’re not trees, they’re actually the world’s largest herb, at least according to banana.com. But I’m not going to be the one that starts calling them banana herbs.  People might misunderstand that in unhelpful ways.

Comment As Stick Beating Song

Someone left a fantastic comment on a flickr photo of mine–I’ve posted the photo below along with the comment (it’s a song; we’re aiming for an MP3 soon):

We Never Liked That Tree Anyway

Here’s what our banana trees looked like back in May when we planted them:

Here’s what they look like now after Gustav knocked a tree down in the backyard:

That’s about the worst of the damage from the fallen tree. It missed three houses, falling perfectly in our backyard, the upper branches only grazing the back edge of our house.

The tree even missed our compost bin:

Though we haven’t been able to do much with the backyard yet, we cleaned up the front yard and most of our street–stuffing all the vegetative debris into 24 large lawn garbage bags. That’s what I don’t get about the city’s hesitancy to allowing its citizens to return. It’s the ultimate in crowdsourcing–we clean up the place!

Nola Excavation

Last weekend we bought a couple banana trees to plant in our backyard. We found a nice spot near the edge of our property line by the neighbor’s fence and started digging. I got about 5 inches before hitting what I thought was a rock. Turned out I’d hit a vein of brick.

We pulled up a few dozen full bricks and about as many broken and crumbled pieces of brick, including a fat chunk of about four or five bricks still held together by mortar. We thought maybe we’d found a barbecue pit, but G Bitch’s mother knew better. She said the bricks were probably from an old brick alley that used to run at the back of the property lines. Makes perfect sense–and explains the large piles of bricks a couple of our neighbors have stacked in their backyards. We’ll be using our brick for a walkway along the side of our house. If we need more, we know where to go.

Part of the reason we picked this spot for the banana trees is because we thought the cats would appreciate a little extra vegetation to better conceal their comings and goings.