Tersa Sphinx Hummingbird Moth

Pentas

I've been enjoying my pentas this year.  Massive butterfly attractors, these plants grew back wonderfully from the plants I put in last year.  They also do well from cuttings.  Penta cuttings seem to be sensitive to humidity and do not like to dry out.   I added several to my propagation station, a large clear plastic tub that creates a high humidity environment for my new cuttings.  Yesterday, when checking on these plants, I found this:

Ackk!!

It did not go into the tub this way.  There were plenty of leaves when I cut it.  I've seen this sort of thing before.  After checking the rest of tub for the culprit, I felt it before I saw it:

Tersa Sphinx Hummingbird Moth

There he is!  I did some research this year and found out it is a Tersa Sphinx Hummingbird Moth caterpillar, also known as a hornworm.  Here are some good sites for more info: Hornworm and Hummingbird Moths.  While this little guy is no longer with us, they are pretty harmless, excluding their taste for penta salad.  I'll have to keep an eye on the rest of the pentas to make sure there aren't any others hiding out.

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?

Recent Flowers

Yep I'm still here! I'm still gardening too. I've just been a bit, err, pre-occupied. Oh well. Here is what has been blooming in the garden:

The cannas have been doing very well this year, despite the leaf-rollers.

The front garden has done especially well. It attracts multitudes of butterflies, and reportedly a few hummingbirds as well, although I haven't seen them yet.

This is an iris from the front garden.

The Globba Ginger managed to avoid the squirrels and blooming nicely - yay!!

September is when the weather cools in this area and the garden and the gardeners start to perk up. I've got some big projects planned soon!

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!

Second Spring Surprises

Have you ever had an extremely gorgeous weekend that just begs you to spend time in the garden and you have to spend most of it doing errands, or worse, work? It is enough to make you cry a little. The weather has cooled dramatically in the last few days and is just wonderful. I had to stay inside and clean the house before my husband threatened to move out. The plants have really enjoined their second spring and gave me a few surprises.

This is plain ol' lantana, but I like this shot.

The butterflies have been plentiful this season, but it seems like only the dull ones stay on the flower long enough to for me to take a picture.

The purple pentas are perfect.


The elephant ears became HUGE over night.

The butterfly ginger are gearing up for round two - yeah!

And the most massive surprise of all, a completely jaw dropping one, was that a stargazer lily from last year decided it would bloom after all, sneaking up behind some salvia. It's almost October! I was so disappointed that last years bulbs didn't bloom. I suppose it was just trying to be fashionably late.

Weekend Weeding

Spent the weekend weeding out the butterfly garden with my daughter. This is "her" garden and she is very protective of it. Here is the before:And the after:

The garden is looking pretty lately, waking up a bit from the intense summer heat. Above are Mexican petunia blooms.

Some pink salvia in the back of the garden.
I planted a bunch of pentas in the butterfly garden. They were cheap ($.50 for a 4-inch pot) and somewhere I heard they were decent cool weather plants. The cashier said they were "hummer magnets." Yeah, yeah. I've lived in Florida for 20 years, and I've never seen a hummingbird. I've heard that they are around, but I've also heard that big foot is around these parts if you spend time in the forest. Well, damn if I didn't plant these the other night and yesterday evening we saw a hummingbird. It was small, about the size of my thumb and looked a lot like a large bug, but it was a hummingbird. Makes me think I've seen them before but didn't know what they were. I went out this morning and bought more pentas for the front garden. Now I'll be like the little old ladies with all the tacky bright red plastic hummingbird feeders, perched by the window just waiting. . .