Update: Front Garden

Wow - This update is overdue!  The winter annuals have peaked and been torn out.  The summer annuals are already coming along.  This is what the garden looked like in March:

I loved the Double Petunias from Kenny's Place.



They almost looked like carnations.



Here is what the garden looks like today:

I can't believe how big the philodendron has gotten in just a few months.  I didn't realize it changed much at all until I looked at these pics.  In front are some rain lilies that have been sending up single blossoms one at a time.  I wish several would bloom at once.  Also in this bed are baby pentas, coleus and vinca.  In front are some lily-of-the-Nile. They didn't bloom last year, so here is hoping for blooms this year.

One of my favorite spots in the garden is under the philodendron.  I poke my head down there when I weed and it seems like such nice spot for creature much smaller than myself.  Kitty sleeps there all the time and I'm so jealous.  

On the other side the summer annuals are coming along.  I'm pretty proud that the only flowers I've had to buy were some vinca and the pink/green coleus up front, and their numbers have increased due to cuttings.  Everything else came back from last year.

 1. Pentas. Grew back nicely from last year.

2. Persian shield. 

Doing well in the back, but struggling in the foreground.

3. New coleus.  No name on the container.  Damn big box store . . .

4. Coleus "Stained Glass"
More on these in a later post.  Hope to have the garden filled with these soon!

5. Various Daylilies

Looks like this garden is also attracting visitors.  Check out this butterfly I found there.  I have no idea what it is, but today I found a cool website that might help me find out.  It is called Project Noah.  You can upload pictures of wildlife and the community there will help you identify it.  This little guy will be my first submission. 

Update of the Front Garden (And Other Bits of Happiness)

Time to do an update of the Front Garden. I slacked on doing updates of the gardens last year because they never really got to where I wanted them. Hopefully things will be better this year and I'll be posting more updates. I'm doing the front because is it is really the only garden with anything green in it, never mind something blooming. 

Gotta love petunias and snapdragons.  This snapdragon reminds me of popcorn. 

I'd love to go in here and plant some pentas and divide some irises, but my last frost date is still almost two months away, so for now I've got to wait.  For now, I have to content myself with cleaning up dead stuff and keeping new weed growth to a minimum.  Such a bummer because when it isn't rainy and cold, the weather is down right decent.  Not hot at all and zero bugs.  I've decided that the bugs will keep me out of the garden more than anything else in the summer.

Well here are some things that aren't bummers:

WORMS!!!  Is it gross to take pictures of your compost?  Probably, but I'm so excited I don't care.  Got to love the worm poo!  I've been using the excess water run off from the bin to water plants for a while now, but I can't wait to harvest some fresh new worm poo for the garden.  The worms seem to have taken the freezing temps just fine, but they are very camera shy.

FREE TOOLS!  Okay, not quite free, but close. I found these clippers in a big pile of gardening stuff in the shed. Brand new and in the package! It think it is from a few Christmases ago when everyone I knew got me a pair of clippers.  These got shoved to the back of the shelf and totally forgotten about.  The best part is that I really needed a new pair.

GINGER!  My Disney Ginger survived both squirrels and freezes this year.  Maybe there is hope for a bloom on this one yet??
Well, that's it for me.  What made you happy today??

Does Anyone Else Still Have Their Christmas Lights Up?

Procrastination is often detrimental to the success of a garden.  Seeds aren't sown in time and aren't ready for the summer heat.  Weeds aren't pulled and quickly take over the garden.  Garden blogs don't get updated for months at a time . . .  But every gardener has experienced a little beneficial procrastination.  That beloved plant that up and dies out of the blue that you can't bear to throw out.  You stick it in the left-for-dead pile and suddenly next season it comes back to life - Wa-hoo!
This year, we've delayed getting on Christmas lights down.  Certainly mid-January is far from epic procrastination: A friend of mine's mother kept the Christmas decorations up in her house well into July, but that was generally interpreted to mean she wasn't taking her recent divorce too well.   Mid-January is late for us, though.  Here's where the beneficial part comes in.  This year the freezing temps came early in November and December.  Usually I cover as much as I can with sheets, fitting most plants only half way, and hope for the best.  I normally loose just about everything.  This year, I thought I'd focus all my efforts on to one plant, the philodendron in the front garden.  Every night before a frost I've covered it with two sheets, one of them flannel! I filled several gallon milk jugs with hot water and placed them near the plant in hopes the heat would radiate out and get trapped by the sheets.  Also, this plant was nicely wrapped up with Christmas lights.  I've kept them up, the theory being that the electricity in the wires is enough to keep the temperature up half a degree or two.  I'm sure there is a fire hazard here, but so far, so good, and the plant has had minimal damage.  This year, the Christmas lights will stay up a bit longer.  The giant inflatable Snoopy?  It is coming down.

Summer on the Sill

In Florida, summer is an ending. Most of the plants that did beautifully through the frosts start to look something like this:

The bugs, the heat and the humidity prove to be too much. It gets to be a bit much for me too. Saturday morning I opened the door to go outside and walked straight into a brick wall of humidity. Sometimes you forget what summer in Florida can be like until you get a weekend like this one to remind you. I realized I needed to get the summer garden started. In the front yard I'll take out the snapdragons and petunias. In their place will go lime green coleus, silvery-purple Persian shield, pink pentas and pink vinca. These aren't by any means the only summer plants I could have chosen, but they all have one redeeming quality. In my garden at least, they are all free.

The vinca are starting to reseed themselves in the garden bed, and the pentas cuttings do best with a slightly different method. But coleus and Persian shield I am propagating by cuttings. The method is pretty basic and any seasoned gardener knows it well, but I'm always surprised by how few take advantage of DIYplants.

First step is to find a momma plant. In my case, momma is actually a collection of cuttings I took hastily right before our first freeze in November. I typically pinch off a stem about 3 to 4 inches long. I strip the leaves off, leaving a small pair at the top, and at least one leaf node below. Then stick in some water and wait for roots:

When the roots come, you could plant straight into the ground and the coleus would probably be just fine. The Persian shield on the right is a bit more finicky, so I put both plants in small containers of dirt:

For some reason, I kind love the little yogurt cups. I poked holes in the bottoms with a nail heated by a candle. They fit great on my window sill, but they will only hold the plants for a couple of weeks. At that time I put the cups outside to acclimate for about 24 hours and then it is planting time:

Above is a little coleus baby tucked behind a still peaking snapdragon. When I tear out the snapdragons in a few weeks, the coleus will be ready and raring to go. The nice thing about this method is that the volume increases exponentially. This little plant will soon be big enough to take clippings from it, and the whole process starts again.

Hope this post didn't bore you too much. I enjoy watching other people's methods, and it seems like every gardener has their own variation on the method above. What is yours?

Irises

The African Irises in the front garden are putting on quite the show.

In other parts of my yard, I think I'm going to give up on growing gingers this year.

Daylily

I've been busy lately, but I had to show you the Daylilies. They are quite literally the garden variety, but I'm just so excited to have an actual flower in the garden right now.

Lesson Learned

If they gave out gold medals for procrastination, I'd be Micheal Phelps. I'm a total pro. Sometimes the things that are most important to me get procrastinated the most. I'm terribly good at doing things when I feel like it, and not when they really need to get done. Case in point: I was looking at posts from this time last year and came across this pic from the front garden.

And the same garden bed this year: Pretty much the same plants each year, but last year I did what I was supposed to do and planted the snapdragons and petunias back in October. This year the summer annuals were still going strong in October and it was hard to think about taking them out. Money and time were tight too. So I put it off, and now instead of a nice lush garden, I have a wimpy, limp garden. Oh well. Chalk it up to a lesson learned. Plant winter annuals by October.

What lessons have you learned this year?

Mother Nature is Hating Me Right Now

Remember my beautiful pentas from this weekend? I came home and found them majorly chewed up. After a close inspection, here is what I found! A good dozen of them, grazing on my local, organic produce. I'm sure they are lovely butterflies, but I determined a while back that I garden for flowers, not for bugs. I won't use pesticides or fertilizers, but that didn't stop for plucking each of these big nasties off my pretties. This whole organic thing is rough.

UPDATE: The Front Garden

Time to do updates! It has been ages since I've posted updates. Mostly because there hasn't been much to take pictures of. Now it is time, and I've had a lot of changes in the front garden. Gone are the white snapdragons and petunias, and in there place are the gorgeous pentas that grew back from the fall planting. It actually drives me nuts when I see all of the snapdragons and petunias on sale at the garden center in the spring. Down here, with all the heat and humidity, these plants don't last long. I've added heat friendly vinca, hot pink coleus and yellow day lilies (not in bloom.)

Love the pentas!

Great Garden Day - Finally!

Above is my front garden today. I'm just loving having a bed with established plants at this time of year! I'm quite proud of myself for planning ahead. Next year I'll plant the snap dragons near the back and skip the pansies, which were disappointing. The petunias are doing well and are almost blindingly white. I might just add a bit of color, but I'm liking the all white too. I've got some vinca that intended to under-plant today. This seems to be the secret with the seasonal annuals. Didn't get to it today because I was preoccupied with other things. Today, at least in my yard, was the official start of spring. It was the first day I've had to enjoy the weather and get all dirty. I kept quite busy!

Finally, after planning for it for years, I've got a bamboo trellis! Okay, it is a bit "rustic," but it was free, collected from Freecycle member who had it growing in her yard. I replanted the shell ginger under it and added some pink impatiens. On the trellis I'll plant some passion vine and moonflowers.

In the corner, I took out the crinums, which I planted them in the sunnier bed by the shed. In the corner I put my butterfly gingers, ti plants I managed to over winter, and some lime green coleus. All of these should do well in the deep shade of this garden and is a huge pop of color. Most of my planting today was just moving one dead looking root from one hole to another, but in a few weeks the the effect should be very cool. I needed a great planting day.

Update on the Front Garden

Turns out that the oleander was just a bit top heavy. I cut off a bunch on the left side and it popped right back to life. I think this took care of a lot of the caterpillar problem, although I'm sure there are still a few there. My husband has commented that he likes this bed (and he rarely comments on the plants.) During the week, we only see it in the dark at this time of the year, so I purposely picked white flowers so we could enjoy it more.

The snapdragons are coming into their own now. Makes me wish I planted a hundred of them.

Too Much Eggnog?

I'm on vacation this week, so after washing mountains of laundry, scrubbing the kitchen floor and wrapping a bazillion presents, I might have a little extra time to do some gardening and, hopefully, get back to some regular posting. My focus will mostly be on the front garden. I think the backyard is at least temporarily a lost cause. The petunias above were an experiment. I wasn't sure how they'd hold up to frost, so I didn't want to by a ton of them. But so far, so good. I know we really haven't had a very hard frost yet, so they could still get damaged, but I might get some more today, just to make the bed all spiffy for Christmas.

My oleander has a problem lately. Its been curving to the ground. Not falling over, as the trunk seems straight, but curving. Did it have too much to drink at the garden party? (They get crazy every year.) Oleander osteoporosis setting in early? I have no idea what is causing it or how to fix it. I was thinking about lopping off the top third to make it a bit less top heavy. That would stink because there are quite a few buds on the tree. Of course, these little bastards will probably get to the buds before I do:

Here I thought caterpillar season was over.

As I'm taking these pictures, I can literally see the vultures circling. Talk about a sense of doom.

UPDATE: The Front Garden

This pic was taken almost a week ago. Since then the pentas and the oleander have started blooming.

The rest of the story is here.

Word of the Day: Soggy

Well Fay left us a soggy mess. The storm was not intense, but the wind and rain stuck around for a while, over 24 hours, and we still may see some outer bands of rain later this morning. Fortunately we are not seeing the flooding that some parts of Florida are and we haven't lost any trees like our neighbors have. I thought I'd stroll around the yard and show you what did happen:

The major thing was this branch falling in the corner garden. The branch was dead and hanging ominously over the garden. We cut down as much of it as we could, and since we couldn't afford a professional to trim it up, we hoped that when it did eventually fall that it wouldn't take out the fence or the palms. Fortunately, this is what happened. It did squish my gingers, but they will bounce back with no problems.

This picture of the pool shows how truly concerned we were about this storm. We forgot to take the umbrella down, and it is no worse for the ware.

My oleander in the front garden is strange . . . it didn't really fall over, more like it is bent over. Not sure how to fix it. Maybe prune it back so it is not so top heavy.

My lantana tree fell over, which is not a surprise because it falls periodically even without a storm. Before Fay it was on the agenda to spend some serious time weeding this garden and that certainly hasn't changed. This is the only real damage. I think the branch broke some slats in the fence. No big deal, but I'm sure the neighbors will leave it there for another three weeks. Do you like their paint job? A few months ago they painted as far up as they could reach and then left like that. Attractive, huh?

Update of the Front Garden

Here is the front garden. The tree is a pink oleander. There is a tree philodendron, pink vinca, lime green coleus, and irises against the house. Snap dragons and new Guinea impatiens have largely faded away. It always amazes me the things I notice in pictures that don't really stand out in real life. For instance, I pass by this spot several times a day, but I only just now noticed how crooked that first line of vinca is. I'll have to work on filling that in.

Update of the Front Garden

I realized that it has been a long time since I've updated this garden, so here you go.

Update of the Front Garden

Well, I'm due for some updates. I hate to show the garden right now, as it is less than stellar. But I'd like a reminder next year if March that it does eventually get better.

The iris is pretty though.

Yes! We have no bananas.

Aren't these New Guinea impatiens yummy? I went to the nursery with a totally different objective in mind, but I couldn't reisist these. They are bit of an exeperiment as I've never planted them before. I'm hoping they will last a bit longer than regular impatiens, which tend to got dormant during the heat of summer.

I added them to the front garden, along with a Philodendron 'Hope' and lime green coleus. The coleus and impatiens were intended for my mother's yard, (more on that in a later post) but the plants created rave reviews from the monster and his son, boys who don't typically care much about plants. So we had to keep them. I'll get some more for Mom tomorrow.

Now for the more depressing part of the day:

Time to get rid of the banana trees. They just look like crap late in the season, and as you can see the white bird of paradise plant has the same effect and stays much nicer.
I am only realizing now, looking at the pictures, how much better this all looks. The dead plants were bothering much more than I realized. Unfortunely, the trunks of these plants were far more difficult to move and they are still there. I tried with all the Freddie Krueger malice I could muster, but no luck. In some parts it is just solid trunk, no room to even dig around. If anyone has any suggestions for removing banana trunks, it would be helpful. Well, if I'm this happy that the bananas are gone, imagine how I'll feel when we fix the pool!