A small sad bed turns happy

I don't know how it is in your garden, but in mine my planting beds get changed a lot. I'll put together what I think is a fantastic bed, and a year or two or three later it's a mess. Plants have died, others have gotten too big, weeds have taken over, plants are struggling due to too much shade -- for whatever the reason, some beds just need to be redone every few years. I've already done a couple of the worst ones this year, so I've almost gotten all of my planting beds looking nice again.

There's one smaller one that was left to do, and on Saturday I tackled it after tying up those floppy bamboos. This bed is right next to the second floppy bamboo, and since I had a good long look at it while moving the ladder around during the tie-up, I decided I couldn't live with it anymore.

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Floppy, leaning bamboo again

You know how at some point in the season some plants just go crazy, get out of hand? Whether from a growth spurt, from lack of attention on your part, or some interference by Mother Nature plants get too big, start leaning, fall off their supporting structures, hang a branch where it isn't wanted -- in short, they just need some human intervention to get back in line. Maybe some sharp-edged tools need to touch them. Maybe they just need to be introduced to some twine or strong cord. I have plants like that. I call them "bamboo".

If you grow bamboo and have limited growing space like I do, it's a fact of life that you'll need to deal with wayward shoots, spreading rhizomes, and floppy culms (canes) at least once a year with each plant. Today I've got a few of those bamboo projects related to floppy or leaning culms to write about.

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Vine needs some space

I've started this year off badly in this planting bed. It really started last year when I let the Spanish flag vines overgrow everything in this spot, and although I think I weeded this early this spring, I haven't touched it in a while.

Now that I want to plant a new vine here, I need to get things back under control. How many different kinds of weeds can you spot?

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Spider flower and bees

I was walking around the garden this wonderfully cool morning, trying to find something to photograph. I was hoping for something insect related, as the night before I was tempted to take a bunch of fly and ant photos but decided to spare you, as the subject matter was a bit too grisly. (If you're curious, I'll just remind you that it's baby bunny season here, and we have a nearly-feral cat as a regular visitor.) Anyway, I was drawn this morning to the Cleome or "spider flowers", and soon noticed several honey bees visiting them. Perfect!

Cleome is to me a very interesting plant, and apparently it was to the bees too. I like it because once it starts flowering it doesn't stop, with each flower head continuously elongating, sort of like an atomic blast mushroom cloud, but of lovely flowers instead of nasty radioactive dust.

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You stay right here!

"You stay right here!" is what momma deer said to this fawn, and the young one listened. The other day I scared away a fawn -- or at least the flash of it I actually saw seemed like a fawn -- when I threw a pile of weeds onto the compost pile. Then yesterday I saw a pair of fawns come through the yard with their mother, so I've been keeping an eye out for this next generation of Nature-supplied pruners.

This tyke was back near my compost pile, and luckily I noticed it before I bumbled back there again -- I didn't want to have to worry about scaring another fawn away, possibly separating it from its mother.

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Sundown-touched clouds, storms away

I love clouds, and photograph any notable ones I see. You may have noticed that I post quite a few sunrise and stormcloud photos. You may not have realized that I do not typically post sunset photos. It's not that I don't like sunset clouds, it's that we can't typically see them from our house. We have no view to the west, so unless the sunset is dramatic enough to spill over into the sky directly above us, or unless conditions to the east are just right, we're not seeing anything at sundown.

Last evening the conditions were right though, as huge stormclouds to the east acted as a screen for the ruddy light of sunset, making the sky irresistible to me. Here's a taste of what I saw.

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Briefly bees, coneflowers delight

Cicada season is winding down, Japanese beetle season is starting up, and the heat and humidity of this last day of spring have me completely uninspired. The garden just seems like a long list of chores right now, and I don't want to be out in it. Thankfully I read a post on pollinators over at Great Stems, a cool garden blog by Austin wildlife gardener Meredith -- her photos of bees, birds, and pollinating insects gave me the little kick in the pants I needed to get the camera out into the garden.

As usual once I was out there and looking closely enough, I found plenty of camera-worthy subjects. I decided though to just post a few photos of bees and coneflowers. I'm keeping it simple today.

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This bamboo is going to make it

A few summers ago when I was at the height of my bamboo-acquiring phase and had to have any bamboo that had even a remote chance of surviving in my climate I found a fantastic deal on a plant locally. Typically there aren't too many choices when buying bamboo locally, but every nursery usually carries one or two different types at different times of the year. I spent a lot of time combing the local garden centers that summer looking for bamboo (and other plants), and one morning I found two large pots of "dwarf whitestripe" bamboo marked down to $10.

I quickly grabbed one of them and planted it in a prominent spot in my garden, as Pleioblastus fortunei is a beautiful variegated bamboo. It would be treated as a groundcover bamboo here, dying back to the ground each winter, but coming back strong each spring. Unfortunately, the spring after being planted it started to flower. I then read reports of other people's fortunei flowering too, which was distressing. When bamboo flowers, it usually puts all of its energy into producing seeds then dies. A bargain plant that dies is no bargain, is it? So I anxiously waited for this spring's shoots to see if the plant was going to produce more flowers than it did the previous year.

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Mango seed update

It hasn't been too long since I opened my first mango pit and put the damp paper towel-wrapped seed into a plastic bag, but there's already some activity going on.

Here's a quick look. (If I don't do this now, I won't remember to do it before I pot these up.)

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