As you probably know, it's been a few years since I've posted anything here.
I usually avoid putting spoilers into my post titles, but since I post so infrequently these days I thought I'd get right to the point. A couple of weeks ago I was doing some winter damage assessment on the bamboos, and was taking a close look at this completely fried Phyllostachys dulcis:
I haven't been out in the garden too much lately, but as I walked by this bamboo patch I realized something wasn't quite right.
A few weekends back we were having some decent temperatures, cooler than normal and breezy, so we decided to take a hike. Technically a drive followed by a hike. One of the regular customers at the pie shop had told us earlier in the week about this place, and after seeing her photos we just had to visit!
Remember how the stream rebuild unexpectedly turned into a tadpole rescue? Well, it's time for an update on these metamorphosing amphibians.
I think "ootheca" is the perfect word for... well, I'll tell you in a minute if you don't already know.
This is one of my Fargesia sp. 'Rufa' (possibly no longer the correct name as it seems to change every couple of years):
We're not doing any extended road trip like we did last summer and a few years earlier, but that doesn't mean that we're not getting out and seeing cool things. Just this past Sunday we drove down to Washington State Park (in Missouri), about an hour from home. What's there of interest? That's actually what we wanted to find out, knowing only that it's a heavily forested and hilly region that we've driven past several times on the way to our favorite winery.
I've been doing quite a bit of cleanup in the garden the last week or so, and much of that work involved pulling leftover leaf clutter out from under some plants. (Some was left as mulch intentionally over the winter, and some is from the oak tree that drops leaves until early spring it seems.) I've noticed so many different types of spiders under there, what are categorized as "hunting spiders" because they don't build webs to catch prey.
This is the view of my neighbor's house from my driveway. Why am I showing you this?
Yes, it seems like we've made it through another winter, but with that title I'm not talking about myself.
After a very cold start to January, the pond had a thick layer of ice on it. I can't really say how thick it was (at least 6"/15cm), but it lasted for most of the month. It thawed a bit once and got over an inch of rain on it, then another cold snap froze that.
So you may have noticed that the images on most of the posts here (except for a few recent ones) have been replaced with Photobucket's "broken link" image. So annoying. I'd say that "it bugs me"...
This is my driveway behind the house, as seen from the bedroom window. It's the messiest part of the space because it's where plants are being repotted, things are waiting to be relocated, etc. Just a general working area.
I neglected my ribbon bush (Homalocladium platycladum) last winter. The previous winter I kept it in the garage and watered it a bit more than the other plants. This past year though it was in the garage again -- a bigger plant -- but I didn't water much.
So I noticed something just the other day about the Pachypodium lamerei that overwinters in my living room...
Remember the coconut I brought home from Florida? I was trying to decide if I should try to let it sprout, or just eat it.
In early January we took a much-needed vacation and spent a week on the beaches of Sanibel island in Florida.
If there's one thing that makes winter scary to a cold-climate gardener it's ice. Nothing has the potential for breaking the bones of a garden like an ice storm, when decades-old trees and other cornerstone plants can be damaged beyond recovery literally overnight. The number of dead limbs and twigs in my front yard is evidence of that -- I'm not sure yet if my plants made it unscathed.
Yesterday a spider surprised me. Today, I surprised a pair of turtles.
The area underneath my deck was once wasted space, nothing growing there. Over the past few years I've been converting it to a fern bed, and it's been doing well.
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