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.

New Layout

Thought I'd try a new layout for 2010. Let me know what you think.

IT SNOWED!!!!

Hell has offically frozen over.

Updates

I know it has been a while since I posted the corner garden, but it is coming along nicely!

Didn't the pathways turn out good?

Love the Angel's Trumpet!

And lots of new visitors!

Alright. I'm not fooling any of you. These are pictures from the Butterfly Rainforest at the Florida Museum of Natural History. A girl can dream, can't she? If you live near Gainesville it is worth a visit. It may be the only good reason to visit G-ville (stupid Gators.)

Last weekend, I hit up the Master Gardener's fall sale. In past years I have been less than impressed with fall sale. Pretty much the same ol' stuff. This year I got there much earlier, and I don't know if it was the earlier time or just a better show, but I could have bought the whole place. The above haul was for my yard: 6 red cannas, a pagoda plant, a terribly awesome curly-leafed coleus with burgundy spots (I already have cuttings rooting) and the plant on the chair, which is something random my daughter pick out. I still don't know were I'll put them all.

For my mother's yard, I got a fantastic variegated spiral ginger, a peach ginger (Disney??) and two red firespikes.

Now for some ginger blooms from my garden.

Well, it is a big mish-mash of stuff for this post. Hopefully I'll have some real garden updates next week!

Gardening for Dummies

Ok. So I have million reasons why I have not posted in a while, but they are all terribly boring, so I just recap some of the gardening stuff I've been doing. Last week, I took a course called Gardening for Dummies at the Extension Office. Now I've been around the gardening block a time or two, and this course was really designed for total newbies, but I got a chance to hang out with other gardeners and even learned a thing or two. Much of this info pertains specifically to FL gardeners, but some of these facts are might be useful even if you aren't one. Here are some of the highlights:

• I am in zone 8b. It seems every map I reference says something different. Some say 8, some say 9. There is a road that bisects the county (SR 40) and anything above is 8b and anything below is 9a. I am north, so I am once and for all 8b.
• There is a website called floridayards.org that has a great plant database. Pick your area of the state, the specific conditions of your site, and it recommends some suitable plants. Kinda cool.
• Echinacea is a FL native. Need to get some.
• Rain water has nitrogen and there for is healthier for plants
• Put a few drops of veggie oil in rain barrels to keep mosquitoes from breeding
• Don't use "Weed and Feed" products in Florida for your yard. Weed preventive should be done in January, while the best time to feed is March. Cheaper and smarter to do them separately.
• Iron supplement will green up grass quickly and runoff doesn't cause the problems fertilizer does. You can add it every week if you want and it won't make the grass grow faster, so less watering.
• "Volcano Mulching": Mounding mulch around the base of a plant in the shape of a volcano. Can cause the plant to change its root structure and cause rot. Don't do it.
• There is a caterpillar that feeds on the candlestick cassia plant. If it eats the yellow flowers, it turns yellow. If it eats the leaves, it is green. If it eats both, the caterpillar has yellow and green stripes.
• Nutrient Deficiencies (This was info I always wanted to know)
  If it is deficient in:
  Nitrogen: Older leaves will yellow uniformly
  Potassium: Brown spots on older leaves
  Magnesium: Yellowing of old leaves in "V" shape
  Iron: green veins, yellow in between veins of new leaves
  Manganese: yellowing in between the veins of new leaves
• Nutrient Properties:
  Nitrogen promotes color and growth
  Phosphorous promotes flowers
  Potassium helps with water uptake, stress tolerance
  Calcium helps develop cell structure
• Plant Amaryllis and Crinum with the crown of bulb exposed.
• Most bromeliads produce pups that can be divided.
• Publix will give away free pineapple tops, if you want to make your own plant
• Less than 1% of incests in your yard are harmful
• There have been little to no reports of Brown Recluse spiders in Florida (Since this is the only spider that really scares me, this was good news.)
• Stink bugs with pointy shoulders = good. Stink bugs with rounded shoulders = bad.
• Scarlett Hibiscus is a native - gotta get some.
• Plumbago blossoms are sticky and 6 year old girls can stick them to their earlobes and pretend they are earrings.
• Karst = Porous rock our county is built on and drains water into the Aquifer. Excessive amounts of fertilizer will flow through the karst and into our drinking water.
• Liatris are pretty and I need some.

Most of you probably already knew this stuff, but this website is equal parts my personal garden journal as much as a public site. I will promptly loose the notebook I wrote these notes in, so now I have it for good. Hope you can take something useful from it.

In the Garden this Evening. . .

Camelias are blooming already.

I should have more ginger blooms by now, but the squirrels did their damage. There quite a few buds, so I should see more soon.

My Kind of Pest Control

I'm totally fascinated watching this guy in the garden.

Signs You've Neglected the Garden Too Long

Plants try to take things into their own hands.

The spiders start thinking they own the place.

There are trees growing out of the compost pile.

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!

Once Bitten . . .

I was just outside for 10 minutes. Now I count 18 bug bites, and one more the size of a quarter on my forehead.