object #4 and random pics

My life in 100 objects. Object #4 is my ponytail palm. 

This was a wedding gift from one of the guys that Marc worked with at the Hughes Tool factory where he was working when I met him and was still working when we got married. The ponytail palm was small and unpotted when Henry showed up with it at our wedding. I remember a picture of Henry sitting on the couch holding it around the one neck with it balanced on his knee but a quick run through of the picture album from that day did not turn it up. I wish it had so you could see how it started and how it is now. Or maybe it’s just a memory in my head, seeing Henry sitting there with it on his knee. Regardless, I potted it up and over the years it sprouted two more necks, kept growing getting put in ever larger pots. Eventually it got so big that it couldn’t be moved around and it lived on the driveway in front of the garage converted into the shop. 

The last time I repotted it it went in a 3’ diameter formed plastic circular pond in which it continued to grow until it burst the sides of the pond and was probably about 8’ tall, up to the eave of the shop surviving our light freezes during the winters, too big to even think about trying to cover. Then we had a winter that went into the 20s  that killed my plumeria tree that was in the ground and froze the ponytail necks all the way to the bulb. I was afraid that the whole thing had frozen but it sprouted new growth in the spring. A few years later when we bought the shop across the street out here and we sold the Houston property we managed to get that enormous and heavy busted pond full of ponytail palm bulb in the truck and brought it out here where I planted it in the ground on the shop property on the south side of the concrete bunker with the help of my grandson. Of the last four winters that have sent temperatures into the 20s even though I covered it, during the first two all the new growth froze to the bulb, but the last two, last winter and the one before it, I managed to cover it more effectively and the necks have survived. They aren’t tall enough to be seen and it has at least 24 sprouted all over the bulb which you also can’t see because the leaves hang almost to the ground. It looks much like Cousin It, a big round bulb with a mop top and is now almost four feet in diameter. Just for perspective, that concrete wall behind it is 4’ high. I have had this plant for as long as Marc and I have been married…48 years.

Other random pictures…

I turned a tub over that was upside down over behind Pam’s house and this little lady was hiding within.

One of the leeks from making the potato leek soup. I love how they look sliced in half lengthwise.

Minnie on a cold morning. She was in my lap and I had gotten up to get a cup of coffee. She was peeking out from the blanket covering her when I came back.

The pink heritage rose in the flowerbed in back. I’m going to have to prune it back some this spring. I don’t want it getting bigger.

This is a Christmas decoration in a neighbor’s yard on the next street over. It reminds more of Hansel and Gretel than Christmas.