Photo Friday

The cold that has settled into my body has left me unwilling to write more than a few words.


Fortunately the cold has also settled upon my new pond, solidifying, texturing, giving me a wonderful new subject to photograph. Photos only today.

Read more...

An unexpected opportunity

The other day I noticed there were a few more potted elephant ears that I hadn't dug up yet -- I knew I had a lot of these this past year, but I didn't realized exactly how many. In any case, I noticed something else about these specific pots:


They have some other plants growing in them. "Weeds" was my first thought, but the leaves looked familiar. After a moment I realized they were volunteer Verbena bonariensis plants!

Read more...

Tweets, and Followers, and other gardens

Today's post is going to be a little bit different, as I'm not going to talk about my garden at all. I'm also not going to talk about other gardens, or animals, or Nature, or building anything. I'm going to talk briefly about this blog -- or more to the point, some features of it I'd like to point out.


Although "features" may not be the right word... I'm battling a nasty cold right now and I don't have complete brain control yet this morning, so I apologize if the things I write are less clear than usual (if they ever are clear even on good days). The things I want to talk about are found in the right column of the blog, starting with the topmost item: Twitter.

Read more...

Saving papyrus

Yesterday I wrote about saving some water plants, growing them inside the house under lights. Those were small plants -- today I tackle the big one: the papyrus. I actually had three large plantings of papyrus 'KingTut' this year because I was able to successfully overwinter a few plants last year. With that experience I'm going to experiment a little and should end up with lots of papyrus for next year -- plenty to share with neighbors.


The largest plant is in a large tub in the garage, and I won't do anything with it except water it once in a while -- I don't want it to grow in the garage, but I also don't want it to dry out. The plant I'll be dealing with today is the medium-sized planting -- it also was in a large container, but had a drainage hole so was drier than the other planting. Not ideal, but my goal was to see how it would do, and I think it did quite well.

Read more...

Save these plants, save my nose

Even though I've only recently completed my pond and haven't done any planting around or in it, I already have several water or bog plants. In fact I've had water plants for a few years, growing them in pots or in the ground -- most water plants do fine in regular garden soil as long as they get enough water. The problem is that most of the water plants I have are not cold-hardy enough to survive our winters, so I need to overwinter them in the garage or the house.


The large plants like various elephant ears (the ones that I either have just a single plant of, or that don't form a good bulb) and papyrus will spend the winter in the garage in a semi-dormant state where they won't form any new growth, but won't die or go completely dormant either. Some plants though I want to actively grow over the winter, either because I'm not sure yet how they'll do in the garage (with low light and temps that bottom out around 40ºF/4ºC), or because I want to have extra plants in the spring. Today's post is about these plants that will stay in the house, actively growing under lights all winter.

Read more...

Pots, begonias, and more -- maybe much more

My gardening friend Mike emailed me a couple of weeks ago saying that he had a lot of large nursery pots that he wanted to get rid of, and wondered if I was interested. I told him YES, but couldn't get out there right away. Yesterday morning he gave me a reminder call, asking if I'd be able to pick them up this weekend, and if so, he wanted to show me his begonia collection. He caught me between projects, so I jumped in the truck, excited to get a few big pots -- I knew I'd be needing them next year.


A couple of hours later, I had packed the truck with as many pots as I could. Mike wanted me to take more, but I think I'll be hard-pressed to use all of these next year (although I do have an alarming number of elephant ear bulbs that will need potting).

Read more...

My variable cardoon

I've grown cardoon on and off for about 5 years now. The first year the one plant I put into the ground flourished, becoming huge and beautiful. It didn't survive the winter though. The next year I had two pretty nice plants in the ground, and for whatever reason they both overwintered, giving me those huge, wonderful thistle-like blooms the next year.


Other years I haven't had much success -- the plants stayed small, or just never really looked that good. This past year I planted four cardoon seedlings, and -- as expected -- had varying degrees of success.

Read more...

It's grass salvage time again

I've been growing purple fountain grass (Pennisetum setaceum 'Rubrum') for several years, and used to buy new plants each spring as it's not cold-hardy enough to survive our St. Louis (zone 6) winters. For the past few years I've been overwintering plants indoors under lights -- it's time for me to do this again now.


Actually, since we had our first hard freeze a few weeks ago, the purple fountain grass that was planted in the ground has all died. I always grow at least one of these in a pot each year though, and I pull it into the garage when the cold weather is imminent. This lets me work on the salvage project when I have time instead of rushing to get it done before the freeze.

Read more...

Path, weeds, moles

Even though I've just recently done this, it's time for another collection of mini-topics.


Starting with a simple solution to a problem I've lived with for at least two years.

Read more...

  © Blogger template Shush by Ourblogtemplates.com 2009

Back to TOP