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??

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?

What has Lived

That seems to be the big question in my garden right now: What has lived? It was a weedy mess before, but after a week of hard freezes, and SNOW, everything pretty much loooks like this:

It is all enough to make you want to give up and start blogging about home decorating. In addition to being a mother with a full time job, computer issues, squrriels (bastards!), I'm going to throw the newest member of our family under the bus.

Kitty, (AKA Free-loader) was a neighborhood cat that hung out our house for a while. About six months ago we noticed that she was getting very skinny and we started feeding her. That was pretty much the end of it - we were adopted. She is incredibly sweet and tame and charmed her way into our decidedly "not-pet-people" family. While she is an angel in the house, she is all cat in the garden. She's made several exits holes in our fence and regularly poos in the sand box. Good thing she's cute.

I'm trying to focus on the positive and figure out what has lived. The amarylis from last year is coming back, along with many of the very sturdy crinum lilies.

I didn't get my winter annuals in the ground on time (October is ideal) but I did plant a few straggelers, and they are steadily pumping out some flowers. Good thing: I ALWAYS need this color in my life.

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.

Notes to my Husband, Regarding Staying Married.

Dear Darling Husband,

I love you very much. You are a wonderful father, and usually a pretty great husband. But there are some serious garden related issues that we need to discuss. First of all, contrary to how it may seem, digging in the dirt, pulling weeds, and raking leaves are not my favorite things in the world to do. If someone came up to me and said let me do that, I'd happily pass the rake and go get a pedicure. They are chores, like folding clothes and washing dishes. I do laundry because I want clean clothes, wash dishes because I want a clean kitchen and garden because I want a pretty garden. So when you see me out there, don't act like I'm goofing off. Just because I'd rather be outside on a nearly perfect, just-like-summer-but-without-the-bugs day than stuck inside, doesn't mean I'm a slacker. At least I'm doing something productive, instead of playing video games or running RC cars, like someone else I know.

Now for the really pressing issue. DON'T SPIT IN MY GARDENS! Don't act like you don't do it, I've caught you! It is gross! So when I'm weeding this afternoon and pull some weeds and STICK MY HAND IN A BIG LOOGIE, I think I'm understandably upset. Even more so when I start to gag so hard I throw-up right in the front yard. Oh, and tip for the future: When I come inside to tell you what happened and can't because I'm still gagging and throwing up, try not to laugh your ass off, okay? Seriously, if it happens again, we are seeking counseling.

Love, your wife.

(Here's a pick of the amaryllis, looking very little like the Garden Pinks I planted. )

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.

There's Always One . . .

Look what popped up in my "white" snapdragons.

In my brilliance of buying discount gingers yesterday, I failed to actually look at the weather. No planting with freezes on the way. It's not cold enough to worry about covering the plants, but at 33 degrees, I have to pull in all the unestablished babies, just in case. So the gingers have to stay in their pots a little longer. (No wonder they were so cheap . . . ) It's a dilemma for me because I'm a notoriously bad container gardener. Frankly, when it comes to gardening, Mother Nature does all the heavy lifting, I just let her know where I want things. When plants go into containers and are dependant on me to actually water them, they don't do so well. With the time change making it dark when I get home, it is even harder to remember to care for them. So I don't like to keep any more containers than I have to. With any luck, I won't kill the gingers before I get them in the ground.

Update of the Butterfly Garden

The butterfly garden has perked up.

Yellow Snapdragons

Happy looking salvia.

Even the lilies have come up.