Doves, Part 4

Well, I'm an empty-nester, at least in the literal sense of it.

Scene looking out through two slats in the window blinds.  The bigger squab was the one to launch first.  In the way of many birds, he (or she) actually sat on the back of this chair for quite some time getting his bearings in his (or her) first trip out of the nest.

The smaller squab left the nest about an hour later, perching on top of a wind chime until getting his (or her) bearings.

They actually both returned to the nest last night, after spending their afternoon in the great outdoors.  According to Wiki, their father (not their mother) will continue to feed them for up to two weeks now that they have fledged (both parents participate in raising them - I didn't know that until looking it up just now). 

Meanwhile, it's time for me to give that bedraggled hanging plant some much-needed water. 
:-)

Doves, Part 3

Look at what a difference a few days make in baby dove development:

April 2, 2012

April 7, 2012

Just five days.  Wow. 

A dove was killed in our back yard yesterday, probably by the Cooper's hawk that we see on a regular basis here.

Between our yard and our next-door neighbors' yard, there is a discrete trail of feathers suggesting that the entire bird was methodically stripped before being consumed.

Fortunately this victim of Nature was not the mother of our twin fledglings, and she's still feeding them.  Any day now, they'll fly the nest. 

Landscaping Made Easy, Part 4: POH Yaupon Holly

Be open to yaupon.  (In case you're not familiar with the term, that sentence rhymes).

I should have been more clear at the outset of my landscaping posts about my intentions: identifying a variety of landscape plants that will make for an interesting and practical (i.e., private) back yard assemblage that requires virtually no maintenance or intervention of any kind. 

There are plenty of alternatives to the plants I'm listing here that are more exotic and sexy.  We live in a humid subtropical climate that lends itself very well to the growing of a wide variety of showstopping landscape plants.  However, the trouble with many of them is, unless you baby them and treat them with various chemicals, they won't do well for you.  You'll either be out there spraying and dipping and digging and watering and fertilizing and treating according to the schedule they demand, or you'll have dead plants. 

Nothing in my back yard gets treated with chemicals, ever.  If something gets attacked by some insect or fungus, I let it die and move on to trying the next hopefully-more-resilient candidate. 

I'm primarily aiming these posts at the Centerpointe residents who currently have nothing whatsoever in their back yards.  Obviously these are not residents who care to spend every weekend manicuring their landscapes, or they would have demonstrated that kind of behavior already.  These are typically the busy two-earner family-oriented professionals who need hands-off economical landscaping options that are suitable enough to create privacy and increase their property values accordingly, but who may have the time and energy to work on their landscapes only a few days each year.   

This perspective comes to mind at this moment because, if I recommend yaupon, some folks would be inclined to say, "That plant is SO over-done."

Well, there's a REASON why it's overdone - it's pretty and once it's established, it almost cannot be killed.  It's native to our area, evergreen, and is a landscape work-horse whether in miniature or larger form.

And the POH, which stands for Pride of Houston yaupon cultivar, is really special because, not only does it provide wonderful screening...

Like many Centerpointe residents, we have a few dreaded utility boxes inside our backyard easement.  Behind these POH's there is an ugly electrical utility box and an even-uglier Comcast utility box, but you can't really see them because the POH's shield them so well.

...it also is unique in the sheer number of flowers and berries it produces:

This is a pic from a previous post.  In the spring, POH's are covered with white flowers that are very attractive to just about every insect.

Wow!  The brightest scarlet berries persist on POH's for months, basically from the fall until they drop off the following spring just in time for the next flowering.

Once the roots are well established, POH's basically never need watering or care.  They're native to Houston.  They live here naturally and they can deal with the environment without assistance.  I've never seen a native yaupon attacked by any pests.

Like the other choices I've listed, they don't cost much.  I have four of them that I bought at the Lowes hardware store on FM 646.  I saw them come into the store in the spring of 2010, mature five-footers, beautiful shapely POH specimens, but they were priced at $100 apiece due to their large size.  So I waited, and waited, and waited... and sure enough, that fall, they went on sale for $30 apiece, and I bought the store's entire remaining stock of them.    Again, not much money for a plant that now defines the entire northwest corner of my back yard.

Try some non-frustrating POH's, and the only red you'll be seeing will be in the annual outrageous proliferation of berries. 
:-)
I've also seen them for sale at Houston Garden Center, where the tags may say "POH" only, minus the words "yaupon holly".

Landscaping Made Easy, Part III: Layouts

I'm going to diverge from my plant-by-plant assessment of what (in my opinion) would be appropriate to integrate into a small-Centerpointe-yard landscaping plan, and focus on the issue of how to actually position trees and shrubs around a yard for maximum artistic impact. 

In my mind's eye, I can hear people saying to themselves, "Well, sure, some Texas wax myrtle might be a versatile and cheap choice for my yard... but I don't know how to arrange them and other plants so that they look good."

I use two very general artistic principles in DIY landscaping:  diagonals and thirds (and to a lesser extent, the "golden section" rule, which is mostly a reference to focal point).  Even if you do not consider yourself to be artistic, if you simply apply these basic mechanical principles on their face, odds are good that you'll come out OK with a DIY landscape plan.

Basically what these rules say is that your eye prefers to see scenes chopped up into thirds, because a view of stuff chopped into halves is somehow unsettling to the brain.  And it prefers to see diagonal lines because horizontal lines are severe and discordant and visually-flattening, whereas diagonal lines impart movement and energy to a scene.  And the eye wants something to anchor itself as a focus.

Here is an easy smaller-scale example:

I bet your eye finds the scene in that photo to be fairly pleasing, doesn't it?  Here's why:

There are boundaries and visual cues in the scene suggestive of thirds...

...there are linear elements forming primary and secondary diagonals, which impart energy to the scene...

...and there's a nice big focal point.

Design gets a little tougher when you're dealing with a very shallow back yard, however, especially when you have competing objectives:  not only does the vegetation have to look good in the way of making an artistic impact, in Centerpointe, that vegetation has to provide a practical function (privacy screen) as well.  So compromises usually have to be made.  The biggest challenge to many Centerpointe homeowners is going to be creating an illusion of depth and movement when there's almost no backyard depth to work with:

I only have a puny 23 feet of depth to work with in the space between our back porch and the rear fenceline!!  The property is 70 feet wide, but the visual effect is flatter than a pancake because of the corresponding lack of depth.

My freedom to form visual thirds with my design was weaker here because there's a 2-story house behind the two wax myrtles on the right, and I had to concentrate on blocking that to the extent possible.  That was Priority #1. 

I had to concentrate on imparting as many visual diagonals as possible in a space that had almost no depth to work with.  But these two points are important:
(1) Notice how many of the resulting visual diagonals converge on the focal point.
(2) Notice that the focal point is off-set to one side.  Focal points do not need to be in the center of the field of view.  In fact, often times, you will unwittingly create an undesirable "halves-ie" view by centering them. 

Focal point, about which I'll post later.

You'll see these same principles manifesting in other blog entries, such as the one about Italian cypress. 

So there you have some compositional ideas about how to best turn your sow's ear of a tiny back yard into something that more closely resembles a silk purse.
:-)

Microwave madness

So, in yesterday's post, I asked for anyone to contact me if they had issues with their builder-installed microwave oven. 

I should have just gone straight to the Source of All Local Wisdom - the big-box retailers.  After patiently explaining my dilemma last night, explaining that I've had two magnetron failures inside 24 months, Salesperson Who Shall Remain Nameless replied,

"All these brand new houses you see around here were built with GE appliances, and they're all crap - they fail [in high numbers].  These new homeowners constitute the majority of our customer base [for new microwave oven sales]."

One person's opinion.  I stress that it's a seller's opinion rather than representing the results of a formal appliance-cratering investigation. 

But it's a very telling opinion, isn't it??  And so was the answer to my next question:

"Is there any brand or model that I can buy that will come with a magnetron that will work for more than 12 months?  It's OK if I pay a little more for reliability.  I just want a microwave oven that will last so I don't have to go through this hassle for a third time."  Answer, again, one person's opinion:

"No.  They all look different on the outside, but it's basically all the same equipment on the inside of them.  One is as likely to fail as any other.  The price differences you see basically represent styling [rather than construction quality]."

So isn't THAT special.  For the moment, this leaves us stuck without a working OTR (over-the-range) microwave. 

As an aside, let me mention that we never buy any new item for our house without "trying it out" in the space to see how it works and looks.  Here, I took a replacement candidate, enlarged a photo of it, printed it out in sections, taped the sections together, and then stuck the resulting composite photo in the space where the microwave is to go.  While I liked the resulting aesthetic effect, I quickly abandoned plans to buy this model after reading on-line reviews of it.

We're not sure how to best resolve this issue, but are still researching it.  Do we locate a magnetron on the open market with greater than a 12-month warranty and have it installed in the existing machine, or do we invest in a new machine? 

I'd be willing to invest in a new machine regardless of magnetron quality IF such an investment would solve two related issues for us:

1. The under-mounted lights in OTR microwave models are pathetic, in my opinion.  They are tiny incandescent bulbs that do not light the cooktop at all.  Furthermore, they are specialty bulbs that cannot simply be swapped out for higher-wattage bulbs (I've tried).  If we could find a manufacturer that produces microwaves with a halogen or LED bulb option, it might be worth paying for.
2. The exhaust fans in most OTR microwave models are pathetic, in my opinion.  Hurray for us - we finally got a house with exterior venting, but the GE builder-grade microwave's fan is so weak that it can't pull air away from the cooktop.  I believe that the installed model is rated at 300 cubic feet per minute (CFM) but if that's true, it's woefully insufficient.  (I should note here that the same salesperson warned us that new microwaves come with a default configuration that exhausts air into the house.  So even if your builder hooked your microwave to an exterior vent line, if they did not manually switch the exhaust route, the vent line may be useless.  I'm not sure if this is affecting us... it seems to release some air back into the house, but not all of it, which the salesperson said is not really possible given how they are built... further investigation is needed here on our parts.)

In closing, let me underscore the extent to which our problems with the GE Spacemaker microwave are not unique, both with complaint threads and with a video and with a "feeler" site for a potential class action lawsuit:

http://www.sfmslaw.com/class-action-lawsuits/cases.php?id=670

In investigating whether magnetron replacement would be an option for us, I did some internet research and found a YouTube tutorial where they explain how the replacement is done.  TWENTY-THREE THOUSAND HITS on this tutorial as of the date of this post.  This stuff ain't light entertainment - this is the kind of video you only watch if you need to - such as, if you're replacing your magnetron.  And there's another one with sixteen thousand hits.  Can you imagine that many people needing instructions on how to repair a single brand / model of microwave?  That says a lot.  It doesn't even necessarily count those additional owners who decided simply to chunk their ovens and buy new ones. 

Mornings for mournings

Wow, I can't believe it was a full month ago that I posted about our latest mourning dove occupation.  And exactly a year ago yesterday that I posted about our first mourning dove occupation.  These critters are nothing if not consistent in their reproductive timeline.

And (drumroll, please!) here they are in their almost-fledged glory, looking like feathered versions of Yin and Yang with one eyeball apiece showing - the babies!
:-)

Yes, it was taken with a telephoto so as not to disturb them. 

That is one useful hanging basket.  This year I put asparagus fern there, which the Mama seemed to like better than the last thing I chose, which was a broad leafed plant that didn't provide as much camoflage. 

Anyway, I'm glad I managed to snag that photo op, because it won't be but a few more days before those flight feathers finish coming in, and off they'll go to take their places in this world.

Miffed at a microwave

My GE has me saying GD.  The magnetron (the part that generates microwaves) in our Meritage-installed GE microwave has failed twice in just two years. 

*%$#@*!!!!
Magnetrons rarely fail (except for ours).  I know folks who are still using first-generation microwave ovens that they bought in the 1970's or 1980's!!

The first failure was covered for both parts and labor, but the labor warranty expires after one year, so now I'm looking at a labor charge to get this thing fixed. 

But really what I'm wondering is, is our experience just an isolated case, or is this brand/model just a lemon that we should not be dumping any more money into?  Drop me a line if yours has had issues.